“You can’t be in control of anything that you’re not aware of! The key is to realize your purpose is not outside of yourself. It comes from going within and discovering the highest version of yourself!” Jeff Bezos

Why Self-Awareness is Important – Crisp Vision Hack by Alex Dee – The best metaphor that I could come up with to explain awareness is to imagine you’re seeing with your eyes, but it’s not clear and crisp. It seems very faded, but you just can’t see everything! You can see enough but you can’t see everything. Now imagine being able to have your eyes get to a place where they can literally see everything and it’s crisp and clean, and you can really see the world in a very different clarity. That’s essentially what’s happening today. We’re all walking around, and we can see things, but it’s not as clear as it should be. It’s faded, and yet we’re OK with it because this is the way we’ve been looking at life through those same eyes for all our lives. What happens is we start listening to our Inner Voice to find out who we are. We find out what our talents are and the gift that we want to bring to the universe, our purpose, or whatever it is that lights us up. It’s that awareness that gets our eyes to see clearly and see the world and our place in it, in a whole new light!

How to See Awareness – Two Voices Hack by Jay Shetty – Most of us don’t even realize it but we have two voices that are going on in our heads. One is the voice of a child and this is one that makes us compulsive. We want everything now where it’s constant, immediate gratification. It’s constantly moving without a thought or an impulse. This can be good because this causes us to take action, but it’s not the process before taking the action. The second voice is the one that’s more like a parent, and it’s the one that tells you things you don’t want to do! It tells you to think long, hard, slow, and deliberate before doing anything. This is great because it allows us to slow down and think before making decisions. If it’s just this one voice, we would be stuck in a mode of paralysis by analysis not taking action. So, what most of us don’t realize is that we’re thinking with one voice or the other! The awareness factor comes from realizing which voice is talking to us and then being able to step back and become aware of it. This will make a huge difference in being able to take action where we recognize, okay It’s my child voice or it’s the adult voice speaking to me now. Versus unconsciously! We then can make decisions using awareness!

The second part to this is that if you’ve ever noticed when you listen to a song a few times and then stop listening to it, that song is basically placed in the back your mind, and you end up singing it and hour later, or a day later. This is similar to how our unconscious works from parenting, to the environment. All these things have been rooted in us and whether we realize it or not, they planted a subconscious seed where we’re still taking actions unconsciously. We start taking the actions of what our parents belief system, or our environment, or our friends have put within us being aware of it. Just like with that song, as we start singing it, and playing it out in our lives. We start acting on it unconsciously without giving it the awareness it deserves. This is the second way to hack being aware of what you’re thinking about!

Self-Awareness Hack – Write a Self-Biography Hack by Alex Dee – One of the best things you can do to become more self-aware is to just take some time and write out your life story. Spend some time starting from your childhood years, to adolescent years, all the way to early adult years to where you’re at now! Think about the major memories that come up. Why they were valuable; the pain or the lessons that you learned along the way have shaped you to who you are! Most importantly, to see the way you think! An easy hack for this is to spend one hour a week journaling, starting from the time you were born to where you are today. This will give you a profound insight and awareness to yourself. Things such as why you are who you are today, or why you think the way you do! From then on, you’ll be able to take something that may have been programmed into operating subconsciously and unconsciously, into something that is very conscious, so you can make a choice on whether you want to continue thinking that way, which lets you define who you are! And an extra benefit is this is also a great way to get your first book done! 😊

How to be Aware of What You’re Feeling and Thinking – The Two Brains Hack by Mark Manson – I think for every person there are two sides to your brain and the best way I can sum it up for you is with an analogy of a car! Imagine you’re thinking brain is a driver and that is the one that is trying to get on a map and moving towards that direction. You also have your feeling brain, which is like a snotty little kid in the back and keeps distracting and playing with you with all sorts of emotions. Your thinking brain is really focused on trying to get the tasks done, but the feeling brain is always coming up and asking questions! 

Still the key for us is to get the two to communicate together so we can be able to achieve the results we want and become aware. But how do we do that to get the two to communicate? That’s why awareness is by far the greatest half because let’s say you want to go work out in the morning. Thinking brain says how about today we work out in the morning how would I feel? Your feeling brain says God I don’t want to wake up at 5 o’clock in the morning to work out! That sounds awful and the thinking brain says, well how bout 6 o’clock, do you want to do that? And the feeling brain says yummy that’s a little bit better and I do want to work out so that might work! So, it’s always a negotiation between the two to get to do what you want. The key is becoming aware of the feeling brain and what it is saying and allowing you to communicate so you can get what you want.

How to Become Aware of the Truth – Feel the Pain Hack by Tucker Max – The point is not so much in understanding why you do what you do, but when you can both understand how intellectually and emotionally we can feel the pain of what you’ve gone through. Not so much the happiness, because we never mind feeling that happiness, but the actual pain you’ve gone through! That’s when you have an everlasting change and it sticks with you! So, with awareness I would say it’s not just being aware of what you’ve done or thought, but it’s about feeling the pain so it will have a lasting impact!

One of the hardest parts about being smart and being an analyzer is it’s easy to rationalize and come up with excuses of why it wasn’t your fault, so you had to take ownership! And let’s face it, the best defenses are usually true! So, you can rationalize something being true and be very good at it but if you look and discover the emotion that’s there, that is keeping you from admitting it, then you’ll discover the underlying truth.