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When I tell people I’m a certified stress management coach, they ask me if I can “help them be the best version of themselves.” I explain that this is a big part of the practice, but that self-awareness is the one thing that can really help people be their best.
I’m sure you’ve heard people talk about the importance of self-awareness before. I had a client who was able to take a very simple action to get rid of a bunch of stress, and after a couple of months he said “I feel like I’ve been working on a new project. I feel like I’m making progress.
The problem is that a lot of times we only see ourselves as we see others. Some people may actually be more aware of their flaws than others, but that doesn’t mean that they themselves are any better at anything. This is why it’s very important to practice self-awareness (and to actually do it).
When I first started practicing self-awareness, I was a nervous wreck. I had to take a long, hard look at my behavior, and I had to accept that I was not perfect. This was actually a big part of the reason why I quit med school and started my own practice. When I realized that I was not perfect, I had to develop my self-awareness of my shortcomings.
Once you notice your faults, you have the power to change them. If you don’t, you have no reason to put up with the rest of us. That, in a nutshell, is the power of self-awareness.
Michael Veale is one of my heroes. In the early ’90s he was making the rounds doing some research on consciousness. He spent a lot of time with an Indian monk named Atishaya, who thought that the first conscious experience was not a flash of light, but a flash of pain. I think it is this pain that is the fundamental experience of self-awareness.
So what’s the good of self-awareness if you can’t change anything? Well, self-awareness allows us to recognize when we’re wrong or not in control of ourselves. It’s this awareness that allows us to identify our own actions as being out of line with who we are. So now it’s important to exercise self-awareness because it helps us identify our actions as being out of line with who we are.
Self-awareness and action awareness. I don’t need a lot of self-awareness at the core. I know who I am. I know who I can be. I know who I want to be. But I can’t change who I am. I can’t change who I want to be. But that’s okay. I still get to act as if I am who I want to be. I still get to make decisions. I still get to make commitments.
I can accept that I can sometimes make mistakes, but if I stop and think about it, I will see that I am learning from those mistakes and I am growing again. And the more I do that, the more I become who I want to be.
That’s a very important concept to understand about self-awareness. It is a process. In other words, when we say that we can’t change who we are, we are not saying that we can’t change who we are, we are saying that we can’t change who we want to be. We can’t change who we are, but we can change who we want to be. Self-awareness is about making the conscious decision to do that.
