15. The Surprising Power of Self-Awareness

My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, running coach and mindset expert. I believe mindset is the most powerful and most underrated tool you have as a runner. So I’ve devoted my life to helping runners like you develop the mindset you need to fuel your inner fire and become the badass runner you were meant to be. This is The Running Mind podcast.

Well, hey there, and welcome to The Running Mind podcast. My name is Patrick McGilvray. I’m your host. And I’m a master life and success coach and a weight loss coach for runners. I teach you how to stop struggling, and start getting the results that you want from your running in your weight loss journey and in your life.

And it all starts with learning how to manage your mind. That’s what I teach you here on this podcast, I teach you how to manage your mind so you can create better results in your life, whatever that looks like for you. Today, I’m talking about self awareness and the surprising power of self awareness, I want to talk about what it means to develop self awareness, how you do it, and why it is perhaps the most powerful life skill that you can learn.

So first, let’s talk about what self awareness means. Self awareness, the Google definition is, “a conscious knowledge of one’s own character, feelings, motives, and desires”. So when I hear that, I think of it being the ability for you to take an honest and objective look at yourself without any sort of attachment to it being right or wrong. So it’s the act of thinking about your own thoughts, thinking about your own feelings, without any kind of judgment.

And I think one of the things that people struggle with is a lack of self awareness. I think this is a big problem for most people. Most people are just not consciously aware of their own thoughts and their own feelings, and even their own actions, they’re not even aware of what they are doing, or why they are doing what they do.

Most people think everything is just happening to them and they aren’t aware that they are actually creating all of their own thoughts, all of their own feelings and creating all of the results that they’re getting in their life or not getting in their lives. Most people just don’t take the time to think about their thinking or to just feel their feelings or to notice what it is that they are doing.

What most people do, is they feel some kind of emotion that feels terrible inside them, which is like an alarm going off. I’m feeling something, and then they do whatever they can right now to change it to stop it to stop the feeling. You know, I can’t feel bad, I can’t be sad, I can’t be angry, I can’t be hurt or frustrated. I need to do something right now to change this. What can I do?

So what do most people do? Most people in a situation like that reach for something outside of themselves to make them feel better. They grab the bottle of wine, and the biggest glass they can find, or they go binge on some junk food or binge on some Netflix and then ah, they feel so much better, right? So this is called buffering. This is where you’re using some external thing to feel better internally.

And it’s buffering because it puts a buffer between you and reality. And it does. It feels good for a minute, but it’s actually a false pleasure. It’s temporary. And it has many negative consequences, being addicted to alcohol or drugs or, you know, chronic procrastination, lethargy, being overweight, and then all those negative things, they lead to more negative emotions inside.

And so what do you do when you have the negative emotions? You go drink more, or you eat more or you watch more TV. I hope you’re starting to hear like how crazy this is, right? You have to get out of that loop. So remember, your thoughts create your feelings. Your feelings drive, all your actions and your actions are what produced the results that you get in your life. So eventually, you’ll want to change your thinking. So you can change your feelings so you can take more aligned action so you can get better results, right?

And here’s what I hear people say to me, my clients, they tell me this, they’re like, okay, I know I need to think new thoughts, so I can feel better right now. So how do I do that? Tell me the new thoughts to think. Tell me how to feel differently, so I can start doing different stuff.

And the answer, which doesn’t make sense at first, but hear me out, the answer always starts with increasing your self awareness. The first and most important step in creating different results in your life, in your running, in your marriage, in your weight loss journey, is to increase your self awareness.

You can’t change something unless you know what you’re changing, you can’t change your thinking. Unless you know exactly what your thoughts are, and what’s driving them. You can’t change your feelings inside your emotions, your emotional state, unless you’re really in touch with your emotions, unless you really understand them profoundly. And you can sit with them, and experience them and you know what that feels like.

And you can’t take different actions, unless you can observe yourself objectively. And honestly, which is the tough part for most of us, and determine what actions are serving you and, and what are not. So is this thing I’m doing right now moving me closer to my goal or further away from it? You have to get really honest and objective.

