-Do you ever get anxious, stressed or depressed?
-Do you procrastinate or repeat habits you know aren’t good for you?
-Has anyone ever said, “you’re in denial?”
-Has an important relationship gotten stuck even after everything you’ve done to fix it?
-Has someone pointed out a flaw in you that you didn’t agree with?
-Ever felt like your relationship with God isn’t getting much traction?
If you said yes to any of those statements you are not alone –we’ve had all those experiences and plenty more. But we’ve found a significant key that is turning those situations around. It’s causing us to think differently, feel differently and work differently. And it’s brought us a richer, more authentic connection with God and each other.
Unfortunately for us, it took a disaster of galactic proportions to show us the way. We were successful Christian leaders and, at one point, we led one of the fastest growing churches in the U.S. We were both passionate about our relationship with God and had enormous love and goodness in our marriage.
Then the unthinkable happened.
A personal train wreck completely derailed our marriage and ministry. We literally lost everything dear to us. Our entire life was in shambles. A number of things contributed to what happened but after all the smoke cleared the ultimate diagnosis from our counselors was this:
A failure of self-awareness.
It was our inability to see and accept significant blind spots that, over time, had a disastrous impact on our relationship, our family, our spiritual community, basically, our entire world.
Out of that devastation grew huge motivation to pull out all the stops, to find out what had happened to two people who deeply loved God and each other. For several years we studied, prayed, reflected and processed with wise spiritual counselors who had much to teach us from their own failures in self-awareness.
You don’t have to be facing a situation as drastic as ours to gain the incredible benefits of growing your own self-awareness. In fact, if life is feeling pretty perfect right now, -you’re in the best place to discover one or two areas that might be needing your attention.
How many people can you name right now that have spent years faithfully accumulating God knowledge but they’re still struggling in some major area of their lives? Did they just not pray or fast enough?
Forget about them- can we take an honest look inside ourselves and admit that even on our best church going -Bible studying-conference attending- days we can still get angry, reactive, defensive, blaming, envious, resentful, controlling, deceitful or selfish?
What’s going on? Why haven’t the promises we’ve made to God and others been enough?
We are only able to surrender to God the parts of ourselves we are able and willing to see. It’s those parts we cannot or will not see that is keeping us from the abundant life we really want.
Are there areas of your life people have hinted about or tried to talk to you about and you just wouldn’t listen?
So, what is self-awareness?
Self-awareness is the ability to see and own all the ways your thoughts, emotions, and behavior are affecting you and those around you.
Daniel Goleman, the best-selling author of the book Emotional Intelligence cites research at Cornell University that shows high self-awareness to be the #1 predictor of a person’s overall success in every area of life. That’s huge!
What self-awareness is not…
Self-awareness is not just thinking harder about your life. It’s not self-absorption and it’s not self-centeredness. It is not selfish. Growing greater self-awareness is probably the kindest thing you can do for those you love and work with. And self-awareness is never about beating ourselves up.
You get a ton of benefits when you boost self-awareness. It…
- Allows you to build more satisfying relational connection and harmony
- Helps you be more proactive than reactive in challenging situations
- Increases your emotional intelligence and supports better working environments
- Maximizes authentic spiritual growth for true, lasting change
- Boosts your personal maturity, relational vitality, and vocational efficiency
- Strengthens your “inner witness” and empowers you to live from your true self in God
- Stimulates greater empathy and compassion for others
In our next blog, we’ll share with you 3 specific ways you can join your God awareness with self-awareness.
However, we’ve got a couple of extra bonuses for you today:
Join us for a FREE mini-class (20 minutes) on the huge benefits of joining your God awareness and your self-awareness, to boost your personal and spiritual growth. Watch here!
In the FREE mini-class, we’ll dive into three ways that can help you increase freedom and fulfillment in every area of your life.
Then…
We’ll invite you to take a free quiz we’ve created that helps you identify your current level of self-awareness and how it may be impacting your spiritual, relational, and professional life. It’ll show you what’s working and where you could be sabotaging your best intentions. (Sounds fun, right?!)
Watch the free class & take the quiz now!
Also, this week we’re releasing our new online course called: The Transforming Power of Self Awareness: Learn the #1 predictor of your relational, professional, and spiritual success.”
Stay tuned for more details.
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