It’s easy to see a rainbow of personality traits in other people and yet it can be very tricky to recognise our own colourful array of strengths and weaknesses. Underneath all the personas though, we are all ultimately consciousness, every single cell in your body is consciousness, so how do we begin to get more clarity and see ourselves a little clearer?
Well there are a few ways, but the biggest hurdle we face is that many of us feel uncomfortable when we turn the mirror on ourselves or start to look inwards, our ego (I prefer to call it our protective personality) doesn’t really like it. This might sound negative but there are also plenty of people who can’t take a compliment or witness their own qualities and courage in situations, there are always two sides to a coin. With this in mind rather than turn our attention inwards we tend to fill our lives with constant distractions like our phones, working towards goals, retail therapy, comfort eating, drinking, TV, video games, the list is endless but all done in the subconscious hope that we can find that ‘thing’ that will make us feel better, if only for a short while.
The human species is naturally designed to seek the emotion of feeling good, it is our genetic programming, you can’t escape it, but the truth is most of us don’t get taught why we feel the way we do or what we can do about it, therefore it is obvious that we would look to the world around us and copy and paste what we see others doing hoping consciously or subconsciously that maybe once we have X amount in the bank, acquired a certain something or had our summer vacation we will feel fulfilled and happy.
It is also easy to think that if one has ‘been’ a certain way for a very long time it’s outside of our control to change (or worse blame others), and anything outside of our control is always going to feel very disempowering. The good news is humans actually have a tremendous capacity to change, but wanting to is the first step and bringing awareness of what and how to change becomes key to success. People are generally drawn to change through two avenues and often frustration, pain, failure, recognising repeating patterns or at worst hitting rock bottom will lead a person to re-examine their own lives. On the contrary someone who has big dreams, desires, aspirations and who already have had a certain amount of success, will become the driving force behind wanting to reach bigger dreams and a higher level accomplishment. I can pretty much guarantee all top athletes, performers and high flyers in life will work with their conscious and subconscious mind on a regular basis, your mind is the most powerful tool you possess, you could think of yourself like a computer and updating your software will improve the performance.
The most influential place to work from is the subconscious mind because hidden in the subconscious is 95% of your beliefs, automatically influencing your personality, behaviours and habits, which means there is just a mere 5% left is your conscious mind. This is why it is so hard to recognise traits in ourselves. The subconscious mind can process at 11 million bits per second compared to the conscious mind at a mere 50 bits per second.
Your conscious mind, (the thinking mind) might not even get a glimpse of what is going on yet but we put so much faith in what we can see and figure out mentally when the rest of our body is literally screaming at us to listen to all of our senses. This is why many of us have feelings of insecurity, anxiousness, pain to name just a few because we ignore, reject, suppress, dismiss or deny how we feel and don’t understand our body is simply trying to speak to us and get our attention through the rest of our intelligent senses and what is worse we turn to substances to block out our emotions in order to relax. If one constantly suppresses their feelings they become energetic blocks it the body, Un-ease causes Dis-ease in the body, so my first suggestion is to stop ignoring, suppressing or denying your own feelings, your emotions can be your north star when you understand the why behind them. Maybe you are someone who distracts themselves with everyone else’s feelings? And someone who tends to dismiss other peoples feelings tends to dismiss their own feelings too.
Try not to label your feelings as good or bad but just see them as energy trying to move through you and carriers of information.
Once a habit or reaction is practiced a enough it automatically becomes part of the subconscious and often lost to our conscious thought. For example when you learn to drive it seems like you have to think about so much, mirror, signal, manoeuvre etc, but after you’ve been driving regularly you can literally get to a destination without consciously remembering how you got there.
Self examination usually starts with deeper questions. What do I really want? How will I feel when I have that? What is important to me about that? What void am I trying to fill? Take comfort in the fact that sometimes we need to experience what we don’t want in order to determine what we actually do want, it’s easy to fall into the grass is greener syndrome but the problem is you take the same protective-personality with you. We are all in this school of life and I’ve learnt more in the last decade of my life than I have in the other four put together through the study and application of subconscious work.
When we understand someone else’s reasons behind a behaviour or decision we can generally sympathise with a situation or the experience they may be going through. Should we not treat ourselves the same way? Instead of judging our distractions on a surface level, recognising the real reasons behind our habits and vices may lead to giving yourself a pat on the back and turn a perceived weakness into a strength, criticism withers and self praise naturally builds self esteem and confidence.
Recognising areas in your life where you are distracting yourself, busy doing, buying, digesting etc., simply ask more questions, is the goal/purchase/habit actually making you feel better and for how long? What would benefit you more? What is the underlying tone behind what your doing or not doing?
Don’t underestimate, this is a huge act of self-love building on my last article. To understand yourself is incredibly empowering and builds on self-worth but how many of us actually take the time to sit with ourselves? We tend to think of intimacy (Into-me-see) as something we do with another person but again it’s about cultivating a relationship with self. How can we expect to have real and meaningful relationships with others if we don’t really know ourselves deeply first?
The nuts and bolts of ones personality are created from ones personal-reality as child growing up, and because the subconscious’s priority is to keep you safe these habits and coping mechanisms we have created over time are just another way for your mind to maintain that feeling of safety. After all, life is a series of stories and therefor metaphors and your external world is a reflection of absolutely everything in your inner world. It does take courage to turn your eyes inward but the rewards can be enormously life changing.
Take care,
Janet x