Your Reality vs. Actuality
Your reality is what you make it, but that doesn’t mean it’s actual. Most people are not aware of the difference between their reality and actuality. They also lack awareness of how they let circumstances affect them at the core of their authentic being. Your reality includes a complex layering of thinking, emotions, relationships, health, and spiritual assumptions that cause problems because you are unaware of what you are doing to yourself. Your reality is the world you create. The state of things in your life is based on your romantic idea of them. Your reality is the unconscious bending of your perception to meet your desires or achieve your expectations. Your thinking creates your reality, and your choices reinforce this reality. However, your reality is not necessarily actuality, and you live with much dissonance, where many of your problems emerge. Dissonance is tension, a clashing that takes a mental toll on your well-being because your intrafunctioning (i.e., personality strengths, character, habits, attitudes, assumptions, beliefs, values, and perceptions) is out of alignment. You strive for consistency, but dissonance occurs when your reality differs from actuality. It’s not healthy for the long term, so you must become aware of your reality versus actuality.
Actuality is the world as it actually exists (e.g., the laws of nature, principle of reaping and sowing, etc.). Regardless of how you think or feel about it, actuality is the state or quality of something as it is, not as intended, expected, or hoped for. You can determine your reality by shaping it as you want it. Your circumstances, finances, talents, knowledge, abilities, attitudes, skills, and experiences influence what you think, which impacts how you feel and motivates your behavior, but that doesn’t mean it’s actual—hence the false reality. Everyone lives in a false reality to some degree, and the question is, to what degree? The higher the degree of your false reality, the more dissonance you experience. You experience a more significant performance gap that minimizes your performance or effectiveness in your mental, social, physical, emotional, and spiritual functioning elements because it skews your thinking (Brookfield, 1987). Skewed thinking lacks clarity of the actuality of the situation and circumstances, allowing dissonance to emerge in how you feel, behave, and make choices. If you minimize the gap between your reality and actuality, your performance or effectiveness improves. The minimized performance gap is because your thinking is based on actual facts and actual experience. If you make good choices, you will feel better, smarter, and more confident as you reinforce this process for yourself and strive with hope toward your potential to be fully functional.
Living a life based on actuality enhances you and helps you shape a more accurate reality, allowing you to pursue your potential and fully function. You need to be aware of what is actual in your life, and not simply good intentions, dreams, and desires. What are you learning? What are you (actually) doing? How are you measuring what you are doing? For example, many people love the idea of being a writer. “I’m going to write a book one day.” However, few actually write.
You are constantly influenced all day, even at night, when you dream. Daydreams and Nightdreams keep your mind active. What is this constant influence doing to you? On a scale of 1-5, how aware are you of the impact of what is influencing you? Most people need to be aware of what is happening around them. How significant is that influence? Who are you allowing to influence you?
REFLECTING ON WHAT IS HAPPENING TO YOU
Awareness is a lifelong practice that needs to be practiced daily and not something to be rushed. Hurrying might lead you to pull back or even throw in the towel entirely because your life is filled with busyness, getting things done. Small, sustainable steps are critical for development and require support and guidance (often from a professional-level coach). A significant aspect of your awareness is the elements of your humanity: the mental, social, physical, spiritual, and emotional for the development of how you fully function. Thomson (1998) reminds us that part of our development is learning how to align the inner and outer worlds, and that is done through your choices and your chemistry.
Your Choices
You must choose to be aware. The development of your awareness requires a willingness to change. I suggest that you keep a journal. There is a world of information on the benefits of journaling. Journaling includes journals, paper, pens, and journaling styles (e.g., bullet, visualizing, art, gratitude, and reflective). It would be worth your time to explore journaling, but remember that the most crucial part is to journal. You have a lot on your mind. You have a lot of thoughts, questions, and a variety of feelings that you need to make sense of to understand the meaning of the situations, circumstances, and experiences. Use your journal to write out your thoughts and gain clarity on what you think, feel, act, or want to say. Live intentionally. Mean what you say and say what you mean. Emotions are a deep and complex topic that you can explore. For example, here are nine general causes of hopelessness that are worth your exploration:
- You feel alone/abandoned
- Life seems out of control
- You don’t have clarity of purpose
- You’re grieving a loss
- You don’t have what you need
- You’ve done something wrong
- You’re being pulled in the wrong or different direction
- You’re hounded by fear
- You’re facing defeat
Beyond your emotions, you need to take the time to examine and reflect on your SWOT Analysis. Your personality strengths and weaknesses, your character strengths and weaknesses, your skillset strengths and weaknesses, habits, attitudes, assumptions, beliefs, values, perceptions, principles you need to live by, passion, purpose, mission, plans for your future, your level of discipline, choices, and self-esteem as well as your fears and doubts. There’s a lot to think and write about. A simple way to begin practicing your awareness is by regularly checking and asking yourself:
- What am I feeling right now?
