Self-awareness allows you to live your life in a state of authenticity, joy and flow

Most of us race through life giving very little thought to who we are. What about you? Do you know what motivates you? Drives you? Excites you? Calms you? Causes you stress? On what basis do you choose, select, and decide.

I do all of this with self-awareness. It helps me with my day-to-day thoughts, actions, and decisions from what to eat, when to work, what to wear, to larger decisions like which car to buy, which holiday to take? It also helps me make my life-changing decisions such as should I stay in this marriage, should I sell my company? Life for me was not always like this.

Till I reached my 40s, I lived my life on autopilot, some of it in accordance to my parents’ expectations and then mostly allowing life to happen to me; calling it fate and destiny.

As I began my study into human behaviour, positive psychology and neurobiology, my journey into self-awareness began. It is the first time I began an exploration to understand my own thoughts, strengths, challenges, aspirations, and values. Life has been in a state of, mostly-effortless flow, since then.

Anytime I need to choose a thought, an emotion, an action, a decision- it is easy to do. All I do is reach into my self-awareness toolkit. It then becomes clear what I should choose. What decision I should take. Which way I should behave. It means that now I live in an authentic state and in alignment with my values and purpose.

This process of discovery should be one that all children go through, before schooling, society and the external world starts to influence who they should be.

An inside-out approach to self-awareness, rather than an outside-in approach, ‘to ‘being’ without awareness. It is only after doing the inner journey work that I experience the ease with which I live my life. The benefits of this have been fabulous and is worth investing time to discover. Self-awareness can help us find our identity and drive our purpose. It helps us think about the way we think and mindfully choose our thoughts in alignment with who we are, where we want to go and what we need to do to get there.

The self-awareness theory is based on the idea that you are not your thoughts, but the entity observing your thoughts.

So one way to go about your day and life is without much thought about your thinking and feeling, and the other is to mindfully bring awareness to your inner self and to self-evaluate whether your thinking and feeling is in line with who you are, where you want to go and what you need to do in order to get there.

There are many areas of self- awareness we should explore:

• What are our personal values (and these can be chosen and shifted as we develop and grow)?
• What are our personality traits, habits, emotions?
• What are the psychological needs that we have, that will drive our behaviour?

Self-awareness allows us to put ourselves in environments where we thrive.

For example, knowing whether you are an extrovert or an introvert or someone like me that needs time to be an extrovert and socialise and then blocks off time for solitude, helps plan work and play. I stay in the hustle and bustle of Mumbai and work at a pace that matches the city. I socialise at a similar fast pace. I then retreat to my home in the forest in Goa, where I regroup and centre my energy and slow down my breath, my thoughts, my pace.

Mumbai is where I am ‘doing’. Goa is where I am ‘being’. I know that I need both to thrive.

Self-awareness sets the stage for success- your own definition of success. When you live authentically to achieve your definition of success, you are intrinsically driven to do what needs to be done to achieve it.

By allowing children to map their aspirations, whether it is to get on to the basketball team, or get into a specific course in a specific college, or to invent or contribute to humanity in some way — if the aspiration is truly their own, then so will the motivation and drive and the chance of meeting this aspiration through setting a sub-set of goals.

How great it would be if all children had self-awareness as a natural cognitive state, that they were mindful of, and could depend on to decode their thoughts, emotions and behaviour and to actively choose based on who they are.

In the year 2000, UNICEF identified self-awareness as one of the essential life-skills that children will need to cope with the rapid changes occurring around them in a fiercely competitive world.

Children who are self-aware have higher levels of emotional intelligence, they have more empathy and are likely to be more compassionate and kinder. They will have better communication and listening skills. They will have stronger relationships and better leadership skills. They have a better arsenal of awareness from which they can make better decisions, ones that align with who they are.

The first place children learn self-awareness is from their parents. It helps children to map their self-awareness if you model this for them. Speak about your strengths, and your values, but more importantly model them.

Children learn from what you do and not what you say as this story taught me. I would talk about my values to my son when he was young. I would tell him that I valued generosity and giving. My son who was 5 at the time, has always heard from me that I feel it is more important to give than to receive, and I would always have boxes of biscuits that I would hand out to children when they tapped on the windows asking for money on the streets of Mumbai. He then watched me one day when a street vendor tapped on my window to sell me a box of strawberries. As almost any Indian would do without thought or reason, I set out to negotiate and my son looked at me perplexed and asked me ‘Why Mom? What does 10 rupees mean to you and what does it mean to her?’ Kids have great hypocrisy radars and they will call you out. I have never negotiated with a street vendor since that day.

