How To Grow Your Self Awareness: The Key To Understanding Yourself

Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor podcast. I'm your host, Rob Dial. Today we're going to be talking about self awareness and I'm going to be teaching you how to understand yourself better. And I'm going to be talking about the difference between self awareness and self consciousness. And if you've been listening to my podcast for a while, you probably notice that self awareness might be the main thing that I promote more than anything else. I feel like almost every single podcast I'm talking about self awareness, self awareness, self awareness. When I go onto other people's podcasts, one of the questions that people always like to ask to have like a, you know, they have a lightning round and they have fun questions and sometimes they ask the question of, hey, if you could give everyone in the world a superpower, what would it be? And I always say extreme self awareness. And the reason why is because if people were more aware of themselves, all of the problems in the world would disappear if they were aware of how when they do that thing, they affect other people, good or bad. If we were all more self aware, the world would be a better place. And the phrase ignorance is bliss is probably the most true thing in the world. Because I'll tell you this, it's way easier to just not be aware of yourself. It's way easier to just blindly go through life and just do whatever it is that you are doing. It won't lead to a fulfilled life, it won't lead to a happy life, but it's way more blissful just to not be aware of yourself. Because once you become self aware, you start to notice the things that you need to work on. And a lot of times when you become aware, self aware of the things that you need to work on, you start becoming self conscious. And we're gonna talk today about the difference between the two of them and we're gonna talk about how to improve yourself and go on this journey of self development without judging yourself, without shaming yourself, without feeling guilty for doing the things that you do. And so let me real quick, before we dive into self awareness, let me give you the difference between self awareness and self consciousness and being self conscious. Okay? So as far as self awareness goes, that is basically the recognizing and understanding of your emotions, of your motivations, of your thoughts, of your feelings and your behaviors. It's the recognizing and understanding of them. It's like, you know, I'm 37 years old, it's like, if I've never been self aware, it's like, I'VE been driving a car for 35 years, 37 years. And I, and I'm like, you know what? I'm kind of curious what's under the hood of this thing. And you decide to pop the hood open and look at it. So when you become self, aware, you start getting curious about looking under the hood, figuring out what makes this thing run. And so being self aware means just really having, developing clear perception of your personality, of your strengths, of your weaknesses, your thoughts, your motivations, emotions, every aspect of you, the traumas that happened to you in your past, how your relationship with your parents, your mom make you who you are, how your relationship with your dad make you who you are, how your relationship with your brother and sisters make you who you are. And it really. Once you start to become aware of yourself, then you start to become aware of other people. And you start to become aware of how other people start to perceive you based off of how you act. You start to become aware of your attitude and you also start to become aware of your responses to other people as well as. And you really start to learn who you are. Cause you might know yourself, but learning the difference between knowing yourself and learning yourself is knowing yourself is based in the past, learning yourself is based in the present. It's a journey of, let me go on this journey of self discovery and find out who I am and why I am the way that I am. So why would you want to get better at self awareness? Well, it can make, I mean it helps you a lot with better decision making, with emotional regulation and really helps you with more fulfilling relationships. Cause you will start to understand why, how the way that you are changes the way that other people are around you as well. And so it also helps you decide what you want to work on, what you want to get rid of, what you want to strengthen yourself, all of that. So that's self awareness. Being self conscious is excessive awareness of yourself. It's a really acute awareness of yourself, especially in your relationship with other people and how other people view as well. And to be too self conscious really can bring a. It can be beneficial and I'm going to tell you about it in a minute, of how being self conscious to a point can be beneficial, but being too self conscious can make you feel really uncomfortable in a lot of situations, really uneasy. And you're, you're judging yourself too much, you're, you're guilting yourself, you're shaming yourself for who you are. And a lot of times when we become self aware, we now notice things that we