Awareness and responsibility
Awareness and responsibility are two key pillars of coaching and effective living.
When we are aware of something, when we’ve seen it, we know about it. Now it’s available for change because in words of a psychologist Nathaniel Branden: “You can’t leave a place you’ve never been.”
When we’ve seen it, we can be responsible. We can change it. We can change it instead of waiting or hoping for it to change. And we can’t change what we believe is outside of our control or reach.
Awareness: Seeing what before was hidden.
Responsibility: Choosing to change or accept it.
It’s also useful to look at the opposites. To see life lived from a place of avoiding awareness and denying responsibility.
Bumping into the same problems, again and again, and having no clue why we do what we do.
Blaming others for our inaction: the government, our parents, the economy, the weather, even our mood. Waiting for things to change, some day, maybe. Waiting. Blaming. Hoping. Having no clue why. What a grim life.
Awareness is critical because once we’ve seen something new about ourselves we cannot unsee it. It’s forever with us. Maybe we are still far from changing that pattern of behavior or that part of our personality but we know it’s there.
And three resources, three turning points in my life that elevated me and helped me see were MBTI, Enneagram and Human Design systems. With each of them life was divided into before and after. Each of them explained why I was doing things the way I was doing and how I could change.
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Luckily, there are tons of information available for free about each one of them if you decide to seek more knowledge about yourself, more awareness.
And sometimes we don’t even need to consciously try to change. Sometimes just seeing is enough to start changing, almost effortlessly.
And with responsibility?
Our power and influence in life is directly related to the amount of responsibility we choose to take.
Notice that we can choose to take responsibility, even for things that we seem to have no control over like economy or weather.
We can decide to be a certain way, to act in response to that outside circumstance. To be proactive. To act, not react.
In this economy, what will I do?
In this weather today, what will I do?
With this mood today, what will I do?
We are always responsible for our inner stance, the place we are coming from.
And if before we would be blaming or waiting or hoping, now we can act.
And with consistent action? Who knows how far we can go.
