A photo is a record of a memory, a trace of a lived experience that will bring back important moments of your life. Taking a selfie is the metaphor that describes the process of becoming more self-aware. What does it mean to take a selfie of your inner world? It is taking a picture of who you are. What does it happen if you take a selfie of yourself and then looking at this photo from an external perspective? This process is useful to understand who you are, to recognize your emotions and thinking process.
Self-awareness is the ability to recognize and evaluate what is happening within yourself and with others. An important factor is to thoughtfully examine your core beliefs and to reflect upon those regularly. This process will help to develop a clear understanding of your values and goals and the assumptions upon which those values and goals are based. Honing all these elements will allow you to feel confident in guiding your life and in building high trust relationships with people around you. Individuals high in self-awareness are skilled at self-monitoring and in adapting their behaviors to relate effectively with others.
Knowing yourself might be challenging and requires your engagement in conducting unbiased self-examination and accepting possible personal shortcomings. The ability to confront the realities about yourself begins with a desire to thoughtfully take a personal inventory of who you are and what you believe. This self-examination requires both personal confidence and authentic humility to recognize the variance between your self-assessment and the evaluations of others.
People may think that there will be someone who has greater influence in judging them, first their parents, then the teachers, then the employer and society with its rules and expectations towards each person. But as you grow up, you learn that all of these are the external judges who have played a temporary role in your life. While there will be a judge who will be by your side throughout your life, perhaps this is the most severe, sometimes ruthless, to remind you what is right or wrong. This judge is your Ego. You are born with him, sometimes he is your best advisor, but other times he demands a lot and makes you feel inadequate if you do not meet the expectations. 
How do you build an effective dialogue and positive communication with your Ego?
A first step to become a more benevolent judge with yourself is to focus the attention on the positive words you use to describe yourself.
Let’s try to imagine having taken a selfie of your life or a particular moment of your daily life.
- What do you see?
- What is happening in your life?
- Who are the people around you and the environment in which you live and work?
- What emotions do you feel?
Now that you read the written words, what do you notice? Are there more positive or negative adjectives that describe your world?
This is a self-assessment tool to develop major self-awareness of your peculiar traits, recurrent emotions, strengths and limitations. It might happen that a selfie image is not the perfect or best one, you mainly notice the flaws and your reaction is to discard it. But the next time you decide to take a picture of yourself, before taking it, let’s have a few seconds to reflect, breathe and think. Perhaps you will take many photos and the perfect photo will not come out immediately, but each photo will reveal something about you, emotions, desires, ambitions and dreams. Only you have the power to make each photo the greatest masterpiece of your life.
Photo by Steve Harvey on Unsplash
Photo by Max van den Oetelaar on Unsplash
