The key to self-awareness is to know your default thinking, feeling, and doing patterns. Rather than lucking out with success, you should know your personal success patterns and anti-patterns. The following are solutions at a glance for self-awareness:
How to improve your self-awareness
A simple way to improve self-awareness is to reflect on your results each week. Each Friday, you can ask, “What are three things going well and three things to improve?”
How to understand and use your strengths
Strengths are activities that catalyze you. Strengths are things that come easy for you, you enjoy doing, and you do better than other people. To find your strengths, you can pay attention during the week to which activities you feel you do your best. You can also reflect on what people go to you for or consider your strengths to be. Get input and test.
How to understand and avoid your weaknesses
Weaknesses are activities that drain you. Improvement comes slowly, if at all, and you don’t enjoy the activity. If a weakness is a liability, try to reduce it. Find ways to spend less time in your weaknesses. Consolidate activities that make you weak if you can’t get rid of them. This helps limit the time you spend in weaknesses.
How to find your blind spots
Find a sounding board you trust. This could be a trusted set of friends or colleagues that know you well and can provide effective feedback. Ask them what they think your blind spot is. Once you have some suggestions, find ways to test some behaviors that help you deal with your blind spot. Your friends and colleagues might have some good suggestions for how to improve in your blind spot areas.
How to learn your personal success patterns
Look to your past to see what’s worked. Chances are, you know when you are at your best for various things. For example, you probably know your best routines for sleeping, eating and working out. If you flip back through your life, you can probably remember key patterns that worked well.
How to learn your personal anti-patterns
Just like success patterns, you can flip back through your life and find patterns that didn’t work for you. You probably have key patterns that work against you. If you can identify these, it will help you avoid these because you can name and organize them.
