Awareness week..

This week has been intense. Day 68 of lockdown. It has been 68 intense days. 5 intense months. 

So much awareness. I started Reading Johan Maxwell’s “No Limits” with my leadership team.  Chapter one is all about awareness. Awareness+Ability+Choices=Capacity. It all starts with awareness, and it made me realize it’s simple but not easy. Most people are just living to survive, not to thrive. Physically when we feel we cant anymore we have only reached 40% of our capacity. “Life is all about staying out of your comfort zone.. If you don’t challenge yourself, you don’t know yourself”.  Being aware is not easy, I feel like I really have to challenge myself to be aware. Of course you are aware of the obvious things you know in your life you want to change or do better. But what are your blind spots, those things that you not aware off that you need to change. The challenge is finding them. I loved his story about how they train big asian elephants. FRom when they are babies they are tied to a pole with a chain. When they are little that chain is strong enough to hold them back. As they get bigger that same chain is not strong enough to keep them from breaking away anymore, but they have grown up in the limitations of the chain knowing it holds them back and then it keeps doing that. So what are the limitations you are not even aware off that have been unknowingly placed upon you up until now? The challenge is finding those chains in your life and having the ability to break them, choosing to break them. Getting comfortable being uncomfortable. 

This pandemic has forced the world out of their comfort zone. It has forced the world into awareness. It brings me back to this text I received earlier this week. “ Ya one thing this lock down has taught me is life is actually simple, we don’t actually need a new dress, or a crowd of people, we don’t need the “right things”, all we need is the “right now”, I think if anyone is not affected by the way life has come to a stand still then they were not even moving to start with, and if they realized in this time that their lives were not going any where then I hope this lock down has inspired them to move...“

Are you inspired to move? Have you become aware of how little we actually need? What your abilities are out of your comfort zone and what your capacity can be. Do you choose to try and reach that capacity? Or are you just surviving. This pandemic to me has brought such grace into the world. People have been forced to stop, to pause. What gets me is how we default to complaining about our challenges, thats the mindset we have. What we don’t have, what is hard, what is not possible. We focus on the things we can not change instead of embracing them. It is finding the balance between being pessimistic, optimistic and realistic. Yes I am optimistic, I see the opportunity. Because you choose your reality. What you complain about Today take for granted as a given can change in an instant. Stop, pause, become aware of the world around you, the struggles, the challenges, the opportunities. What you see depends mainly on what you look for. I hope that this awareness of how much we have to be grateful for, how little we need, and the grace we have had towards one another will last.  

It all starts with awareness. So when this is over, are you going to go back to the same you that you were 68 days ago? Or did you grow? Did you become aware? Are you adding your ability and the right choices to this equasion so you can reach a new capacity?