Self-awareness is a superpower we all possess. We just need to practice it consistently (like all superheroes), dust off parts of ourselves long forgotten, and maybe sometimes have a special cape.

This months blog post’s goal is to give you access to more ways to harness and nurture your self-awareness and amplify your superpower.

What is Self-Awareness? I found this great definition from Hubspot:

Self-awareness is the ability to focus on yourself and how your actions, thoughts, or emotions do or don’t align with your internal standards. If you’re highly self-aware, you can objectively evaluate yourself, manage your emotions, align your behavior with your values, and understand correctly how others perceive you.

Without self-awareness you cannot enable your best future.

How do you know you need to work on this? Well, I would argue life will constantly give each of us opportunities to enhance our knowledge of ourselves. But generally, if you are saying you want things in life, but you’re actions aren’t adding up… you have some opportunity here.

Key Tools to Enhance Self-Awareness:

Here are some of my favorites:

• A curiosity behind your own actions, words, and deeds
• A willingness to learn: ask your friends, family, and coworkers how they’d describe you and compare that with your own list
• List out what you say you want, then, with so much love, list out all the actions and inner dialogs that go against this
• List out things that come naturally to you, that you always enjoy doing and lose time doing
• Journal for one minute at the end of the day noting your wins, opportunities, and feelings
• When you’re feeling extra stuck? I pull out a deck of oracle cards and ask it to show me where I’m holding me back and what action I can take to shift for my highest and best. ALWAYS enlightening.
• Personality tests: these ones have helped me the most
  • Clifton Strengths Finder : helped me see areas that don’t come naturally to me (sales), which has helped me find new ways of approaching them
  • Enneagram : as a peacekeeper and helper I know where to amplify what comes naturally and what environments will trigger me
  • Human Design: it’s like astrology meets nasa meets all sorts of magic, but I learned that as a generator I’ve been acting against my human design my whole life. Not anymore… #magic

Know Your Triggers

What is your kryptonite?

Here’s the tricky part of this… sometimes your triggers are really painful awful things, like being bullied at the office or even lack of sleep. Sometimes your triggers are really wonderful amazing things that you’ve been working hard to co-create that actually happen but deep down you don’t think you deserve.

Ask yourself how you can grow you sense of self-worth and how you can feel and process past pains to align your nervous system with your highest and best.

It’s not easy. Your brain wants to keep you safe so will do everything in it’s power to stop you from doing scary things. If your nervous system isn’t used to safe and secure, safe and secure will feel wrong and it will fight it tooth and nail.

Knowing your triggers will help you put things in place so they don’t derail you for long. Knowing your triggers will help you pause before you self-sabotage. It also helps you communicate better.

Create a Solid Foundation

When you add daily, tiny, rituals they become your foundation. They do not need to be long, but my experience has taught me they do need to be repeated. Consistency is what creates a solid foundation.

Your foundation can also be the people and animals you surround yourself by.

Think of this as things that anchor you in storms. What keeps you rooted but helps you sway in wind gusts?

Here are some of my favorite rituals (that have paid me back in dividends):

• Morning Meditation to bring yourself back into your body
• Gratitude list with a cup of coffee
• Breathing exercises: 3 breaths in through your nose and out through your mouth
• Envisioning my feet rooted on the earth
• Connecting with my boyfriend
• Snuggling my dog
• Gardening: getting my hands and feet in dirt always make me feel better
• Spending time to journal about my day
• Prayer and reiki send