SELF-AWARENESS and SELF-DEVELOPMENT
Self-awareness and self-development have been near and dear friends for fifty-one years and counting. The journey commenced during a walk in the Coors Container two-piece, aluminum can manufacturing plant with a new boss. We were enroute to a planning meeting with his boss. Having recently left the military service it felt necessary to walk a step to the left and a step to the rear. The new boss subsequently coached that he felt it was necessary for the author to begin to work on evolving beyond the military, stress producing behaviors.
In normal boss-subordinate behavior, the author agreed and launched a fifty-one-year self-development and self-awareness journey with the reading of I’OK, You’re OK. Since then, there have been oodles of dollars, time, distractions, books, miles, workouts, seminars, ZOOM meetings, conferences, classes, and coaching sessions. A learning has been that the journey is more important than the result. The tendency has been to finish reading a book, hurry through the exercises, and start a new book; wish the ZOOM meeting was producing a deeper result and lose interest; hurry through a class reading because it felt like a waste of time; all in the interest of starting something new and not reaping the value of the current process.
An interesting reflection has been mentally organizing the areas of some of the self-awareness and self-development work: business, psychology, human communications, including public speaking, meditation and religion. A key learning has been that significant time has been spent learning about “external stuff” in lieu of deep “inner stuff” that may offer the value of solitude, learning to love the self, and awareness of personal karma. A wish has been that more of the self-awareness and self-development work had involved the personal effort and means to go deeper into exploring how one was raised to begin to grasp why one shows up in the world the way they do. An example for the author is how his perfectly hidden depression is displayed today based on what was learned from dad, mom, priests, nuns, grandma and grandpa. Simply buried. Another example is learning that one must learn to love the self before one can deeply love another.
At times, the self-awareness and self-development work have been welcomed distractions from everyday life. However, the time, effort, and dollars committed and expended would have been more fruitful absent the haste to move to the next project and the perfectionist tendency to get this thing called life “right.” A key learning has been to commit the time to go deep, to do the reflections and exercises, and complete the time-consuming homework. Self-awareness and self-development work is process and requires passionate intent, patience, 100% responsibility, and commitment to face everything and fear nothing. Simply learn, perk, write, and sit to experience the wisdom.
