This Year, I Hope You Learn To Value Self-Awareness

December is drawing near which means another new year is approaching us yet again. With a new year comes new resolutions. After counting down and wishing everyone a happy new year, we all like to think that we can start again with a clean slate. A blank page. A new chapter. As if it’s so easy to wipe away everything that has happened after the clock hits midnight. As if anything is solved after we hyped ourselves up to lit the sky with fireworks and feel mandatory to end the year with a festive celebration.

But really, what is there to celebrate if we didn’t learn anything from the past year?

It isn’t that there is nothing to learn, but it’s up to us if we are willing to open our eyes and seize the chances and take them as lessons along our way. There is always something to learn, even if you think that you live a quiet life and motion through it like you are on automatic pilot. And that’s already a mistake that we are making; living through the automatic pilot. Which means that we react what it’s familiar to us instead of adapting and stay flexible to each different individual that we encounter with. Just like when we are used to treating some people in a particular way even though it may not be the best way to treat them like that.

Unconditionally trusting our automatic pilot and acting according to it might hurt ourselves and others a great deal because we act on what’s already familiar and not focusing on what’s the best way to handle a situation.

Our automatic pilot is there to keep you moving, to keep you safe and help you to reach your destination, but it doesn’t take into account that something sudden can appear before you or crashing into you. It doesn’t take into account that life is not a linear route but a chaos of day and night. You might lose the skill of navigating if you only rely on familiar patterns and not trying new routes and techniques. Without the necessary skills of navigating, we might be crossing lines that’s not ours to take. Without looking out for ourselves and steering the wheel, we might deflect from our intended route and accidentally bridging boundaries and crashing into someone’s territory. Just because we didn’t pay attention to the route we take, including the actions we should or shouldn’t have taken or the words that we should or shouldn’t have spoken out, doesn’t mean it is okay to project that on others.

I cannot sweat this enough but self-awareness is such an undervalued concept that a majority do not have a clue how to practice it.

Between self-awareness and social awareness, the second one always makes it to the top.

We overvalue fancy candlelight Christmas dinners and ridiculously expensive gifts and gloss over financial struggles. We overrate how we come across in public; fun, quirky and full of charm and gloss over social anxiety. We are desperate for picture-perfect moments and gloss over routines. We pretend nothing bad can get to us by shrugging off with our witty remarks and gloss over anything serious or negative. We put so much effort in how lovable we appear and dare to think that the world owes us anything because of it and gloss over the importance of integrity and personality.

We overvalue anything that requires zero input from our side but expecting tons of it from others.

If anything, we are just fooling ourselves by thinking that we have taken control of our own steering wheel.

A new year should not be a reason to think that you have another shot.

It is to look back to what you did wrong and what you can do better to merge the broken pieces if it’s not already too late to fix it.

It is ignoring our toxic ego and thrive to be a decent human being – to our family, to our friends, to our acquaintances and to the strangers that we come across day in and day out.