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You can change your life by developing self-awareness. You can gain an understanding of the underlying issues tied to your strengths and weaknesses.
Developing self-awareness can be a wonderful life-changing process. Once you have an idea where you stand in relation to others in various life measurements you can begin to work on those areas to either enhance your strengths or begin to build competence in those areas where you are lacking.
Why is it important to develop self-awareness? Understanding your strengths and weaknesses will help you in life and in your career as you will be able to enhance performance by listening to and relying on others who have certain strengths that you don’t currently possess.
The process of developing self-awareness is very personal. To evaluate yourself effectively, you must be brutally honest about your competency in the various categories that you are measuring. Think of it as a performance evaluation for your life. The good news is, you are the judge and jury, no one else needs to see your results. Keeping it personal will help you be honest in your evaluation of the various areas and objectives in your response.
We have all come to this earth to learn and evolve as human beings. That means that no one will score high in all areas. The purpose of this evaluation is to help you focus on the areas where you choose to learn your lessons. If you score highly in one area, it is likely that you have learned everything you need to learn there. If one area is a particular challenge, you know to pay attention to what’s going on there. That’s when developing self-awareness begins and you know that you have your ducks in a row.
Relationships
Do you make friends easily? Have you had long-term romantic relationships in your life? How would you rate your relationships with your family, both parents/siblings and spouse/children? Don’t let one or two bad relationships within your circle affect your score greatly here—remember you are looking for your overall competency. Everyone has someone in their life that is a challenge; the importance here is how you handle that challenge. Rate yourself from 1-5.
Finance
Do you make money easily? Do you always have enough money to meet any financial challenge? Making money is an area where many people struggle, so you should be able to assess your ability here fairly easily. Do others ask you how you do it? Perhaps you make money easily but you always spend more than you make, or you have difficulty maintaining a good credit rating. All of these factors should be considered when rating this area. Rate yourself from 1-5.
Spirituality
Are you centered on your spirituality and belief system and have absolute confidence that it is the truth? Are your views validated by events in the outside world? Is your faith exclusionary—in other words, could anyone participate in your faith no matter gender, gender preference, race, nationality, belief systems, etc.? If you subscribe to a faith or belief system that excludes others or punishes others then this is a challenging area for you and one that needs to be examined. Rate yourself from 1-5.
Career
This can be related to but is not the same as the “Finances” category. Are you competent in your chosen career? Have you been promoted regularly? Are you highly regarded as competent by your superiors and your peers? Rate yourself from 1-5.
Health
This is an area where you might say, “I have health challenges, but no one can control that.” All health challenges have an emotional component to them, so this can definitely be an area where you choose to learn lessons. Examine your health history objectively and evaluate what areas of your body have been affected. For example, if you have heart problems, you may need to examine “love” in your life; if you have issues with your stomach, look for self-esteem issues. Rate yourself from 1-5.
Evaluate Yourself
Do you feel like you are dealing with the same issues all the time and those never get resolved? Maybe you can even see the same issue repeating down through the generations in your family. If so, developing self-awareness will help you along the path towards resolving that issue once and for all. I promise you, it can be done.
Developing self-awareness will help you evolve as a human being. Once you start along this path, you will find yourself resolving issues in one area and moving on to resolve new issues. As an example, when I first started my spiritual path, I tended to play out everything in my career. I worked on these issues for years. Then I found issues coming up in my health. This is all a part of my life purpose and plans.
If you have given yourself a score of 3 or less in any given area then this is an area that needs work
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Have you read the original anthology that was the catalyst for The Good Men Project? Buy here: The Good Men Project: Real Stories from the Front Lines of Modern Manhood
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