[VIDEO] Developing Self Awareness For Personal Growth

Developing self awareness for personal growth.

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TRANSCRIPT

Hey, it’s Joel Mark Witt for Personality Hacker. This video, I want to talk about awareness as it relates to personal growth.

I’m finding myself more and more vetting people, the people I desire to spend time with or connect with, the people that are attractive to me, the ones I want to be around…. I used to just look at intelligence, intuition, same shared values. We matched up on all those levels so then we can hang out.

One of the things I’m looking at now though in life is the level of awareness a person has, self-awareness they have, surrounding awareness… social awareness… but importantly self-awareness.

I’m finding myself really attracted to people that have high levels of self-awareness. They’re able to be really honest and aware with themselves on what drives them, what are their motivations. In my life, I’m trying to do the same thing.

I’m trying to develop a high level, a high sense of being aware of myself, aware of what drives me and my motivations because I want to be attractive to the same type of people. I want to practice what I preach.

Here’s an exercise I want to give you today around self-awareness. When you are determining what you want to do in life, I want you to categorize things into high, mid and low level reasons for why you want to do those things.

Let’s just take a quick example. Let’s say you come to me and say, “Joel, I want to start my own online business. I want to develop an online business.” I go, “Okay, great.” We sit down for a cup of coffee… I say, “Why do you want to start an online business?”

You say, “Well, I want to give back to society. I want to make sure that I can support charities. I want financial independence for my family and buy what I need and I want to develop myself as a leader.”

I’d say, “Great. Those are all good reasons. Can we get more nuances in those reasons?” Most success coaches and most business professionals will tell you to go down deeper on those reasons. Why is it important to support your family? What’s the reason behind that? Blah-blah-blah.

What I would encourage you to do is to expand the level of reasons you have.

You have some reasons to start and that’s kind of a mid-level cluster but I want you to expand on the upper levels of your reasons and this is going to be the tough part, expand in the lower levels of your reasons. What in the world am I talking about?

Well, you have the financial independence. It’s a mid-range reason.

Higher on the scale and when I say, higher, it’s not like a moral or ethical higher. It’s just like a higher vibration of the universe or a higher … Let’s call it an ideal. Let’s say, on the higher end, they’re more ideal. On the lower end, they’re more concrete or more animal-based needs and things like this, the more animal drives of us as humans.

On the higher end of the conceptual spectrum, you might say, “I want to make a huge impact in the world.” Maybe your business is around some kind of educational shift. What are your real high conceptual ideals is to shift the education system in the world. Maybe that’s one of your really high ideals of why you want to start your business.

One of your mid-range reasons might be, “I want financial independence for my family and I want to feel secure.” Maybe one of your goals is, “I’ve always had a dream of building my own house. Owning my own business will give me enough money in the bank. I can fulfill my dream of building my own house.”

Then, maybe if you really look at it, you can get some of those lower resonant reasons on to your list. I think awareness around these lower reasons around stuff is where the power lies in self-awareness. This is where things start to really open up for you as a person.

In business, if you look at some of the lower reasons of what you want to do business for, it might be something that you’re afraid to admit to yourself but if you really truly look at it, it might be just to look important. When you walk around the town you’re in, you want to people in that restaurant you go to on Friday nights with your wife or your kids or whatever to go, “Hey, that person over there, they’re a really successful business person. I envy them. I’m jealous of their success.”

You want people to be envious of you or jealous of you and that’s one of the reasons why you’re in business. It’s a legitimate reason. You may not like it as a moral or ethical stance, but when I say the word legitimate, I mean, it exists.

An awareness around it existing is important for you to know why you want that thing because once you know the full picture of why you want something, now, you can address those individual things and try to either work on those or just accept them for what they are. We all have these in our life.

Let’s take another example. Let’s say you want to get into a relationship with someone, a romantic relationship. I ask you, “What are your reasons for getting into a romantic relationship?”

You give me your basic reasons, “Well, I want companionship. I want a person that I can wake up next to in the morning to share my life with.” I go, “Okay, that’s great.” That’s a pretty good mid-level reasons. What are some of the altruistic reasons? All right, well, let me expand my mind here. I want to be in a relationship because I want to connect spiritually with another person. I want to find out parts about myself and work on myself. I want a person that will drive and push me to be a better version of myself in the grand scheme of my life.

That’s a high-level abstract idealistic reason. Then I say, “What are some of the lower, maybe more animal reasons or more base reasons or more tangible human reasons why you’d want to be in a relationship?” You’d maybe hem and haw and it’s hard to get there but the authentic reasons might be, “I want to get laid. I want to have sex. I want my old lovers to be jealous of me because I’m with this new awesome person. I want them to look at me and be green with envy and jealousy as I walk by with my new lover in my arm. I want people in my social circles to be jealous. I’ve got this attractive man or beautiful woman on my arms.”

Those are real reasons why you might want to be in a relationship. You might not like those reasons. You might not even think they’re ethical or moral but they exist in your heart. They exist in your mind.

My challenge to you today is that getting a full picture of awareness about why you’re doing what you’re doing, not just the medium-range stuff. Not just the idealistic, “I want to grow as a person,” and you ignore all the other stuff that comes up, the base stuff, the normal stuff, the human stuff. If you don’t have any awareness, you are limited for your personal growth because those things are still there. They’re still affecting your life. They’re still affecting your personal growth. They’re still affecting the goal you’re trying to achieve.

If you’re trying to achieve business success or relationship success and you will refuse to identify those parts of you that are true and real even if you don’t like them, if you don’t identify with them, they have power and control over you.

By making aware all the parts of you, bringing it all to life, laying it on the metaphorical table, all your cards in the table so to speak, it allows you to see a full and accurate picture as much as you can of awareness of why you do what you do.

In business, I have my high level reasons. I want to change the education system. It is something I’d like to see changed in my lifetime or at least a trajectory of change. I have high-level reasons. I have mid-level reasons. I want to take care of my family. I want to make an impact in the world, change people’s perspectives, empower people. I want to take care of my family. I want to have wealth and to be able to have freedom of travel and motion.

Some of my reasons, I might not like about myself but I have to be honest with myself about why I’m doing what I’m doing.

One of the reasons why I want to be successful is to stick it to all the people in my life that said, “You’re not going to make it. You’re not going to be successful. You don’t have what it takes, Joel, to be successful in business,” and I want to prove those people wrong.

My challenge to you today is to take a quick few minutes, take any goal in your life, something you want to achieve, bring a higher level of fidelity of awareness to all the reasons why you want that thing. It could be relationship, business goal, health and fitness, eating right, raising your kid in a certain way, connecting with something, whatever that is.

In the comments below this video, just write out the goal, goal whatever it is, as specific as you can and then just quickly jot down some low, medium and high vibrational reasons.

You’re going to come up to resistance when you start to look at the lower reasons why you do stuff. You’re going to find things that come up for you that you don’t like about yourself you don’t want to admit.

Now, you don’t have to publicly share it here if it’s something really personal but you’re not going to want to admit this to yourself either. My goal is to get you to the place where you can begin to open yourself up and have self-awareness around the true authentic reasons why you do what you do. There’s a ton of personal growth gold. There’s a ton of benefit for doing this and having an accurate picture of yourself. I can promise you, it lends itself to great benefits and future videos will talk about what to do with this but for now, let’s identify this in the comments below.

Leave me your feedbacks and ask any questions you have. Let’s start a community of discussion online around this and we’ll talk about it in future videos. Joel Mark Witt, for Personality Hacker, I’ll talk to you on the next video.

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