Building Self-Awareness

It has been a month since I started my 100 Happy Days challenge. It’s has been a difficult month for me personally and at times keeping a positive outlook has proven to be tricky. I have found a few obstacles in my way but I have to say that the 100 Happy Days Challenge has helped me to remain positive and has heightened my awareness and gratitude for life.

The moment I signed up for the challenge and made myself accountable to others who knew about it, I started consciously searching for things in my day that made me smile and made me happy. I started paying attention to the things I have in my life that I should be more grateful for.

Most people by nature tend to have more negative than positive thoughts during a day and with our busy life and schedules we “don’t have time” to spend analysing our day and thinking about what made us happy. Instead we often clutter our minds with worries about the future and criticizing ourselves for errors, questioning our abilities, you name it… All this negative “fuel” filters into our consciousness and damages our positivity and our feelings. If you leave these negative thoughts hanging around and don't challenge them, they will not just disappear.

The language you use along with your beliefs will be absorbed by your subconscious. Your thoughts activate your emotions, both positive and negative, so the choice of your thoughts will determine how you feel. Therefore developing self-awareness is the first step to transforming your thoughts. Remember, that you are the only person who is in charge of your thoughts, emotions, responses and actions.

That is why building your thought awareness is so important. The moment you consciously start paying attention to your thoughts and become aware of what’s going on in your head, you will become able to identify the things that need to be challenged or changed. This also means that you will be able to notice and choose how you think about yourself, behave, talk to yourself and how you respond to different situations…

Self-awareness begins with attention. When we keep conscious attention to our thoughts and behaviour, we will know what needs to be improved.

There are different ways of building your thought awareness: keeping a diary of your thoughts, deep breathing, mindfulness, meditation, gratitude list to name a few. For me the 100 Happy Days challenge is proving to be a positive reminder of how lucky I really am, even if things seem bad at first.

I would encourage anyone to give it a try and join the challenge. If you would like to keep up to date with my progress, follow me on twitter @lifecoachplease