|
"Desire is possibility seeking expression." --Ralph Waldo Emerson With ten hours of hard hiking ahead of us we were full of excitement. The mountain loomed above us with a smile, as if saying, "Wait till you see the view I have for you!" At a deep stream we faced a choice. We either had to climb down the embankment and wade across, or try to jump the chasm. Neither was very appealing, but we had to do something. Most of us chose to climb and wade, but one member of the group, Tony, decided to jump. He got a determined look on his face and leaped! He cleared the chasm with inches to spare but fell to the ground writhing in pain. His knee had given out, the one he'd injured in college. For Tony, the remaining ten hours were pure misery. His injury took all the joy out of the hike for him, while the rest of us had a wonderful climb. Have you ever done that? Overestimated your physical ability or endurance and ended up injured? How about psychologically? Have you ever miscalculated your ability to think your way through something or underestimated the impact your feelings would have on you? Most of us have. Self-awareness knowing your nature, your abilities and how you’ll react to people and things may well be the greatest life management skill. The better you know yourself, the better decisions you make. The better decisions you make, the better your life will be. Compared to persons who don’t know themselves very well, people who are self-aware: • are better listeners. • are less self-conscious. • tend to be less judgmental of others. • seldom take on tasks for which they are not suited. • do a better job of assessing risks. • are more willing to admit their mistakes. • recover from disappointments more easily. • are less likely to be absent from work. • tend to produce better quality work. • manage stress more effectively. • experience fewer interpersonal problems. In short, people who are self-aware are more likely to succeed and live an abundant life than those who are not. They are also much easier to work with. Every day you face choices: people to see or not see, places to go, things to do, ways to deal with whatever life gives you. The more effectively you make those choices, the more appealing your outcomes will be. Someone once asked the famous humanitarian, Dr. Albert Schweitzer what he felt was "wrong with people today." He replied, "Most people simply don’t think." On many levels, of course, all of us think. But what most of us neglect to think about is how we think. Self-analysis is what is needed. If we were to recognize the patterns in our own thinking and our own feelings, we would understand so much more about ourselves. We could save ourselves a lot of pain by making better life choices and avoiding or redirecting relationships that were destined for difficulty. Sigmund Freud said, "The trouble with most people’s self-analysis is it stops too soon. They are too easily satisfied." That’s what The Acorn Principle book is designed to address: your ability to understand what makes you who you are. To understand a person, first, we need an overview of the person with information about his or her key traits. What if I could show you how to notice the following and more in each person you meet, as well as in yourself? • Natural values the intrinsic motives behind a person’s interests and choices. What they care about. • Personal velocity the pace and intensity at which someone performs best. Their "zone" of optimal performance. • Multiple intelligence the unique and varied ways in which a person is smart. How they are smart. • Thinking style (Intellectual Bandwidth) whether someone tends to think conceptually, strategically or operationally most of the time and how much information they could effectively process at one time. • Behavioral style the predictable patterns within a person’s behavior in both positive and negative situations. How they come across to others. • Background imprint the influences and effects one’s experiences have had on them. Whether they are working with a head start or a handicap. If you knew that much about anyone you would have a tremendous advantage in dealing with them. You could predict what they’d like or dislike, how they would approach a new task, what they’d do under pressure, how they might interpret the behaviors of others . . . and more. Your "guided tour" will start within yourself. By the end you’ll have a journal full of self-awareness and understand things about yourself that never made much sense before. You will recognize yourself in these profiles. Psychological researchers have a term called "face validity." It occurs when a person reads their own psychological profile and says "Yes, that is me. This profile accurately describes the person I’ve known myself to be." Let’s examine why you should even care about increased self-awareness. Through over twenty years of conducting training in the area of human development I have discovered that very few people give much thought to how they think and act or why they are that way. Sure, they occasionally read their horoscope or get a handwriting analysis or call a psychic. But beyond those occasional amusements they don’t think much about how they think, why they make choices as they do, how they work best or who they connect with most effectively. But if they did think about these things they might save themselves a lot of unproductive time and effort. One of my favorite examples is Mike, who grew up in a suburb of New York City where his dad was a journalist. From his childhood Mike wanted to be a writer. However, when he reached college, his best writing efforts brought him only mediocre grades. His confidence wavered, and he switched majors to premed. A natural interest in science carried him through his premed studies, and he was accepted to medical school. In his first year of medical school he tried to quit, but a counselor talked him into staying. His second year of medical school was worse, and again he tried to quit. He hated his third year, so it was back to his counselor who again prevailed. By his fourth year, it didn’t make sense to quit, so he finished his medical program and became a doctor. Then he quit. Somewhere along the way, to take his mind off medical school, Mike started writing again. Before long, he was supporting himself writing thrillers. By the time he finished four years of medical school, he had rediscovered his true passion and was determined to follow it. Mike is Michael Crichton, and he might have been a pretty good doctor (though his heart wasn’t in it) but he became instead a truly great writer when he chose to follow his passion and use his natural strengths. That choice led him to the career of his dreams and a stunning series of bestsellers. Thought Break: How would you have felt after graduating medical school if you realized that you didn’t really want to become a doctor? What would you have done about it? Would you have become depressed and stopped growing or..., like Michael, would you have reached out in new ways to apply what you knew and who you were? Those who do take the time to explore and nurture themselves have a tremendous edge in the world. |
