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"All beings desire happiness
always, happiness without a tinge of sorrow. At the same time
everybody loves himself best. The cause for this love is only
happiness. So, that happiness must lie in one self. Further,
that happiness is daily experienced by everyone in sleep, when
there is no mind. To attain that natural happiness one must
know oneself. For that, Self-Enquiry 'Who am I?' is the chief
means."
Ramana Teachings
As one of the Elements of FLOW,
Know Yourself may have the most leverage.
Let me show you how I got here. In
2000, I ran across research that showed the impact of
self-awareness. Until that time, I had bought into the BS idea
that awareness is available to all of us in equal amounts, and
that all we need do is just "work on it" which is consistent
with the BS Work Out Program for anything-->since anything is
available to you, as well as everyone, then all you need to
be, do, have and become is just waiting for you.
Yet, it was clear from my coaching
experience, then more than 12 years old, that I could notice
that some clients seemed to have more self-awareness than
others.
Self-awareness
is the capacity for
introspection and the ability to reconcile oneself as an
individual separate from the environment and other
individuals. Self-awareness, though similar to
sentience in concept, includes the experience of the
self,
and has been argued as implicit to the
hard problem of consciousness. From
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-awareness
Now, 24 years into my professional
coaching experience, I am convinced that all of us have
differing levels of self-awareness and that some levels of
self-awareness just are not attainable for any of us, not
alone all of us.
Ok, now the dilemma.
If we can't attain any more
self-awarenss than we can, not all there is, or as much as
someone else, then the dilemma is, do we keep pretending that
we can attain enough self-awareness to solve the equation that
self-awareness serves?
Look at the research: I summarized
it here for you, and it comes from Hay Group and I use their
slides with permission, because i wanted to show you what
experts on emotional intelligence will show you about
self-awarness.
www.flawlessliving.info/sa
So, the bottom line?
Without Self-Awareness, you don't
have much of a chance, so like BS would have you do, GO TO
WORK ON IT, because you are broken, not enough, deficient,
weak, etc. And without a doubt the self-awareness wheel has a
lot of busy little squirrels running on it for sure, it's
really BIG business this days.
YET, if you can get only that which
you have, and most likely, it's not going to be enough, then
it explains to me simply, why people don't change...much;
except over time as they mature.
Hmmmmmm.
If I'm in the changing people
business and of course I thought I was, and people can't
change much, then what is that about? Sure, if I can design a
hundred ways for people to experience change, and people think
that changing is the way...then I would be a BS Fool, not to
participate in that, since most of us LOVE to change OTHER
people anyway? Right?
I went down that path for awhile,
and I realized more and more that we were not EES in these
practices and essentially, if you have to look at yourself in
the mirror everyday, you soon realize that you are selling a
form of tabacco-->even though as I found in my travels,
cigarettes named HOPE in the Philippines, I didn't want to
continue to face that moral question.
During this same time, what I did
notice was that people who were getting help (my executives
due to resource controls and availability)...seemed to do a
lot better when we could just off-load the negative issue onto
someone who "handle" it...and where that was possible, bingo,
it seemed to solve a lot of the problem space without going
through the "dance of change"!
At the same time, dealing with my
own rather meager self-awareness issues, I seemed to notice
that delegating things I didn't like doing was actually a lot
more effective than I thought, because something done,
compared to not done is quite a bit of an improvement, in
whatever form it was done-->in most cases.
Now, in facing this self-awareness
dilemma I had the good fortune to be guided by my Indian
Partner, Ajai Singh (our assessment center
director for
Personality Dynamics) on one of my many
visits to India to visit a living disciple of Sri
Nisargadatta Maharaj since he had died in 1984. While I
wasn't impressed with this disciple, I found none of what i
had learned about Nisarg there, but as happenstance might
arise...on the coffee table was a book written by
Ramana_Maharshi who believe it or not, used silence to
teach...and when asked for advice, he recommended
self-enquiry as the fastest path to
moksha.
I spent a little time in his book
and realized that if I helped people focus on self-knowledge,
that whatever self-awareness was there, would emerge.
As I spent more and more time in
trying to give people simple ways for self-inquiry, I realized
that self-knowledge in almost every one of my clients was more
of a defining element in what they needed and with that
self-knowledge, a clear opening for me to help them design and
scaffold, versus try to change themselves.
KNOW YOURSELF brings about all the
data you need for
design,
scaffolding and
EES
in your live, work and relationships!
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