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Self-Awareness
Self-awareness means you know what you’re feeling. You know how it shapes your perceptions and your thoughts and your impulse to act. Emotional self-awareness is what I’m talking about. Emotion directs attention. So knowing what you’re feeling and how strongly you’re feeling it and where it’s driving you to attend is extremely important because your attention creates your reality moment to moment. So self-awareness gives you a kind of diagnosis of where am I right now?
Maturity is sometimes defined as widening the gap between impulse and action. Self-awareness, it’s the least visible part of emotional intelligence, but we find in our research that people low in self-awareness are unable to develop strengths very well in other parts of emotional intelligence. People that are high in self-awareness, however, are able to develop excellence across the board very often.
Mindfulness
To develop your self-awareness, I’d recommend doing an exercise daily that strengthens the brain’s muscle for self-awareness. It might be what’s called mindfulness these days, which is actually an attention training. For example, you might watch the in breath, the full in-breath, and the out-breath, and the space between the breath and then the next breath, in-breath and out-breath. And then when your mind wanders off, and it will, when you notice it wandered, bring it back to the breath. That’s like going to the gym with a weight, and every time you lift your arm to do a rep with that weight, you make that muscle that much stronger.
So in the mindfulness, every time you bring your mind back to the point of focus, you’re strengthening the brain circuitry for paying full attention. And this generalizes. You will do it in the morning. It’s like being mentally fit. It’s the same as physical fitness. It’s there when you need it. So later in the day, you’re better at juggling tasks. You’re better at getting fully absorbed in what it is you need to do. That’s one thing anybody can do to pay full attention, and to get into that optimal state more often and more readily.