Self-awareness and self-esteem.
Knowing and Acting Leads to Growth.
Welcome to another amazing week, I hope you’re enjoying a great start to the week already and I hope you’re reading this in the best conditions ever. Don’t forget that whatever phase of life you might be in at the moment, life is beautiful and with a little bit of perseverance, you’ll see and enjoy the beauty of life.
As it is our tradition in the newsletter, I also want to remind you that if you can focus on yourself and apply yourself to development and the things that matter to your growth, you’ll achieve your dreams in no time. The year is coming to an end, yet so many blessings are still waiting for you.
Focus on yourself, focus on growth and you’ll win.
Talking about focusing on the things that matter to your growth, this week, I want to speak to you again about self-awareness and how it’s a tool that you must use for your development and building healthy self-esteem.
In an earlier issue of this newsletter, I wrote to you about the real meaning of awareness, and how the usage of the knowledge you’re gathering is the most important aspect of being aware. Read the issue here to bring yourself up to speed.
My Definition.
Self-awareness is a continuous practice of personal commitment to studying, obtaining valuable knowledge about yourself, analyzing the information and using it as a tool for self-development in all facets of your life.
Being conscious of yourself in a way that helps you build on your strength and expose your inefficiencies for you to actively work on them till they’re no longer there.
Like I said in the earlier issue (read here) awareness is not about obtaining information or being woke, that is only a gateway, the totality of the concept must extend to the way you use the information to ensure that you’re a better person.
There is no end to self-awareness, as life progresses, you must make improvements in your life, you must continue to study and pay attention to various areas where you have to improve, and this is how to build a better self, this is how to build better self-esteem.
Self-awareness is the gateway to building something better in all facets of life, it is an educational value that must bring you to the understanding of things that are not working and help you learn how they can work.
Becoming self-aware must bring you to the admittance of your inefficiencies and encourage you in committing yourself to get better.
Before we go further, let me quickly show you some of the things you’re most likely to suffer when you lack self-awareness, and these are the things that will ruin your development in life, negatively batter your self-esteem and make you a shadow of whom you’re meant to be.
These things include:
®   Low self-esteem.
®   Identity crisis.
®   Lack of confidence.
®   People please syndrome and
®   Fear of rejection.
These are vices that will hinder you from carrying yourself confidently in a way that gives you any form of advantage to build something for yourself in life.
Bringing you to Admittance.
There cannot be any improvement without admittance, it is admittance and the commitment to become better that brings the intentionality that’ll result in improvement, and there cannot be admittance without self-awareness.
You cannot admit things that you’re not aware of, it is self-awareness that brings you to the place of admitting the things that you have to improve about yourself.
For example, if you’re not aware of the things that negatively affect the way you carry yourself, you’ll keep doing them and keep getting worse, it is when you pay attention to yourself and become aware that you can bring yourself to admit that those things are affecting you and you have to work on them to become better.
Admittance is a needed step in becoming better and what brings you to admittance is self-awareness.
Knowing Yourself.
Proper self-awareness is a swot analysis of yourself to know what you have to build on and what you need to correct. This is the aim of self-awareness, to know yourself and to build yourself.
I know Funmi, a good friend of mine whom we attended the same university, often time back in school, Funmi will come to me and complain about how she was feeling down and depressed, I will talk to her, keep her company and after some time, you can visibly see how better she feels. But the problem is that this solution usually never last, in the next two days, we’re back to the same problem and applying the same antidote only for it to last for a while and then we’re back to the same place again.
On a particular day, I probe Funmi to tell me about some of her activities apart from the normal class activities and when she was with me, that was when she told me about her boyfriend that will always abuse her and call her so many dirty names, but of course, because love is blind and deaf too, she stayed with this guy even when it should’ve been obvious that being with him is the cause of the unending bad moods and depression.
She kept going back to a doomed place and person because she lacks the self-awareness to know what was negatively affecting her, I spoke to her about leaving the guy and she finally left him and became a radiant version of herself.
Knowledge, especially when it has to do with yourself, demands that you pay attention to the totality of your life, removing things that should not be there and constantly adding things that you need.
The lack of knowledge about yourself will keep you unaware of things that you need to change and improve about yourself.
Understanding yourself.
People ask this question all the time; why am I doing this? Why is this happening to me? And they go ahead to repeat the same circle over and over again.
Lack of awareness automatically takes away understanding from you, when you haven’t paid enough attention to yourself to know who you are and the things that work and don’t work for you, it becomes impossible for you to understand yourself and when you don’t understand yourself, you’ll not be able to commit yourself to intentional development.
Self-awareness brings an understanding of self, you know what you need to do, you know why things are happening to you, and you know the route you need to take in getting better results.
This is very important in building something better for yourself, and in building healthy self-esteem you must be aware of yourself in a way that gives you a key understanding of what you must do and what you must not do.
Awareness brings understanding, clearly showing you what you need to build and how you should build it. When you have an understanding of yourself and know the areas where you’re not doing well, it becomes easy for you to improve yourself, and that is how you build something better for yourself.
Applying Wisdom.
Awareness will give you insight into how to apply the things you know to make yourself better. Awareness makes application easier because it enhances your knowledge and you’re sure of what is wrong and what you need to do to make things better.
A lot of people are executing outside of the bandwidth of their problem, wasting precious resources because of their lack of awareness, most people that are restricted to trial and error are people who are not aware of the things they should know before executing any form of solution.
Wisdom is profitable to direct and self-awareness enhances your level of wisdom in applying knowledge to your life.
Wisdom is the end-point of knowing and understanding and they’re all products of self-awareness, the gateway to properly building and developing yourself is by being self-aware of yourself.
How to Become Self-aware.
There is no heavy lifting in becoming self-aware, it only takes your active commitment to doing things the right way.
Here are some good tips you can apply to become more self-aware.
®   Plan things: Don’t just live on the cruise, plan your day, plan your week, plan your month and plan your year.
Planning helps you become aware of yourself when things are not working, when you’re deviating, and there is a plan, it becomes easier to notice things.
Don’t live on the cruise, plan.
®   Set Standards: Having set standards will help you become more aware of yourself, standards give you a framework to operate within and you become more aware of yourself when you begin to fall short of that framework.
Set standards to guide yourself.
®   Paying attention to yourself: This one is straightforward. Don’t just do things, do things that are good for yourself.
Pay attention to how things affect you, don’t just wake up every day and just follow routines without knowing how they affect several aspects of your life. Being intentional about how you live is one of the ways to become self-aware.
There are various areas in your life that you must pay attention to if you want to become more aware of yourself.
®   Your personality traits.
®   Your values.
®   Your habits.
®   Your needs. (Physical, psychological needs and spiritual needs.)
®   Your emotions.
Being self-aware in these various aspects of your life will help you improve yourself and build you into something better in life.
Finally, I want you to know that self-awareness requires a high level of self-discipline, you have to be intentional about your life, how you live, the things you do and how they affect several areas of your life.
If you want to build better self-esteem, you must be committed to knowing yourself and understanding the aspects where you need improvement, you need self-awareness to do this.
Become self-aware, understand yourself, commit yourself to improve and getting better in life.
It’s such an amazing feeling writing to you again this week, I pray you to have an amazing week.
Leave a comment for me below and click here to reach out.
Talk to you soon again.