want to fix. But we're human, so we're gonna screw up again and again and again and again and again. So when we do screw up, if we become too self conscious of it, then we start to guilt ourself. Damn it. I thought I was past this. What the hell's wrong with me, man? I'm still fucked up. I'm always gonna be this way. And the self awareness shouldn't turn into judgment and it shouldn't turn into shaming of ourselves. That's when you start becoming too self conscious. And so being self conscious turns into being overly preoccupied with how other people perceive you. And it can really lead to feelings of unease, discomfort, embarrassment, awkwardness. And sure, there's definitely a certain amount of self consciousness that can be good. Like making sure that you act appropriately in certain situations in public. But to be excessively self conscious can be really debilitating because you're thinking too much. Oh my gosh, what do people think of me? Am I doing this wrong? Am I screwed up? Do I look like an idiot? Oh my gosh, I just said this thing to her. Did she take it the wrong way? I didn't mean it that way. If she did take it that way. And it can lead to social anxiety and really prevent you from acting as your true authentic self. So that's the difference between self awareness and self consciousness. Let's dive in into self awareness and really how to get better at it. Because at its core, self awareness is basically like having a clear internal mirror. The more that you become self aware, the more that you're able to understand yourself a little bit more and look into the mirror and start to see why you are the way that you are. You become more introspective and allows you to see your strengths, allows you to see your weaknesses, your desires, your fears, your aspirations. And the more self aware that you are, the more that you can start to understand your emotions. And this is really important for people because I think a lot of people are not, myself included. As a child, was not taught to understand my emotions. And so I would get really angry or sad and I'd be like, where the hell did that come from? I don't understand why I feel this way. And so I just. Oh, it's easier just to push emotions down, act like they don't exist. But really what we're trying to do is we're trying to understand ourself. I feel an emotion come up. Huh? Okay, where did that come from? What am I thinking about? What am I feeling? And Then as you start to learn yourself a little bit more and become more self, aware, you can also start to anticipate emotions and notice them before they come up. Or notice that if I put myself into this circumstance, in this situation, I will probably have this emotion come up. You know what? I'm just gonna avoid that. I don't need to be part of that. And then we can also start to manage our emotions better as well. And so how do we develop this thing? It seems so weird. It's like, very nebulous. You can't really grab on to self awareness. Right, well, let's talk about how to develop self awareness. The first thing I think is really important is to start trying to implement reflective practices. And by reflective practices, I mean, like looking into a mirror, not actually physically into a mirror, but looking into a mirror and saying, hey, Rob, what's going on here? You got some shit you're trying to work through? Why are you this way? And doing it in a very objective way. Hey, this guy seems to be really angry. Speaking about myself, this guy seems to be really angry. Why is this guy angry right now? Versus being like, oh, I'm angry. Why am I angry? Fuck that person. She shouldn't have done that to me. Getting some. It's just like, hey, interesting. This guy's noticing some anger inside of him. What is this anger? So how do we start to get reflective practices? The first one, which I know you've heard me say before, is journaling, right? Some of you are like, if you guys have been listening to podcasts for a while, you're like, damn, is this dude talking about journaling again? Yes. Because are you journaling every single day? No. Okay, I'm gonna keep talking about every single episode, right? Sometimes you need to hear something a thousand times before you're actually like, all right, fine, I'll go ahead and do it. Journaling is really just writing down your thoughts, your experiences, your feelings, your emotions to try to start bringing clarity to them. And the reason why pen and paper is so easy is because your brain is so complex and there's so much happening behind the scenes. There's your conscious thought, which you know you can journal through, or you can. You can kind of think through, which is 5% of what's going on in your head. And then there's your subconscious thought, which is subconscious is below the conscious thought, which means you're basically unconscious of it a lot of times. And which is 95% of what's going on in the programming behind the scenes. And so if you're not aware of the 95% and you're only aware of the 5%, you don't really know yourself. So it really comes down to taking a pen and paper and jotting them all down. You're so complex that to try to figure yourself out in your own head sometimes