Awareness - Watching Models

Before you change your thoughts, learn to see what they are creating.

You notice a thought that makes you feel terrible, and immediately you want a better one. Something positive. Something that will make the feeling go away.

I understand the temptation. But if you rush past awareness, you can miss the very thing that makes change possible.

Before you try to fix your thinking, learn to watch it. See the connection between what you think, what you feel, what you do, and the results you create. That is what I mean by watching models.

What is the Self Coaching Model?

The Model separates circumstances, thoughts, feelings, actions, and results. A circumstance is a fact. Your thoughts are the sentences you use to interpret it. Those thoughts create feelings, which drive your actions and contribute to your results.

Knowing that explanation intellectually is different from recognizing it in your own life. You can understand the Model and still explain your frustration entirely through what someone else did.

Awareness asks you to slow down and notice the thinking between the event and your experience of it.

Start with your actions and results

When you feel stuck, begin with something you can observe. What are you doing? What is that creating?

If you believe you never have enough time, keep a time journal. Record how you actually spend your day. Be specific. A vague conclusion about being busy gives you much less information than a record of your choices.

The purpose is not to criticize yourself. It is to become conscious of a pattern you may have been living without noticing.

Notice the feeling behind the action

Next, ask what you are feeling when you take that action. Can you name the emotion? Can you describe how it feels in your body?

Pay attention to whether you resist it, react to it, or distract yourself from it. Getting busier can sometimes be a way of avoiding an emotion rather than solving the problem you think you have.

Suppose you postpone a task and spend an hour checking messages. You might notice that you feel overwhelmed before you reach for your phone. Now you have more information than simply saying you need better discipline.

Recognize your story as thinking

When I ask someone what they are thinking, they often tell me about their day. The boss is terrible. The conversation was awful. Nothing is working.

Those descriptions feel like reports of facts. But they also contain interpretations. Recognizing an interpretation as a thought opens up a choice you could not see while treating it as the only truth.

In the task example, the thought might be that you cannot possibly finish everything. That thought creates overwhelm. Overwhelm drives avoidance. Avoidance leaves the work unfinished and seems to confirm the original thought.

Watch the whole pattern before replacing it

The five phases I describe are unconsciousness, awareness of actions and results, awareness of feelings, awareness of thoughts, and awareness of cause and effect across the Model.

You do not need to hurry to a new thought. First, see how the current one is operating. Ask why you are choosing to think this way. Notice that a thought can be familiar without being compulsory.

This practice is not a demand to feel positive all the time. Growth can include discomfort. Awareness gives you a way to understand that discomfort instead of automatically treating it as something that has gone wrong.

A simple awareness practice

Choose one moment from today. Write the facts separately from your interpretation. Name the feeling, describe the action you took, and identify the result.

Then read the Model without arguing with it or judging yourself. Can you see the connection? Can you recognize the thought as a sentence in your mind?

Let that be enough for this practice. Seeing yourself clearly is work. It is also where a different choice becomes possible.