Corporate E-Learning

A vital way of becoming more effective in both business and life is by becoming more self aware. If you can become aware of your self – your strengths and your weaknesses – then, you can become aware of the effects you create. Only once you know your effects can you know how to change them, or even whether you should. Implementing the guidelines in this module is the first step in a continual process of deepening your awareness of yourself and the effects you create. Becoming more effective can only deepen your rewards in both your professional and personal life.

What is the self? To many, the answer might be so obvious that they haven’t given it much thought. Others might proffer up one idea after another and finding each imperfect to an extent that they wonder if the self even exists, and if it does can it be defined. They may or may not realize that this is a question humanity has been asking for millennia, with answers from different eras often addressing not just what we are but who we are at that particular place in time. Nor is the answer a trivial one. Too often we stumble through life and take a shallow view of ourselves, our environment, and prevailing forces. And yet, we can do better. We can be better. Our first step is to become aware of who and what we are. Which still fails to answer the original question, what is the self? No answer will be completely accurate or at all times precise. Instead, here is a temporary answer, good for the purposes of this course: the self is the aspect of an individual organism that is aware of its existence as an individual organism. It’s the part of ourselves that we are referring to when we each say “I,” as in “I am thinking” or “I am feeling”, etc. One helpful way to think about the self and become more aware of our complete and total self is to divide it into four aspects: the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual

Even though we live inside physical bodies, so to speak, it’s not uncommon to proceed day in and day out without ever truly being aware of one’s body. Unless we are experiencing high degrees of pain or physical stress, how our bodies feel at any given moment can completely escape our notice. However, an increased awareness of your physical body is the first step in improving both your physical and emotional health. Even though it is a first step, the importance of being aware of your physical self and the space it operates can’t be understated.

Another way of thinking of physical awareness is being aware of how you deploy yourself in your environment. This can be your work environment, your home environment, and any other environment in which you are engaged. Life in the early 21st Century is fast-paced and in order to effectively engage with the overall environment, you must become aware of how you spend your time and how to maximize that time.

The emotional aspect of the self has long been misunderstood. The ancient cultures from which many of our own contemporary values have derived were faced with a difficult task. With the advent of agriculture, for the first time in human history, people did not have to wander and had food surpluses that went beyond the immediate moment. As a result, you suddenly had large groups of people living near each other. In order to limit the destructive impulses that tended to come out when large groups gathered, people began to champion concepts of reason and rationality. In doing so, they suggested that emotions themselves might be undesirable, or that acknowledging emotions is a sign of weakness. Nothing could be further from the truth.

If you cannot control how you feel and avoiding your feelings has negative consequences, the only recourse you have left is to manage your emotions. This involves understanding not only how you feel, but what use you can make of your feelings.

Strictly speaking, it is not possible to control your emotions. However, your thought processes often determine how you assess a situation, and it’s that assessment where emotions can come into play. If your assessment is off, you may be angry in a situation that when viewed in another way would not warrant anger at all, for example. Consequently, in developing greater self-awareness, you must become aware of your mental self.

As you develop a greater degree of self awareness, you will also become more aware of the dynamics at play in your interactions with others. However, this awareness doesn’t always go two-ways. When you have a greater awareness of thinking, learning, and personality styles, you also have a responsibility to be more adaptable in your interactions with others.

Developing awareness of the spiritual self is the capstone to developing awareness of one’s whole self. When you begin to focus on spiritual development, all other approaches to increasing your self-awareness become enhanced because frequently a key step to becoming more aware of your body, heart , and mind involves paying attention to the needs of your soul.

Increasing your self-awareness can be a highly enriching experience. However, it is only a prelude towards greater awareness of your place among others. In fact, too much focus on your self can have detrimental effects.

In Europe before the Renaissance, the idea of individuality wasn’t considered a good thing. People lived on farms, and groups of people were far more important than the individual. This was why a person’s family name was often more important than the first name. Since then, the idea of independence has become more important, so that most people even think of the notion of dependency as a bad thing. However, now that the Internet and high speed forms of travel and communication have become the norm, the idea of independence as the best form of social organizing is being supplanted by a new notion: interdependence.

Although this workshop is coming to a close, we hope that your journey to greater self-awareness and awareness of others is just beginning. Please take a moment to review and update your action plan. This will be a key tool to guide your progress in the days, weeks, months, and years to come. We wish you the best of luck on the rest of your travels!