Self-awareness is one of those most essential skills for any professional, regardless of your role. It can lead to success in many ways.
Self-awareness helps you understand who you are and how others perceive you. With increased self-awareness, you can uncover your blind spots and create a more comprehensive understanding of your mindset.
What do we mean when we talk about mindset? Mindset represents a person’s way of thinking and leads to an established set of belief systems. It shapes how we see the world and experience everything around us. Most importantly, it governs what we think about ourselves and what we believe we can achieve.
“Your beliefs about your abilities and potential fuel your actions and foretell your successes.“
According to the research of mindset pioneer and Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, your beliefs about your abilities and potential fuel your actions and foretell your successes.
In other words, as individuals, we view and experience the world through a set of filters. Think of it as Instagram filters, some soften harsh lights, others cool down, bring out the contrasts, or make the picture look dreamy. If you view the world and challenges mostly as black and white, you may be missing out on the nuances and possibilities in between.
We all have developed a certain set of filters over our lifetime. We are conditioned through our life experiences, education, upbringing, and influences of people and the world around us. As you can imagine, those belief systems can help us achieve success or present obstacles that cause tension and stress.
Yet, there is another layer to this. The belief system we’ve generated also influences and fuels the inner voice that’s constantly chatting away in the back of our minds. So many of us live with the inner self-critic who constantly judges, interprets, and often produces feelings of guilt, deficiency, and self-doubt.
A harsh inner critic can wreak havoc and hold us back from stepping into our true potential. Once aware of the judging mental dialogue, we want to eliminate it as quickly as possible. We’re trying to fight it and ignore it. Yet, if you fight it, you only make it stronger.
It’s not willpower that will stop it. You stop it simply by recognizing the futility and destructive nature of this type of thinking.
“With awareness comes freedom”
What does it take to do that? Awareness.
When you’re not aware, you are at the mercy of your thoughts.
Once you see and recognize the mental dialogue, you have a choice. You can choose the thoughts that serve you, acknowledge the debilitating ones, and let them go.
Your thoughts and emotions determine your actions and the results you are creating in your life. You, however, are not your thoughts.
“You are not the one who speaks your thoughts, you are the one that hears them.”
Thoughts, however, are merely a reflection of the conditioning you have received over time. In other words, the way we see the world is based on the beliefs and our level of awareness.
How to increase your level of awareness
Imagine, you could take something as abstract as the filters you’ve developed and turn it into something measurable. That’s exactly what the Self-Awareness Assessment does.
This proprietary, research-backed tool provides a quantifiable measure to assess and track the status of your awareness. The beauty of this tool is that it uncovers the thinking and attitudes that lead to stress and might be holding you back from realizing your goals.
After all, the ability to achieve success, happiness, and fulfillment happens when we can recognize and release the mental chatter and the challenges associated with it.
If you are curious to learn more about your current level of awareness and untapped potential, feel free to email me at [email protected]
“We are each a product of our own belief system” – iPEC Foundation Principle