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THE VERY REAL VALUE OF SELF AWARENESS

Self awareness has been said to be a profoundly important key to personal and organisational success.  Daniel Goleman is a leading authority on this subject and he found from research done in 1995 that emotional intelligence is twice as important as IQ and technical skills, and what’s more, the higher up an organisation’s hierarchy the more important our ‘EQ’ seems to be.  
 
Knowing who we are (self awareness), what motivates us and trips us up, and the compulsions that drive us are vital if we are to lift ourselves out of the limitations of the Ego and express ourselves in authentic and healthy ways.  Cultivating emotional intelligence is part of the journey of the conscious co-creator – one who brings unconscious patterns to the domain of conscious choice in alignment with our greater built in impulse to learn, grow, and express our own potential.  This trip is all about waking up, becoming more ‘grown up’ in our interactions (not taking the world personally) and maturing as a species.   

There is much about being a child that is wonderful and divine and we would do well to keep connected to our sense of wonder, playfulness, spontaneity, creativity, and hunger for learning (even a bit of mischief can be useful!), yet overall, if we don’t leave childishness behind us, integrate our need for power trips and the compulsion to control and dominate each other and our environment, we will be lost. “If you keep going in the same direction – you’ll end up where you are headed” – no mystery there!  

We all do the best we can with the resources we have.  Sometimes the resources we had in our early life were not sufficient to enable us to grow into mentally and emotionally healthy adults – even as our physical survival needs might have been met (they obviously were somehow if you are reading this!).  Rather than be victims to parents, teachers, siblings and other influential people in our lives, as well as the systems we live in, we can learn how to understand how they impact us now, take and use what is useful and learn (often profound lessons) from what wasn’t.

By growing our emotional intelligence (and thankfully this can continue throughout our lives), we free up life energy hitherto used to hide or deny our true selves and which limits the expression of the potential we have.  For me, there is nothing more exhilarating!

The challenge inherent in growing more self aware, and that which needs much courage in the journey, is that we will probably find out things about ourselves that we might rather not know.  As challenging as this can feel initially, if we hold a space of compassion for self and others, we come back to ‘we all do the best we can with the resources we have’.  That said, if we want our best to be even better – we need to add more resources.  Often the resources we need are nothing to do with what is outside of us and everything to do with our ‘internal climate’.  Climate change is in our faces on the planet, and, it is also happening inside people all over the world.  I believe we are being challenged to recognise ‘internal climate change’, cooperate with it and find ourselves a more responsible connected species working together for the good of the whole - just as our body is designed to do with the organisation of billions of individuals little cells that makes up a human being.

Imagine feeling free of limiting beliefs about yourself, making better life affirming decisions, communicating more effectively, being more creative and feeling more satisfied with life.  Imagine knowing that taking full responsibility for your life (rather than having enough money or a job) is the key to feeling secure, that you really do have choice in how you respond in life and that your choices make a difference to the whole. 

Some ideas to help enhance your EQ are:

  1. Understand that our life energy (what we do) follows our attention
  2. Realise that to take charge of where our attention goes requires self awareness
  3. Cultivate ‘witness consciousness’ or the ‘inner observer’, by noticing what you notice so you become more conscious and consequently have more choice in what you do and how you be
  4. Accept that all of this takes ongoing practice until it becomes natural to use environmental feedback and our internal responses as fertiliser for our growth and evolution
  5. Understand life is a never ending story and we are always becoming….creation never stops 

"Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending."  - Maria Robinson

So notice what you notice, especially about your thinking and feelings and then choose your actions….notice what happens….make corrections and choose again.  You will enhance your ‘people skills’, your higher operating Self will come forward and the quality of contribution you make to the lives of others and your world will grow.  We don’t need to be trapped in a past that holds us back.  So many people are alive on this planet – billions of us, and yet so many still sleep in unconsciousness.  

Christopher Frye says it much better than me….

A Sleep of Prisoners

The human heart can go the lengths of God
Cold and dark we may be......
But this is no winter now.
The frozen misery of centuries cracks, begins to thaw.
The thunder is the thunder of the flows, the thaw, the flood, the upstart spring.
Thank God our time is now.
When wrong comes up to face us everywhere, never to leave us.
The longest stride of soul folk ever took.
Affairs are now soul sized, the enterprise is exploration into God.
But what are you waiting for?
It takes so many thousand years to wake.
But will you wake? For pity's sake.

- Christopher Frye 

Amanda Fleming
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AUCKLAND