Developing Career and Life Skills

Of all of the soft skills you must develop to have a fantastic career, self-awareness is at the top of the list. Self-awareness is a life skill you must develop, especially if you want to become a business leader at some point in your career. Examine what self-awareness is and why it's so important.

Defining Self-Awareness

Self-awareness involves having a vital understanding of your own emotions, strengths, weaknesses and motivations. It also lets you understand the effects these things have on the people around you. Self-awareness is one of the main components of emotional intelligence, and it's a life skill that leads you to make good decisions.

Why You Need This Life Skill

Psychologist Daniel Goleman, writing for Harvard Business Review, outlines why self-awareness is so a vital to your success. He says self-aware people make deadlines much better because they know how to prioritize. They also understand how to deal with demanding clients, because they can get to the heart of the customer's frustration and bad mood. Tapping into a client's emotions can also lead to better customer service, allowing companies to retain more clients over the long term.

Throughout your career, use this life skill to help you determine the next step. Although a higher-paying job offer might be tempting, recognize the drawbacks a company has that it may not fit into your overall plan, long-term goals or social consciousness. Self-awareness leads you to make the right decisions for yourself, allowing you to take various issues into account before choosing a particular path.

Developing Self-Awareness

You can learn self-awareness as a life skill. Begin with an online assessment that lets you see how self-aware you are at the present moment. The test might not completely accurate, but it gives you a picture of how you tap into your own feelings and emotions to make decisions.

Ask your trusted friends and loved ones for help. These people can give you honest feedback about your self-awareness and emotional intelligence. They can answer questions about your greatest strengths, weaknesses and emotional triggers. They can describe how you respond to criticism, deal with conflict and communicate.

Try a SWOT analysis, which stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. This analysis shows you how these things relate to each other. For example, your strength could be in using data to your advantage. Turn this into an opportunity to create new ways for your company to make money.

Practice mindfulness meditation as a way to become more aware of the present moment. Mindfulness meditation involves shunning all thoughts and feelings of external things by focusing on a single point, such as your breathing. The goal is to become aware of everything going on around you and inside your mind, which leads to better self-awareness.

Write everything down so you can see the patterns you develop over time. Writing things down can help you overcome past triggers and emotional snafus, and you can see how to accurately reflect on your past experiences. Writing down your thoughts and feelings make them more real.

Self-awareness is a life skill that produces consequences and results in almost every aspect of your career. Developing this skill sooner puts you on the road to success and happiness faster.

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