 Self-awareness is a necessary condition for positive inner change
Many focus on why they find themselves in negative situations, which is a natural thing to do, and which also historically has been the focus in many forms of psychotherapy.
Even if it feels good to have achieved insights from exploring and talking about why one has inner problems, and even if these insights can motivate oneself into working with oneself, it is regretfully so that insights in themselves do not lead to change.
But, to become aware of how one's actions contribute to the negative outcome, is the first step in the process of inner positive change. This process consists of three steps:
The first step in all inner change is to become aware: what is it I do / think, that leads me to feel this way? This step also implies that one transforms self-criticism to self-observation.Being able to be aware of what one does without judging, just observing.
The second step is to establish better ways to act, and thinking is part of action.
The third step is to automate the new way of acting and thinking, so that new automatic habits are formed. A kind of positive "brainwash", a "reprogramming" of the brain.
It may be beneficial for you to increase your self-awareness if
- You often react without reflecting on what you really are saying.
- You end up in conflicts which you don’t know how they arose.
- You think you express yourself in clear ways,
but you still often become misunderstood.
- You sometimes repeat the same mistake over and over.
All our coaching and psychotherapy starts with self-awareness
As self-awareness is a prerequisite for being able to work with one's inner change, work with self-awareness is always a part of our coaching and psychotherapy.
We often use non-verbal methods when helping our clients to "discover themselves", as Gestalt Therapy, intuitive drawing, roleplay with one's subpersonalities, Sandtray Therapy, visualisation (mensioned in alphabetical order).
We also use more conventional conversational therapy, where one is led through memories of different situations in order to observe, as an "outside observer", one's reaction patterns and one's way of acting, communicating and expressing oneself.
Non-verbal exercizes can also give new "memories", which is to say that the exercizes may imply that typical situations are
re-created in the therapy room, and reaction patterns, way of acting, emotions and thoughts typical in these situations "become visible". After the exercize there is then a discussion of what happened here and now, which also leads to increased self-awareness.
Many of our e-courses have exercizes for increasing self-awareness
We often give our e-courses as "home assignments" to our clients. It is even so that the origin of our e-courses are different exercizes that we e-mailed to our clients as home assignments to be performed between sessions. When many of these exercizes frequently recurred, with many clients, we chose to "productify" them into e-courses and to make them publicly available as self-help tools.
The
e-courses are therefore the result of many years of client work, and the methods taught in the e-courses are methods we have used for a long time, with many clients, and with good and permanent results.
Examples of online tools for self-awareness (in alphabetical order):
- An anchor for presence. This paper can help you become more present in what your sensory organs record.
A mini-course in Conscious Awareness.
- Basic Communication. Become aware of how you communicate, especially the interplay between what you say with words and all the non-verbal communication that in reality builds up the majority of what is communicated. Learn to communicate more clearly and in a way that promotes dialogue.
- Elementity is an online personality test, where ypou in 30 minutes can get to know how your basic personality expresses itself, in terms of the ancient symbology Earth, Water, Wind and Fire.
- Release the Emotion. With the help of this e-course you can learn to observe a negative emotion without having to act on it at once, in order to be able to decide whether you need to act on it and to decide how to do this, or if it would be better just to release it.
- The Ways of the Self. If you are searching for your spiritual path, this paper describes seven different paths in an ancient spiritual tradition: The Way of Love, The Way of Action, The Way of Devotion, The Way of Beauty, The Way of Science, The Way of Will and The Way of Ritual.
- Many of our other e-courses contain exercizes for increasing self-awareness, and will be described later on in this guide, as they are focussed more on other levels of the path of finding the Self.
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