Since the day my son made me aware that I can slip into autopilot mode, unaware of what I have chosen as my values and needs, I spend some time reflecting at the end of each day, processing my day in a self-aware and mindful way. Just a sort of internal check-in to reflect on my thoughts, emotions, actions and decisions and to see if they were in line with my purpose and my values.

So, what are some of the aspects of our self that could do with some self-awareness and mindful defining? Self-awareness means knowing our values, personality, needs, habits, emotions, strengths and weaknesses. It is a sense of who you are and a vision of the person you want to become.

Values are the core aspects we live our life by. Someone who values ‘acceptance’ may lead his life differently to someone who values ‘assertiveness’ or ‘uniqueness’. Someone who values ‘family’ as highest on the list may lead his life differently to someone who values ‘success’.

High on my list of values is ‘peace’. Whenever I need to choose a thought, action or decision, the question I ask myself is ‘Will this increase the peace in my life or decrease it?’. Based on this, I decide my thoughts, actions and decisions. This applies to the clothes I wear, the car I drive, the relationships I choose and the work I do. For example, while I can afford an expensive car, I have chosen a utility one, as an expensive car driven on the roads of Mumbai can never increase my sense of peace.

Habits are the behaviours we repeat routinely. All of these will affect the outcome of our lives. It is of little use to value learning if we don’t develop the habit of reading. It is of little value to value health if we don’t develop the habit of exercising and eating healthy. So, based on what we value, we create our habits to support the things we value. Since peace is high on my list of values, my habits include meditation, music and reading books like Ekhart Tolle’s ‘The Power of Now’ and ‘Stillness Speaks’.

Psychologists and life coaches identify needs in slightly different ways.

For example, Maslow talks about these as psychological needs that drive our behaviour: esteem, affection, belongingness, achievement, self-actualization, power and control.

Anthony Robbins lists these as the 6 basic human needs:

• Certainty/Comfort,
• Uncertainty/Variety,
• Significance,
• Love and Connection,
• Growth,
• Contribution.

Our behaviours will be influenced by our highest needs. Someone who has significance or power and control as their main need will be motivated differently to someone whose main need is love and connection. Needs create the motivation for our behaviour. Needs change as we grow and develop and move through phases of our lives. A younger me had high needs of belongingness and achievement. An older me has higher needs for growth and contribution.

Emotional self-awareness allows us to have an understanding of our own feelings, what causes them and how they impact our thoughts and actions. A person with high emotional awareness understands the internal process associated with high emotional self-awareness and therefore has greater emotional control and balance.

If you know what triggers your anger, you already have some amount of power over it. I am aware of my intense need to control and that it affects my relationships. Control is always met with resistance and, therefore, conflict. I think of my highest values, which are growth and contribution.

So, in order to grow myself spiritually and contribute to the well-being of others, I am aware that I need to come from a place of love, and not control. This is what will align with the value I hold high, which is ‘peace’. So, before I think, speak or act with another, I ask myself, ‘are you coming from a place of love or control?’. This answer guides what I do.

Knowing our strengths and weaknesses allows us to play to our strengths and find support for our weaknesses. I know I am creative. I also know that I am not structured in my head. So, I have someone schedule my tasks and submission dates. I am a big picture person and so I surround myself with detail-oriented people.

Very often the opinion we hold of ourselves is based on what others think, or more correctly, on what we think others think about us. So much of our beliefs are buried in the subconscious, where they can do irreparable harm if not examined and re-calibrated to more correctly reflect who we really are.

Once we have spent time on becoming self-aware and choosing who we want to be, and what we want to believe in, we need to reflect and revisit. An internal check-in to remind us of who we have chosen to be and making sure we are on track.

We owe it to ourselves to become more self-aware of the thoughts and beliefs within. The subconscious holds ideas and beliefs to be true, so if not examined, we run the danger of running our lives in autopilot and from the ‘outside in’. True joy, success and meaning is worth spending some time with our inner self and living an inside-out existence.