Looking Inward

Hello all!

This past week we covered self awareness and self concept. Understanding yourself and being aware of how you think, feel, and act is incredibly important. It is something I feel is overlooked a lot of the time because people do not fully understand self awareness as a whole or they think they already know themselves well enough when in actuality they may not. I feel like I know myself fairly well, but I also feel like I learn something new about myself often, that I have thoughts and feelings deep down that I never express. Most of the time when these feelings come out, I don’t even know they existed or how to correctly express them.

Our future mentees will be in a very confusing situation when we meet them in the fall. They will be on their own for the first time and will be doing things for themselves that they never had to do in the past. It is important for them to understand how being self aware is important in their new environment. Coming from high school to college is a big transition and most of the freshmen may not be aware or understand their own actions and feelings. It is our job as a peer mentor to help them transition into college life and in some ways adulthood, and in order to do this well we need to let them make their own discoveries about life and about themselves.

To accomplish this goal, it’s important to pose questions to students often about reflecting on different points of their lives or how recent events make them feel. This can easily be done with the question of the day right at the beginning of class. It’s a great way to get class started and get them thinking from the beginning. Also, if your co-leader and you decide to do some sort of activity in class, having a short reflection time at the end of class can be important for students to understand how the activity had an impact on them. Though becoming self aware is a lengthy process, taking little steps such as these will help get the ball rolling.

As for myself, there are many ways I could become more self aware. Overall, I would love to have a time set aside at the end of everyday where I could reflect on what had happened to me and how those events made me feel. There are many times where I think of how something effects me, or a reason as to why I behave in a certain way, but then time passes or I get distracted and I quickly forget my previous thought. It’s times like this I wish I wrote down my thoughts and feelings to better understand myself. As always, it is an ongoing process.

Hope everyone enjoyed the beautiful weather this past week. Spring break is just around the corner! Think warm thoughts!

-Chels