Wellness Report

Self

How are you feeling right now?

What can you do today to improve your well-being?

All kinds of great things start with your self:

  • Self-confidence
  • Self-expression
  • Self-esteem
  • Self-respect
  • Self-advocate
  • Self-fulfillment
  • Self-belief
  • Self-determined
  • Self-discipline
  • Self-improvement
  • Self-love
  • Self-expression
  • Self-motivated
  • Self-reflect
  • Self-worth

But the most important of them all is self-awareness.

Self-awareness, or mindfulness, is the secret ingredient in our well-being pizza. It’s the trick to making all of the other ingredients a little bit better.

Self-awareness means learning how to accurately identify your feelings, thoughts, and actions. When you understand WHY you’re doing or feeling something, it’s a lot easier to decide if it’s a good or bad thing for you and those around you. Self-awareness also helps you understand other people and communicate so that you can have better relationships with others.

Why is self-awareness important?

People with good self-awareness are able to notice their own strengths and weaknesses. You see the things that you aren’t happy with, but you also see the things that make you a great person too.

People who are self-aware:

  • Can figure out what is needed to do a task
  • Can understand their feelings and talk about them with others
  • Understand how their behaviour affects others
  • Want to improve
  • Learn from their mistakes 
  • Acknowledge other people’s feelings and needs

When we think about our 8 wellness ingredients on the well-being pizza, you can see that mindfulness can help you improve in other areas too.

Sleep – Understanding when you are tired and what steps to take to sleep better

Screen – Thinking about what you are doing on your screen and if it makes you feel good or bad

Sit – Realizing when you need to take a break and move around

Step – Making the time for physical activity and noticing how it makes you feel better

Snack – Considering whether or not you are hungry and taking the time to eat slowly

Social – Identifying the feelings of others, including your family and friends

Stress – Figuring out what is causing you stress and how you can help alleviate it

Advice

How can you improve your sense of self and mindfulness?

Check in with yourself

It all starts with taking a moment to think about how your feeling and why. 

Maybe you’re feeling mad because a friend didn’t like your shirt. Why does that make you feel mad? Is it because it hurt your feelings or made you feel embarrassed? Why did you feel that way? Maybe it is because you care about what your friend thinks about you or you value their opinion.

When you get the REAL “why”, then you can understand if your feelings make sense and how you can address them. In the example above, you might talk to your friend and tell them that what they said hurt your feelings because you care about what they think and value their opinion.

Try identifying your feelings

You might not be able to identify all of your feelings when you first start checking in with yourself. Sometimes we experience more than one emotion at the same time, which can make it hard to figure out what’s going on.

You might want to try and explain your feelings to someone you trust to see if they can help you identify your emotions.

Practice empathy

Empathy is the ability to understand other people’s feelings and imagine what it is like to be in their place. 

When you try being empathetic, you learn more about how other people experience the world and how your actions affect them. When you learn about other people, you’re also learning about yourself!

Empathy can help you identify your own emotions and talk to others about how you feel, which is important for setting boundaries, working with others, and learning how to reduce your own negative feelings when someone makes you feel bad or upset.