One of the biggest skills you are ever going to learn to be more happy and feel better about yourself on a more regular basis is self awareness.
If there is anything other than courage that I could possibly give you that’s going to make such a big impact in your life when it comes to your self love, is this ability to have self-awareness
When you are able to understand yourself , you can then discern between what is a thought that you generated from your truth and your soul, and what is a thought that is generated by something that’s external from you. I understand that all thought feels like it’s coming inside of your head because that is where we experience it, but some thoughts are generated externally and others are internal. The more we rely upon external sources of our thinking, the less empowered we become and the more those thoughts a created by our own mind- it’s a viscous cycle.
We are like sponges, the information and the data that we consume on a regular basis becomes the internal narrative of our minds. Our repeated external experiences become our internal thoughts.
The brain is just like Google, it simply takes the information that we feed it and produces a result- or in Goggle’s case, millions of results. Whatever data you’re putting into your brain is what the data of the brain is going to produce.
So if on a regular basis, you’re consuming social media that makes you feel like you need to compare yourself and you’re seeing images of perfection all the time; you see images of super mum’s doing this, that and the other and entrepreneurs kicking goals in business. If you see people who are losing weight and doing amazing things with their life and it looks like they’re feeling so good and everything is always amazing and all you’re seeing is the highlight reel of these peoples lives, then your mind will think that it needs to be SUPER human as well.
If you’re only getting that kind of input into your mind on a regular basis then that’s what the mind will produce; and it’s a slippery slope from consuming this to low self esteem .
Here is a real life example of just this that happened to me earlier this week. I was scrolling Tik Tok for some morning motivation as I follow great people who inspire me and as I was watching, I noticed my body contracting. I experienced feeling gross about myself and I noticed how my self talk was starting to warp. I realised in that moment
“I’m on social media, I’m lying in bed, it’s time to get up.”
It was time to get up and get out of bed and do something different. I needed to change the scenario that I was experiencing. So I did just that, I put the phone down, I took some deep breaths and I grounded in my body.
As I sat at the end of the bed, reclaiming my thinking a thought popped in my head, it was clear as day and obvious- it said ” You’re not producing enough, you need to produce more”
Boom! Straight away with self awareness, I realised that the thought was a “not enough” thought. If I let this thought run it’s course, it would get carried away into nothingness. In the past, for perhaps the whole week or the whole day that thought of “not enough” would have permeated everything that I did. My self esteem would undoubtedly slip and I would start to feel unworthy- All from one sitting on social media.
The beauty of self awareness is that I was able to notice the thought as it popped into my head and I was able to make a distinction as to whether or not that thought was MINE and whether or not I actually wanted to keep it. It wasn’t mine, it was driven from social media and the undertone of always having to be more in order to be valuable.
So I said (out loud) ” No thanks, that’s not mine and I’m not buying it- I am worthy irrelevant of what I produce. I am enough.” With self awareness, I was able to hear the negative thought pop into my mind and make a conscious decision as to whether or not I wanted it.
The more we can discern between the rubbish that is coming in externally and what is true in our hearts and souls, the more self worth you can cultivate from within, rather than listening to the outside pressures. Doing this is one of the fundamental keys to happiness.
