The Art of Self-Awareness

Don’t be like Paul. Learn subtext to read people better and begin to truly respond to what people are trying to communicate.

Going through this checklist will assist you in reading people’s emotions in a way you may never have considered before.

How might your thoughts and actions be misinterpreted?
What are other people’s primary motivations and what unspoken, underlying motivations might they have that they (and you) are not even aware of?
Consider people’s built-in biases and life circumstances that give rise to certain emotions. What is their background and upbringing?
How do people display their emotions both positively and negatively?
How are emotions displayed in different ways?

Possibility and intention questions are good for developing external self-awareness, and helping you synthesize internal and external.

What kind of a person are my actions making me into?

What can I change here and what is out of my control?

What is the one best thing I can do right now to improve my situation?

What kind of life do I want to live, and what kind of person do I want to be?

What would I like to create?

“What if I decided not to eat any more and instead manufactured chlorophyll so I could photosynthesize like a plant? I’d save so much money!” (Ok this last one is silly, but creative thinking never hurt anyone! This line of thinking might spur you to realize that you could make significant savings by eating less…).

What could this situation evolve into?

How can I think differently from how I’m thinking right now?

What could I do to elevate this situation, or raise the standard?

What if the things I’m thinking are impossible aren’t?

What aspects have I ignored or downplayed?

If there were no limits, what could I create here?

It’s likely that you will have some values that conflict with each other. Like the person who values his family but ignores them nonetheless, we can value our career and family both at the same time. In such cases, a simple ranking won’t always help us. We might generally value one over the other, but that does not mean we should choose the thing we value more every single time. This is true even when we don’t have value conflicts like these. Decision-making is an active process; we can’t simply compile certain values and rely on a ranking to have every choice pre-decided for us. While a ranking chart is a good general guide to what we should do, we still need to make decisions on a case-by-case basis.

Living your future life, does your satisfaction rating for any of your values go up or down?

You carefully imagine what your life would look like one, two, or five years in the future if you accept this offer.

The second way to use values to help with decision-making is to consciously imagine the outcome of certain choices in the future, and then weigh up this outcome against your list of prioritized values. This works a little better for bigger decisions that play out in the long term. For example, you might be wondering whether to accept a new job offer.