Mental Freedom Starts With Awareness

For most of my adult life, I've been hearing from people that they work on self-improvement to either increase their wealth, health, and financial accounts or to enhance their awareness. Self-awareness and mindfulness are buzzwords that have haunted my last few years. Until a few months ago, if anyone asked me if I were self-aware, I'd swear I was, ready to provide strong reasons for how I'm actively working to increase my awareness.

I could easily say, "I'm very self-aware."

However, I now realize that my actual journey towards awareness started only a few months back — more precisely, around spring 2023. And I'm still very much at the beginning of it.

The other day, when I came to this realization, I was shocked and intrigued by my own findings about myself. It seemed almost impossible to believe that I'm not the only one who has been lying to myself about being more aware of my own identity when, in fact, things are just starting for me.

So, I googled it. Surprisingly, in research conducted by Tasha Eurich, PhD, an organizational psychologist and researcher, she and her team demonstrated exactly that: 80% of us think we are self-aware, when only 10-15% of people actually are. The result? We've all been lying to ourselves.

I suspect the definition of self-awareness might vary, and I'm not an expert here, but I can share what I mean by my own self-awareness:

Self-awareness is the inner state of knowing and understanding my own feelings, strengths, weaknesses, and the reasons behind my actions. It's like having that imaginary friend from the mirror who knows everything about us — thoughts, feelings, behaviors, reactions, and our relationships with wealth, health, and finances — made real. This best friend helps define me, and together we've made a pact to conquer the world; we've become partners now. We know each other very well; now we're working on communicating directly, without any limitations or fluff.

You might say, "Oh, I know all those things about me."

If you do, congratulations. From my own experience and research, I've learned that this is a very unique quality — belonging to only about 10% of the population.

Theodore Roosevelt aimed to be right 75% of the time. What do you think would be a reasonable threshold for being right for average people like me? I’d probably say with confidence that it's below 50%. This explains why, when I thought I knew all those things about myself, I was, in fact, living in my own blind spots.

What I believe actually happens is that most people's sense of self is shaped into a package produced by the external world — by elite expectations and the cycle of conditional validation.

When I learned this about myself some months ago, that's when I started to peel back all those layers and began building a self that is a conscious, personal and authentic creation; an actual identity aside from the external world's beliefs that gains more control over their own mind.

I’m just at the beginning, but even the 0.0001% progress I’ve made feels enormous. And it feels right; it feels like I’m on the right path now, even though I’m far from being one of those 10%. Awareness is curative.

The internet is full of productivity and self-improvement hacks, but if you read them carefully, you start to realize that not many of these creatives have developed and expanded their mind to a point where they have built up their level of consciousness. They might have expanded their wealth and health, but they have done so in a manner distant from their authentic self.

I’ve expanded my financial accounts throughout my career while not having a great level of consciousness. Having myself as an example, I am confident that it is possible. And, to the point of being seen as arrogant (however, the research supports my point), most people who are doing well still have a very low level of consciousness development.

To grow your mental muscles, you must release the beliefs and ideas that prevent you from expanding.

You must stand almost naked in front of the mirror and start questioning everything you feel, think, believe, and react to. Be gentle with yourself, but go deep.

Release the attachment to what you think is your identity, let it go, and try to peel away as much as you can. If with every layer you discover the same you, it means you’re indeed knowing yourself. At this stage, I believe someone who’s aware of themselves doesn't even need to “test” themselves, because they simply know the difference between believing they are aware and actually being one of those rare 10% of people.

Once you start the awareness process, I think it never stops. It comes in levels, but you know when you have really started becoming more conscious and building that mind muscle.

Let's consider a straightforward question about awareness: "I have clearly defined values that outline what is most important to me." Or, "I understand what I find the most personally rewarding, and 'I'm clear on the types of situations where I will feel the most satisfied.' 'My values drive how I approach the world.'" (These questions are from Tasha’s awareness test in her research.)

Don't rush, but take a moment to think about these questions. Can you really answer them?

You are likely to find these questions cliché if you haven't begun any sort of awareness process within yourself. You won't appreciate them if you haven't yet identified with being on a true journey of awareness.

You have thousands of ideas shaping who you are, how you act, what you think, what you aspire to, and what you do every single day.

However, most of us don't even know why we are doing what we are doing.

That's dangerous.

If you don't know why you're doing what you're doing, if you don't know why you are going to that job, having that partner, liking that thing, it means you haven't created (yet) yourself.

There's a difference between floating on a river because you've heard there's a great valley full of fruits and greatness down the path, versus choosing the same river path because you want to explore it, because it makes you happy to be on that path, and at any moment, you check in with yourself to evaluate if what you've seen from that river is enough.

It's the difference between floating on the river and consciously swimming in it.

I've been floating for most of my life.

I started to discover this when I really began introspecting a few months ago. Despite my adult journey being exciting and full of rewards, I felt tired and left with a huge void, sensing that something essential was missing.