is just not going to happen. And so I always give the example, like if I said, hey, what's two plus two? Everybody listening can say, oh, that's four, right? Yeah, you got that one. But if I said, what's 300, 374 plus 17,614. Most people probably can't figure it out in your head, but you could figure out if I gave you a pen and paper, you could go back to second grade or third grade and you could start to figure the problem out. Why? Because when it's on paper and you can write it out and you can visually see it, it's very easy to work through as opposed to inside of your head. You're a million times more complex than that math problem. And you're trying to figure out what's going on in your head and why you're acting the way that you are and why you are the way that you are. So journaling is really the act of taking a pen and paper. And it's not like sitting down and saying, dear Diary, today I went to the grocery store and I bought some apples. It's not a diary. I'm talking about journaling and the fact of writing down, man, I'm really frickin pissed off right now. Why am I so pissed off? And you write the question, why am I so pissed off? And then you answer the question, I'm so pissed off because this, this, this, this, this happened. Okay. And then go a little bit deeper. Okay, why, why does that bring up such a strong emotion in me though? Oh, and you answer the question, okay, is there any way that maybe this isn't my true self and whatever it might be and you start to journal through it. What's really interesting, if you actually do this, there's a reason why I preach this so much, is journaling yourself is you will start to figure out who you are way more than you ever knew. And one of my favorite things when I used to do one on one coaching a lot was when I would work with clients and I would teach them how to journal and make them journal every single week. And about two months into working with me, they'd always come back and say like, oh my God, I thought I Knew myself before I started with you, I didn't know myself at all, because you're not really aware of these things because they're subconscious. They're under the conscious mind. And so you try to bring them to the service and work through them. So the first thing to be really good at reflective practices is to journal. The next thing, which I feel like I talk about almost every single episode, is meditating, Right? So meditation is not just about calming your mind. It can be that if you like, but it's also about learning who you are. The amount of times we just ran an event this weekend, and some people are like, well, I just don't meditate. I don't meditate. I'm not good at it. I'm bad at meditating. I'm so bad at it, I can't get my mind to stop. And back in 2017, my wife and I, we traveled and we traveled for six months. And one of the times that one of the places we went to was Thailand, and we went to this place called Chiang Mai in Thailand, and there they have a lot of monks, and there was this really cool experience where you could go and you could spend a day with the monk and just kind of see what they do, ask them questions, meditate with them, all of that. And one of the things I'll never forget is that monk who was there said, meditation is not about having no thoughts. Meditation is about watching your thoughts. And so if you think you struggle with meditating, you're not good at it because you're thinking too much. You're doing it right. You're just supposed to be watching your thoughts, not trying to resist your thoughts. So meditation, what it is, is it's the state of doing nothing so that you can watch your normal state of mind throughout the day. Because if your mind can't stop during meditation, I guarantee you, I'm not a betting man. I would bet all the money that I have in the world saying that if you can't stop your brain in meditation, your thoughts and meditation, if you can't stop overthinking meditation, I guarantee you that's exactly how it is all day, every day for you. So if you sit down to meditate and it's stressful and you're like, I can't do this. I can't do this. I'm not good at it. The reason why it's stressful for you is because you cannot run from it. So a lot of people will be like, I'm gonna meditate for 20 minutes, and then six minutes. Then they're like, fuck this, I can't do it. I'm terrible at it. There's no possible way, right? That's what most of us think. The reason why meditation can be so stressful for some people is because they're getting their normal state of mind heightened. And you can't run from it because normally we try to keep ourselves so busy throughout the day that we don't pay attention to our mind. And over time, meditation can help us become more attuned to, to what we're thinking, our internal states. It absolutely can help you calm down. But really what it comes down to is like, what's going on in my mind all day long? Like, that's what I wanna know. I wanna be like the Indiana Jones of figuring out what the hell's going on in the crevices of my mind. I wanna be an explorer and figure out what's going on. And it really comes back to being curious about who you are. Another thing that's really important