SELF-AWARENESS, WHO ARE YOU?
By: Deena Lamarque Piquion
Life is a beautiful journey of self-realization and development if you let it be. Learning how to cultivate your intuition and work on a stronger connection with yourself takes dedication. To be more in tune with yourself means living a more fulfilled life. Who are you? What do you stand for? What is unique about you? Are questions we all ask ourselves as executives, managers, employees, human beings and dynamic members of society. These questions often dictate what projects, initiatives and time commitments we say yes and no to.
We are on a journey to discover your true authentic self, a self that truly embodies your core values. Through time and perseverance, we can uncover our core values. After some soul searching of my own, I discovered mine – authenticity, generosity, and strength. Indra Nooyi, Tiffani Bova, Arianna Huffington, Sheryl Sandberg, Silvia Vanni are a few women who have embodied these values and served as role models and examples for me. Every story is unique as a snowflake and yet as impactful as an avalanche, find yours. Identify the qualities you appreciate in others and yourself most; humor, strength, selflessness, service, respect, and authenticity each deliver a unique humane reaction. Reflect – What qualities do you instinctively react to most positively?
Awareness is a combination of many things that all help us to excel personally and professionally. Below are three key factors.
- Identify
- Understand your unique self (your highs and lows) so that you can properly exercise your signature strengths
- Finding enjoyment in hobbies without an end goal or outcome in mind so that you connect with what makes you truly happy
- Develop
- Be open to guidance and feedback to continually improve yourself
- Pause to feel and act on your intuition which is built and shaped by your unique story
- Meditate, practice yoga or any other mindfulness practice that helps you be more present and aware
- Communicate
- Honestly with self and others – courageously and authenticity
- Harness your intuition as the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning
With those factors in mind, self-awareness helps us realize our strengths, our values, and even our weaknesses. We begin to realize that we are guarded, calculated and measured in how we are able to connect with our intuition, especially when it comes to work-related decisions. We are afraid to make a mistake, too cerebral and not emotional enough to push ourselves further. Here is where awareness becomes the first step of change. A great resource for a list of books on developing your self-awareness can be found here.