Self-awareness helps you manage your mindset and be happier

How do you manage your mindset?

Our unconscious mind often takes control when we have learned certain behaviours and developed ‘strategies’ around routine things we do including relationships, communication and those triggers that set us ‘fighting’.

Sometimes it is just a word that needs to change that will alter your perception of yourself or your situation and therefore will change how you feel about it and in turn change your actions, your behaviours – your reactions to responses that you choose to make instead. Again, learning and developing a more helpful response.

Your unconscious mind will hold all you have been told, experienced, interpreted and perceived for the whole of your life. Therefore, things that once helped you in childhood or teens to survive and stay safe or take calculated risks similar to previous ones that worked out, your mind will hold it all - and respond to it accordingly.

Safeguarding you, fighting for your needs to be met or message to be heard, protecting you behind a shield of silence or distance.

The benefits of self-awareness

The more you understand yourself the more benefits you will have:

To create your own best environment to feel safe to speak up and explore potential, to challenge yourself and expand into the world.

To meet your personal and natural needs from sustenance to home to belonging to status and ultimately explore until you find your natural flow and purpose – self-actualisation.

To know the values you actually already live to without realising it and then you can use these to help you make practical choices easier, make informed decisions and be able to explain why you do or don’t do what you do.

Know your life purpose, your natural talents and tendencies so you can rise up to meet them. There will be things, ways and traits you were born with – nature – and then things you learned along the way, especially in childhood – nurture.

The beliefs you hold inform your expectations of your Self, your life, the world, other people, relationships, businesses, authority, family, community – all of it!

These beliefs will be inherited to some extent because as a child you knew nothing and had to learn about it. In order to belong and be taken care of, you learned how to fit in with that community. Then as you grow up and away, find your own Self and your values, ways to meet your particular needs you find they no longer work for you and need to change and you create your own.

Your natural tendencies, your personality or character and traits as well as certain behaviours and outlooks, are who you are at your core and who you need to be in some way or other.

People are too often encouraged to fit society's idealistic views and needs, rather than fit in as much as possible whilst still finding their own ways and meeting their own needs – in families, relationships, workplaces, education, job roles and career - or who they are fully and honestly.

Your natural talents too will need to be used and will fulfil you when you do – artistic, academic, physically sporty, analytical or creative – whoever you are, you will be happiest fulfilling those skills and talents, those interests you were born with.

In this way, you will then be able to learn how best to manage your own mindset.

Managing your mindset

Change a thought, feeling or behaviour and you change them all

Changing words as we’ve said – from control freak to organised purposeful leader.

Change your perception – from low earnings to fulfilling your natural needs and tendencies, working with your talents and skills – the interests that draw you there.

Change your feelings – accept what you feel and work with it, not against it. Trust your instincts and take note of the messages from mind to body and back.

Changing a behaviour is, in coaching terms, ‘acting as if …’.  This is not pretending, this is practising! Modelling behaviours you want to adopt, want to have come naturally in due course and become that sort of person!

Change your mind, change your life

You can manage thoughts that pop into your mind. You can choose which to dwell on or not and for how long and when if they do. You can plan when to work on your problems and find solutions rather than let your mind run away and do it at the most inconvenient moments!

You can choose how you see and feel about yourself – and choose to make it positive and helpful, good, not listen to previous critics trying to meet their needs through you.

You can choose the words you accept others use to describe you and refuse those that put you down, give a negative connotation to your image and change them to words that suit your needs.

You can build your self-esteem, self-belief and self-trust - with practice. Acting as if you are …

You can correct people's interpretation or perception of you and your behaviours so that it becomes fact.

And most of all, you can manage your self-talk to boost yourself up and become the person you want to be tomorrow.