Tag: Self Awareness

Noise

Posted on by jabittan
In a letter of advice written to James Harmon for his book Take My Advice, Valerie Martin writes about the noise that we fill out days with and how we use that noise to fill our minds so that we do not have to think.  Through constant television and radio broadcasts everywhere we go, in the car, at home, waiting rooms, and even at the grocery store, we are fed small and often times unnoticeable advice on what our lives should be like, how we should live, and what happiness looks like. According to Martin, we need to turn off the noise and learn how to be happy when the atmosphere around us is empty, and our mind is overcome with only our thoughts.
To conclude her letter Martin writes, “My advice is simple. When possible, turn off the sound.  Don’t be overly concerned about being happy.  Try to need less, to find work that doesn’t demean you.  Read more, talk less. Try to raise your own children without television.  When despair sets in, as it will, sit quietly and wait it out in silence.”
I think that what Martin is saying is that there are plenty of opportunities for us to reflect on our lives and to really consider what it is that we desire or expect. Instead of using those moments to dive deeper into ourselves, we float along the surface of who we are while we let television or radio distract us.  She is critical of the message presented in those broadcasts because they give us a false sense of reality and show us someone else’s expectations and desires for life.
Learning to be comfortable without noise and with only my thoughts has been a difficult challenge for me.  However, thanks to my running I understand what Martin is trying to explain. Having a time where you are unplugged and left with only your thoughts can be a meditative moment. I do a lot of long distance running, and I have never enjoyed running with music. I love to be unplugged because it allows my mind to churn through the thoughts that build up in a day, and it gives me time to reflect on what I think, what I say, and how my actions align with who I want to be.

The Long Haul

Posted on by jabittan
In the book Take My Advice: Letters to the Next Generation from People who Know a Thing or Two, James Harmon organized a collection of letters from creative people he admired, even though most of the world would not call them celebrities.  Richard Meltzer is one of the many writers who sent Harmon a letter to be published in his book, and one of the themes in Meltzer’s letter is accepting that success and becoming good at something takes longer than what we would like. Meltzer writes, “it will in all likelihood take you much longer than you expect— an unfair percentage of the time you’ve got left — to get much of anything right.”  This is an important quote for young people today to understand since so often we want success to happen immediately.  “You have to factor in the LONG HAUL,” Meltzer continued as he explained that in order to achieve the goals and desires, we must plan for the unavoidable periods of mundane and hard work.
I know that I have felt a lot of pressure to succeed and to reach certain milestones very quickly. The pressure comes from the outside as well as the inside as I criticize myself for not having achieved goals, whether they relate to exercise, finances, or personal hobbies. From the outside we are all driven to achieve a level of success that other people expect from us. We see the lives that our parents have and strive to reach or exceed their lifestyle, and we compete against our peers and high school classmates to be impressive.  All of these pressures can be damaging, especially if we expect to achieve success overnight.
Factoring in the long haul means that you are aware of the hard work that it will take to build the experience necessary to grow.  It involves showing up, being self aware, and re-organizing your desires so that you can have alignment in your life.  The amount of time it takes to reach the level we all desire takes longer than what seems fair as we spend our younger lives preparing ourselves to become the person we want to be. Constant self awareness and accepting the fact that the hard work is not sexy will help us continue to grow and reach for new opportunities, no matter how slowly we seem to progress towards our dreams.

Giving Ourselves Permission

Posted on by jabittan
Ever since I reached the halfway point in my college career, when I began to feel pressure to decide what I wanted to do to earn a living after graduation. Many times along my journey, I have been overwhelmed with the fear of not choosing to do the right thing. I want to put myself in a position where I can live comfortably, enjoy my work, and have time to do thing I am interested in, such as running, hiking, writing, producing the Blue Pulse Podcast and spending time with friends and family.  In order to get to this point, I feel like I have had to practice a lot of self awareness to help me understand what exactly I desire, why I desire what I do, and whether or not those things should be a priority in my life.  Adjusting what I considered a comfortable lifestyle and enough money to reach that lifestyle has been difficult, but striving for greater self awareness has helped me realize what expectations for a comfortable lifestyle are unrealistic. In the same way, improving my self awareness has helped me see how much of a roll my own ego plays into my desires to be active and healthy, and my desire to have a good career/title.
For me, self awareness has helped me understand and recognize the barriers to my own happiness, but has not completely solved my internal questions, anxieties, and doubts.  However, a quote from Allison Vesterfelt in her book Packing Light, has helped me begin to reach a better place. “Here’s permission to live your life, not dictated by fear of what might happen.” This quote was recently echoed to me in a podcast by Brett Henley. In episode 6 of the Mindful Creator Podcast he sat down with Berni Xiang who spoke about giving ourselves permission to be the person we want to be now.
I can take Vesterfelt’s quote and combine it with Xiang’s idea to create a new mindset for myself. Instead of allowing my self-doubt and fears for the future to take over and shape the decisions I make, I can give myself the freedom to be the person I am now, and also the person I want to be in the future.  By sitting down and telling myself that I do not have to live my daily life worrying about what I may have in the future, I can combine permission with self awareness to see that no one is holding me back from applying my talents and abilities.  This means that starting right now, I can be the person I want to be in the future.

