The only thing you need to practice for happiness and fulfillment in your second half
In this Amazoning way of life, there are hundreds of people, services, and products to help you become a healthier and more creative midlife man, and all of them offer dozens of ways to deliver those things to you right now.
But with all these choices there inevitably comes the questions of what do you choose first?
We go into what writers call ‘research mode’—spending hours and hours consuming videos, articles, and social media in order to find out what is right for us—which, if no action is taken, will lead to intense feelings of helplessness and anxiety.
I know indecision all too well (last night I ate my pasta dinner scrolling through Netflix trying to find something to watch while I eat).
One thing that helps me is to pick one thing I like and try it out.
Sometimes this led to something I stuck with, sometimes not. But the point is it got my momentum rolling. It took me out of my indecision and got me working towards a goal.
So I was thinking to myself the other day, what's one thing I can offer you that would be an essential first step towards having the very best second half?
The answer? Burritos.
(Sorry, couldn’t help myself.)
No, there’s something bigger and more life-changing than burritos and it’s the only thing you need to work on for the rest of your life, to ensure better mental, physical, and emotional health.
What is Self Awareness?
To help you understand how important self-awareness is and how it’ll help you, let me first break it down into its basic components and then I’ll give you the 3 ways to maximize this new life practice.
Awareness
Do you remember Encarta 95?
It was like an encyclopedia on steroids. It was a computer program that gave you the typical articles that an encyclopedia would but with videos and audio tracks from the Internet.
I used to sit at the computer for hours just to listen to Abe Lincoln, to watch films about World War II, to see experiments on electricity. (I mean, what IS electricity? The world may never know.)
Encarta 95 three-dimensionalized my experience. Before I was curious, now I was aware of the world in a way that made it so much more personal for me. These figures were not just dead people, but they were living breathing humans just like me.
Self
As soon as I began to learn more about the world, I automatically began my journey of who I was in relationship to that world and how I could act in it.
This led to nearly three decades of consuming everything I could—metaphysics, science, psychology, mythology, sociology, history, religion, fiction, nonfiction—all with the intent on learning who humans were.
This also informed me on how I could live in the world in accordance or in opposition to what I’d read about them. And I always started the same way—curious about a subject, aware of how it related to me, and how I could be and act within that subject.
This journey began as a young kid but it came to a head in high school.
Why high school?
Because that's the first time I began to work on my identity. Who we are and how we work in the world is one of the key challenges of adolescence.
That’s what midlife is too.
Barbara Waxman calls it ‘middlescence’. To quote her from her website:
Middlescence: a transitional period between the ages of approximately 45 and 65 created by longevity patterns of the 21st century. Like adolescence, a term popularized by psychologist Stanley Hall, it is often accompanied by physical, emotional, social and economic changes.
It's a time of tumult, of taking inventory of who we were and where we’ve been in order to gain awareness of who we are, want to be, and where we want to go.
In other words, it’s an opportunity to gain awareness of our selves and how we work in the world.
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Now that you know a little bit of what self-awareness is, here are three tips to maximize your self-awareness.
1. The more self-aware you become, the more you must exercise self-acceptance
We gain it in several ways—through astrology, enneagram, Myers-Briggs, and other ways of learning about how the different personalities are categorized.
We gain it through journaling and being curious of what you do and how you tick.
We gain it through making art.
We gain it through therapy and coaching.
But self-awareness isn’t easy if you’re doing it right.
That’s because we’ll eventually learn about our nasty sides, our bad sides, our ignorant and lazy sides, and we must learn to accept them all.
Let me take a second here to clarify my language—there are no bad sides to us. I used them as a way of showing how even I fall into this trap of shaming.
Yes, humans do bad things, I’m not saying they don’t and I’m not going to get into a philosophical discussion on the nature of evil.
What I’d like to do is borrow Thich Nhat Hanh’s way of describing our sides as skillful vs unskillful.
It’s better to say “I was unskillful with that barista when I yelled at him” rather than “I was a dick to that barista”. There’s room for improvement with “unskillful”. There’s nothing but judgment from “being a dick”.
I still struggle with the way I was conditioned as a boy just as you do—I don’t talk as much as I do about my feelings, I don’t find ways to address my emotions in a more accepting and healing way.
And when I fail at this, I feel horrible, ashamed, guilty, and depressed.
We must accept ourselves because if we don't, we’ll keep on acting in those fractured ways—an angry man angry at angry people, a stupid man being stupid about stupid people.
Self-acceptance is about understanding that it may not be entirely our fault but it’s completely 100% our responsibility how we act towards ourselves and others.
“The most fundamental aggression to ourselves, the most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves, is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently.”
2. The more you self-accept, the more you must exercise self-compassion
After you learn more about all the sides of yourself, you must come from a place of curiosity to be more graceful, patient, understanding, and loving to yourself, so that you can work on yourself.
Without self-compassion, self-awareness is just learning what you do without trying to make yourself better. “Yeah, I’m a dick about that,” he said, shrugging and walking away. Don’t do that.
