Awareness is an awakening to who you are and to your blind spots.
Today’s Wisdom Bite about awareness begins to mirror back who you are beyond a number on the scale. If you picture a mirror attached to a car, you can appreciate you’re going to have some blind spots about yourself. We all have them. Limiting beliefs that keep us stuck. Habitual behaviours that have us on autopilot. We’re constantly feeding ourselves a narrative about all this. But we rarely pause to consider the language and framing we’re using to deliver that narrative and how it affects our resistance. Your self-talk, the words you use, either deaden or awaken you to your authentic self. Disabling or enabling perspectives make a huge difference in your behaviours and your growth.
Your self-talk can help you see links to your weight loss struggle you never realized before…
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Here’s what you need to know
Your self-talk can help you see links to your weight loss struggle you never realized before. That’s because your focus has probably been on the physical aspect – through diet, through exercise. You might be pouring a lot of energy into your weight (e.g. starting-stopping programs, preoccupied with food, obsessing over the scale). This is attention not awareness. Trying to control your weight is stifling not enlightening.
My guess is you already know what to do to lose weight…but you resist doing it. Terrific I say! Resistance is just misdirected energy. Consider it a teacher to help you unpack your choice points and understand what is influencing you in those moments. These observations may appear at first to have nothing to do with your weight but it’s all connected underneath (e.g. creativity feeling blocked? hmm, there you go reaching for food). Putting words to your experiences helps with your awareness of these links.
Maybe your current narrative uses ‘must’, ‘should’, and ‘have to’ language and you push back against this. There is more supportive ‘want’, ‘like’ and ‘get to’ language available that can help you lean into things. Your self-talk plays a significant role in tightening or relaxing your resistance. Here are three guidelines for developing your awareness:
- Everything’s accessible. In the spirit of Thomas Edison, “There are no rules here – we’re trying to accomplish something.” If you want to learn about choice, you can’t start from rules or restrictions. That means all foods and all forms of movement are on the table. It also means letting go of any notions of what’s good-bad, right-wrong or even healthy-unhealthy. Any experimentation that helps inform your choices going forward is useful. Curiosity and objectivity are the fresh perspectives to practice here.
- Have present moment experiences. When you’re reaching for your favourites, especially comfort foods, you’ll typically eat from memory and what that memory is telling you the experience was years ago. Having a present moment experience gets you off autopilot. You become aware of subtleties and nuances that never registered before. This level of awareness can actually be curative for simple habits. You’ll even start to find the quality of the food surprisingly lacking. This would have been inconceivable before, when your psyche was relying on that comfort food to be the solution to your problems.
- Learn from every experience, positive or negative. So you read an inspiring article, set out to get some movement in every day last week and only made it to Day 2. We tend to live from a limiting belief that says when we know better we will now always do better. Then we misstep, label it a failure, beat ourselves up and quit. This is actually a gift of contrast to help us clarify what helped and what hindered our efforts. All this has to land in our awareness before we can adjust our efforts. Every experience informs. Edison tested over 1600 substances in developing the light bulb. Personally, I’m grateful he didn’t quit at 1599.
Here’s what you can expect in Module 1: the Awareness stage
“I’m getting back to who I am as a person, not just a dress size.” – L.D., Peace Officer
Core Value: Choice; Primary Skill: Non-Judgement
Awareness is the inner work that turns your resistance into insight and progress. It helps you awaken to yourself as a multi-layered human being with legitimate needs, not some black and white, idealized version of yourself. The focus of this stage has you managing your emotions and your internal state better. This self-regulation enables you to maintain your composure better when under stress. You start developing a sense of choice you didn’t know existed.
You begin to understand your resistance and struggle have manifested for valid reasons and they don’t warrant the judgement you’ve brought to them. You can now see judgement as the barrier to your learning. Learning that is showing you the kinder words of Soul go much further than the harsh criticisms of Ego. This gentleness of Soul is the beginning of self-like. You shift from “I am my body and I must control it” to “I have a body and I’m learning to relate to it.”
