Self-Awareness
Chris Aluta
Management Consultant |Teen Coach & Mentor | Facilitator |Podcaster| Advisory Board
Happy new year once again, wishing us all a new year filled with great learning experience where we can grow and make the best use of the opportunities that come our way.
We had our first teen and young adults virtual mentoring workshop on the 11th of January with the theme Self- Awareness. It was an interesting 60 minutes in the room with most of the teens engaging in the discussion, using the information to reflect on their journey in life so far.
“To thine own self be true” is a well-known Shakespearean quote. It is found in Hamlet in Act I, Scene 3, and is spoken by the King’s advisor, Polonius when he was giving advice to his son Laertes, who was about to leave for the University somewhere in France.
In the story, the character Polonius, who was a senior adviser to the king, was a scheming, backstabbing, hypocritical character, one who was good at playing games with information with the intention of making life better for himself either by hook or crook. It becomes an irony when his own son who was about to embark on a journey far away from home, gets advice from Polonius where he says, “to thine own self be true.” This leaves us with the question, how can you be true to yourself if you do not know yourself?
Top Questions Teens are Asking.
According to various research, one of the top questions an average teen is asking is “who am I”?
To be true to self, one must first know themselves. Yes, the journey of self-discovery is one that is like a never-ending story. As one grows in knowledge of self, one discovers something unique about one that now helps them do better at decision making, relationships, handling peer pressure, career and more.
What is Self-Awareness?
“Self-Awareness is your ability to perceive and understand the things that make you who you are as an individual, including your personality, actions, values, beliefs, emotions, and thoughts. It is a psychological state in which the self becomes the focus of attention.” Verywellmind.com
As teens go about their daily journey of self-discovery, they encounter bumps and curves such as mood swings, academic pressure, career choices, peer pressure, communication breakdown with their parents and the list can go on and on. To become better managers of all the road curves, the teenager must be true to self. Which in simple terms would mean looking in the mirror and being honest with self, making the necessary adjustment. But to achieve this, the teenager must first be very aware of themselves and ?getting better at knowing themselves continuously.
Advantages of Self-Awareness for Teens
1.?????? It helps teens to know what fuels their motivation and drive in life, whether internal or external motivation.
2.????? It helps teens to improve their decision-making skills.
3.????? It can help teens to better manage stress and negative peer pressure, as it helps shape the company they keep.
4.????? It can help teens speed up their personal growth and development.
Self-Awareness and Decision-Making
As newborn babies, we all relied on our parents or guardians to make decisions for us. Decisions as to our hospital of birth, the first dress to put on, choice of baby milk, Creech and so on.
As time goes on and we become pre-teens our parents start bringing us into decisions that affects our lives. Decisions such as school to attend, career choices, dress style, the company of friends we keep and more. And for us to make good decisions around these things, we must be true to ourselves, meaning we must make effort to improve on knowing ourselves.
Self-Awareness and Self-Motivation
Not all teens know what drives their motivation the most. I have over the last decade seen teens that are so initiative taking that they need little or no push to set remarkably ambitious goals for themselves and do the work to achieve the goals.
I have also seen other teens who may not be very good at setting high goals for themselves, but once a system that they have come to trust and believe in like their parents, family, school or mentor, sets a goal for them, no matter how high they put in the work and accomplish the goal.
Are you that teen that will put in the work when you hear there is a scholarship to be won if you get the highest score or are you the teen that just wants to get the highest score even if there is no scholarship to be won?
Ways to Improve Self-Awareness
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Journaling: at the workshop, we asked teens to after the class conduct an experiment where they track all their thoughts withing the next 24 hours.
Track their thoughts not their words, but their thoughts and identify what is feeding that thought and note it down too.
Then after two days, take time go over what you have written down and use it to improve your self awareness. This if done properly will reveal to you your triggers, your reaction to certain things like good news, success, failures, rejections etc
Self-Reflection: after journalling comes self-reflection.
This is where we come back to the quote “to thine own self, be true.”
Capturing or journalling your thoughts and reflecting over it, should reveal to you some self sabotaging behaviors, wrong company of friends, poor time management, and any other things that your captured thoughts reveal. The question now becomes, what are you going to do about it? What you do about it, is what makes an improved self awareness important.
“What matters most in reading is not that it improves our intelligence, but that it does so by increasing and harmonizing our knowledge.” Anne Lamott
Seeking Feedback
For a teenager who wants to be true to self and improve their self-awareness, after journaling and reflecting on their captured thoughts, the next thing is to seek feedback from a trusted system, like parents, guardian, schoolteacher, mentor, or counsellor. This step will help us eradicate our irrational self-criticism.
“We are harder on ourselves than we are on anyone else. “Anne Burton
What feedback from a trusted system will do is help the teen give an objective balance to their “journalled thoughts”. I once had a teen who believed that nobody cared about them and after questioning this thought, we realized it had to do with not having someone to really talk to and confide in without feeling insecure. After listening, I said how true is this position that no one cares about you? If you really believe this position to be true, then what am I doing listening to you, is it not a form of caring for you? At the end, the teen on their own adjusted their “nobody cares about me lens.”
Personality Test
Our last suggestion during the workshop was to encourage teens to take a personality test. They are various researched based on professional personality tests today that can help bring scientific reasoning to any teen who is keen on improving their decision making, self-motivation, from a place of improved self-awareness. We encourage teens to not shy away from it.
The DISC Personality Test
For our workshop, we settled for the DISC personality test for its simplicity and its relatability.
Teens were guided to fill in the questionnaire and they are to email their results to the TBH team who, in our next session on the 25th of January, will interpret the result showing each teen how their personality influences their decision making, self-motivation and personal development plan.
The workshop ended with teens sharing their feedback.
?Thank you for reading, please feel free to share your thoughts.
Virtual Mentoring Workshop 25th January 2025
Are you a parent of a teen or do you know any teen or young adult that you know would benefit from our virtual mentoring workshop? Please sing them up for our next session which is coming up on Saturday 25th January time is 6pm (Nigerian time).
Click the link to register.
Thank you.
Chris Aluta
Teen Mentor