Why is Self-Awareness Key to Our Growth?

In order to live your best life, embrace your most authentic self, and understand your core beliefs and intentions; self-awareness is pivotal for keeping yourself successful and motivated. Sarmistha Mitra, Founder & CEO of The Wellbeing Sanctuary and Holistic Health Expert provides tips on learning self-awareness and why it’s vital for a happy and successful life.

WHAT IT MEANS

According to Mitra, self-awareness is a term used to represent that state of mind when you are aware of your emotions, your thoughts, your choices, and the reason behind all of those. “This clarity helps you to be balanced in your understanding of the others in your environment and create a harmonious society,” she says, “there is no shame in accepting that we all function from fallacies.” Self-awareness leads to psychological maturity. If we had an unpleasant experience in the past, then most of our choices in the present are maligned by the judgment of that past event, she says. And it is this that keeps us psychologically immature. She adds, “I would consider someone self-aware if they can answer all the ‘whats’ and the ‘whys’.”

WHY IT’S SO IMPORTANT

Self-aware also means being realistic with your expectations, and being aware of the variables and components which aren’t in your control, she says. “Selfawareness also helps you stay connected to your authentic self,” she says, so, even when you are stretching your arms to touch the sky, your feet will be well fixed into the ground beneath you. In fact, Mitra firmly believes that selfawareness programs should be mandatory once children reach their teens. She elaborates, “Teens today hardly find time to explore anything outside their curriculum, thus it would be best to begin this training in school as a part of their weekly program.” We can create fun, and interactive sessions to engage them and create curiosity to discover themselves.

THE QUESTIONS THAT CAN ASCERTAIN SELF-AWARENESS

We have we heard the term ‘being in the present’, but do we truly understand it? “If we can ask ourselves the below questions before taking action on the choice we made, then we may have the clarity of what truly needs to be done in the present,” she says. “A few questions help me understand if a person is self-aware and are as follows.” One is ‘do you know what you are thinking?’ Another is ‘do you know why you are thinking what you are thinking?’ Also, ‘do you know what you are feeling?’ Others include ‘why are you feeling what you are feeling?’; ‘what choice are you making?’; ‘why are you choosing it?’; and ‘what does that tell you about yourself?’ Mitra explains, “I can guarantee that 99 people out of 100 will answer ‘I don’t know’ to most of the questions above. Yet, they are living a state of self-ignorance. Most of the choices they are making are functions of fallacies based on their perception of life in the childhood. And these fallacies act as malwares in our functional software. This slowly corrupts the hardware, and causes crisis. This crisis, in the long run may even appear as diseases in the body.” H