As human beings, we all have a set of strengths to use in our daily interactions with other ones in our family, school or work. Get to know them, and having tools to remember them (especially in difficult moments) is really important to give the best of us in any circumstance that comes to our day. In this lecture you can find a set of techniques so you can apply your strengths in a self awareness way; wich means that you are completely aware of your best strengths and the one that better fits for confronting any situation.
Our set of strengths
Based on Synchronicity, here's a list of the most important strengths we all have, please read them regardless of their position, in fact: they are ordered alphabetically, so you don't mind the order (we are going to see next that the order is actually an important thing in our set).
- Appreciation for beauty and excellence
- Courage
- Creativity
- Curiosity
- Enthusiasm
- Equanimity
- Forgiveness
- Gratitude
- Honesty
- Hope
- Humor
- Judgment
- kindness
- Leadership
- Love
- Love for Learning
- Modesty
- Perseverance
- Perspective
- Prudence
- Self-regulation
- Social Intelligence
- Spirituality
- Team work
Self-awareness in the strengths usage
First of all, you need to know your set of strengths. We all have the same items in that set, but in different order. So, you can try programs like the given from Synchronicity in order to know your top strengths. After knowing them, notice that the ones at the top are where you are particularly good at, so; start by using them to solve any issue that hits your life. Up next; we will see different ways to remember these strengths based on different parameters like emotions, and learning techniques.
Gathas
A Gatha is a short verse that helps you in the goal of remembering something quickly. By creating a Gatha, you can remember key strengths for key situations. For example, imagine someone at work being rude with you, but you don't want to respond with the same low energy, that is an important time to remember a strength to help you move forward the awkward situation. For instance, imagine you are really good at Social Intelligence. You could have a Gatha like:
...I'm the master of social intelligence, being part of an argument is nonsense...
Meditation
Meditation is an excellent way of being present in the moment. You can use some time during the morning for meditation, and once you get that awesome energy that comes after a good meditation practice; is an excellent moment for analysing the stuff happening in your life and come with a plan of how you could use your strengths in order to pass through them, the energy and the mood you get after meditation will help you choose strengths wisely.
This is a good opportunity to introduce a couple of well-known meditation techniques you could use to achieve the presented goal of becoming self-aware and pick strengths from your set, they are the following ones:
Belly breathing
Belly breathing, also known as breathing focused on the heart; is a meditation technique that will calm you down when you feel anxious. It consists in taking your full concentration in the exercise of feeling how the air goes in when inhaling, and slowly exhale the air. This will provoke several relaxing feelings because of the movements of your muscles after reacting of this way of breathing.
Labeling feelings
This is a technique where you need to label how you feel about a given situation. There is a list of feelings that you definitely need to know in order to achieve the best results of this meditation, you can find it by visiting the Atlas of emotions website. There's a performance rule that says: "you can't improve what you don't measure", that apply for this context as well, you need to know what you are feeling so you can look forward for picking a strength that could help you in the way of start feeling different. Remember there are no bad feelings, feeling sad or angry is equally valid as feeling happy or exited, we can't get rid of any feeling as they are normal and organic for us as human beings.
Labeling Thoughts
With this technique you will let yourself just go and think whatever comes to your mind. Just be there, think and then label that thought in a given classification that works for you. For instance, you could use the useful/not useful classification, where you simply think in something and then label that something and continue with the next thing in the queue. By doing this, you could write down the things that result useful for you, and by having a list with only the important things, you can then start by matching the best strength that fits with the given thought in the list, so if that thing is an issue or something that provokes stress in your life, you can tackle it sooner and in a self-awareness way.
Befriending fear exercise
This is a technique that appeals to your capacity of accepting a fear you have and try to calm down even thought the fear is there. This is really important in top situations where you really need to calm yourself down in order to make a decision that could severely change how things are looking in your life. By accepting your fear, you will be capable of put in practice your strengths in order to reduce that fear, or even completely eliminate it.