I began by questioning everything I was feeling, asking a lot of "why" questions lately. Some of these questions left me stuck without answers. In those cases, I shifted to asking many "what" questions: What can I do? What do I do when I feel X? What pushes me to do Y? What doesn’t give me the energy to do Z? What do I really love? What makes me feel drained?

After these questions, I was sure I'm mainly the product of the external world.

So, I asked myself some months ago, "What do I have to do to become what I am?"

I started with the idea that I don’t know what I am in the first place. That I have to discover and create myself. And I think this is a lifelong journey. It never ends. But it’s a much more creative journey, authentic to me.

One might ask - where do we discover ourselves?

I don’t think there's a recipe for that; the entire point is to have a journey authentic to you, where you follow nobody but yourself. But I think you'll need some form of dissection to peel yourself of all those layers built by the external world and detach from the false beliefs you have.

For example, in my last years of high school, like any teenager trying to choose wisely for my university and career path, I consulted widely, looking left and right. Being told I was very good at math, physics, and any quantitative field in general, and that I should pick something that keeps me relevant but also ensures a good financial path, I went to study Computer Science. Another big factor was the prestige of the university - it even had up to a 1:10 competition ratio for the seats available each year. Generally, you were considered smart and intelligent for going, but most importantly, if you could finish Computer Science at the University Politehnica of Bucharest. And aside from getting all the badges from society about prestigious things, the IT field has been a good financial path in the last decade or so.

So, I did it.

Did I do it driven by my true self? No, very little of it.

Did I do it for the external appreciation of society, parents, friends? Yes, the majority of it.

Did I do it for financial security? Yes, I was told it’s good, and that gave me confidence. Does it really come with security? No, nothing comes with any form of security.

Was I able to do better for myself, by myself, and not take the path influenced by the external world? In my case, probably no, I don’t think so - I had little understanding of the world and myself at that age.

But, how much do I allow myself to float with the external world's opinions of what’s good or what I should be doing?

If that was the right approach for me when I was 16-17 years old, I can’t afford to be in my mid-30s, waking up and continue to take decisions which are not rooted to my true self.

Do you love what you do? Can you find a % of love in what you do every single day?

Being good at something doesn't mean we love that something.

I was told I’m good at physics. I was - for a fleeting period - and I nailed everything - but did I love it? No, absolutely not. I was doing and acing every single exam just because I didn’t want to have anything to do with it again. It was, in fact, draining me.

It’s easy to confuse being good at something with enjoying doing that thing.

And I’m not talking only about jobs only; I am talking about anything we do — from deciding our education path, from reading that book to implementing that productivity hack, to going on those vacations, to doing things at work in a certain way because that’s how it should be done.

We don’t have to love and like everything we do. But I think it’s essential to find at least a small percentage of love in what we do. Otherwise, we’re simply a mismatch for that activity or job.

Let’s take the job as an example as it’s an activity we can all understand.

I was fascinated to come across a book by Marcus Buckingham, a giant researcher in the field of leadership excellence and work/life satisfaction. The book, "Love and Work: How to Find What You Love, Love What You Do, and Do It for the Rest of Your Life," supports the idea that we don’t have to love everything we do. But if we have no love for any part of our work, then we won't be satisfied, creative, innovative, resilient, or likely successful. We might look successful from the outside, but we will likely be a void inside.

His concept is that everyone’s job is made out of different threads (red, brown, green, whatever) signifying different elements such as tasks, people, activities, situations. Some of them, we don’t enjoy, but some of them do bring us joy. Those that we find enjoyment and love in, that inspire us, that make us feel good, satisfied, alive, and energized, those are the red threads.

What really surprised me is that Marcus’ research has found that to be fully engaged, satisfied, and committed to what you do, you only need to love 20% of what you do. So, you only need 20% of those red threads to create that feeling of being alive in yourself. But that should be every single day.

That number surprised me because it’s very low, and looks very achievable, yet I am personally surrounded by a lot of people that have no appetite for what they do at their job.

20% every day from a 9-to-5 job correlates to finding love for 1.6 hours per day. Every single day.

Do you find love for almost 2 hours every day at your job? Every single day is the key here.

So, if the number is so low, if we only need a job where 20% of what we do involves activities that we really enjoy to create a significant impact on our motivation, fulfillment, satisfaction, and the state of mind of feeling good and alive, why is it so hard for so many of us to find that alignment between what we love and what we do?

And the only answer I could think of is that we don’t know what we love. We don’t know where to look, connect, and find those red threads.

We usually float throughout our life, never achieving the state of consciousness, introspection, and authenticity that allows us to genuinely say: this is what I love. And I’ll do whatever it takes to give me at least 20% of that joy every single day.

To find that 20%, we need to confront our own limitations and beliefs, peel back everything that composes us, get naked with ourselves, be willing to pay the price of the suffering of that process, and find that profound connection to our authentic self and a life that reflects not just what we do, but a bit of who we really are.

That's it for this note, I'll see you next week.

-Luciana