Self-Awareness and Emotions

Self-awareness starts and goes on with a continuous process and perception of yourself - including your personality, strengths, weaknesses, passion and more and your emotions- and this leads you to a knowledge about yourself, acquaintances and familiarity - referring to an objective and non-judgemental evaluation.

Why me - why should you value self-awareness so much?

Sometimes what we feel can fool us. Feelings and emotions are highly subjective. Without self-awareness, our emotions can lead us to false beliefs. When you know yourself well and you are able to judge yourself at least a little more objectively, it's much easier to break free from emotional bondage and challenges.

If you deal with it in a more reflective way, you can deal with the ups and downs of life better because you understand them better - better understand what you want and what you want, should or must do next.

Emotions are the essential part of life

Emotions are an integral part of who we are, but they are not who you are. Yes, emotions can be messy, complicated, and confusing, but they are not there to control our lives, they are there to move us forward on our individual path.
Emotions can all too often be so unfamiliar to all of us - like a strange or new taste on the tongue, like an eerie imagination / picture in your head, on our mind, but only if we increase our understanding of our emotions - especially the difficult or even "negative" ones - As we deepen, we begin to stop ourselves from remaining in emotional excitement and falling even deeper into a difficult situations or challenges.
My most important rule – perhaps this way of thinking stems from my stoic lifestyle – is that there are no “good” or “bad” emotions, only “good” or “bad” reactions.
Be it in private decisions, sexuality, sport or work. We tend to label emotions like anger, jealousy, or sadness as "bad" and emotions like happiness, excitement, or inspiration as "good." To my knowledge and point of view, it is the case that both are true and OK - if you allow it and which you should.
It is so important to feel, allow and see both positive and negative emotions as indispensable and essential to your well-being. We would be doing ourselves so badly that we would be doing incredible and unjust things to ourselves if we didn't allow ourselves to fully experience both ends of the spectrum.

Self-awareness - A kind of Design Thinking Process 

The challenge with negative emotions—especially when we experience them as intense painful emotions such as in trauma—is that as soon as we begin to feel those emotions, we tend to resist them. In other words, we block them.
Imagine the moment you find out that your partner has betrayed you, how do you feel? After he or she breaks your heart and you absorb the shock, you will start to experience waves of sadness and anger. You will try to rationalize everything: “Why did he do this to me?” or “How could she do this to me?”

Well - how I deal with it ...  It’s this: Don’t resist any emotion because whatever you resist simples continues to persist in your reality. 

You can’t run away from fear or anger or guilt, they’ll chase you. When you run away from your emotions, you give more power to them—you ignite them. They become louder, clouding your sky and filling it with noise.

• Validate your emotions by identifying them and fully expressing them. Give yourself the respect you deserve by first giving your emotions theirs.
• Sit with it so, allow it, so that you can fully feel it. Look at it from different perspectives. The emotions you suppress today are the ones you will have to heal tomorrow - because healing is simply the act of allowing yourself to freely feel today whatever you didn’t allow yourself to feel yesterday.
• Process it and seek the lesson from it.By processing our emotions, we learn and grow and make sure not to hold the grudge inside so that it doesn't become poison or a trigger point in the future. By processing our emotions, we find meaning in them and hence we see the good in them.

My conclusion - I like to share with you

Learn to be curious and not judgemental with your emotions because judgement carries bad, and darkness, even fear and fear carries hate. And where does hate lead you? Nowhere good.

Experience are all around us - stay open - stay open-minded to yourself - be curious.
As said you might be surprised about one or two emotions - you might be 'whatever' - but look at it, validate it and deal with it. And enjoy it as long you not harm yourself or others.

And please keep in mind - while your emotions do not define you, if you consciously suppress them, they will unconsciously direct your life and thus, totally limit you.

The most important conversations you'll ever have are the ones you'll have with yourself.

Former articles about self-awareness and emotions