Knowing your friends

Awareness of others? What does that mean?
- that you know a lot of people?
- that you know your friends?
- that you can read your friends emotions?

If you look at my facebook profile you would see that according to facebook I have a lot of friends. One could say I'm popular ;)
The thing is though, not all of those people are people I know well. I would say I have a lot of acquaintances. Facebook is an amazing tool for me to stay connected to these people I meet at conferences.
Anyway, that was a little site tour from what I started out to write.

Awareness of others for me is that you try to get to know the person on a deeper personal level, you learn how to read their feelings and emotions, and they dont feel uncomfortable sharing with you.
In a way, to master the awareness you need, in my opinion, the empathy competency.

My personal competencies are not rich with empathy. Honestly I find it quite hard to read people's emotions from talking to them.
I was never aware of this level of communication, empathy, until AIESEC began with their competency model.
After getting to know this though, I realized that some people actually have this skill of being empathy.

As I try to get to know my family and friends more on a deeper, more personal level, I see that this skill, empathy, is something I need to work on.

Finding out who my family members are, how they feel and what they have to say is extremely interesting quest for me. I learn about myself, my communication skills as well as knowing more about this family I belong to.
For a person with family as their main value, how can this discovery not be a pleasure!

I once heard a man, Stuart Knight, on YouTube where he has left messages to people. This message I am referring to is a message about the Art of conversation, where he is talking about the questions we ask in order to define the level of intimacy you will have with that person.
Usually, those questions we choose are very shallow like;
- What do you do?
- what do you think of the weather? and so on

Why not, when you are in a conversation with someone, preferable a friend, take the level of intimacy higher and ask questions you really want to know the answer to about your friends, like;
- What are your values as an individual and what does that mean?
- what does love mean to you? and more along these lines.

I think, if you really want to be aware of others, you have to put some effort in it. Listen, ask the 'right' questions and try to understand how people feel.
- but please, also be careful of not pushing topics of your interests on to people when you feel they are not ready to discuss them.
Finding the balance in this is another skill one has to adapt and develop in order to be aware.

Yeah, a lot of thoughts going on in my mind when first days of May are showing it's bright colors.
I wanna leave you with the message from Stuart Knight. Enjoy and think about others.

-with love and awareness-