Who Am I?

This week's class Anthony and Bethany talked about self-awareness, at first glance felt like knew exactly what that was but putting it into words was a lot hard than I expected. The book's defines self-awareness as "understanding your own thoughts, feelings, and actions." Now the tricky part of self-awareness is teaching our students to be aware of their thoughts, feelings, and actions and how these things affect them. I liked what Anthony and Bethany did with the go around talking about something that really changed your perspective and help shape the person you have become. Doing this made me think back at myself and what things changed my life, may it be a hardship I went through (i.e. My Mom's passing) or something that I was involved in that shaped me in to who I am today (i.e. FFA active member). Realizing where I have come up from makes me more self-aware, what choices do I make today that could affect my future self.

Our jobs as peer mentors are to help our students become self-aware and self-motivated. We need to push them to think about their choices they make but yet as some point to let them fly free and be self-dependent. Some ways I think I will help my students with this would be taking them to the rec so they know what is there and so we as a group can play a game or do something active. Another good physical awareness thing is already done with the big lecture of freshmen Hixson Scholars is the sex talk. It is good to go over since high school Sex Ed is sometimes pretty poor and the guy who spoke to us in 2009 (whose name escapes me at the moment) was a good speaker and funny. For social awareness, I personally sometimes need to be force into a position where I have to talk to a group where I know no one to get me to open up. For example the trip to Omaha zoo, we had a game that forced us to interact with others outside of are small groups so we opened up to more people and got to know more people. Some of the best questions a mentor can ask a student are an open ended question that makes them think about themselves and their choices. Perfect example would be Anthony and Bethany's question asking us to look back at a something in our lives that changed us in to who we are now. Another one of my favorite questions I like to ask myself is "Where do I see myself in 5 years, 10 years, or 20 years?" and then once I figure out that out I ask myself "What can I do to make this possible?" and set goals to achieve.

Looking at my Activity 5.4, my highest scored type of awareness is social awareness but lowest two is spiritual awareness and intellectual awareness. I figured social awareness would be highest because I am aware of my social status and I am happy with my social life. I also figured my spiritual awareness would be the lowest because I am not a very spiritual person. Don't get me wrong I believe in God and all that but I am not big on being a consistent church goer. I am happy with where I am at with my spirituality. I am at peace with myself and I feel like I have a purpose in life. With my intellectual awareness, I believe I could use some work here. I don't like to study so I usually put it off until I finally tell myself that I have to study. I am trying to actually "learn" the material for class as we go instead of figuring out what I need to know for the test and memorizing as much as I can. I have some work to do before I feel happy with my intellectual awareness level. I didn't score a 20 on any type of awareness but I believe that there's always room for improvement that I can always be trying harder in every type if it may be my social awareness (highest score) or my spiritual awareness (lowest score).