Self-awareness is a tricky concept. It’s also the key to disable auto-pilot in your life. The human brain, pulsating, lazy, tangle of nerves that it is, takes training and exercise before it can turn it’s clever, amazing powers in on itself.
For the sake of efficiency, since your brain is constantly being bombarded with sensations from your environment, i.e., the sounds of the ticking clock mingling with the tic-tic-tic of the key strokes, which I also feel depress under my finger tips, as I silently read the words I’m typing to you right now…
Your brain processes everything around you, at all times. Tuning out the extra distractions to give your attention and focus to the task you’ve mentally prioritized. Often, taking time to consider our internal reactions to our experiences, and how those reactions affect our behavior, doesn’t fall high on the priority list.
Developing self-awareness is an ongoing, fine-tuning of how your brain automatically prioritizes your actions based on the assessment of your emotional and cognitive climate. Trust me, self awareness is a good thing. Don’t want to take my word for it? Emma Higgins over at The Fishy Bowl goes so far as to say: “Self-Awareness is the single most important and advantageous tool you can have to find success in any area of life.” Her piece on Self-Awareness is pretty convincing..
Here’s the deal: Life wears us down.
Day in and day out, the monotonous droning of routine, of ‘normal’, it erodes the ‘awareness’ from our consciousness, making it more difficult to challenge our comfortable perceptions. Facing this fact has been the hardest part of living through the global COVID pandemic for many, many people.
It can be shocking, to look at your life and realize you’re on autopilot. Heck, even if you do realize that you’re just going through the motions of day to day living, accepting that fact can be down right painful. Disabling autopilot often requires a person to challenge firmly held beliefs, and processing those discrepancies gets uncomfortable. Which is part of the cycle when the need for self-awareness kicks in; this is when you have to choose: Learn from the new information with the intention of making changes OR, continue on Autopilot.
The Alternative? Reclaim the Driver’s Seat of your Life.
Intentional living means taking control of life by taking action when you’re confronted with new information. This requires awareness of your thoughts, feelings, and actions in order to consciously choose your life’s direction.
It’s increasingly easy to become complacent with sources of stress readily available to the average person, and settling for whatever life circumstances come along seems pretty mainstream when you have to balance work, family, education, social interaction, housekeeping, blog writing, and all of the other hundreds of items that ‘must’ be taken care of on any given day.
Fear, aggravation, and uncertainty are unavoidable parts of life that we all have to learn to manage in our own personal balancing acts. Actively deciding to make conscious choices in place of automatic ones is the key to changing the motivations behind your behaviors which will bring greater self-awareness and more meaning to life.
While the concept is simple: Be conscious & actively think about all of your actions – it can take a while to incorporate conscious living into your daily life. If you’re looking for a place to get started, here is a list of great tips originally complied by Leo Babauta over at Zen Habits, pick the one that resonates with a problem you’ve been dealing with, and give it a shot!
1. Make reflecting on your life a regular routine. Whether you keep a journal, or make reflecting on your day part of your evening routine, or have a weekly session where you review your life or take some time away from the office to reflect on everything … it’s important that you give things some thought. Regularly.
2. At least once a year, set or review your life’s goals. What do you want to do in life? What is important to you? What do you want your life to be like? And how will you get there? Write it down, and keep it somewhere you will see it often, and take action.
3. Also review your relationships. The people we love are among the most important things in our lives, if not the only important things. You need to think about your relationships. Do you spend enough time with them? Do you show your appreciation for them? Is there a way you can improve your relationship? Do you need to forgive or apologize about anything? Are there barriers that can be removed? Communication that can be improved? Also review your relationships with others, such as co-workers.
4. Consider your impact on the world. How does what you do, what you consume, and how you live, impact the environment? How does it impact poor people in Third World countries? How does it impact the poor, the powerless, the voiceless? How does it impact your community? Your life has an impact, whether you think about it or not. Being conscious of how your decisions affect others is important.
5. Consider the real costs of each purchase. We often buy things without really thinking about what we’re doing or what they really cost. Sure, it’s just $30 … no problem, right? But that $30 might represent several hours of your life … hours that you’ll never get back. Do you really want to spend your life earning money for trivial purchases? Is that what you want to do with your life? Worth some thought, I think.
6. Consider the real costs of the things in your life. Our lives are filled with stuff … our houses, our offices … and beyond just the cost of buying the stuff, this stuff takes a toll on us. The stuff in our life must be arranged, cleaned, moved, taken with us when we move … it takes up the space in our life, it is visual stress. Later, we’ll have to get rid of it, sort through all of it, take time to throw it away or recycle it or donate it. If having the stuff is not worth all of that, then get rid of it.
7. Review how you spend your time. Until we do a time audit, and keep a log of our day, even if it’s just for one or two days, we don’t really know how we spend our time. And if we do audit our time, it can be very surprising. And if we know how we’re spending our time now, we can make conscious decisions to change how we spend our time in the future.
8. Explore yourself. (Dig your mind out of the gutter, then) Take some time to think about what kind of person you are. What your values are. Whether you live your life according to those values. How you treat people. How you treat yourself. Think about this: what do you want people to say about you when you die?
Ready to Go Deeper?
Some of this is heavy. It might be difficult for you to adjust to the weight of active thought and awareness of how you feel and and why you behave in certain ways.
Spending valuable time and effort considering the answers to the questions presented by these tips is an excellent way to start dealing with any discomfort you have. That’s the best way for you to expand your self-awareness and allow yourself the space you need to make intentional choices. Which, of course, are essential for cultivating happiness and success, qualities most folks are seeking.
If you’re also seeking a Guide in this process, click here to review my current offerings and see the ways we may be able to work together to Disable Autopilot.