Here’s what you can practice
It’s been suggested we have over 60,000 thoughts per day and about 35,000 of those result in choices we make each day. So let’s start from the premise you have plenty to work with! When you’re on autopilot and tipping from one habitual behaviour to the next, it’s hard to examine your choices and their impact. The key is to slow down your thought process and get present.
This starts with dialing down the Doing part of you so you can dial up the Being part of you. Be willing to first observe and learn something about a choice you’ve made, before trying to change it. Note: judgement and learning cannot co-exist, so if you choose to judge the choice (and yes, that IS a choice), you will cut yourself off from the learning. You’ll be stuck repeating the choice until you opt to start seeing it through a lens of curiosity.
Any choice point where you notice yourself being: reactive; impulsive; indecisive; perfectionistic; compliant; avoidant; or disconnected are all rich moments for developing your awareness. Keep in mind too, insight comes to us more often like the pieces of a puzzle, not always as a single Aha. So at this early stage, success is…the speed at which you apply your learning. By taking each bit of insight and looking for your earliest opportunity to apply it, you’ll be turning it into wisdom and making this process your own.
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How did it go for you?
Don’t just take my word for all this. When you simply adopt someone else’s approach, you are trying to control your way to an outcome. It’s important that you test what resonates with you, to ensure it works for you and your circumstances. When you go through this process by adapting what you’re learning to your own life, you’re also demonstrating critical thinking and your ability to live from choice as you begin to address your struggle.
Select an early insight about yourself or one of your blind spots and share it in the Members-Only Comments section below.
Explain how this new awareness is helping you see yourself in a different light.
Be sure to check back in too, to let us know how it’s going!
Conscious Weight Loss®
New to Conscious Weight Loss? Continue to this next Wisdom Bite
Truth (Module 2)
Interested in more? Check out these related Wisdom Bites
Resistance
Ego and Soul (Members-Only)
Deep Truth (Module 3)
Alignment (Module 4)
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The Three and a Half BIG Questions You Gotta Ask Yourself to Lose Weight
Having just completed Module 1 here are my takeaways:
You can’t change what you can’t see/hear/feel which makes awareness the bones of change
The way we talk to ourselves absolutely affects how we feel and thus our capacity for change
Lived experiences in the present moment create new neural networks!
Resistance is fear!
Can you see your evolution from your previous post (prior to going through Module 1) & this current post (after completing Module 1)? Most notably, you saw self-talk as a means of UNDERSTANDING your struggle & yourself better – which it certainly is – but you’ve now dropped from your head into your body to appreciate how self-talk makes you FEEL. Well done!
I’ve always had difficulty with “the pause” I felt silence was awkward and unpleasant. I’m going to try using self talk to get a better handle on my choices in each situation
That pause isn’t just metaphorical, it’s literal. And perhaps a better descriptor for those moments is stillness (vs. silence) because there’s lots of insight that presents within those ‘conscious windows’!
Self talk is the window into understanding our weight loss struggles better, it is also a way to understand self better.
Physical aspects of weight loss are ATTENTION not AWARENESS
Resistance is just misdirected energy, we can use resistance as a teacher to unpack choice points and understand what is influencing us in those moments. I am driven by resistance so redefining it as a teacher and breaking it down to, what it means for me is going to be crucial in this journey.
Limiting belief -> when we know better we will always be better. This assumption is so personal for me. The amount of times I label things as a failure and then give up or feel defeated…countless!
Wonderful takeaways Ada. Our self-talk literally defines us – you’ll be amazed when you take ‘failure’ out of your vocabulary just how much easier it is to recognize your incremental progress. As for examining your resistance, you’ll find a bit of lightness & humour go a long way.
We miss so much of our life being on auto pilot . Being able to slow down and make a choice is huge and will allow me true freedom. Think of all the energy I could redirect my resistence energy to!