Watch your own movie
In this exercise you will picture yourself in a movie, and you will imagine yourself telling that movie to a friend. The goal is to describe your movie with so much level of detail that you will take yourself to the present moment, self-aware of what you're going thought. In that moment where you are no longer in automatic pilot, you will remember your top strengths and give a conclusion to the movie, which means; imagine that you solved your problem by using your top strengths. Ask yourself then, how did the guy in the movie get to solve the problems? How did she/he used the strengths? That could be the beginning of your answer.
Ask yourself frequently which strength could you, or others, use
This is more like a general learning technique for remembering things that could be used in many contexts, but still is worth to mention here. When you ask yourself questions frequently, you will exercise that path in your brain that makes the answer come faster every time. Now, imagine you constantly use this technique in daily bases by asking yourself explicitly which strength can you use in a given moment of your day. That works for other ones as well, you could see how others act and without judging anyone without knowing all the information (which is actually a bad practice for becoming self-aware) you could ask yourself wich strengths would you use in that guy's position.
Motivation
Don't stop recognizing yourself when you choose a good strength and use if for solving an issue. Can you remember how good it feels when you do great at some task at school or work and the team congratulates you for such an amazing job? Well, this is the same principle, but without the dependency of waiting for others to notice you and give you a high five. You need to be in a constant loop of self-awareness, and when you find yourself applying a strength, start being proud of yourself, that will propitiate more moments like that in your daily basis activities and you will be using your strength more often every time.
Ask for feedback
Mental healthiness is a topic that gets stronger every day. They say it will become as normal as work out every morning and eating healthy, so; why don't you ask for feedback about how you use your strengths in the workplace, home or school? Not everybody is going to know the set of skills, and not everybody will give you any feedback, but just express to your close ones that you are making yourself stronger at X, Y or Z strength, maybe you could pick the ones you want to start growing faster, and ask them to give you feedback about them, either positive or negative, it doesn't matter because both will help you knowing that you are doing good and what you are doing bad, so you can improve!
The Feynman Technique
In this technique you will understand the list of strengths first, and then; you will explain some of them to a friend that doesn't have the knowledge about this topic. In order to make her/him understand you, you would need to use words that don't confuse her/him, for example: probably you wouldn't use concepts like self-awareness, mindfulness, resilience and so on... The idea is to see if your friend understands what you are telling her/him, if there are any gaps in how your friend got your explanation; that are the gaps you need to study and understand better so you can master where and how apply your strengths, and if you are choosing the right ones for the situation you are confronting.
Just in time learning
This means you will pay attention for the things you are experiencing at a given time. For example; if you choose to pick a strength and that didn't result as you expected, pay fully attention on why it didn't work and write that down. Later, you can organize those thoughts and complete them with more accurate information on why that didn't work. That way, you will do better next time, that's the importance of having a journal with this kind of stuff.
Conclusions
In this short lecture we saw different key concepts that will help you in your way of becoming self-aware of your actions and start removing the automatic pilot from your behavior. Also, we saw how we all have a set of strengths sorted in different order based on wich ones are the best developed in your actions.
Given these concepts, we then presented you with a bunch of techniques you could use in order to first become self-aware of your reality, and then; choose the strength that better helps for attending any particular situation.
We encourage you to master at least one of them, the one you feel more comfortable with, and try to apply your strengths every day for problem solving, intelligent conversations, negotiations and so on... The number of places where you could use those strengths has no end!
Top comments (2)
I found a lot of interesting points in this article on the topic of self-awareness. I recently researched this topic and wrote a self awareness essay with the help of a resource with essay examples, and as my research shows, this is a very under-explored topic, and not many researchers were dedicated to it. But this topic is important for psychology and mental health.
Congrats for the article Jean Carlo! Just to clarify, the list of strengths is from the VIA Institute of Character. Congrats again, and kudos for going above and beyond and doing it in english!