And that’s what self awareness is. It’s a non judgmental awareness of yourself. I think this is the most important life skill you can develop. If you can increase your self awareness, you dramatically increase your potential. Because you’re constantly analyzing the data without judgment. It’s just facts, just data. So you can constantly make improvements in all these different areas of your life. Practicing self awareness is like the most important thing you can do.

Okay, so how do you do it? So one of the things you need to work on here is to be a non judgmental observer of yourself. And that’s a lot easier said than done. I get it sounds simple. Sounds easy enough. But the truth is, we are constantly judging ourselves. This is a good thought, this is a bad thought. This is a good feeling. This is a bad feeling. I need to feel differently, how can I change the way I feel right now? I don’t want to feel this way any longer.

Like we’re constantly doing this battle with ourselves over how our thinking is messed up, or how we shouldn’t feel this way. Like, for example, you might be feeling a little stressed out right now with everything that’s going on. With the stay at home order, you’re working from home, your kids are there with you, against your better judgment, against your wishes, you know, you’re trying to homeschool them and get all your work done.

And you’re feeling completely stressed out about everything, right? So what do you do? So most people when they feel anxious and stressed out, they look for something outside of themselves to make them feel better. So they have a drink, eat some cookie dough, go buy something, you know, put that buffer between yourself and what’s going on. And most people just can’t stand to feel stressed out, even for a minute.

They can’t stand to feel anxious or overwhelmed. But what would it be like for you if you were to just let that feeling be there without any kind of judgment? And without doing anything to try to change it? What? I know it sounds crazy, doesn’t it? But what if instead of rejecting reality, the reality of what’s happening around you, and the reality of how you’re feeling instead of trying to resist it, what if you just allowed it to be?

What if you just allowed yourself to feel the stress and the anxiety without having to change it? Notice what comes up for you. When you feel it when you just sit with it when you experience it when you let it process through. You notice it with curiosity. Hmm, that’s interesting. I’m kind of feeling a little freaked out right about now. I wonder what that’s all about. And that’s it. You don’t have to do anything else. You don’t have to try to change it. You don’t want it to go away. You don’t have to switch it into something else.

I know this sounds crazy. But here’s the thing, the more you can practice just noticing your thoughts. same feelings, the better you can get at managing them. And notice something managing and not changing them. So managing your thoughts and emotions means being super aware of everything you’re thinking and feeling. And then just allowing it to be as it is. Just let it be, all of it: the good, the bad, the ugly.

Well, there is no good or bad or ugly because you’re not judging any of it. Try to be a non judgmental observer of your emotions, from your thoughts. When we talk about emotions, and just feeling our emotions, like how do you just manage your emotions? It’s just being with them and experiencing them and letting them do their thing in your body.

You know, watch yourself express an emotion. How do you do it? What does it feel like for you? What does it feel like inside your body? Where do you feel it inside your body? Sometimes it’s in our chest or our stomach and our throat? So where do you feel? Is it big? Is it small? Does it feel like it’s swirling around inside you? Oh, it does. Which way? Is it swirling clockwise? or counterclockwise?

Does it move from top to bottom or the other way? Really just get in touch with your emotions. When we think about emotions, they’re just like sensations in our body. That’s all they are. They’re just vibrations that we can sort of feel inside our body. That’s it, your emotions, your feelings cannot hurt you. What can hurt you is resisting them, immediately trying to change them, reject them, pushing them down, pushing them away. When we do that, that’s what causes the internal suffering. That’s what causes our self misery.

You know, when we try to constantly reject and resist our emotions, wishing we didn’t feel this way, I should be feeling differently, we buffer them away. When we do that, that is when we suffer. But just feeling an emotion. You don’t suffer because of that. You just feel the emotion. Oh, I’m pretty angry right now. You don’t have to do anything about it.

You might feel like smashing somebody’s face, but you don’t have to act out on that. And you don’t have to judge that either. Just go oh, yeah, that’s interesting. That’s curious. So you don’t have to fix it, you don’t have to change it. Your job in life is not to change everything, to just feel better. In fact, your job in life is not to just feel good all the time. This is not what our lives are supposed to be.