too, as far as self reflection and starting to learn yourself is start to pay attention to your thoughts, start to pay attention to what's going on in your head. If you start to feel a certain way. Usually what there was is there was a thought that came before that feeling. So if you feel like a whole lot of sadness and you're like, why do I feel sad right now? You take a step back and in cognitive behavioral therapy, they say to ask this question, the question is, what was I just thinking? So if you feel a bunch of sadness, you're like, why do I feel this way? You, you ask yourself the question, what was I just thinking? You start to pay attention to your thoughts, pay attention to when you get triggered. For me, oh my goodness, this happened earlier today. I was driving and you know, we're about to be in the election time and all that stuff. And I saw somebody that was just pushing somebody for election and I got a little bit triggered. And a few years ago I was much, much more triggered, but I got so triggered by that. And I was like, okay, hold on. This person is just holding a sign that says somebody's name. That shouldn't trigger me, but I feel triggered. This happened on the way when I was driving to the studio today. Why do I feel triggered right now? I feel triggered because of how I've seen that person that's running for that position act. And I feel like it is not the way that a leader should act and how they should do and all of this stuff. And I was like, man, I'm so. I'm really triggered by that. But a lot of times what's interesting is about when we're triggered is we're triggered not by that person, we're triggered by our programming, but a lot of times we're triggered because we notice ourself in that person, and there's a part of ourself that we hate. And we just have that person be a mirror for us to say, hey, yeah, you can hate this person and you should want this person to be different. But why don't you try being different first? If you want the world to be different, you have to be different. If you want the world to change, you have to change. If you want other people to be different, you have to be different. Get off your high horse and realize that you're not perfect. And if you want the world to change, you have to start with you. And so you ask yourself, what was I just thinking? Why was I just triggered? She said this to me and then I blew up. Why did I blow up? What was I thinking? In that situation, you start to really pay attention to your thoughts. You start to notice your programming. Once again, I've said this many times on the podcast, Being triggered is a gift. It is a absolute gift, because it is the universe coming to you in the form of another person to trigger you, to show you where you are not free. And we want to try to get free from all of our problems, circumstances, things that we're stuck in, places that we're stuck, all of that. So you ask yourself, what was I just thinking? So that's the next thing is to pay attention to your thoughts. The next thing is to pay attention to your feelings. You ask yourself, why am I feeling this way? I'm really angry right now. Okay, I'm gonna go ahead and just feel the anger for a second, and then I'm just gonna ask myself, why am I feeling angry? What is it about the circumstance that's making me feel this way? Cause it's really interesting, like, if you look at life as simply as possible, you're born, you have a bunch of sensory experiences for your entire lifetime, and then you die. That's like the hundred thousand foot overview of being a human, right? You're born, you have a sensory set of experiences and things that happen to you, and you die. How you choose to interpret the things that happen to you, completely up to you. So you ask yourself, I'm angry. Why am I angry right now? Why am I feeling this way? You start to really interested, interested and curious more. Anything else? I'm feeling fricking amazing today. Like, I feel amazing. I'm so happy. Why do I feel amazing today? Oh, well, you know what? I actually got eight hours of sleep. And you start to notice patterns in yourself. Oh, man, I'm feeling really sad today. I'm feeling really sad. Okay, why am I feeling this way? What could have possibly happened next after you go through that? Your thoughts, your feelings. Now what we also want to start to pay attention to is our beliefs. And one thing that I would really recommend for everybody here is to challenge and question all of your beliefs. Because your beliefs are that make you who you are at this point, are just a blend of cultural upbringing, personal experiences, trauma, societal norms. And it's learned from you. You learn it from your parents, you learn it from what part of town you grew up in. You learn from your religion, you learn from your nationality. There's so many aspects. There's a million things that have happened to you over your lifetime that have made you who you are. And really, like, beliefs are great because it gives you, you know, a worldview and a way to look at the world. But beliefs are very, very limiting. And so what you need to do is to actually start identifying your beliefs and challenge the hell out of them to