Is It Wisdom or Self Awareness

Posted on by jabittan
Allison Vesterfelt in her book Packing Light, writes about wisdom in a way that one of my favorite authors, Paul Jun, writes about self awareness.  On wisdom Vesterfelt writes, “I think that’s what wisdom is— the ability to zoom out from where we’re standing and see the larger picture.” This idea of wisdom aligns perfectly with Paul Jun’s metaphor for self awareness. Jun writes that our focus is like a flashlight, and whatever we focus our mental attention on is illuminated. The more we focus on one thing the more clear it becomes, but also, the more we dial in on one thing, the more we don’t see around us.  Becoming self aware is the process of taking that flashlight and stepping backwards. We turn our focus on our entire lives, and allow the flashlight to illuminate a grater sphere of our lives.
I love calling wisdom and self awareness the same thing. By allowing ourselves to recognize our feelings, and then take a step back to look at our interactions with the world and those around us we are able to better understand our emotions and reactions. The more we step back and spend time evaluating what is happening around us, the more we are able to connect the dots and understand not just our reactions and emotions, but the decisions and ideas of others as well.
This whole process can be called wisdom because instead of seeing the world through the narrow band of our flashlight, we eventually can reach a point where we have a floodlight illuminating everything around us and helping us connect new dots in new places.
Paul Jun is the author of the book Connect the Dots and has a fantastic blog at Motivatedmastery.com

Adjusting in Mid Flight

Posted on by jabittan
Continuing from yesterday’s post and where the last quote left off, Vesterfelt wrote, “Maybe what I needed wasn’t fewer expectations, or lower expectations, but the ability to adjust them in the middle of my trip.” This quote came from Vesterfelt when she made it to Mt. Rushmore during her 50 state road trip. She had really been looking forwards to seeing the mountain, and found it to be underwhelming. It was smaller than she expected, filled with retirees in RV’s, and crowded with souvenir dealers. As she drove through and stopped for a while, she couldn’t help but wonder where her expectations came from, and why she was so upset that her expectations were not met.
Ultimately, Vesterfelt’s quote shows her ability to take a step back from the situation and examine not just where she is or what she is doing, but why she is reacting the way she is. I believe this is a powerful ability that everyone should practice. Being aware of who you are, where you are, and what your situation is, helps you avoid being reactionary in any situation.  It is easy when we are driving down the road to feel rage when someone cuts us off or is driving too slow, but if we take a step back and examine those feelings we find that we are better off if we just take T-Swift’s advice and crank up Shake it off.
In this situation Vesterfelt was trying to understand her reaction and emotions for a bigger set of expectations. The small disappointment she felt by having Mt. Rushmore not live up to her expectation allowed her to look deeper into her life to think about what types of expectations she had been carrying with her. She started to understand that we can expect certain outcomes, but at the same time she was seeing the value of not tying too much importance or value judgments to those outcomes. In my life I have tried to understand the same thing and let go of expecting a certain amount of financial success in my life. I have expectations that I can work hard and reach a point where the money I have is sufficient, but I am trying to allow my expectations to shift for how I will get there, and what that point will be like.  This is the overall message that Vesterfelt was passing along. She learned during her trip that she can have high expectations for things she could or couldn’t control, but that she had to allow those expectations to change depending on the demands placed on her or the nature of her situation.

Do things become more simple over time?

Posted on by jabittan
What I have begun to learn as a recent college graduate is echoed by Vesterfelt in a section I highlighted in Packing Light when she wrote about things she was learning and beginning to understand as her 50 state road trip continued on.  “The longer I traveled, the more I realized things don’t get more organized with time. They become less so.” Having recently moved, started a full time job, and tried to start a new podcast, I have seen how true this sentence is.  I constantly struggle with balancing the things  I want to do in a day with the responsibilities I have. Crossing the graduation finish line and getting a job right out of college was a huge mile stone for me, and I always imagined reaching this point and having life feel easier. I predicted life becoming more organized without homework to bog me down and prevent me from doing the things I like.
After crossing one finish line, what I have instead found is more finish lines, and less time to do the thing that will carry me there.  This has been a very frustrating realization, but a little self awareness has gone a long way in helping me understand myself at this point of my journey.  Recently I listened to an episode of the Mindful Creator Podcast in which the host and his guest discussed this phenomenon of always chasing new finish lines. The two speakers both shared the same visions of the future settling down when they reach the new finish lines, but one said that he understood that crossing one line would just make another appear. His approach was interesting. Rather than denying new finish lines, he accepted them, and believed that through understanding this process he could learn to be more happy with the place he was currently at.
Combining the message from the podcast with Vesterfelt’s quote helps me see that I am in a good place to work on organization now.  Rather than putting off organization until I reach a future finish line where things are supposed to be easier, I need to find ways to maximize where I am now. I may reach that point with better productivity habits, or more self awareness and appreciation for the life and lifestyle I am able to live.  Waiting on things, and putting them off until a future where I will be more successful and things will be better organized means that things will never happen, because as Vesterfelt wrote, things do not become more organized as time goes on.

Fear & Goals

Posted on by jabittan
“After all, we’re all scared of wanting something.” I think this quote from Allison Vesterfelt is a good place for us to base our views of ourselves and others.  Too often I find that it is easy for me to look at other people and ignore the fact that they want something, an object, a promotion, to be in better shape, or to be more confident, and think of them as self content bubbles without goals or motivation. I think that it is important for us to look at the things that scare us, and ask why we are afraid of those things. Are they things we desire but are not sure how to take the first step towards action? Are they things we desire but are afraid to tell others we want? Are they things we desire but we fear that they do not fit in with the identity that we have created for ourselves?
Understanding your own fear of attaining something, and identifying the ways in which that fear lacks a true base can help you overcome it. You may find that the fear does not go away, but that you find a new way to be confident about your goals because you know that the fear you bring with you is irrational and can be overcome.
This quote also helps me see other people in better ways. I try hard to look at someone and see that they have interests in certain areas and goals and desires related to those interests. Perhaps once one masters that, they begin to be the person who can help connect people with the paths towards their goals and desires, I do not know because I am not at that point.  For me, understanding the fear that I have and how it affects me, helps me to remember that other people may face the same or greater fears, and once I understand the base of my fear I can better see that the fear that other people have may be based on something more concrete than the anxious worries of my fear.