Your role in life, the only things that really are things you have to do in your life, are to live and to die. And that’s it really, you exist. And then you don’t know it sounds kind of depressing. But no, those are the only things that are like your required requirements for being a human on this planet is to be alive. And then to die.

Everything else in between is what you choose to do, honestly. And we’re not supposed to feel good all the time. I don’t know where we came up with this idea. But you know, we feel good about half the time and we feel not so good about half the time and this is normal. This is like nature. This is the nature of life for all human beings on planet Earth.

We feel good about half the time and the other half is like not so good. So the meaning of your life is not to just control the show. You know controlling everything so you feel better all the time. It’s to get good at being with both halves of that equation, the good and the bad. You know when we try to just control everything so we feel good all the time.

We are miserable because everything is constantly not going according to our plan. And so we have all this internal misery when we do this. You need to stop doing this. Accept the good, accept the bad, just be with it. Have that self awareness of oh, this is interesting. I don’t feel good. I am pissed off right now. I feel hurt by what, you know, by these thoughts in my head are creating these feelings and that isn’t that interesting.

So you’ve got to get out of this victim mode where like everything is happening to you, take responsibility. Understand that you’re a normal human being feeling feelings, thinking thoughts, and doing things based on what you’ve, you know, what you feel is best for you and for others. People are whatever and just just be with all of it. Be aware of it. Be curious, don’t judge yourself. Practice self awareness.

So what if instead of trying to control everything or change everything, you were just an observer of your life? Like, what would that look like for you? And I’m not saying you never take action, you just sit around passively observing yourself going, Oh, that’s very interesting. And then, you know, waste away on a couch somewhere, that is not what I’m saying at all.

You definitely want to take aligned action and create the kind of life that you want. But what I’m talking about here is before you can do that, you have to have the self awareness to know what is coming up for you. What does your life look like, really? What do your thoughts sound like to you? What do your feelings feel like to you? And if you were to just do this, instead of trying to control everything, you were just an observer?

How would that change how you showed up in the world? How would that change how you showed up for yourself? For your partner, for your kids, for your work? For your running? Just notice everything with like a neutral curiosity. Hmm, well, that’s interesting. It’s a good phrase, I use that a lot in my life.

I think about when I start to feel a feeling that feels like a negative feeling. And to me, that’s an alarm going off. And that triggers this thought, hmm, isn’t that interesting? What is that for me? Why am I feeling this way? And usually, I can just pinpoint a certain thought, a sentence in my head that’s causing me to feel hurt or sad or angry.

So when you stop resisting, when you stop rejecting, when you stop trying to change everything, that internal suffering that you have stops, when you can notice without judgment, what’s going on in your mind, what’s happening in your body, what’s going on with your thoughts and your feelings, your internal conflicts and your internal struggles melt away.

Like this is the most important step, the first step and the most important step in becoming the badass person that you want to be. And I love this quote from Eckhart Tolle, he says, “Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it.” Whoa, I love this.

Whatever is coming up for you right now, just accept it as if you had chosen it. You know, developing self awareness, being aware of your own thoughts, being aware of your feelings, being aware of your actions. It’s not something that’s like, bestowed upon you like here, you get self awareness, and you don’t know it’s a learned skill.

And it’s a skill that you have to practice if you want to get good at it. But when you do it, when you do get good at developing more self awareness, you create this like neutral space, where you can make better decisions, instead of making all your decisions based from a place of judgment and fear and resistance and suffering.

So I’m going to encourage you, right now to start practicing self awareness, and see how things start to shift for you. See how things in your life become clearer. See how you start to make better decisions, and you start moving towards that badass person that you know you are that you want to be, you can start becoming that person right now.

And it all starts with just practicing self awareness. And anytime you’re thinking of thought or feeling of feeling and you’re, you’re wanting to resist it, or thinking it should, you should change it. Practice that little line that I use, which is huh. Isn’t that interesting? And then see what happens. This is powerful, powerful stuff, you guys.

So that’s all I got for you today. I hope you got something out of this. Reach out to me with questions or comments Hello at Inner Fire tribe.com I’d love to hear what you think of this. Much love to each and every one of you. We’ll see you next time.

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