How I learnt to develop my Self-Awareness

Part of the reason I fell into so many of the same cycles, traps, and made the same mistakes is because I was stupid. I mean I wasn’t self-aware. We are all so judgemental of ourselves that we forget to step back and audit, reflect on, and just, well listen to ourselves. This post is really a call to action, for compassion. Compassion to you who on so many occasions might have thought why me? Why does this keep happening? I’m so lost. I want so much for you to feel the way I feel which is genuine connectivity to my being, consciousness stream, self, whatever you want to call it. When you have an awareness of what is going on in that head of yours, what you like, what you don’t like, things you aren’t sure about, things get real clear. What do I mean by this? Like come on Dan this all very fluffy and it’s really tickling my balls but what does it mean? Well there, steady on I shall explain as articulately as I possibly can.

The world is a bloody noisy place! You’ve got opinions flying around, opinions about you from friends, from family, from your partner. There is the societal narrative that has walked along side you since you started school, we have to be looking like we are doing well, there is no room for the weak, it’s a constant dick measuring competition. Then you have the noise in your own head from your day to day stresses, your ego, and everything else. By developing your self-awareness and getting to know yourself you will have a greater sense of who you are and what you want, and therefore will be able to understand what is your stuff and what is not your stuff. In life there are a lot of outside forces that will impose upon you like your job, your family, and your friends. They don’t mean to do it but will sometimes project their problems onto you. Understanding what holds true for you will allow you to recognise when this is happening and you’ll be able to separate it from yourself and not be impacted emotionally as much as you might’ve been before. Becoming intimate with who you actually are will allow you live and lead a more authentic and fulfilling life as you’ll likely pursue what actually makes you happy because you have done the hard work understanding who you are!

Enough of the fluff though, the main reason I did this post is to give you a gift, the gift is an exercise is developing self-awareness which I learnt in my training to become a counsellor. Beware it is quite an emotionally taxing exercise and should not be done if you are already in a distressed or emotional state.

So grab an A4 piece of paper and draw a horizontal line across the middle of the page, the left hand side of the line we’ll call our earliest memories and the far right of the line we’ll call today. The exercise is to map out milestone events that have happened in our lives that have had a significant emotional impact. Milestones that are positive go above the line, milestones that are negative go below the line, simple enough right? With each milestone that you document on the page I want you to think back to what age you were when it happened, what the milestone was, and what emotion you feel is attached to that milestone. So for example for me when I was assaulted when I was 16 that would go below the line as a negative milestone, and I would document how that event made me feel, so for me it was humiliation, fear, anxiety, and depression. We start off from our earliest memory and document up until today, it will interesting for you to see what you document on the page. You may for instance see a trend of negative events over a decade and find that interesting to attribute to state of mind or phase of life you were in, you may find that there have been problems with relationships, or you have been consistently promoted at work.

The exercise is important because it begins to map out in your head key moments that have helped shape who you are today, and we need to understand what has happened up until today and be conscious of it’s impact of us if we are going to evaluate who we are and better than that make a change and grow.

I hope you have enjoyed reading this blog post and I just want to say thank you for your attention, I truly hope to the bottom of my heart that this exercise is the rolling stone for you to start the path to figuring out who you are, and I wish you well.

Daniel James Udale-Forrester

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I’m a passionate, enthusiastic, and relatable trainee therapist that brings clarity to mental health