How to deepen your self-awareness for your overall wellness
Our wellbeing often starts with self-awareness.
How do you know where you want to go until you know where you’re starting from?
How do you know what you might need if you’re not asking yourself the right questions?
I’d like to share some steps with you to help you deepen your own self-awareness around your wellbeing.
Grab your favourite journal or pen and paper and let’s get started.
1. Complete a life assessment
What do I mean by this?
It’s taking an inventory of the different areas of your life. I often talk about how all areas of our life are connected and all affect our overall wellbeing. When we achieve in one area another tends to benefit.
This concept goes both ways. When we’re struggling in a certain area this can also spread into others.
It’s important to take stock (without judgement) to get a really clear picture of where you’re at. Once you have this full picture, it becomes easier to create goals and any changes you might like to make.
You could look at areas such as:
Health & Wellness
Relationships
Work & Finance
Spirituality
Your Environment
2. Look to your energy
Our energy levels are often an excellent indicator of where we’re at.
If you’re feeling tired and sluggish during the day it can point to a few different things.
Are you getting enough sleep?
Are you taking enough breaks and time to switch off?
What about food & water. Are you eating plenty of whole foods to fuel your body and drinking enough throughout the day?
Do you have techniques to manage stress? Do you meditate, do yoga or get out in nature?
Are you living in alignment with you? This one is a deeper question. But very important. If we’re living in alignment with the work we do and the people we surround ourselves with it can give us more energy.
All of these questions can help you get started with really considering what you may need to add into your life or take away.
3. Consider what you love
Your wellbeing journey won’t look like anyone else’s and nor should it.
You may love a morning gym session and someone else an evening run. You may love green smoothies and someone else oats and berries.
What you do and the healthy habits you create need to be for you.
The following questions may help you get started:
What activities do you like?
What time of day works best for you?
What would work with your current lifestyle?
Or do you want to change your lifestyle and what do you want to create?
What small steps can you take?
What’s your biggest challenge with your wellbeing?
What’s your biggest goal?
4. Keep a journal
This one has really helped with my own self-awareness around my wellbeing.
I tend to write daily with longer sessions on Sundays and at the beginning of each month. I’ve made it into a ritual where I set intentions in each area of my life. (I’ll go into the importance of setting intentions in a future post.)
For now, I’d like to highlight how this can be used as a measuring stick.
I list out the different areas of my life and go through where I was and what I’d like to achieve going forward.
5. Meditation
There are of course many, many benefits to meditation.
In this particular case it helps us listen. Listen to ourselves and what we really need. In this quiet space we are better able to hear what our intuition is saying.
Set an intention for your practice (there’s that word again!). Perhaps it’s around your work, a relationship or what your body is trying to tell you it needs. Set the intention and see what comes up. This time and space is a great place to cultivate self-awareness for your wellness.
We talked about a few strategies here.
Taking stock with a self-assessment, getting clues from our energy levels, considering what you love and what’s uniquely you, keeping a journal to note your journey, and meditate to enable you to really listen to your needs.
Deepening your self-awareness for your wellbeing is a skill like anything else. It does take a bit of time. But the real benefit is that you will know yourself better, what you need and what you might like to change for your own overall wellness.
Now I’d love to know how you got on and which strategy resonates with you. Let me know in the comments below.
