August 12, 2014
To experience happiness it is important to have a sense of peace and satisfaction about who you are. If you want to achieve that, it is important that you in fact learn to understand who you are. If you can understand yourself, you can understand others. However, to understand yourself, you must learn to become self-aware of your environment and how it affects your emotions. Your emotions are affected by what you experience in your environment. However, the events themselves will not affect your emotions but rather your interpretation of those events. This is where self-awareness is important because if you let emotions take over your judgment you can experience negative outcomes. Emotions can sometimes become irrational and can clout your judgment to the point that you make decisions that result in catastrophic outcomes. However, when you practice self-awareness, taking control of your emotions becomes easier.
In order to develop self-awareness you must first understand your personality traits and behavior. For example, if someone says something that makes you angry, and you practice self-awareness, you can immediately identify exactly why you feel angry. That is that you know enough about yourself to understand that what he or she said is not really what made you angry but the fact that he or she did not treat you with respect is what did it. Once you come to that conclusion you can then avoid escalating the situation by just addressing what triggered your anger. For example, in that particular situation, you might say “I feel that you are trying to hurt my feelings by disrespecting me and although that might give you some satisfaction, it is not going to solve the problem. I rather we focus on solving the problem.
This is just one example of how self-awareness can help you achieve a sense of peace and satisfaction. However, self-awareness is not something that you develop by reading about it. It is something that you achieve by getting to know every aspect of your emotions. For every emotion that you experience, you must find its trigger and its origin. You must go back in time and find how your emotions came about.
There are countless books and guidelines that will help you achieve that, and thus, I do not need to re-invent the wheel here. However, I just wanted to make you aware that it is something that can help you achieve that sense of peace and satisfaction that might be eluding you.