Be Aware

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work

—Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work

It is only by becoming aware of the patterns of behaviour that form the basis of your life that you will be able to take action to achieve your goals and ambitions and satisfy your needs.

Understand Awareness

Awareness is about noticing everything. You need to be aware of the impact of the words you use, your thinking, the pictures you create in your head, the labels you attach to people, the judgments you make about others, and your patterns of behaviour and the impact they have on the way you run your life. It is only by developing your awareness that you will be able to prevent your thinking from impeding your progress towards your goals.

Achieve Your Goals

Whatever you want to achieve in your life, you need to be aware of the factors that might impede you in attaining your goal. If, for example, you want to become fit and healthy, think of the following.

• What do you eat and drink?

• What exercise do you take?

• What is your daily alcohol consumption?

• Do you smoke?

• Do you get enough sleep?

• Do you get enough fresh air?

Your goal of becoming fit and healthy clearly depends on setting yourself a series of mini-goals, such as giving up smoking, each of which will have its own impeding factors.

Plan to Succeed

You will need a plan if you are to achieve your goal. Your starting point and finishing point will define the route to success. If, for example, you want to lose weight, ask yourself:

• What is my current weight? This is your starting point.

• What is my target weight? This is your finishing point.

• When do I want to reach it? This is your route to success.

Plan your performance goals as stepping stones and monitor your progress. Break down your planned weight loss into weekly totals. Calculate the exercise you will need to do each week and roughly what your total calorie count should be per day/week.

Case Study: Being Aware of Your Needs

A highly valued employee, Peter was a top performer within his company and was asked to take on some extra work. He already worked long hours but began to stay even later to get the job done. Peter’s job was important to him but he was a man with a strong sense of family values and he missed spending time with his wife and children. Peter became aware that if he continued this pattern of behaviour he might come home one night to find that his family had moved out. Before matters got out of hand, he decided to delegate some of the other projects to his team, and was soon working a normal day again, giving them an opportunity to stretch their minds and learn. Peter was able to spend more time looking at the strategy of the business.

• Peter’s awareness that he needed to reinstate his work/life balance enabled him to address his problematic workload.

• Delegating some of his workload to people on his team gave them an opportunity to stretch their minds and learn more, which benefited them and the organization.

Being In the Now

Being present in the moment, awake to how you are interacting with yourself and others, and aware of what you are thinking and feeling is difficult. Usually there is so much going on in people’s minds that they don’t listen properly to themselves or to others. They focus on what they are going to say next or are processing something that has just been said. Buddhists acquire the ability to be present in the moment. They practise the technique of slowing down and clearing their heads of all distractions.

Who Are You?

How often have you sat down and thought about who you really are? A lot of the time people define themselves in terms of their personal or professional relationships with others – manager, husband, daughter, brother, mother. It can be reassuring to be able to relate to such an identity – you know exactly who you are and where you fit into the picture. However, when you accept the label that you have given yourself, or one that others have ascribed to you, your identity is shaped by that label and you start to behave in line with that image of yourself.

Think Smart

The quickest way to slow down is to notice your breathing – your inhaling and exhaling, and the rate of your breathing pattern.

As you breathe with awareness start paying attention to everything that is going on inside your mind. Ask yourself if you are worrying about something that hasn’t happened yet or if you are thinking about all the things you need to do. You will begin to be aware of the quality of your thinking and its effect on what you do and say. The benefits of slowing down will be that your awareness will be heightened.

Find Time to Reflect

Spend time having a deeper look at yourself. This will help you to become more aware of the forces that guide you through your life and anything that you need to change.

Keep a journal in which you can note down all the things that happen to you each day. Ask yourself:

• What makes you happy?

• What winds you up to the point where you lose control?

• What is the person inside your head saying? What type of things do you worry about?

• What are you afraid of?

• What assumptions do you find yourself making about yourself and others?

You can always find time to jot down your thoughts even when you have a busy schedule. Keep a journal with you so that you have something to refer to in the future.

Be Self Aware

Just how in touch are you with your body and feelings, and how often do you use your intuition? Do you pay attention to the signals that your body sends you, or do you ignore and bury your stress? The physical symptoms of stress are often easier for you to detect than any behavioural or emotional changes, which may be more apparent to others. It’s important to recognize some of the symptoms of negative stress which, over prolonged periods of time, can cause a complete breakdown in your immune system, leading to various illnesses. Some of the physical effects of negative stress include:

• Disrupted sleep

• Headaches and pains in the neck and shoulders

• Skin rashes

• Changes in appetite

• Changes in libido

• Frequent minor illnesses.

Use Your Intuition

When you get a gut feeling about someone or something, rather than using logic to make a judgment, exercise your intuition by checking whether your initial gut feeling about the situation was correct or not. The only way to improve the accuracy of your intuition is to exercise it more. With practise, it will soon match up with the hard facts and logic on which you have previously relied, and you will eventually be able to rely on your intuition to pinpoint the root of a difficult problem. This will help you to achieve more awareness of how others are feeling and will improve the quality of your relationships.

5 Minute Fix

Pay attention to your body’s stress signals.

• Draw an outline of your body on a sheet of paper.

• Mark any aches and pains you feel when under pressure.

• Rate the pains on a scale of 1–10.

• Identify the situations that cause the pains so that you can avoid or manage them.

Take Time to Focus on Yourself

Mindfulness, the sense of being present in the moment and becoming fully aware of one’s thoughts, feelings, and actions, is a key concept in mind-and-body therapies such as tai chi or yoga. This type of focused awareness helps you to stay calm, centre yourself, think more clearly, and feel more connected to your surroundings. There is no special posture or exercise that you need to learn, it is simply a question of bringing your mind to focus on what is happening within your body and your mind.

• By learning how to clear the mental chatter inside your mind it becomes easier to focus and push away distraction.

• When you reach the state of being totally absorbed your mind starts to function more clearly and creatively – a habit or way of thinking you can adopt in everyday life.

• Place your hands flat against your chest and diaphragm then breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth. Try to visualize the air moving in and out of your body as you breathe. Clear your mind entirely of thoughts.

• Lie on the floor with your arms by your sides. Starting with your toes and slowly working your way up your body, tense each muscle group in turn and then relax. This type of progressive muscle relaxation helps you to develop mental calmness and feel more connected to your body.