Your Life Will Change the Day You Master This

When I think about self awareness, I have one word for you. Consequences. Your entire experience is being shaped by your levels of self awareness. Most misery is a consequence of missing a lot of signs along the way. If you don't increase self awareness, you cannot increase progress. We're talking about the ability to strive consciously and succeed in our lives and the root of all that comes from self awareness. When I think about self awareness, I have one word for you. Consequences. That's it. The consequences in your life can all be tracked back to your actual levels of self awareness and self mastery. It's kind of two sides of a coin, right? You have to have the awareness, the attention, the consciousness to who you are, how your life is really developing, how you're really showing up. And then the self mastery side on the other side is, well, I'd better be disciplined and deliberate in shaping who I am and shaping the results of my life. And you can track all of that right to your consequences. Your consequences in your life, how your current circumstances are and what your future consequences will be based on your current behavior is all correlated with your actual levels of self awareness. The more lacking in self awareness you have, the more a mystery your anger is, the more debilitating your frustration is. The more confused you are by why do you keep procrastinating? The more unsure you are in that next sales situation. Meaning your entire experience is being shaped by your levels of self awareness. And the consequences of that can be dire emotionally, or they can be more positive and more positively intense for you. And I know that sounds like a lot to throw at because it's a hard question, what's self awareness? But I want to come, everyone go like consequences. What is your life actually like now and where are you headed? That's a conversation of self awareness. And I think consequences are a result of choices, and choices are a result of self awareness. The more bad choices you've made in your life, you can probably look back to that time and go, I was lacking a little self awareness about who I was, what I wanted, what I was hoping for, what was driving me. And when we can be honest about that, then we'll do the work in self awareness. If you just say self awareness, people are like, they're not interested. But if you say, you know what, some of those bad choices, some of those bad habits, some of those bad consequences in life, we could limit those from now on by getting you to master your mind and becoming more aware. Now that's the, that's the key is like, people need to feel that energy that their self awareness is tied to their consequences. When they get that, they're like, oh, I gotta do the work. Because if they won't do the work, no one just wakes up to higher levels of self awareness. It actually takes a lot of work. And that's what I think has been lost in the conversation ever made it so mindfully beautiful. And I'm like actually this self awareness has a lot of edge to it. Reaching higher levels of consequence, that's mastery. And I know this can sound like a lot of philosophical conversation for everybody, so let's get to some very finite terms when I say consequences. Because this is how you can gauge your self awareness. Because self awareness usually leads to three very distinct consequences in your performance in your psychology. Number one is your level and intensity of enjoyment of life. So how much enjoyment and what's the intensity of it? The more I tend to enjoy life, it's because I'm in align with who I am and what I want. My expectation is kind of meeting the moment. I'm enjoying things, I'm doing things that I understand bring me pleasure, I understand bring me a sense of fulfillment in life. So when you're miserable, the reality is, yes, you're aware that you're miserable, but often you ended up miserable because along the way you missed the signs. Most misery is a consequence of missing a lot of signs along the way. Let me say it again. Most misery is a consequence of missing the signs along the way. You're burned out, frustrated, broke and angry. Well, you probably just didn't wake up that way because it happens to be Monday, right? It's like there was a pattern along the way that you were missing. And that pattern was either internal or external resident. So enjoyment is number one. The second consequence is the level and the intensity of connection with other people. This is the quality of your relationships. This is very clear in the science that the lower your perceived levels of self awareness, which can be measured as we'll talk about then the lower the quality of your relationships. You don't have relationships that last as long they're not deep and that it's not true affection and compassion there. So your relationships are a consequence of your self awareness. The more conscious you are again of self and social, the more you tend to have deeper relationships. And that's evident. And the third consequence is progress. Do you feel like you're progressing at the levels and intensity that you want? And you can substitute the word often growth, but they are different, right? We, we are, we are either progressing in our career or in our relationships or in our health, or we're not. And self awareness is very critical to progress because you have to be able to note to see the distinctions of where you're stuck or what you need to learn or what you need to face or what you need to get better at in order to progress. Because if you don't increase self awareness, you cannot increase progress. It's literally impossible. Athletes know this, right? It just progress in athleticism doesn't happen naturally. It actually happens through very deliberate focus, measurement, tracking up leveling your programming up, leveling your effort up leveling your coaching up, leveling, you know, your technique. And so if we don't increase self awareness, we can't increase progress. But those are three simple measures. Am I really enjoying life? Am I really deeply connected with other people? Am I really progressing? So the more distracted you tend to be, the less self aware. You're turning to distractions because you don't want to face something in your awareness. You're like, I'm uncomfortable. And your brain's like, I don't want to deal with uncomfortable. I