Your Superpower Is Your Self-Awareness
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Regardless of what you would like to accomplish in your professional or personal life, the foundation of your progress is going to be your self-awareness.
What is self-awareness?
It’s the ability to tune into your Inner Observer or Inner Witness at will. The Inner Observer is the part of you that can observe everything that is happening inside of yourself with objectivity and non-judgement. It’s like an inner camera that you can choose to turn on in order to observe what thoughts are running through your mind, what feelings you are experiencing, and what sensations are coursing through your body.
Why is it important to develop your self-awareness?
Your self-awareness gives you access to all your resources and all dimensions of your intelligence - your knowledge, your emotional sensitivity, and your instincts. All of this information is extremely valuable, and the power to turn your attention to it in order to access it fully is incredibly important to make progress on your path of development and fulfillment.
Not being self-aware means being run by our unconscious thoughts, feelings, and impulses, and being biased by what tends to be most prevalent for us in a given time, which could be a specific thought, emotion, or sensation. This is perfectly normal, as being on autopilot is our unconscious way of functioning. It takes commitment and practice to disengage the autopilot, make contact with our Inner Observer, and practice turning it on at will.
When you turn your attention back inside, you can:
Observe your thoughts, interrupt unproductive ones, and choose more useful ones. This is key to managing the inner critic, work with your distractions, and stay focused on your goals.
Observe your feelings, validate them with self-compassion, and find the needs underlying them. This is essential to foster a good connection with yourself and others.
Observe the sensations in your body, detect new impulses arising in yourself, and be able to shift from impulsivity to making a choice on how to respond. This is what supports your well-being and self-care - tuning into the messages that your body sends you, so that you can take good care of yourself.
Regardless of your goals, success will rest on the foundation of your self-awareness since you need access to all the information that your mind, heart, and body send you. You need to have a healthy body, a solid connection with yourself, and the possibility of focusing your mind at will in order to fulfill your intentions. And because we are part of various personal and professional networks of support and collaborations, let’s remember that mutually satisfying business and personal relationships also depend on our self-awareness and on the self-awareness of others.
How to develop your self-awareness?
In order to develop muscles, you’d work out on a regular basis, starting light and progressively increasing the load with more weight and more repetitions, as your muscles grow stronger.
You can follow the same principles for your self-awareness. You can start small with just a couple of pauses every day, simply taking 3 breaths in full awareness of what is happening in your mind, heart and body. These pauses could be taken when you get up in the morning, when you reach for your water bottle to take a sip, when you wash your hands, etc. There are plenty of opportunities to take a quick pause, turn on the Inner Observer, and welcome what you notice with awareness and compassion.
By doing this, you’re truly building your superpower.
