Life Skills!!!!!

Self-awareness is useful to us throughout our lives and the ability to self-reflect is particularly useful in an educational environment.

In simple terms self-awareness is about trying to understand who we really are and why we do the things we do, in the way that we do them. By becoming a bit more self-aware we can gain a greater degree of control over how we are operating in the present, instead of reacting to something conditioned by our past.
Much of the learning we undertake these days encourages us to look at our responses to the work we do, reflect upon them, and then develop our ideas further.

By understanding ourselves better we can:

•gain more control
•be more flexible and confident in our approach
•help ourselves deal with challenges in a more positive and less anxious way
•interact better, communicate more effectively, and understand our relationships with others more fully
•make better decisions
•reduce our stress levels
•get more out of life

Some steps to gaining self-awareness

•Talk to friends and other people whose opinions we value.
•Make a list of our strengths and weaknesses: knowing more about ourselves including our weaknesses can often allow us to turn them into strengths. Listing our strengths can help us feel good about ourselves!
•Start recognizing different ‘parts of yourself’: we are made up of many different feelings, thoughts and behaviors depending upon the situation; it can be helpful to think, beforehand, about the way we might respond to a given situation. Also it can be valuable to reflect, or think about our responses
• It can be useful if we can put ourselves in another person’s shoes and try to look at what is happening from their point of view. This can help us try to understand how the other person might be viewing something, and help us when we communicate with them.
• Think about body language and those other subtle messages we send and pick up. If we are with someone, what are we communicating by the way we are: do we try too hard; are we a bit diffident or uninterested; or do we appear confident and comfortable?