Peel High School

Partially selective and feature school for agriculture

Telephone02 6765 7088

Emailpeel-h.school@det.nsw.edu.au

Self awareness

Self-Awareness Builds Resilience

What is self-awareness?       

Self-awareness involves acknowledging who you are, your own personality, style, likes, wants, values, beliefs and future goals. To gain a better insight of who we are it is often helpful to self-reflect, and this involves taking time out to think about all these things. Everyone is different including in the way they communicate, learn, and process information or events which may happen.

Why is self-awareness important?

Self-awareness allows us to understand our strengths and weakness, and therefore improve our weakness and use and acknowledge our strengths throughout day to day activities. The ability to understand our own strengths and weaknesses also promotes better decision making, and this in turn leads to more positive outcomes in life.

Three steps are helpful when working on building your self-awareness.

1. Assess your self-talk and thoughts

Listen to what your mind is saying, is it negative or positive: Listen to yourself. It is just like the saying "always looks on the bright side of life. If you have trouble sitting and thinking about yourself try writing down your thoughts or your feelings about how you look or feel, or another area of your life you may think about often.

2. Use your senses

Most of our insight into the world is gained through our senses, and in particular our eyes (sight) and nose (smell). These senses allow us to gain insight into our own worlds as well as the world of others such as family members or work colleagues. It is important that we don't let self-talk "filter" what we perceive in our world – it is important to often step back and objectively view things how they are. For example, someone groaning doesn't mean you're boring it may be that they have an issue on their mind that is frustrating or perhaps a simple stomach ache – it is important to be aware of other interpretations and not always jump to the conclusion offered by our first thought.

3. Express your feelings

Many people do not like to think too much about their feelings and this may make getting any emotions out very difficult for them; however doing so can often be very worthwhile. Our feelings are immediate responses to our experiences and give us good information about what is happening in a situation.Feelings are hard to capture however some physical signs can help, for example that feeling in your stomach that people often refer to as "butterflies" is your bodies way of telling you that you are nervous or anxious about something that is about to happen, and tensed muscles or fists is a strong sign that you are feeling angry.
For more help with self-awareness see:

http://www.canyons.edu/committees/leap/team1/15tips/tip13.asp

http://au.reachout.com/What-is-self-awareness

 

Kylie Pursche, School Project Officer, kylie.pursche@hnehealth.nsw.gov.au

Tristan Jones, Peel High School, HSHF Liaison

hmri

 

NSW Health

 

nib foundation

 

University of Newcastle