Welcome to the second principle of mindful communications. This is about developing awareness of yourself and others, tuning into your feelings of your body, your ego, brain or mind and soul, and mindfulness. There are two definitions of self awareness, personal and professional. The personal definition is having conscious knowledge or awareness of your character, behavior, feelings, motives, and desires with the ability to self regulate, in conversations. The professional according to Daniel Goleman, who is an expert on emotional intelligence and Who has written many books, and I even provided a YouTube video for you to watch in the reference section. He calls self awareness, emotional intelligence.

In business. It's like the business definition of self awareness. It's awareness of yourself and others and how you both impact conversations. Remember back to the three levels of effective listening, how you're listening and also conversing with your friend, your colleague or your family member, and you are both impacting one another as you speak. Self Awareness can be learned both personally and professionally. This chart I really like it was created by Richard Barrett.

He wrote the book called evolutionary coaching, I highly recommend that you read it and again, it's part of my list in the rest section for you. So, self awareness, again is tuning in to the feelings of your body and trying to locate where these feelings are in your body. When you're in alignment, your body is energetic, revived, or even rested. When you're in misalignment, you're exhausted, lethargic, sleepy. I'm sure you've seen in the press in the tech industry, where these 20 year olds are absolutely falling asleep at their desk because they're working so hard that they are just exhausted and they need their sleep. So they fall asleep right on their computer.

I would say that's a wake up call to these companies to be more caring about the workers. And their health and well being. So if we move into the ego, or the brain or the mind, when you're in alignment, you're feeling proud. You have a sense of security, safety, and you can be competitive. Sports is a great way of being an example of positive competitiveness as well as in the business world. When you're proud of achieving some accomplishment, that's when you want to give yourself a pat on the back.

Now, when you're in misalignment, that's when you're worried, have high levels of anxiety. You might be jealous or envious and stressed out. And being self aware is important because as you notice that you're in the states of mind, then you can get out of misalignment and shift your energy level into a more positive energy level. And you can do this by being self aware. On the soul level, maybe some of you don't believe we have a soul. But just for argument's sake, let's pretend we all have a soul or a heart.

And this is when you're feeling bliss, happiness, joy, compassion. And a good example of being in bliss is when you fall in love with somebody, everything just looks really beautiful all around you. And when you're in a state, for feeling compassionate towards another, you are in a way being empathetic because you're able to put yourself in their shoes and understand from their point of view, and understand their suffering. When you're in misalignment, you will be depressed, withdrawn. Sad. None of these feelings are bad.

It's just important to be aware because if you are depressed or sad, you might want to seek psychological help. Or if you're just sad, maybe just having a nice long conversation with a good friend, to help you make you to feel better. It all goes back to self awareness. And when we are aware of our feelings, if we are at a lower energy of level, say like being sad or depressed or exhausted, then we can move ourselves up into a higher energy level. There are many tools to do this. It could be exercising, going for a run in the park.

Many many tools. So this is just the beginning of self awareness. I look forward to Module seven with you that further explores self awareness