Ep 3: Why Self Awareness Changes Everything

Yeah, personalization is important.

As I mentioned to you before, it'd be nice just to say one size fits all and off you go.

But it doesn't because of the things like constraints, the things around you that can influence whether things work.

So personalization is paramount, number one.

I think where I like to start, I use the analogy of a speed camera, and I call these things a speed camera.

So we start with that self-awareness.

What the story is or the analogy is, if you see a speed camera, if you see that telltale yellow box and you know you're going too fast.

Typically panic.

Yeah, you would panic, but then you would do something.

You slow down, you take your foot off the accelerator, you apply the brake.

If you don't see the camera and you are speeding, you don't do anything.

There's no reason to intervene.

And then there is a consequence because you will notice the speed camera after you've gone past it, you flashed, you've got a speeding ticket, you're swearing at yourself.

So I always start with this idea of the speed camera.

What is the thing that is going to initiate the response or the reaction first and foremost? And if we talk about stress, people recognize stress in themselves through lots of different mechanisms.

The common ones are the bodily sensations.

They will recognize their heartbeat and faster, the sweaty palms, the feeling of butterflies in your stomach.

That's really common.

But there are other tells, there are other signals, there are other speed cameras, the way that you think, the way that you behave, your desires, like your wants, your needs, they might be indicators that you're under a stress or you're at the initial stages of a stress reaction.

So that's where I think we start, that those bits are personal, that something might seem quite benign to you, but for me, that could be an indicator that this is actually pushing me out of that safe space or that I'm now in that state of imbalance where the demand is exceeding the resource that I have.

Yeah, we often use the illustration in workshops that we do, don't we, of the tarantula.

If we were to bring a box out into the middle of a conference room, some of the audience would be, even the thought of a tarantula being in that box would be making their way to the door.

Other people would be much more curious.

And so there's a personalized response to stress.

When you were talking there, the memory that jogged for me was, how working with a performance psychologist towards the end of my former career, he played this bit of noise and I recognised it immediately that it was a helicopter.