Where should I start building self awareness?
Building self-awareness takes time and effort, but it is a valuable investment in your personal growth and well-being. By taking small steps and being patient with yourself, you can gradually build a more complete and accurate understanding of who you are and what you need to be happy and fulfilled. The easiest place to start tapping into your awareness is to ask yourself who am I? What do I value? What do I want out of life and why? From here you can learn about yourself, why you do what you do, why you think how you do and how that impacts confidence in your life across the 8 dimensions of health.
The 8 dimensions of health are a tool to ensure that you live a holistic life. Scientists uncovered that where one dimension of health was neglected the others underperformed. As high performers you always want to get as close to 100% (if not 100 itself) in each of these areas. This can become overwhelming and lead you to not feeling enough which impacts your confidence directly. Instead if you acknowledge and appreciate what you are great at and focus on your areas of growth your self awareness will start to drive a level of confidence like you’ve never experienced before.
Think about this, how often have you met someone who talks themselves up so much in one area of their life but you know that there are other areas of life that are totally neglected? Many people right?! Confident people you are magnetically drawn to do not tend to do this. This is because they understand that everyone including themselves are fabulous and fabulously flawed all at once. Instead they are the people in a social setting admitting that they aren’t good at everything. You also have those who say that are good at everything and you know from the moment they say ‘I am awesome at this, I am awesome at that’ that there is probably some insecurity behind the scenes because as a human being on earth being awesome at everything and awesome in character all the time is simply not possible.
Understanding what is possible and not possible, that you can’t be faultless and that you are fabulous and fabulously flawed enables you to have honesty with yourself and that is how you build self awareness. It isn’t always easy. Where you have made mistakes repeatedly you know that these are choices more than mistakes and you don’t feel great about that. It’s easier to avoid finding out why these repeat mistakes happen than facing that maybe you fall short, that is of course if you forget that you cannot be perfect…ever. When you have that awareness at first about humanity you don’t let yourself off the hook in your personal growth you just get real about what is possible which enables you to drop the harsh criticism you have of yourself.
This is so important as you go through the 8 dimensions of health because you will uncover areas of growth that make you uncomfortable. Start here. Why? Because changing how you feel about something you do is the only way to get comfortable and feel happier. Think about the time when you first rode a bike or learnt a new skill, it sucked right? Well that is of course until you totally nailed it. Then you didn’t have to think about how to ride the bike you just enjoyed the ride. This is the essence of a confident life built on self awareness and it is definitely worth the journey. Those things that you nail you can already do in your sleep so you aren’t actually growing much by focussing on them and this is why confidence is changing.
So if you don’t know the 8 dimensions of health and how they impact your confidence it’s time to take a look at them. Here are the 8 dimensions of health- physical, mental, social, intellectual, environmental, financial, emotional and occupational. When you think about how healthy you are in each of these areas and how much you to commit to growth within them you can understand where to start making 1% change where it’s going to give you the greatest bang for your buck when it comes to improving your confidence.
It is worthwhile remembering while you take actions to improve your self awareness that you understand that self awareness isn’t something that you just have one day, it is something you gradually develop when you ask yourself, ‘what can I learn here?’ As long as you focus on this you will build authentic confidence and find your relationships flourish as you can relate to others better than ever before.
Want to learn what you can do to improve your confidence in the 8 dimensions of health? Download our Ultimate Confidence Checklist, by the time you are done using it you’ll know exactly what steps to take. Click the button below to get your free copy!
