Your life is all about you, but not the way you think. You don’t know yourself very well. In actuality, you’re a very complicated person. To be a person of influence is to be a true leader. You need to understand how you function and what influences you to think, feel, and act as you do. The ability to influence starts with your intrafunctioning—the relationship you have with yourself. You are influencing your capability to affect the achievement of your full potential. You can deliberately and knowingly affect how you think and feel and, ultimately, how you act by developing your awareness of two key factors.
1). What is going on around you, and
2). What is happening to you?
It would be best if you made sense of your life. How do you even begin to do that? By understanding what has negative and positive impacts on the way you think, feel, and act, Awareness allows you to function more effectively because you know the effects of what influences you subject yourself to and how those influences impact your identity. You must understand how you process your understanding regarding the difficulties you face, the pain you experience, and any success you achieve. Otherwise, your circumstances alone will define you and undermine your authentic functioning. You must learn how to develop awareness through conscious reflection and self-awareness practices. An individual’s full functioning is typically buried under phylogenetically and ontogenetically psychological development layers. Understanding how you function as a person is difficult, especially in the context of your experiences. The continual struggle to understand what is happening around you and what is happening to you requires understanding your consciousness and your reality versus actuality.
Several factors play into this struggle: a lack of discipline to focus, mental fatigue, overwhelming circumstances, distractions, high anxiety, stress levels, low energy, dehydration, lack of sleep, and the ultimate—fear, all keep you from learning how you function. In addition, everyone has blind spots and lives in false realities. You lie to yourself. Your feelings lie to you. Family and friends lie to you. The media lies to you. The misinformation can be so overwhelming that it stifles you, limits you, and helps you be dysfunctional. Awareness is the first step to changing you from dysfunction to functioning. You must be aware of what is happening around you and what is happening to you.
BEING CONSCIOUS OF WHAT IS GOING ON AROUND YOU.
Awareness is an interesting aspect of our humanity; it is evidence of your brain’s subconscious, unconscious, and conscious work. Awareness is an elusive phenomenon because it’s difficult to understand, yet you’re aware of your awareness to some degree in your everyday functioning (Bargh, 1994). It’s essential to develop your awareness to increase your functional effectiveness. What happens around you is often based on your relationships, situations, circumstances, and goals. These aspects of your life have a significant influence on your intrafunctioning. You receive constant feedback that you must pay attention to so that you can learn and, therefore, modify your behavior to be a better functioning you. This feedback is critical to your performance in the work that you do and the relationships you have. Your context provides essential information that shapes your reality, but your reality has to be shaped by actuality. Let’s look at what makes up your consciousness and the impact of your reality vs. actuality.
Your Consciousness
Your consciousness is made up of your unconscious, subconscious, and conscious. It is your awareness of your surroundings, but more importantly, an awareness of something within yourself. Your consciousness emerges from incoming sensory information, and you need to understand what that means regarding you and how you function. The unconscious is where all your automatic processing occurs. It includes your temperature control, heartbeat, body, brain fluids, and everything you never think about. All this happens automatically every second of every day. The unconscious includes all past events and memories, which are sometimes inaccessible to you, no matter how hard you try to remember them. For example, the first word we’ve learned to say, or how it felt to be able to walk on your own.
Subconscious. The subconscious is where your memories and impressions are stored. Your subconscious supports your reactions and automatic actions, which can be developed through reinforcement until the behavior achieves habit strength. For example, your ability to drive a car requires you to practice driving, reflect on your performance, receive reinforcement, and develop your skills. You get so good at driving that your behaviors become habit strength, and you don’t consciously focus so intensely on how to change lanes, which pedals to press, what the road signs mean, or which mirror to look at. Nevertheless, you always know what was done once you think about it.
Consciousness. Consciousness is the awareness of the information you’re reading right now, the sound of the music you’re listening to, or a conversation you’re having. The conscious is what picks up all the little things you notice. For example, maybe there is missing information in what you are reading, all of the thoughts that pass through your mind, the sensations and perceptions from the music, or memories that are triggered. Your consciousness brings into your awareness things that create your experience. Consciousness defines all thoughts and actions within your awareness. For example, the smell of coffee in the morning, a fire in the fall evening, the beauty and fragrant aroma of a red tulip, the sound of a powerful race car, and the feel of goosebumps when you realize something important.
Your conscious provides immediate awareness when you take in information from your personality perceiving functions (i.e., sensing or intuition); you take in information, analyze the information, and then make decisions based on your personality judging functions (i.e., thinking or feeling) with this information. Even though you take in information automatically, most people could be better at the analysis part. How do you understand the amount of information, let alone the meaning of the information? If you can’t determine the meaning of the information, how do you know if something is meaningful to you? The key is practicing reflection, keeping a journal, tracking events with a planner, and striving to learn more about yourself and how you function. The perceiving and judging functions are aspects of your personality that we will discuss in the next article in more detail. Another practice you need to learn is distinguishing your reality from actuality.
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