Develop Self Awareness to Improve Your Relationships!

TOPICS IN THIS EPISODE

• How does self-awareness impact the quality of your relationships?
• What questions can be very helpful in gaining self-awareness?

HELPFUL  LINKS

• About the Host  - Ela Senghera 
• Speak to Me - Book Here
• Get Free Brochure  - Be True You in Your Relationship
• Audiobook - Finding Love
• Parenting Book (2nd Edition) - Teach Your Kids to Build a Positive Self-Image

Transcript

Today we will talk about self-awareness and its impact. The impact of having self-awareness and developing self-awareness has on our everyday life. As many of you know, self-awareness is pretty much the key to our relationship. Self-awareness really helps us look at ourselves better, understand ourselves, how we are acting, how we are reacting in different situations, in different events, how we behave in relationships, how we form relationships, and how we communicate with other people.

Self-awareness also gives us a way of looking at others and being able to understand them better, and we really, most of us really underplay this, underestimate the role of self-awareness, how, how crucial that is actually, it's something that is really invisible in our day-to-day life, having self-awareness, however, It really makes a difference.

So when we apply it in day-to-day situations, having self-awareness, understanding ourselves better, and understanding our behaviour and reactions have an impact on the quality of our relationships with others, and others feel that too. Others will be able to see the difference when we are self-aware. It really is undoubtedly clear it helps us every day.

How do we develop it? Why is it so important to develop it? Well, when you enter a relationship, any relationship really, you bring with you an entire history of relationships instead of just bringing your official resume. Let's say where we have the places listed, where we studied, and where we work we also have this, we all have this alternative resume that tells the story of all the life lessons we've had of all the experiences we had we have accumulated over the years. They're not usually put on professional resumes because they're not perceived to be relevant. In our careers, and in our professional life, in fact, they are the resume that we bring with us equally every day when we walk into the office when we walk into our place of work.

That alternative resume is part of our relational life. Our relationships with what have been our experiences, our expectations about relationships, and the messages that we received about how central relationships are or not. That whole history shows up and it'll influence how we communicate, how we relate, the way we deal with conflict, the way we develop trust, and the way we establish.

Some of the major aspects of relationships are all embedded in this alternative resume that we carry on with us everywhere we go. What is, what is your story when it comes to self-awareness? What is your family history? When we talk about relational intel, the most important way to really start to understand what language we speak and what are the associations to places and people from our childhood, and this is really where we need to go and look for information in order to develop that kind of relational self.

Why is this significant? This is so significant because our childhood is the time when we build our self-awareness when we form our first life experiences with others when we learn how to behave when we create subconscious beliefs and conscious beliefs. When we learn what is right and what is wrong when it comes to relationships.

Having a strong sense of self-awareness will help you understand what is that you expect from a relationship. What is that you really want in a romantic relationship? What is that you need from a best friend? It'll really tremendously help you throughout life. It's crucial especially if you struggle with relationships or perhaps you are heartbroken or something has happened, you've lost a friend, or you split up with your boyfriend.

It is worth looking back at your childhood and understanding what is your family history. Some of the questions we could be asking ourselves here could be really, really crucial and really, really helpful. For example, do you tend to seek more security or connection? Do you lean more towards freedom and independence? Do you want security and connection, or do you want freedom and independence where you were raised more for autonomy and self-reliance, or more for loyalty and independence? What are some of your expectations in relationships? What stories are you telling about yourself when you're meeting new people? What do those stories reveal? You can ask yourself if you look at your parents and how they related to each other, to their parents, to their community, how would you describe it? If you look at your grandparents, how, how they relate to their community, how did that express?  What has shifted throughout generations? What has changed? What changed in terms of the number of children, in terms of authority, in terms of gender roles and a very good example for looking at how relationships change and the place of the child in the family. What were you allowed and what were you not allowed to do as a child? What was your role?

This reflection can really help here. Historically this gives you a mapping. It gives you a map of what to form and what to create in the future. It's neither right nor wrong is just yours. It's just where you come from. I think the question, do you seek more security or freedom, is a crucial one here when it comes to self-awareness. This is partly because this will define what type of relationship we are seeking. Most of us would either think we grew up with too much of something or too little of something. So we could grow up with too much attention. Too much intrusion sometimes, sadly, too much violence. Others may say, I grew up with too much neglect, too much abandonment on loneliness.

