"So how was your day?" "Awe Dad" (everything is cool) and then I saw the gap to use this trendy slang word to reframe awareness, because awareness leads to Awe Ness.........a light bulb moment, a penny dropping, and you see things in a different light or with a new perspective.
"What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us."
Henry David Thoreau
I am convinced that the new evolution of human performance lies on the inside of who we are and accessing both our inner strength as well as our physical and mental prowess. The journey to discover, uncover and hopefully learn to express ourselves is not one that many notice or ever entertain.
What has this got to do with being a better athlete or becoming an Ironman??
They say the run is all mental, but the mind is not limited to the Cognitive mind (the thinking you are aware of). There are three parts of our brain and we need to know how to best use all of our intelligences.
Our hearts and muscles all hold memory and our subconscious actually plays a significant role in the "all in the mind" theory.
The fact that we generally live empowered or dis-empowered by our emotions or lack thereof means that if we want to tap into a new realm of potency we will need to open our awareness to look a little deeper, scratch below the surface.
Awareness of our thinking and our feelings as well as feedback from our bodies is essential if we are going to combine all three in creating the complete athlete and using our most powerful resources.
Recent developments in Neuroscience are proving with physical evidence that the management and development of our invisible selves can certainly lead to a significant change in our physical state which in turn leads to an enhancement of our performance.
What our intuitive selves have long believed can now be studied with amazing neurological evidence supporting that we can, by choosing and making more informed or aware choices, impact the way in which we are chemically programmed. This makes sense if you consider that as many as 80% of people in hospitals have one or more diseases that are considered psychosomatic.
If "Dis-ease" can impact us so radically surely "Ease" can positively impact us too.
Emotional intelligence and the elusive Flow has long been talked about but the ability to actually develop the muscle and employ its benefits is still something that is rare.
The hope is that this article will be a spark that ignites your own journey to awareness and that it may well lead you to reflection and perception of a host of new possibilities.
Our emotions/passions are immense, like an elephant of energy so it would be a real waste to not attempt to learn and unlock what may be the real treasure of a third dimension of latent power. Can awareness of what, why, when and how to interpret this amazing source of energy become a grand platform to enhance our performance?
The Gold that lies beneath the surface, that part of us that holds keys to unlock significant insights into our way of being, how we react and why? How we express ourselves, what’s working and why ? These are really important questions to investigate as they allow us to consider what drives us and that can be either powerful or destructive.
To ignore this important work and only focus on the immediate and development of our mind and body without integrating all of who we are has led to the demise of so many as they develop only that part of themselves which seems vital at the time.
Burn out and or capsized lives are a dime a dozen on the road of life but if you are prepared to do the internal work you will become considerably more robust in all the disciplines of what it takes to realize the full potential of who and what you are.
So what is Awareness and why do we naturally avoid it and even unconsciously steer clear of opening the apparent Pandora's box? This new consciousness at first is terrifying and often even the mention of it offends people.
It’s our natural human response to avoid anything that is new or might mean change and certainly anything we can’t control. Awareness is the starting block of this process. Stop and listen to your heartbeat. Just for a moment notice something about your body and listen to what it may be telling you.
That’s Awareness at work, beginning to train a new muscle, developing another part of us that has been excluded from our general society for centuries.... IQ and cognitive learning have still dominated the landscape of our societies and look at where that has gotten us. What we are all craving and missing is that part of us that allows us to discover the fascinating and endless adventure of our deeper selves and the AWE - ness and possibility that lies in our imagination and the potential of our whole self.
Dave Vaughan
Human Being.....
