Self - Awareness

Self - Awareness

Self-awareness is the ability to take an honest look at your life without any attachment to it being right or wrong, good or bad. ~Debbie Ford

Self – Awareness means gaining a better understanding of who you are and how your behavior influences others. I often share with friends and family I am the most self – aware person I know. What I mean when I make the statement is that I am suggesting that I know myself extremely well. I am aware of my pluses and minuses to the extent that I am not challenged by my awareness of them.

One of the things my self – awareness introduced me to was the existence of intrusive thoughts. You may be one of the lucky ones that never have this experience. As I understand from psychological professionals, we all do.

An intrusive thought is a thought we become conscious of that we did not summon but there it is in our mind doing what we tend to believe is demanding our attention. Clearly, on occasion I found my intrusive thoughts troubling and I sought professional help to understand how they could be there in me.

I have accepted that I have encoded in the database of my DNA all the experiences of all the people that came before me in my bloodline up and through the point they made their genetic contribution. What I experience in my thoughts sometimes, therefore are not my thoughts. They are just making an appearance on the view screen of my thoughts and they feel like they are mine.

This enhanced self – perspective adding to my general self – awareness was liberating. I do not have to attend the intrusive thoughts that appear in my mind at all. I have no reason to attach to them unless I find value in what they seek to contribute.

I want to make sure that I do not confuse self – awareness with motivation, the why we do what we do, because that comes next. Our personalities are broad and wide. We have been collecting data from before we were born. My brain has been conducting this operation on its own without my permission. My brain is just like yours. It runs nonstop 24/7/365.

We know where our brain is. The question is where is our consciousness? We believe we perceive it from our brain.

With our minds, we can experience things our brain and our nervous system allows us to feel and experience in real and in the time beyond chronological time. Our mind may even be multi – dimensional. It appears it can be in more than one place at a time.

We can be sitting in a classroom or a church or in a theater or at home but our mind is millions of miles away. How many of you have had a teacher from elementary school tell you to pay attention and stop day dreaming. They could clearly witness your body in the classroom. They also knew that you in fact were not there but somewhere else.

What happens when we dream? Where are we when we sleep, and our bodies lie lifeless while some part of us travels throughout space or under the oceans? How is it that our brains are registering these events as if they are really happening?

Many who read and study this book will understand the information derive from the work of Dr. Maxwell Maltz. Dr. Maltz was a plastic surgeon that became very aware that while he could dramatically change the appearance of his patients, but he could not change what they see. He wanted to know how he could transform the looks of a very plain person into an abundantly attractive one and they would still see the very plain features before their transformation.

Dr. Maltz was one of the first people to introduce visual motor rehearsal. He taught George Foster, a slugger for the Cincinnati Reds Major League baseball team how to improve his batting performance by rehearsing his batting in his mind. He taught George how to see the ball in his thoughts and make contact with the bat to the ball with his mind. George had been in a hitting slump when he came to Dr. Maltz for help.

After his time with Dr. Maltz and learning to bat in his mind and seeing his at bats in his head, he created visual motor response to the real time at bats and his batting average climbed.

Dr. Maltz proposed that the mind cannot tell the difference between a real experience and a really well imagined experience. When this activity has been measured by brain sensors, the same parts of the brain light up when imagining the experience as when the experience was really taking place. How awesome is that?

In case, you are still a skeptic. If you are willing to admit you have experienced arousal when alone in your thoughts that your body responded to as if really happening, you get this. You also get it if you have awakened from a dream that was so intensely real and exciting that you were upset because you woke up.  

When we can completely become aware of ourselves without judgment, we hack our development and discover we have capacities for understanding ourselves and other people we never thought possible. As it is really possible to live without judging ourselves, we can learn to live without judging others. The more you know yourself, the more you know everybody else.

This level of self – awareness is liberating and empowering to become the best versions of ourselves possible. Can you imagine you relationships happening without the burden of critical judgment we may have witnessed from our experiences with others.

Psychological professionals inform us that people with unresolved personal issues tend to more critical of others because of their own internal discontent. What would you rather do, live out a painful existence always critiquing others or deal with your own issues, resolve them and become free to become a better you?

QUESTIONS

On a scale from 1 – 10, where 1 equals extremely low self-awareness and 10 means you are self-aware, where do you place yourself on the scale?

Has your self-awareness grown over the first three modules of the course?

How would becoming more self-aware benefit you in your personal with yourself?

How would becoming more self-aware benefit you in your personal with family?

How would becoming more self-aware benefit you in your personal with friends?

How would becoming more self-aware benefit you in your personal with people at work?

How would becoming more self-aware benefit you in your personal with others beyond yourself, your family, your friends, and your work?