Do you want to start taking back control over your life?
If you do, then a good place to start is to develop your self-awareness.
The biggest benefit of doing so is to put yourself in a position where you can deliberately cause a change in your thoughts, emotions and actions to change the results that you’re receiving in your life.
What’s so powerful about your thoughts, emotions and actions?
Your thoughts, emotions and actions are the driving force behind everything that happens in your life. Your thoughts about something cause you to experience emotions.
If you think that something is good, you experience good feelings. If you think that something is bad, you experience bad feelings.
And the way you feel about something inadvertently affects the way you act towards something, causing results to happen in your life.
When you develop your self-awareness, you become conscious of the thoughts that are running through your head.
When you become conscious of what you’re thinking, then you are in a position to change what you’re thinking, thus affecting everything else that happens down the chain.
With a change in your thoughts, you cause a chain reaction in your emotions and actions, and thus a change in the results you receive in your life.
How do you develop your Self-Awareness?
The way I’ve found most useful in developing your self-awareness is to have a way of reviewing your thoughts, or having them reflected to you.
For example:
- Somebody telling you that your actions are causing certain results in your life, causing you to check your thoughts, emotions and actions to see if that is what you really want in your life.
- Review your own thoughts, emotions and actions in a personal and private manner through the process of journaling.
The first method usually requires you to have someone you trust to tell you the truth, no matter how painful or damaging to your ego it might be.
It’s usually a painful process, but it does help for some people.
Look at Alcoholic Anonymous as an example.
The only problem is, if the person you’re getting advice or “reflection” from isn’t a good source, then the advice you get might just screw you up even further.
It’s like a drug addict telling you it’s ok to take 1 shot of heroin instead of 20, because 20 will kill you, while 1 will only make you high?!
The second method is far more private, and versatile.
Keeping a journal allows you to record your your inner thoughts and emotions over a period of time.
If undesirable events are happening over and over again in your life, you’re able to better identify what thoughts, actions and emotions are causing it.
When you do, it gives you a chance to get out of the cycle of repeated behavior.Keeping a journal also allows you to:
- Explore your life perspective
- Examine how you came to certain conclusions
- Spot certain patterns and trends in your life
- Identify areas where you want to further develop knowledge and skill
- Further develop any ideas that you have, while having a record of it in a safe place
- Many other areas that are limited only by your imagination
What to Expect
In the process of keeping your journal, you’ll be recording your inner thoughts from both sides of the emotional spectrum, from good to bad.
If you have more happy events than sad, then you’re probably closer to where you want to be.
If you have more sad events than happy, then it simply means you have more room for growth in your life.
When you’re reviewing or experiencing negative events in your life, you might get disconcerted, upset or even angry with yourself.
That’s the normal reaction most people get when they realize they could have done something better.
That’s OK. It’s just your Emotional Guidance System telling you that what’s happening (or happened) is simply something that you do NOT want.
It’s an indication that if you continue doing the things you do, or thinking the way you think, you’ll continue to experience the same results in your life.
When you feel GOOD about something, it’s your Emotional Guidance System telling you that what you’re experiencing is something that you DO want in your life.
However, when it comes to your Emotional Guidance System, you have to be aware of the difference between your inner feelings and your physical experience.
Just because your body feels good from taking drugs doesn’t mean you really feel good inside.
That’s where your level of conscious awareness comes in to help you differentiate between what your inner being is telling you, and what your physical body is telling you.
The most important thing to realize that when you keep a journal for personal development, you’re doing so in order to grow and develop yourself.
If you knew THEN what you know NOW, you might have done things differently, right?
So while you might feel upset, realize that you’re becoming better and starting the process of growth and change in your life.
Five years from now, as you grow and develop, when you look back on your life you’ll be amazed at how much you’ve grown and changed.
Author: Darbright Ng
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
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