• God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. – Serenity Prayer
• You start achieving self awareness by becoming aware of, understanding, and accepting your present reality, and what you can and cannot do about it.
  • Social Status
    • “Know your place.”  While this is typically used in the context of putting someone down who is overstepping their social status, it is an important detail to be self aware of: what is your actual present social status.  Not what you want it to be, but what is it under the circumstances.  (This is because you want to avoid Denial)
    • Knowing your current place doesn’t mean accepting it.  Say you’re in a marathon race and you’re currently in 100th place: don’t have the delusion of telling yourself you are 1st, but at the same time keep working to try to get to 1st place if that’s what you want.  Acting like you are 1st when you are not will likely cause you to not make the right decisions corresponding to your circumstances, and with bad decision making often comes bad results.
    • If you have difficulty coping, read “Don’t take things too seriously” from the Guiding Life Principles section of my Life Education Curriculum
  • Being Human: Abilities, Limitations, Emotions
    • You have Emotions, so you need to learn to deal with them.
      • Guide to Handling Emotions and Problems
    • You have Limitations, so you need to learn to deal with them.
      • What is Skill, Talent, Potential, Smart, Intelligence?
        • You cannot be a Jack of all trades, there is simply not enough time because you are mortal, so you must choose some to be an expert at, and some to not.
        • Talent has limits: at some point you must put in hard work
        • Human Physical Limits
      • You can only handle so much control over your life; you need freedom (Example: http://tvnz.co.nz/national-news/school-ditches-rules-and-loses-bullies-5807957)
    • Perfectionism in everything is unrealistic
      • Overcome Perfectionism 
      • Don’t be yourself
        • Before, I was intolerant of people who made mistakes.  Now, I am more forgiving and less elitist. Don’t be so judgmental!
  • One of the dangers of being self aware is that you are now always aware of the bad in addition to the good, so you must learn to be happy even though you see all the bad. This is important: you should learn to be happy without ignoring the bad and not being self aware, because the further you are from reality, the more difficulty you will face in trying to live your life.
• Poverty and Wealth
  • Changeable: State of Mind
    • It is based on your childhood and life experiences: if most of the time you feel like you don’t have enough, then you will feel poor automatically.  If most of the time you feel like you have more than enough, then you will feel wealthy automatically.  (Break this trend! The Habits You Will Form in Life)
    • It is based on your expectation of wealth compared to your actual wealth in reality.  While you can desire for and work to increase your actual wealth in reality over time, that is no reason to set your expectations of wealth so high that you cannot appreciate and enjoy what you presently have.
    • It is best to always feel wealthy so that you don’t suffer the mental anguish of feeling poor that affects both your emotional and intellectual health, and your ability to perform well and achieve the wealth you seek, and so that you can be happy now, while you have less, in addition to later, instead of only being happy later, when you have more.
  • Unchangeable: Facts about Reality
    • There is an objective number describing your actual monetary net worth, and that places you in an objective percentile of wealth compared to your peers.  Accept wherever you are presently: there will always be someone better and someone worse.  A lot of people try to avoid accepting their place in relation to others, and instead do a lot of things like keeping busy or going into denial.  Unfortunately, it is a fact that you cannot escape, so instead you must learn to deal with it.  You start by acknowledging the fact and being aware of it always.
• Perception
  • Internal Identity: You can control how you perceive yourself, and how you present yourself.
  • External Identity: You cannot control how others perceive you, and how they interpret your presentation.
  • Who Am I?
  • Find the Right Balance Between Caring and Not Caring about Body Image
• Hiding
  • There are many reasons why you might hide details about yourself.  What you must know though is that unless you reveal something for the world to test and judge, you don’t know what the world will think of it.  For example, you might think you made something that everyone will think is exceptional.  That is a thought within your own mind.  Until you show everyone, and hear what they think, it’s not a fact.  This sounds obvious, but there are many ways this manifests, most often surrounding regret.  “If only” something happened, then something else would happen.  No, you don’t know for sure unless you test it in reality: don’t get stuck in regret and “what ifs” because it’s all fiction.

This post is part of AttemptedLiving’s Life Education Curriculum, a collection of core knowledge everyone should have. Look under the “Self Improvement” section.

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