An excellent way to increase your self-awareness is to keep a diary. In it make a daily note of the important things that happen. Be honest and open with yourself. Be willing to reflect upon your beliefs, thoughts and feelings. Also note how these relate to other people around you.
You need only spend 5–10 minutes a day on this activity. Perhaps you may allocate an hour every 2 or 3 months to read it in its entirety. While doing this you may detect patterns emerging. Many you will wish to keep. Others will be seen as barriers to greater happiness and success. These you will need to change.
2. Positive listing
A great way to improve your self-awareness is to use a technique called positive listing. Not only does it influence your self-awareness, it is also able to improve other aspects of your life.
The technique is as follows:
(a) Select a positive quality in your life that you wish to develop.
(b) Name the quality.
(c) Make a list of all the times that you have directly experienced that quality.
(d) Take each example in your list and add further details. Where were you? Who was there? What did you see, hear and feel?
So, if you want to increase your self-awareness of confidence, do a list of all the times you felt confidence. This may be in small situations as well as large. By doing this you give clearer instructions to your brain as to what exactly being confident really means. Also, by repeatedly thinking this way you make yourself more likely to think and feel that way in the future.
One further advantage of positive listing is that it reinforces the notion that you choose your thoughts and feelings. In most of our lives we are not being hit by huge, earth shattering external events. Instead we live our usual day-to-day existence. We are able to choose our thoughts. Yet much of the time thoughts and feelings just seem to ‘pop into our heads’. By using positive listing we get into the habit of ‘chasing our thoughts’.
Reference: Managing yourself