Yes to that! And for many they’ve been on autopilot for years, maybe decades. As you awaken to choice, you’ll also start to see where your choices predictably take you. Choosing not to get mired in resistance is one level of freedom but then having abundant energy for your bigger life is a whole other level!
The Awareness stage gave me the ability to slow down, even pause, and give myself choices when it comes to my physical health. It has been freeing. In this phase I realized I have limited beliefs, habitual habits, old memories, and language that keeps me stuck. I was on autopilot — making brisk behaviours that negatively impacted me. I didn’t even know I had other options let alone how to carry them out. Now I’m learning to notice those parts and listen for another way of being. I’ve grown commendably in a relatively short time which is rewarding and exciting. I am thankful for Coach Kath’s program and coaching.
You’re describing the experience of shifting from the control paradigm to the choice paradigm & the true sense of freedom that comes with that. Here’s to your continued growth & evolution!
I have noticed that things that I may have turned too in the past don’t hold the same appeal. The fear that has held me back is dissipating and I am willing to try new things. I am becoming more aware in my own life and its wonderful.
This indicates attachments are loosening, fear is dialing down to its natural size & scope & your curiosity is dialing up. Great work!
An early insight for me was recognizing that I adopted the choices of those around me. The choices and decisions I made were from fear and to keep others happy. Through this process I am starting to put myself first and make choices that serve my needs. I’m saying no to second helpings, I’m declining social invites and I’m carving out time for myself to do what I want.
Assessing & addressing your needs as they present is critical to weight loss. When you first become aware of & start doing this more, it can feel RADICAL but the world can & will accommodate you – your work is simply to keep making your needs known.
Rereading this and revisiting these ideas, I am realizing the resistance I’ve been experiencing lately is due to the fear of slowing down and allowing myself to be present and conscious. The feelings I’ve been pushing down are uncomfortable. I need to stop, allow what needs to emerge to emerge, and listen.
Great insight Bonnie. Are you starting to understand blind spots actually help protect us from these uncomfortable feelings until we have some skills & capacity to address them?
The part about having present moment experiences really resonates with me. This is something at whichI’d like to become better. I tend to spend a lot of time on social media which I feel is the opposite of being present.
You mention that “The key is to slow down your thought process and get present” – YES YES YES to this, it would be great to not feel like I’m on autopilot so much.
Great observation about social media. Some great ways to experience more of the present moment are: to simply get out from behind your phone’s camera; admire your meal & its presentation for a moment before eating it; really listen to another person without thinking about what you’re going to say next.
The part of this article that caught my attention was the one about how if I am being indecisive it is a rich moment for developing awareness. I definitely stress indecisively and agonize when I have an important email or phone call to make in business or socially, particularly if I need to follow up/nag somebody that hasn’t been responsive or if in response to somebody not doing what I would like. I play out endless different approaches I could take to the conversation and sometimes take an hour or more to write a fairly short email. Is this a blind spot? I am not sure how to take this from a moment of awareness to a moment of insight.
Indeed, endless debate is the hallmark of Ego which keeps you stuck while relaxed trust is the hallmark of Soul which enables progress. The insight is, operating from Soul doesn’t guarantee you’ll come up with the perfect solution first or make the right choice all the time but rather, you trust you have what you need to address things however they unfold.
A huge “WOW” moment for me in a counseling class a long time ago was the 4 quadrant window with (1) What I know that I know, (2) What I don’t know that I know, (3) What I know that I don’t know, and (4) What I don’t know that I don’t know (BLIND SPOTS). Learning about blind spots and the fact that we all have them explained a multitude of places where I felt stuck and kept repeating counterproductive patterns. It seemed to me the more I could shine a light on those dark corners and actually see what was in there – become AWARE of them – the less they would run my life. I love that that concept is being brought in here.
Counterproductive patterns are certainly flags that some unnamed – & often irrational – fears & limiting beliefs are running things. So yes, get out that flashlight!