Awareness

Let’s talk about the really important topic of awareness.

With greater awareness, you have the opportunity to become more effective in your career, continue learning throughout life and grow your valuable skills. But without maintaining and growing your awareness, did you know that you may become restricted by your habits, become less effective and creative in your work and lose the ability to think outside the box?

The sixth sense

Whilst  the five senses of sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch can sometimes be taken for granted, awareness is like an extra ‘sixth sense’ that can help you to better understand yourself and others, use your body more efficiently and work more effectively. However, people can become prone to losing their sense of awareness over time, particularly when working in high pressure jobs, or jobs of a repetitive nature. 

For people who use their bodies in work or play (that’s all of us!), awareness can help to guide the more efficient and effective use of the body and minimise stress and fatigue.

For example, in an office environment, an awareness that you are slouching at your desk and straining your neck to look at a computer provides you with the opportunity to learn from that and adopt a better and more comfortable posture. Similarly, the way that a musician lifts or holds an instrument may create unnecessary tension and limit the ability to play that instrument as fluently and expressively as possible. If the habit of using excess tension remains unchecked over the years, this can result in repetitive strain conditions and have career ending consequences.  

Being aware of others

Awareness of others and how others work is also important, as it allows you to interact with people more easily and effectively, whether at work or at a social event.

The term ‘commercial awareness’ often crops up in a business context. However, that isn’t only knowing how a business operates on paper, nor is it something that can be read in a quick flick through the pages of a user manual. It is also an awareness of how a business’s people function from day to day – their goals and objectives, their must haves, their desirable and unimportant things and what discretions and freedoms people have to make real life business decisions.

Anyone interacting in business without this level of awareness may end up expending more time, effort and money on matters of little importance or consequence, which may result in frustration and missed business opportunities.

So, awareness brings things into your consciousness, which can help you to learn and become more effective and efficient. But how can you maintain and develop your level of awareness if you lead a busy life?

Pre-conditioning 

We are  conditioned to some extent and form habits, based upon what we have learned in the home, at school, college, university and in the workplace.

For performing artists and sports people, the way in which they are taught and made aware of effective mental and physical techniques is crucial to their development. A good teacher or coach will demonstrate the difference between an ineffective and efficient way of doing something. This gives the student the opportunity to go away and use that awareness to develop better habits – which can be the difference between a golfer hitting the green more times than the bunker! 

Do you stop to think?

In a business environment, there is often an assumption that you will have a certain ‘level’ of skills so that you can be left to get on with your own workload. Of course work may sometimes be supervised, but you may not always have the level of detailed one to one training that an athlete or musician receives to really hone your skills and develop. Therefore, to get through your workload, you might fall back on the habits and systems  that you have sub-consciously developed as your ‘default mechanism’ to get you through the working day.

In any busy job, or profession with any element of repetition, these habits may become ingrained as part of the work routine and provide an automatic, almost machine-like way of performing tasks. Whilst this may provide you with one means of getting through work quickly or even multi-tasking, this ‘automaticity’ may prevent you from doing one thing. Namely, maintaining your ability to stop and think for a moment before doing something.

If you never pause for air, that is likely to affect your ability to maintain and develop awareness. That’s because the more you rely on habit, the less time you have for critical thinking, creativity and considering & challenging different ideas in order to develop more appropriate actions, responses and solutions to day to day problems.

 Other possibilities 

Being aware that you as an individual always have the choice to stop for a moment before doing anything, allows you to think and consider possibilities outside of the norm. In turn, you then have the ability to question whether your habitual action or response is the most appropriate one in the circumstances. But remember, never stopping to really think is likely to hamper your own personal and professional growth.

Where a business’s employees rely mainly on existing habits, systems and processes without really needing to think that much, both the employees and the business will eventually start to stagnate, rather than continuously stretching and reaching new potential.

 The beauty of awareness 

To develop your sixth sense of awareness,  why not try stopping and thinking for a moment rather than rushing into things or being tempted to act on autopilot? You might also want to think about how you can help others to grow and learn  by sharing your increased awareness.

The real beauty of awareness  is that it will open up your thinking, reveal new ideas and enable you to keep learning for the better throughout your life. Whilst your current habits may allow you to perform your job from day to day in relative comfort, if you only ever work on autopilot, you may never step outside of your comfort zone and see a greater potential for your life.

But if you practice growing your awareness, you will expose yourself to new ideas and opportunities which might just help you to develop, grow and achieve all of your dreams and more.