Or you do try to become a better person but it comes from a place of shame for these “bad” sides of yourself and so you burn out trying to be the best person in the history of humanity, coming from a place of perfectionism and workaholism.
You see how accepting the term “bad” automatically lets in the term “good” as a shiny prize to be won? Don’t do this either.
You’re human, do your best, and forgive yourself for what you are, all of what you are.
Note: self-acceptance is not accepting hate and prejudice and brutality and violence, but understanding what's behind those things, which is usually fear, and being compassionate about it.
Self-acceptance is also not just accepting abuse from people. It deals with boundaries as well, which I'll write about more in a later post.
But we need compassion because as soon as we start to do that, it’ll automatically reflect how we see the world because we're still working on that relationship between who am I and how do I work within the world.
3. The more you learn to be self-compassionate, the more you must exercise compassion to others
When I became self-aware of my perfectionist streak, through therapy and through books, I eventually became more patient and more forgiving to myself, which led to me treating people differently. Especially at my job.
For the longest time I would be miserable because no one was working as hard as I was working. I thought that it was unfair and I became resentful of the people around me.
It was only after I realized that I didn't have to be perfect for every single minute that I stopped and embraced my flawed humanity, tried my best, and gave myself endless compassion and patience whenever I did make a mistake.
It was only after learning it about myself that I could exercise it to the world.
That's not to say that I exercise it every single day. It's a practice like anything else and I have my good days and bad days. And that's not to say that I quit being the best person I can be by just accepting who I am.
It’s a balancing act. But I definitely always try every day to stop being perfect because that’s a lose-lose situation.
And when I realized that I didn't have to be perfect to live on this earth, I stopped requiring it of the rest of the world.
Listen: we ourselves are the practice grounds for the way we treat other people. If we don't treat ourselves very well, there’s no hope that we’ll treat others very well either.
You and the world are linked!
As soon as you start to do the work on becoming more self-aware of who you are—how you tick, what your blind spots are, and what you truly want to be as a human being in this world—you begin to see how you relate in the world and how we’re linked.
This is very important because midlife is a time where we look at what we've done in the first half of our life and set a course by whatever star we fix on for our second half.
That star is self-awareness. It won't be easy. In fact, it'll be the challenge of a lifetime. But the gains heavily outweigh the losses. And what's a game without a little challenge?
Conclusion
If you only spend one hour of the entire year doing this exercise, you’ll benefit in so many ways, guys!
Sit down and answer the following questions:
What do I want?
What don’t I want?
What do I hate?
What do I love?
How do I act when I get happy, mad, sad, and frustrated?
What makes me get happy, mad, sad, and frustrated?
What do I feel about all this?
What am I going to do about all this?
These are just some basic questions to get the ball rolling. It’s meant to be the first step in a lifetime of self-awareness.
But without something like this, you’ll just be sleepwalking through life.
In this ever-accelerating culture that has us moving from screen to screen to screen, we're not meant to slow down or even stop to take the time to forge mental and physical space, or a place to do work on our self-awareness and growth.
Do you know what self-awareness is? Starting a budget.
Have you ever budgeted before? It sucks! It's so much easier just to spend your money however you want with whomever you want. But it also means you’re constantly chasing bills and fearing for the future.
I want to get out of debt, and so I started to work on a budget. And every time I do it, I always feel the same things—depression and elation.
First, I feel a little depressed and shameful. (It’s amazing how much money one can spend on burritos!) This is because money work is emotional work and it’s one of the main reasons why it's so hard to start and keep a budget.
But finally, and more powerfully, I feel elation and energy because I gained more awareness and therefore felt more in control.
Budgeting gives me parameters to work in and it helps me be more creative with my money. “Maybe I can make a burrito next time. That would save me money, and it would be healthier. Plus I love to cook!”
It’s the same with self-awareness—you’re not wishing for more opportunities outside of yourself, you’re working on investing in the essentials of who you are and what you can do in this world. And that’s empowering!
Spend time keeping track of what you're doing, what you think about, what you feel, and your progress along the path will accelerate.
This is a hero’s journey – the departure into yourself, revelations, the return to the world—and sometimes, the hero’s journey hurts.
But let me ask you this: do you think that you won’t be suffering or feeling pain or exhaustion or disappointment if you don’t take this journey?
Yes, ignorance may be bliss sometimes, but you’re constantly dealing with things outside your control, including yourself.
And we know what happens when we don’t know ourselves—we fall victim to the outside forces who think they do know us.
So if you're gonna get hurt, either way you might as well try to gain some sort of self-awareness in your life, especially considering all the benefits that come from it.
Self-awareness will help equip you for any challenge you have going forward.
And there will be plenty—a new job or career, the loss of an old one, revelations, dreams and wishes, the aging and death of your parents, the waning of your physical and mental energy, and finally the death of our own lives.
Be more self-aware, and you’re already on your way to being a better person, if only in the smallest of steps.
I wish you the best on your path of self-awareness!
I want to hear from you!
Comment below on how this post resonated with you!
