In all of the research I’ve done, the most common question asked of me is how I manage myself without self-awareness. I’ve always told people it’s because I’m too busy to stop and think about myself, but I’m starting to believe that I’m too busy to even know what I’m doing.
In a study I just finished, participants were asked to think about life without self-awareness and to describe the way they experience it. I think the common theme in these descriptions is a lack of control.
If you want to self-discover, just do it. Don’t force yourself to do anything. Let yourself go. Don’t control your life. This is the kind of thinking that can lead to paralysis.
It’s interesting, because if you stop to think about it, you find that if you didn’t have control, you probably would have stopped to think about it. For example, if you ask yourself, “What happens if I lose control?” and you never have control again, your life would be a complete mess. Likewise, if you stop to think about what you want in life, you probably won’t have any idea what to do about it.
I think that the most important way to break the cycle of paralysis is to take time to think about what you want in your life, what you want out of life, and what you want to do in life. When you get this far, you will realize that you have no control over your life. You are just the average joe, and to think otherwise is just a mental illness. This mental illness is the reason that we don’t have control over our lives.
But we do, and its a mental illness that needs to be treated. One of the main reasons we don’t have control over our own life is because we have no concept of what we want out of life. We have no idea that we’re capable of making any of our own decisions. We have no idea we can change anything we’ve done in the past. We have no idea we can do anything new. We have no idea that we can make a difference.
A lot of the time the mental illness is an illusion. There are all sorts of things that are just out of our awareness. We arent aware of our pain, and we arent aware of our anger, and we arent aware of our guilt and shame. We just have this feeling that something is wrong.
The thing is, that feeling is usually a form of self-awareness. As a result of that awareness, we are able to change our behavior. We can control how much we drink, or how much we eat, or how much we lie, or even how much we sleep. We can control our emotions and our reactions to the world and ourselves.
When I was a kid, I remember my parents telling me that they thought I was a bad, bad kid. It was a joke at the time, but it is a funny one. As adults, I think that self-awareness is not a bad thing. In fact, we should all strive to increase our self-awareness. Learning to be aware of our mind, body, and emotions means that we are able to be more mindful about our behavior and actions.
I have to admit, I didn’t know much about the other one until I was a senior in college. I was told that I was going to be the first person in my family to go to college. My first thought was that I could get into any good college because I just could not handle the social aspects of the social life my parents wanted me to have. I was pretty sure that I would not be able to get into the Ivy League because of my poor social skills.