see if you want to keep them as your beliefs or if they were programmed into you. And so you start to think about one, right? You start to think about, what are your core beliefs? What do you believe in? And then you ask yourself these three questions. Number one, where did I learn this belief? Number two, is this my belief or one that was programmed into me? And number three, from this moment forward, do I choose what do I choose to believe? So it's where did I learn this belief? Is it my belief or one that was programmed into me? And then last but not least, from this moment forward, do I choose to what do I choose to believe? And so let's say, for instance, you come up with the belief of, I believe that we should treat every person with respect. Okay, cool. We can work with that one. First, where did I learn this? I learned this from my mom. She's always very respective with people. I also learned it from my grandfather. He never commanded respect. He never tried to make anybody feel a certain way. He just acted very respectful. And I never saw him ever get mad or talk down to anybody or about anybody. Okay, cool. So I learned it from them. I probably learned it from other places too. Was this programmed into me? Maybe. Maybe it was programmed into me. Maybe it was something I was told, but it was also something that I witnessed and I saw. So a little bit of yes, a little bit of no. What do I choose to believe? I actually choose to believe this. I actually choose to believe that every single person should be given respect. Perfect. Cool. I'm gonna keep that one. Let's say I have another belief and I start to notice my money mindset. I believe that money is the root of all evil. Hmm, okay, interesting. Where did I learn this? Maybe say I learned this from my father. He was always talking about, you know, people have to screw people over to become wealthy. And, you know, all of the evil comes from people who are. Who want money. Okay, was this programmed into me? Yes, absolutely. What do I choose to believe? Hmm? Do I choose to believe that money is the root of all evil? Actually, I don't choose to believe this anymore. This is not my belief because I know some people who make a bunch of money and they do amazing things in the world with it. So money can't be the root of all evil if some people can use money for good. Right? You could take that money, you could donate, you could make $10 million and donate all $10 million to a foundation to feed the hungry. Clearly, that's not the root of all evil. So making money and using it for good can actually cause a lot of really good stuff. So do I choose to believe that money is the root of all evil? No. Could I screw people over to make money? Sure. Do I have to? No. I don't believe that. Okay, I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to let go of this one. And what you start to do is you start to learn yourself and notice yourself more. And so really the key to this is to become key to becoming self aware is to become interested in yourself, to become curious about yourself, to start to learn yourself. But don't let it go too far down the road that you guilt yourself, you shame yourself, you hate yourself, you get pissed off at yourself, because that's when self awareness turns into being self conscious. And self conscious, if it goes too far down the road can turn into anxiety, social anxiety. Questioning yourself and never wanting to actually be around people because you think they might screw up. And so it's a fine line, but it's going, you know what self awareness is learning who I am and going, you know what? I wanna keep learning myself. I wanna keep improving myself. I wanna let go of things that I don't like. I wanna keep things that I do. Like, self conscious is where I start guilting myself and shaming myself. That's not the route I wanna go. And so that is how you grow your self awareness and start to learn from who you truly are. Because once again, knowing yourself is based in the past, learning yourself is based in the present. We're trying to go from the present into the future and we're trying to figure out who you are and how you can improve. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram stories and tag me in it. Robdial Jr R O B D I A L J R and if you love this podcast, you'll probably love my new book that comes out on October 3rd. It is called Level up How to get focused, stop procrastinating and upgrade your life. If you want to pre order it, you can go to robdial.com book right now. When you pre order it only for people who pre order it, you will get a free mini course on how to stop procrastinating and you will also get entered into a prize pool of $25,000 in cash and prizes. And so that will only be available for people who pre order. So once again, if you want to go ahead and do that, go to robdial.com book and the good thing about it is on October 3rd, when it does come out, it should be arriving. Hopefully, as long as your FedEx guy doesn't suck, should be at your house the day that it actually launches on October 3rd. So once again, that is robdahl.com book and with that I'm going to leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.