Time to Crank Up the Awareness Dial

In the last few days I’ve availed myself of the opportunity to check in on “where I’m at” from moment to moment, day to day.  It’s been an interesting process, paying attention to little things like my mood, my posture, my breathing, my thoughts.  Why have I chosen to put my focus on these things?  Because I’m learning that heightened awareness is one way to guage how I’m showing up in the world, what’s working for me, what’s not, and what actions I might take.  In other words, by turning up the awareness dial in my life, I’m finding powerful ways to hold myself accountable to the life I claim to want for myself.  Let me explain.

I know from my own experience, and from bearing witness to clients’ experiences, that moving through life on auto-pilot is a really easy thing to do.  But it’s simple in a less-than-ideal way; it’s not a simplicity that serves, it’s a simplicity that allows us to be out of touch with ourselves and the world around us.  Auto-pilot, when it’s used for long periods of time, inevitably results in you getting to a place and wondering, “how the heck did I end up here?”  which is a thought that is guaranteed to leave you somewhere on the spectrum of confused to scared silly.

When you shift out of auto-pilot and into conscious awareness, however, a number of things happen.

• First (and most obvious) you become aware of every single detail of your life — sometimes a not so comfortable experience, admittedly. This awareness can have you noticing what you’d rather not pay attention to, but it can also have you becoming aware of what’s actually working for you.
• Second, you can become more deliberate about your choices, however small.  Every action you take is done in a spirit of overall certainty.  These deliberate choices leave you feeling empowered about the life you’re creating.
• Third, you notice and draw causative links between the choices you make and the results you experience. In other words, you start to recognize the fact that your life is actually be created by your choices, and not just by luck of the draw.
• And finally, you learn to deliberately tweak your choices based on these observations — if you deem it necessary — so your life circumstances evolve as you’d like rather than by happenstance.

Bottom-line:  standing in a place of conscious awareness can serve you well as you strive to create the life you actually want for yourself.  Yes, there will be uncomfortable moments — particularly when you become aware of things you don’t like or choices that don’t serve.  All of the discomfort, however, is definitely made up for by the resulting  insight and deliberate creation that ensures you a life that works for you.  And isn’t that what you ultimately want for yourself?  I know it’s what I want for myself — a life that works for me.