7 Ways To Improve Self-Awareness Skills and Become A Wise Person
Once, I was taking part in a conference as a participant and had the privilege to observe and talk to many important figures in my field.
The experience changed my perspective about the importance of self-awareness skills and how they help us become a wise person.
One of the delegates there indulged me and talked to me at length about innovation and ideas, her work so far and the importance and potential of mine.
At the end, I asked her a simple question. “How do I become a wise person like you?”
She told me that our experiences and interactions make us a wise person and for that, we need to observe more and speak less.
Observing not only the world around us but also the world inside us is a skill that needs to be cultivated.
Knowing and understanding the world inside us, I came to know later, requires self-awareness skills and is an important prerequisite to become a wise person.
What are Self-Awareness Skills?
“Self-awareness is the ability to take an honest look at your life without any attachment to it being right or wrong, good or bad.”
― Debbie Ford
Self-awareness skill is the ability to understand our own thoughts and emotions, strengths and difficulties and regulate them to optimise our functioning.
It is an important attribute to become a wise person and achieve greater success in life. It can be of two types:
- Public self-awareness skills: It is awareness about how people see us.
- Private self-awareness skills: It is the awareness about our internal state.
How to become a wise person through self-awareness skills?
I am currently reading Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind and his views on conscience and emotions changed the way I think.
He states that our rational thinking is affected by our emotions and we use our rationality to justify our emotional inclinations. His findings are backed by years of research on moral psychology.
This makes it all the more important for us to have self-awareness skills to become a wise person so that we can at least be aware when our rationality is being affected by our emotions.
We become a wise person when we have enough emotional regulation to at least be aware when our emotions are affecting our rational thinking.
This knowledge can motivate us to rethink our decisions at later hours when the emotional peak has passed or consciously try to objectively analyse our options and negate the influence of emotions.
Some important self-awareness skills that we can try to inculcate in ourselves are as follows:
- Empathy
- Patience
- Confidence
- Adaptability
- Mindfulness
- Kindness
7 Ways To Improve Self-Awareness Skills
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