- What thoughts are running through my mind? What am I saying to myself?
- What is happening around me?
- What is happening to me?
- What do I want to do? (What are my next steps?)
You will learn to develop your questions with practice and improve your root cause analysis of yourself. This is where your SWOT analysis may be helpful to review and reflect on what you think are your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. You must determine if you will define your strengths or weaknesses based on your temperament or skills. Part of your journaling should include who you consider surrounding yourself, of which there are four types of people: mentors, models, partners, and friends.
Awareness is not the sole ingredient for becoming centered and, thus, a full-functioning person, but awareness is the essential first step on this vital journey. In the words of Carl Rogers (1961), “The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.” The foundation of centered leadership is based on awareness of how you function. Your personality includes your temperament, character, habits, and attitude, all of which make up your chemistry.
Your Chemistry
Awareness includes reflecting on situations and circumstances that you experience. You need to understand how you take in information and process that information via your thoughts and feelings. We often use past experiences as a baseline for our current experiences, seeking to make sense of and understand what went well or not well. Awareness includes noticing your emotions, good and bad, or negative and positive. It would be best to notice your energy level when you spend time with a particular person, group of people, or a specific situation. Awareness of your frustration or enjoyment of a thing, taking a risk or playing it safe in a decision or behavior, and a variety of emotional factors that run through your mind. Awareness is complex, layered with thoughts that feed into your emotions, physical sensations, and behaviors. For example, you might notice yourself feeling unmotivated about a project. Your body feels heavy; you have low energy when you think about the tasks you must do, causing you to procrastinate. Are you aware of those factors, or do you brush them off? Maybe you’re avoiding a difficult conversation or speaking your mind on a topic because you fear the political ramifications. Are you aware of those factors? It would be best to be mindful of what is happening around you and what is happening to you.
Awareness aims to realize the functioning of your internal world that might otherwise get buried, pushed aside, ignored, or go unnoticed. Your internal world is critically important to developing your thoughts, feelings, and ultimately your actions—your intrafunctioning. Everyone has blind spots and illusions about themselves—aspects of their personality that they don’t see (Hunziker, 2016, p. 11). Awareness of these functions is the first step to positive change and helping you learn your KAASE (i.e., new knowledge, abilities, attitudes, skills, and experiences), develop competencies, increase your capacity, expand your capability, and reach your full potential by being centered. In this regard, you must build strength-on-strength in your personality (i.e., your temperament and character).
The journey to greater awareness requires courage as it’s often confrontational and can be an uncomfortable up-close look at how you function. You will face uncomfortable facts, truths, realities, and actualities about yourself regarding your thoughts, attitudes, habits, characteristics, and temperament strengths and weaknesses. Awareness involves shifting your attention away from the regular engagement in the “noise” of life and work and focusing on your functioning. The emphasis (Cramer & Wasiak, 2006) is placed on how you think and feel about experiences (what’s going on around you) and then on seeking to understand what’s going on inside you (what’s happening to you). You won’t always like what you find, and that’s okay (and part of the point!). You’ll discover new things about yourself when you step back and reflect. There are some things you will like and some things you won’t, but you need to realize this is who you are—your authentic self.
Be aware of the part you don’t want to be self-aware of. Part of you will push back against the idea of being more honest with yourself about how you think and feel, about the actuality of your behavior, about your situation and circumstances. This is just your defense mechanisms kicking in. Old habits are solid and difficult to change because they are grooved into your neural pathways. Habits filter your experience through your current way of thinking or your lack of critical thinking, and that gets in the way of seeing new possibilities or resisting change without reason. It reveals how much you function in fear because change is unknown. Change feels strange, and therefore, you justify, rationalize, excuse, or deny the necessity of the change and don’t want to accept the change because, honestly, you’re afraid of the unknown. So, as you journey through the pages of this book, take your time getting to know yourself in a new way.
Cramer, K and Wasiak, H. (2006). Change the way you see everything through asset-based thinking. Philadelphia, PA: Running Press.
Hunziker, M. (2016). Depth Typology: The guide to becoming who we are. Raleigh, NC: Write Way Publishers.
Rogers, C. (1961). On Becoming a Person: A therapist’s view of psychotherapy. Mariner Books.
Thomson, L. (1998). Personality Type: An Owner’s Manual. Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications, Inc.
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