Individuals with good self-awareness and effective self-regulation experience:
Resilience
Self-Awareness and Self-Regulation
Self-awareness is an ability to understand your thoughts, feelings and behaviours and to be able to judge if they are helpful or unhelpful. It also includes an awareness, through feedback, of how others perceive you. Having a clear understanding of your character strengths helps you to leverage these strengths to live your best life and feel energised.
Benefits of Self-Awareness and Self-Regulation
- Decreased anxiety
- Improved problem solving
- More effective leadership and management skills at work
- Improved job and personal satisfaction
- Improved ability to handle stressors
- Better relationships
More About Self-Awareness and Self-Regulation
Our thoughts determine our feelings, behaviour and physiological response to an event. These responses can be helpful or unhelpful. In our busy lives, we often operate on autopilot and do not take the time to reflect and analyse objectively how we think and function.
On the positive side, having a clear understanding of your character strengths helps you to be able to leverage these strengths to live your best life and to feel more energised.
But we are all human and therefore prone to counterproductive thoughts (known as Thinking Traps).
These can include:
- Mind reading: Assuming you know what another person is thinking (usually negative).
- ‘Me’ trap: You believe you are the sole cause of every setback and problem.
- ‘Them’ trap: you believe that others are the sole cause of all your setbacks.
- Catastrophising
- Helplessness
Other counterproductive behaviours include:
- Rumination: Continuously thinking the same thoughts over and over again (these tend to be negative).
- Perfectionism
The good news is that there are antidotes you can use to challenge these counterproductive thoughts and behaviours, thus building resilience. Try some of the activities and check the resources for more information.
Impacts on:
- Medical
- Sleep
- Lifestyle
- Work
- Connections
- Mental Agility
Strategies to Improve Self-awareness and self-regulation
1. Know your strengths.
Do the VIA Survey of character strengths. You will need to create a login but there is no cost involved and you don’t get spam from this site.
2. Identify your Thinking Traps.
Think of a recent incident and identify which thinking traps you fell into?
Do you have an upcoming or current event that is stressing you? Identify 2 thinking traps you might fall into. Write down a real-time resilience response that would be useful to you.
3. Deliberate breathing.
This can be a good circuit breaker if you are feeling overwhelmed. Find somewhere to sit quietly and place one hand over your chest and one over your belly. That will help you to focus on breathing in to expand your belly rather than your chest. Breathe in slowly for 5 seconds and out for 5 seconds.
Continue doing this for 2 minutes. This is a quick way to subdue some of the unpleasant physiological symptoms (like rapid heart rate) that occur when we feel threatened, anxious or overwhelmed.
4. Mindfulness.
This is a strategy of paying attention to the present moment, which reduces our tendency to focus on negative thoughts regarding the past or the future.
Activities as simple as engaging in a hobby, sport or exercise can tap into mindfulness. It can also be a specific practice.
5. Meditation.
Meditation is a type of mind—body or relaxation therapy. During meditation, you concentrate your mind on one particular thing, such as your breathing, sounds
6. Feedback from others.
Ask one or more close trusted friends or colleagues for realistic feedback regarding counterproductive behaviours. It might be a bit confronting but it could be very helpful in the long run as those who have both high internal and external awareness of self, along with good self-regulation, are the most effective leaders.
