Alphabet Soup: A — Awareness!
With this post, I want to start a series I have been thinking of for a very long time.
The Alphabet Soup of Life!
The plan is to walk through the alphabet, exploring topics starting with the letter of the week.
I hope to post once a week — or maybe more. Hopefully not less!
Starting out with …
A — Awareness -> Acceptance -> Action
Let’s start with the first of the trio:
AWARENESS…WHAT IS IT EXACTLY?
To me, it means that I “know” what is going on around me and within me. I achieve this through “observation”, through “constant monitoring”.
The way I made sense of this concept is with my engineering training.
I am a full time cloud engineer. My team is responsible for making sure all the infrastructure that powers the e-commerce platform of my company is humming along smoothly. We design the infrastructure based on how we want the platform to operate and perform. We automate the functionality and deploy it out in the cloud.
But that’s not the end of it.
We decide on our “key performance indicators” (KPI) — these are thresholds, lower or upper limits to certain metrics, that if breached indicate a problem.
Next we incorporate monitoring tools to measure these KPIs. We set up dashboards to visually show us how these KPIs are doing. We put in alerts to notify us if some parameter is approaching thresholds of these KPIs.
Basically, we are always “aware” of what is going on, and are able to anticipate issues ahead of time. When bad things do happen, we are able to respond with more “knowledge” than going in blind to figure out what happened, and how to solve it. We are able to correlate events and identify the cause quickly.
At times when we are in fact caught unawares, we add new alerts to warn us of this event in the future. The “awareness” is constantly evolving.
This is the definition I have come up with — “awareness” means identifying areas that are key indicators of performance of a system and then monitoring them actively.
Yes, yes, I know if you are not from an engineering background, I might be at risk of losing your attention by now. But stay with me for a bit. Because now I am going to talk about how this applies to life in general.
This is how I mapped the engineering fundamentals to life -
My life is the e-commerce site that I need to keep humming along smoothly.
My work, my relationships, my health, my finances, basically everything in my surroundings — all these are “resources” in the infrastructure that I use to “build” my life.
Each of these resources will have their own set of KPIs. Now if we follow the engineering principles, then we need to monitor each of these KPIs separately — and whew!!! That is beginning to sound quite overwhelming. But, stick with me — and we’ll see how it can be managed, albeit with some practice.
According to the definition we just agreed upon — awareness is a two step process:
- Identifying the KPIs — these are your CORE VALUES! This is important and will need a whole other post of its own!
- Monitoring — here we monitor our thoughts and our behavior to make sure they are in alignment with our values. How do we know they are in violation? You will experience major discomfort in certain situations, in the presence of certain people, while doing some actions. This discomfort is the “alert” your system is sending to indicate that a value has been violated!
Next steps, depending on the situation, would be Acceptance (sometimes we go the denial route!) and Action (whether to do something or not, and if yes, what?). These two will be coming in separate posts.
I’d like to share a couple examples of how awareness helped me understand my own self better, and helped me make better decisions.
Some of my core values are freedom, autonomy and trust.
The first example is from a past job, one that I was happy with until things changed.
Management decided to bring in a new leader for my team. We were skeptical of this move from the beginning, but we had no choice but to accept it. The new leader turned out to be a micromanager — who wanted people to report every single move they made to him, took away work from one person and gave it to the other, and generally created chaos. This created an environment of mistrust and sadly, what felt like dictatorship. Over time, I would feel triggered merely by seeing a meeting invite, or a message from him on Slack channels. It was time to acknowledge the “alert” my system was blaring out, and examine what was happening.
All three values I mentioned above were being violated!
What happened next is for the next post :)
The second example is that of my own behavior.
One of my core values, which is absolutely key to my happiness, is creativity — I like to create jewelry, write blogs, song parodies, get creative with sari draping, write beautiful clean code — and if I am not creating, there is a noticeable dip in my happiness. That said, I do suffer from inertia. Given a choice between Netflix and pursuing something productive — guess what I pick! And at times, Netflix-time is needed to give the brain a break. But what I was not keyed into was that after about 30 minutes, I was not enjoying the break. I was getting restless and irritable, and yet I would indulge in hours of binging.
The irritability was the “alert” my system sent to me. But I was not observing! I was not aware. The story I was telling myself is that I need a break and I deserve the Netflix binge.
WHY IS AWARENESS IMPORTANT?
This here is the big deal — observing and being aware of our own behavior! It is so easy to point out other people’s faulty behavior, we are always looking outwards! Looking inside and observing our own thoughts, and the behavior these thoughts lead to is so very important to living a meaningful and authentic life.
Most of us live on autopilot. We repeat the same patterns over and over and over — and do not notice when the patterns turn unhelpful (like my Netflix binge!). These patterns can be caused by long held implicit biases, habits that were once formed consciously to achieve a certain purpose, or just something we started to do because others around us did it.
It could also be that we are so busy managing the gazillion disks spinning over our heads that we don’t stop to find out if that disk is even ours! Or whether it still needs to be spinning!
When we are aware, we pay more attention to everything, we notice more, we see more and we understand more. We are more alert and our actions more intentional and effective!
Awareness even helps us tweak our values — sometimes these do need to be adjusted based on the phase of life we are in.
SO HOW DO WE SET UP THIS MONITORING SYSTEM?
Ah, don’t we wish there were software based monitoring systems that would do this for us? And who knows — maybe someone is actually working on it too. But till then — we will have to do this manually.
Moving from the autopilot, unaware state into that of awareness is not very intuitive, it takes training and practice. Especially doing it in real time, while multiple things are happening, and you are in the throes of emotion — pfft…not going to happen right away!
Don’t let that discourage you though.
Like everything, we start this journey also with baby steps.
- Monitoring After The Fact
Staying aware 100% of the time is the stuff monks are made of — after years of practice. So we start with “retrospection”. This is also something we do in my engineering team. We hold retrospectives every two weeks to see what went well, what could have been better and what we need to pay closer attention to.
A nightly journal of what the day was like — what went well, what did not, what made you happy, what did not — is a good place to start. Start writing down what situations led to what thoughts, what feelings got triggered by the thoughts and what behavior the feelings led to.
When done regularly, you will see patterns emerge (kinda like machine learning!)
You will be able to identify triggers that you react to in ways that are detrimental. You will be able to identify conditions where you are more productive. Once you identify the patterns and triggers, there is no “unknowing” them. The awareness, and watching out for them will just start to happen! - Body Scan
In addition to retrospection, you can also start a practice of “regular check ins” with yourself throughout the day. 5 minute breaks to do a “body scan” — where you scan your body to see how each part is doing. Tension, tightness, or stress in the body indicate distress, but they are so omnipresent, we don’t pay heed to them. Sometimes just sensing tightness makes us release it right away! - Mental Scan
You can also do a “mental scan” — are you fully present in the task at hand? If not, then where are you? Gently bring yourself back to where you need to be.No reprimanding or analyzing. Just come back to the now. - Take A Break!
If you are sensing discomfort, especially mentally, some resistance coming up against something you are doing, or are expected to do — if safely possible, take a break and step away. Catch what you are thinking and feeling. Are you ruminating about something? Is some sort of fear showing up? Identify the value that is being violated — value violation is almost always the cause of such resistance!
These are the main techniques I have used to become more aware of myself. I am sure everyone has their own unique ways.
Awareness is so important! It is the foundation to change and positive outcomes!
I hope this was helpful!
I promise to be back with my understanding of Acceptance very soon!
Stay tuned!!
