Know thyself!
Why is self awareness so important for success? That’s what I’m going to examine today. I will highlight to you the areas in which you can improve your growth, by simply taking better stock of your strengths and weaknesses.
Firstly let me say: welcome back to my blog! A very warm ‘hello’ to everyone, wherever you’re from and whatever stage of your journey you are at! I hope that some aspect of this, or one of my other articles speaks to you and opens up new possibilities for you.
If there are any topics you’d like me to cover, additional thoughts you’d me to expand on or just general comments you’d like to make: please pop them in the comments section below. I love hearing from you!
OK so: why is self awareness so important for success?
Well first off – success is relative yes? Or at least, it should be! If you’re still caught in that awful, ‘drain-circling’ spiral of defining your success by other people’s metrics – you need to stop! Why? Because that’s quite possibly one of the most disempowering, unhealthy and ultimately: damming things you can do!
Success is subjective, but by assuming an objective standard of it that exists in whatever society you find yourself: you’re chasing a shadow! Now there may be collective agreements around what success looks like (more money than your neighbour, a house bigger than you need, more cars than bathrooms etc…). The trouble is that these are firstly a moving target, and secondly; belief held by those in a state of lack!
Who watches “Lifestyles of The Rich & Famous”?!? Probably not the rich & famous!
Success is also completely subjective, because everyone’s dream is subjective. OK: some might aspire to success in similar areas, but it’s still a subjective version of the same thing. Why? Because it’s a scenario centered around you! Nobody else.
Who is your success for? Really! Yeah I know; your family, friends, employees et al will benefit from it. That’s a beautiful thing too and can be part of what your success looks like, but it’s YOU who can envisage, and then ultimately experience what it feels like when your specific version of a dream life, comes to fruition.
So there’s lesson one of why self awareness is so important for success: you have to be able to differentiate between success that you actually want, and that which you think others want.
There is so much more to explore on this alone, but for now: that’ll do.
So once you’ve interrogated yourself, dived deep on why you’re seeking what you’re seeking and know that it comes from an authentic space: you need to go about creating it! Self awareness is crucial here, especially at the outset, because you need to know how to apply your time and resources effectively.
We all dance with reality differently. This is also why self awareness is so important for success.
What something looks like, smells like, tastes like, feels like; these are all different to each of us. This impacts how we dance with reality.
For example: when trying to get fit and lose weight, there are some methods that naturally fit with who we are. Some people take to running like a duck to water, and they can’t get enough of rainy, cold mornings running for miles on end.
As you might have guessed – running does not jive with me!
Hopefully you get the point though: it’s important that you embark upon your journey to success, by taking the path of least resistance. I don’t mean ‘cheat’! I mean have a conscious relationship with yourself, so that you know how you dance most coherently with reality.
That’s going to give you:
- A – a clear understanding of where your strengths are
- B – the areas in which you are being called to find support
So start by really honing your strengths and maximising them. Why? Because then you will be creating an overflow of skill, that you can use to trade with others. By being the very best, most authentic version of yourself; you will be in the greatest flow with creativity, and therefore you will know exactly how you can be of service to others.
In knowing yourself and your strengths, you will know exactly the problems that you can solve for others.
Once you start doing this, it will quickly become even more apparent what your shortfalls are and where you need support.
This might not be in terms of specific skills necessarily. People are very different in the way that they create. Some folks are more energetic in how they create, others employ more strategy while some create using ‘sweat equity’. By having a good level of self-awareness, you will know how you create most optimally and where you need to hire in help, in order to break down the barriers that are holding you back.
Put another, slightly more esoteric way:
self awareness at a core level is so important for success, because you need to identify where the shadows are in your life.
What do I mean? Well reality is light, ultimately. In all its differing wavelengths, how in interacts with different mediums and winds up being filtered through us.
Why is self awareness so important for success? No two people look upon the same event and take away exactly the same experience.
We can’t rely purely on ourselves for an objective standard. This is why juries are made up of twelve people, at least in common law countries. We rely on the collective agreement of what the light is telling us, in order to reach a conclusion that will provide the best possible outcome.
How we access and interact with the light, varies from person to person:
Some people might be fully ‘juiced up’ – with command over their emotional state, full contact with light and vibration. They know how to manage their energy and uplift the energy of others, but when it comes to mental resilience; they need help.
Other people have mental resilience in spades – but they might also have trauma or ‘shadow’ in their lives, blocking out light or giving the impression of their light being dimmed. For them: creating a solid network of association, will help them to reveal more about them selves and give them more confidence in their abilities.
There are also those who, for whatever reason, don’t have access to their light – they maybe have no clear vision or the capacity to believe in their worth, but they are willing to work! For them: using that willingness to work, in order to create excess so that they can invest in the support they need, is what will give them the uplift they need.
Wherever you fall in this, you have the capacity to grow and expand with others. It doesn’t matter how much support you need, you can still offer expansion for others by using your strengths to create an excess of value, then using that value to bring in others to do the same for you.
Don’t forget also that so much of human creation is in ‘the cloud’!
What do I mean by that? I’m not talking about computers or off-site data storage. There are other blogs that will tell you all about that. I’m talking about the universal cloud. Allow me to elucidate:
No one person possess the knowledge to make anything.
A pencil (for example) requires millions of peoples’ skill and labour to produce. You’ve got the people growing the trees, the people making tea and coffee for the people chopping the trees down, the people who sort and shape the graphite, the cleaner who cleans their factory and so on…
None of those people understand, end-to-end, the full process for making a pencil. The full process therefore, exists in the cloud of universal knowledge that we all have access to by sharing and pooling our strengths.
The last thing that I want to touch on here, on why is self awareness so important for success: is leverage.
When you truly know yourself, that’s when you understand the leverage required for you to take action. Maybe you’re the kind of person who (for example) can’t find the motivation to take a particular action, like filing your tax return. Having a deep level of self-awareness will help you to find the leverage you need to, in order to pull your finger out and do it.
You might have some energy blocks around money, with issues of lack and scarcity. By polluting your environment with evidence of how abundant you really are, you’ll help to dispel the notion that paying your tax will leave you destitute. Taking the action of filing your return will lose it’s sting, in light of this.
On the other hand: the threat of late-filing fees or penalties might be what you need to motivate you, but I’d argue that this is less of an expansive, long-term solution.
Long-term leverage requires training yourself to understand two things:
- The pain of not doing something is greater than the doing of it.
- Doing it is a joy, because it takes you one step closer to your dream life!
But it ALL starts with self awareness. Put the work in now so that you understand how to execute your plan in a way that will work for you! “Sharpen your axe” to borrow from Abraham Lincoln, and the execution will happen effortlessly.
You can learn more on this by watching this video excerpt from Dan’s guest appearance on the Elevate Conscious Conversation Podcast:
Thank you so much for reading this blog, from the bottom of my heart! If you enjoyed this, I produce regular Do It With Dan blogs, podcasts and videos. I have three books published now: Stepping Beyond Intention, The Dreamer’s Manifesto and From Time-to-Time (a really great book on time mastery). All of these are here to serve you and make you part of the journey as well.
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