don't want to be aware of my uncomfortable feelings. So I'm going to push that awareness away. It's uncomfortable. I don't like this feeling I'm having. I'm going to push the awareness away and I'm gonna instead turn to alcohol. I'm gonna watch this thing, I'm gonna scroll. Because I can take my awareness off the uncomfortable thing and put it on something that's more comfortable. So for those who don't know that they're, you know, they're like, I don't know why I'm so distracted. I don't know why I keep turning to this addiction. Their self awareness is low because they're not aware of where their attention is going. And you can often find this in relationship coaching. As an example. Let's just use convenient. A man and woman are in a fight, they get a big fight afterwards. I'm coaching, I'm sitting down there with them. I'll ask the man, what were you so frustrated about? That led to this argument. If he can't hop back in his time zone into the past and go and realize, oh, I was really mad about something at work, I brought that into the house and bam, I popped off at my wife. I don't know why. And so if he just goes, I don't know, she's just, she's awful. And so often people, if they can't recall where their attention was before a conflict we know their self awareness is low. They just blame the other person. They can't say, I was in a bad place, I was in a bad mood, so I screamed at my wife instead. They just go, well, my wife sucks. So blame is a huge red flag to lack of self awareness because when you have self awareness, you take ownership of your emotions. The less someone has ownership of their emotions or where their mental state was, it means they, they lack that ability to be conscious of their attention. They weren't attentive to the fact they were angry and then they took it out on their spouse. So blame is a big red flag. And blame just usually means they weren't attentive to their own emotions and they weren't owning their own behavior. So ownership is a big part of attention as well, is if I can own my reality, I can tell you where my attention was. In the big five traits of psychology, one of them that is highest correlated with self awareness is openness. Right. Openness is tied to curiosity, which is tied to humility. It's that mindset that says, I'm curious about this, I wonder about this, let me go explore that versus just this is how it is, that fixed mindset. So I said there's three things. One, one, when you have higher awareness, if we're trying to gauge your self awareness, we're going to pay attention to your attention. Do you, are you aware of where your attention is going? Are you aware of where your perceptions were? Are you aware of the ownership of your actions? The second big area is what psychologists would call an affect. Affect is a fancier way to say your overall emotions, feelings and mood. And I know psychologists. There's some delineations I'm not making here. Chill, take a breather. This is not an academic differentiation moment. What I'm trying to say is your affect, your emotion or the quality of emotion, feeling or mood that you're experiencing, can you regulate that? That's the question. Can you regulate that? Some people feel angry, they don't know why. Some people are in a quote unquote, perpetual bad mood and they don't know why. Their feelings and their moods are a mystery to them. They can't explain it. And so the more that you have the physical sensations of emotion and the mental mood of, let's say, of a dark mood, of a bad mood, of a negative mood, the more that you feel that and it's a pattern like that's been there for a while. You know, someone needs to do some exploration, some self awareness work. Because being unaware of ourself and of the feelings, the affect that we're experiencing in life. And that is a huge indicator and a lot of psychologists will use that as measurements, not just by the way, for, you know, self awareness, that you've all heard the phrase mood disorder. What makes mood a disorder is not the quality or the valiance of the mood. A mood disorder is primarily driven by, by your awareness, the lack of or the strength of. If you don't have an awareness to your mood, then you probably have what will ultimately be diagnosed. And I'm not a psychologist or a clinician here, but inevitably like the more detached or unaware you are of your mood, the more likely it's a disorder. And so it's a good indicator if you just have all these mysterious feelings and emotions all the time. That's why it's so great to get a therapist. That's why it's so great to work with a professional, someone who can reflect back to you what you're saying, the emotional tone and energy to explore how you felt in a given situation. Because the more fluid you become in sensing affect, emotion, feeling, mood, and the more you're able to actually express it and talk about it and then regulate it. So for example, I felt myself being defeated. I'm like, Brendan, don't get defeated here. That's not going to be a useful state for you to be in to handle this situation. This situation and this challenge requires you to get sharp again, to get optimistic again, to get back at it again and not feel defeated and then enact all the bad behaviors of a defeated person. And so my body and my mind, because I have high levels of awareness to it, self regulated, I interrupted it, I changed it. And that's what a lot of measurement in the coaching space anyway. We just want to know is like is this person familiar of the affect they're actually experiencing in life and can they regulate it? Your actions being driven by impulse and reactivity, meaning you're just going through the motions or you're reacting to people or are your actions more conscious, like deliberate? We're looking for deliberation here. We're looking for high intention. The best way to know if someone is self aware is they also have high intention. Like they're, they're conscious of their goals, they're conscious of how those actions are bringing them closer. The more someone is lacking and awareness to their goals or how they behave to get there, the more we're probably lacking in awareness. And of course everyone can hear it sounds like we're talking about self awareness. But we're talking about success, aren't we? We're talking about the ability to strive consciously and succeed in our lives and the root of all that comes from self awareness.