Awareness is having knowledge or a perception of a situation or being conscious of something.
Having self-awareness means that you have an understanding of who you are as a person and how you relate to the world in which you live.
As you develop your awareness, you can gain a sense of clarity of situations you find yourself in or react to and whether or not they are serving you. Through gaining awareness and clarity, we often realize that a change may be needed.
We become aware of things we are tolerating or putting up with that are impacting us in a negative way.
Tolerations
As humans, we have the ability to tolerate and put up with a lot of things but it’s not a badge of honor. Whether we realize it or not what you put up with weighs you down. What you’re tolerating slowly eats away at you and minimizes what you’re capable of and slowly deteriorates your self-confidence and self-worth.
The first step to realizing that a change is needed is often through awareness of your tolerations.
When you’re putting up with or tolerating something, you may experience the following:
- You may feel that something is out of sorts or doesn’t feel right
- You feel weighed down, lack motivation or energy
- An activity or something you’ve easily have done is no longer comfortable or enjoyable to perform
- You’re interest in things that used to interest you dwindles
- You feel something is bothering or agitating you, but you can’t put your finger on it
- You find you’re not really engaged as you were
- You realize that you are doing things that don’t serve you
- You’re just maintaining the status quo or living on autopilot
- You’re not happy or feeling the joy you once did
- A change is thrust upon you and you’re trying to get your bearings
Awareness often comes with a resistance to change as it’s easier to be comfortable with the status quo. This usually follows ignoring or denying the reasons for change as we see things are fine as they are. We are creatures of habit. We become comfortable and it’s easier to maintain the status quo.
When we have been tolerating something and putting up with things for a long time eventually the discomfort and pain gets to be too great to maintain. This is why we often don’t realize that we have a choice.
We have a choice to take no action and resist change or to accept the need to change and move through it.
When tolerating something that no longer feels tolerable, change is imminent.
Change is hard. It’s one thing to know that change is needed & another to actually take the action needed for the change.
