Awareness of Self

Self-awareness is often touted as one of the most critical skills we can acquire. Beyond specific, tangible skills, the ability to know one’s self, and make decisions around that knowledge, is considered crucial to achieving long term success.

Gary Vaynerchuk, advertising expert and social media guru, says this about self awareness:

Self-awareness allows people to recognize what things they do best so they can then go hard on those aspects of their life. It also helps you accept your weaknesses.
What works for one person doesn’t work for everyone. I want people to learn to be at peace with themselves, to understand what they can offer, because everyone’s got something. The key, however, is learning how to find it.
Speaking of experts and gurus, they are all over the place. Vaynerchuk fits the bill, as someone who has led two multi-million dollar businesses, and is a trusted voice in the marketing world today, with a huge online presence.

But adding “expert” or “guru” to the end of your Linkedin account does not make it so.

Many experts are available to read and listen to online. They will help you with “growth”, or “hacks”, or “productivity”, or my favorite, “10x-ing” your life, or morning, or commute, or bathroom time. Apparently there are many things that need to be increased in your life, and most experts online can help you increase them by a multiple of 10, whatever that means.

If you read most of these guys, it might leave you wondering if there is someone, somewhere, waking up every morning at 4 a.m., without an alarm, after 8 or 9 ours of great sleep, taking a cold shower, journaling, meditating, drinking 64 ounces of filtered water, and then going through a 20 step process of productivity, before heading off to a job they love, and also, they are a multi-millionaire, because they followed the 14 steps as posted in a Medium article.

Listen, there are actually people like this. Really. There is no doubt, that successful people are different. I’m working on my routines, and trying to become more disciplined, and figure out what things I can add to, and remove from my life, to make it more productive and enjoyable.

But don’t be fooled into thinking that all of the keyboard experts out there are some type of cyborg who have all of life’s secrets figured out, and that if you can just make yourself follow their blueprint, then you too can 10x your life in 20 minutes a day.

These people all have more readers than me. It’s very possible, that I’m just jealous.

All kidding aside, the main takeaway is this:

You can read all of the articles you want. You can watch all of the YouTube videos that you want. You can join a mastermind group, and you can even be a part of a small group every night of the week.

But until you learn who you are, and live into those truths, none of that will matter much. Being self-aware isn’t just about knowing what you are good at and what you stink at. That’s a step in the right direction, for sure, and some people will certainly live a lie around these two concepts. People are often afraid to live into their strengths, and refuse to acknowledge their weaknesses.

But generally speaking, we seem to have ample opportunity to become aware as to what we are good at and what we are not, and that starts from a pretty early age. This isn’t the most important aspect of self-awareness, it’s the most basic understanding of the concept.

True self awareness is so much more.

You have to have a clear vision of the basic truths about yourself. And these basic truths won’t come from taking cold showers in the morning, or quitting caffeine. It won’t come from following the directives of someone else’s life. Don’t get me wrong, we can always learn from others. But what works for someone else won’t always work for us.

Our basic truths come from examining these questions:

Who are you?

Where are you?

What do you want?

They come from determining and then developing our roots.

They come from living our values.

(By the way, if there’s anything we should spend time figuring out how to 10x, it’s our values, not our productivity. Figure out how to 10x your values and other things will be 10x-ed, whatever that means.)

And then we have to live into those basic truths. We have to make decisions that reinforce those truths. And we have to do that over and over again, inch by inch strengthening who we are and who we hope to be, each and every day.

Self awareness then, is not knowing when it’s appropriate to laugh or remembering to zip up your fly before you go out in public. And it’s not just knowing what you can and can’t do.

I believe self-awareness means that you’ve taken the time to observe, to reflect, and to listen, to what you bring to the table to this world and to the lives of those that you love. It is a combination of knowing what you are good at (your skill set) and knowing who you are and who you aspire to be.

We all have something to offer, things that we do best, and things that stir up our soul.

Self-awareness, true self-awareness, calls us to live courageously into those things, to share them with the world, and to not waste a minute using someone else’s 10-xed life as our measuring stick.

To thine own self be true.

First, we have to figure out who thine own self is.

Who are you? Where are you? What do you want?

Much Love,

Bryan