Developing self awareness is key to change

If you are looking to develop more self awareness and further your understanding of how your emotions work so you can make some positive changes in your life – then you have come to the right place, because I truly believe I can help you on your journey to make this transition.

Developing your self awareness is often easier to say than to do, especially if this is something new in your life, because it involves letting go of old behaviours, habits and thoughts and for some people this will mean a negation of much of who they thought they were.

Many of our attachments and fears reside in our unconscious mind; where old outdated beliefs seem to just operate on automatic pilot, you see or hear a certain trigger event and then bad feelings or negative actions just seem to fire off uncontrollably.

One of the key first steps in developing a heightened personal awareness is to begin to detach yourself from events and feelings and begin to realise that it is no longer acceptable to have the same old restrictive feelings each time a trigger event occurs.

Detachment and observation

One element of taking back control is to detach yourself when incidents occur and begin to observe all the outcomes that could be possible, this interruption begins to update your unconscious mind so it realises that people who remain calm and in control are those who can experience any event and then choose for themselves the way they want to react and have the most appropriate emotional response within themselves – calmness, assertiveness, courage, integrity, forgiveness etc.

The more diverse ranges of emotional reactions you can generate lead you to a place of control, where flexibility, calmness and positivity open new doors for you in all aspects of your life.

For example; if someone makes a sudden driving manoeuvre in front of you – many people tend to get angry or annoyed, in reality, there are many ways to respond (if you can interrupt that old automatic response)

• Be glad you are safe
• Wonder why he did that
• Just ignore it
• Be impressed by the quality of the manoeuvre
• Be happy that your evasive actions kept you safe

I’m sure you can see what I mean, by remaining calm and looking at things from new points of view you remain in control – it is no longer “that driver made me mad” and becomes “I chose to stay calm” control of your emotion resides within you – by blaming someone else for how you feel leaves you out of control of your emotions.

Time is of the essence

If there is one thing that self aware people know, it is that, time is of the essence because it seems to pass faster and faster as we grow older – A life absent of self awareness and personal growth can often be a recipe for regret and frustration at a later time.

So, once you become aware of detachment and break the cycle of responding to the same old automatic emotional responses, you then need to know how you would like to respond in any situation and why. Don’t let those voices in your head, that internal dioalogue talk you out of moving forward.

Developing values

That’s where values come into play, self aware people are consciously (or unconsciously) aware of their values, the things that are important to them, the essence of what they believe in. Values can come in all shapes and sizes – love, calmness, personal growth, making a difference, courage, honesty, confidence, friendship, win-win, determination, resourcefulness, adventure, caring – the list goes on (see my A-Z of values here)

Once your values are understood they become the code that guides your decisions – your decisions become aligned with YOUR values (not what someone else thinks).

Abdication of power

Which leads nicely into abdication of power, I hear many people say things like “he makes me feel like this” and “if she doesn’t stop doing that I’ll go mad” – much like the driving incident I alluded to earlier – begin to listen to the words you use and recognise that if you are blaming other people or objects (my shoe lace broke and it really #@## me off) then, in reality, you are abdicating your power to these other people – you believe that they control how you feel – that their actions determine if you will feel good or feel bad – self aware people can see this and take responsibility for their own feelings.

Jealousy

Many jealousy issues stem from this way of looking at the world “doesn’t he realise how he is making me feel by looking at her?” Jealous people tend to want other people to act differently so they will feel better – it is so much easier to begin to take responsibility for your own emotions and change yourself rather than try to change other peoples behaviours, so you will feel better.

Goal setting

Then goals come into play, do you know what your goals in life are? Without goals (large and small) we are lost, just bobbling around waiting for things to happen to us – Self aware people are out there making the things happen that they actually want and desire, responsible for the outcomes they want in life, the emotions they want in life and the actions they want in life.

Pretty much everyone would prefer to be happier, prefer to have more money, prefer to be anxiety free, prefer to be in a great relationship, prefer to live in their dream house in a dream location, but how many people actually make the decision to accept nothing else. Not many in my experience.

I heard it once said that it’s not that complete freedom is not wanted by people it’s just that other things are more important to them. Now these other things can be basic primitive drivers such as security or control or they can be more complex ego mechanisms such as the desire to be right rather than happy or the desire to be told what to do rather than have the courage to call one’s own shots, or perhaps the attachment to jealousy rather than doing the inner work required to claim what you want for yourself.

Either way most people live wishing life to be different rather than making the decision that it will be different and doing everything (and I do mean everything) to make it so. This approach to life goes by many names: game playing, buggering about or letting life pass you by just to name a few.

So, in short, rather than wondering why life is not how you want it to be, ask yourself, have I made the absolute decision that it will be how I want it to be?

Once you have made a decision, then set some goals. The goal then becomes the stone of truth upon which all your contrary (to your goal) beliefs, emotional responses, thoughts and behaviours are broken / let go off.

This is important and most people do not truly get this. Goals are created so that you can bring up any internal conflicts to the goal and then deal with them. The reward of dealing with your inner conflicts to the goal is the goal itself. Goals are your tool for personal and spiritual growth, they challenge you to let go of what is preventing the goal from happening.

Follow this up with taking 100% responsibility for everything that happens in your life however great or awful and you are now in control. Any other way puts you out of control and in the place of being a victim. When you take 100% responsibility for everything that happens to you, you can change it.

So start becoming a decision maker, and relish the fact that the bigger the goals you set the more free you will become – but don’t expect it to not bring up those deep fears and insecurities because a good goal always will, then it’s just a matter of how willing you are to let them go, and the strength of your decision will let you know that.