Everybody has two fundamental sets of those human needs. Human needs, we all need security, safety, stability, and predictability. But we also need freedom, adventure the ability to experience change, risk, novelty, and surprise, and everybody wants that connection but everybody also needs to be separate from their partner, and many of us will come out of our childhoods, sometimes wanting more connection, sometimes in need of more protection and more togetherness, and some of us needing more space, needing more freedom, needing more individuality.

Would you say coming out of your childhood you were more in need of connection and protection, or would you say you were more in need of freedom and individuality? When you look at that, how did that influence the choices you made? How does it in particular shape the way you react in certain situations? How does it in particular shape the way you react in certain situations? Not liking to be told what to do, yearning to be told what to do, wanting to be left to do it on your own or wondering why you are left.  to be doing it yourself. One of those questions on our unofficial resume is where we raised autonomy or loyalty.

This was the shape. Our role in the relationship in the future, the role we play in the relationship. This is why we're talking about this because this is all coming down to self, having the self-awareness where we were raised for autonomy or loyalty. What does that mean? Are we going to be looking for autonomy and individuality and self-expression in a relationship? Or are we going to be looking for stability and being loyal and perhaps playing more of a role of a carer? Or will that role really of really frustrate us because we will feel that lack of autonomy? So knowing where we are coming from will help us decide what is good for us and what is not good for us.

Where you primarily educated with an idea that self-reliance is central or, and you've got your own legs to stand on, that nobody will ever know as well as you. What is that? You should do that. If you have a challenge or a problem, you should deal with it yourself and similarly when it comes to independence and loyalty, relationships matter. People are there for you and you are there for them, right? Duty is important, but is it everything for you? So it's worth asking those questions. What are your expectations from relationships? So having self-awareness helps build a satisfying relationship. When you enter a relationship, you bring your history with you. You bring that history, that story that you were told about relationships. When you look at yourself entering into your relationship, you imagine yourself literally entering a house, a place that you can call.  home, a place you can call a relationship, a place where you're safe, relaxed, and you are yourself.

Sometimes it's worth wondering or asking ourselves actually, when we start a new relationship, what is the mood with which we enter this new one? This new place, this new space, this new unity, the two people, what is the set of expectations we bring with us, and do they vary from one relationship to another?

Do you notice they're often the same regardless of where you go and who you meet? Do you ever anticipate that people will want to hear what you've got to say or do you anticipate that is not the case, that you never feel heard? Also, are you more of a listener or more of a talker? Would you say that you mourn someone who goes in and makes mistakes, learns from them, and then wonders how they got here, or are you very self-aware and you know, what is it that you are after? To finish off, I just want to mention that from the moment you come into this world, you evolve, you change you experience conflict, crisis, perhaps a new development, new jobs, transitions, and all of these bring us back to.

You know, rethink how we engage with relationships. When we talk about self-awareness, there is the implication of knowing ourselves. So many of us will think, I know myself, I know my story, but sometimes the stories that we tell ourselves also can be a risk can have risk of becoming rigid and repetitious narrow.

They actually became a truth in themselves just because we keep on telling them. But what that doesn't mean is that it's the only story that exists about us. When you look at your own relational self-awareness, watch out not to fall into the trap of constricting narratives about yourself, about your relationship, and about others that don't allow you space for your actual relational self.

Some of the questions that may help here what is the story that I've told far too many times about myself, what is the story that I should let go of and what is a part of myself that I need to perhaps break up? Sometimes we notice that a part of ourselves exists, but we could really do with taking a break from that because it's not serving us any longer. Very often our limiting beliefs are wrapped into the stories we've been telling about ourselves, about our childhood, about our marriage about our life in general. It's important to start telling a story of what brings you happiness and that will form the foundation of a new future, of a new beginning.

So there are two ways you can describe every event. It's a glass half full or half empty. If our stories are too negative and there are plenty of mistakes we talk about, although those mistakes, this failure, so these negative experiences might have happened ages ago in the past, they are still very active in our stories.

It's important to change the story we tell about ourselves into a more positive and building self-awareness will make you aware of some of your strengths with might, which will be very necessary and of value and will make you aware of some of the weaknesses you might have. So I hope this was helpful for you.