The thing that gets in most people's way of achieving their hopes, goals and dreams more than anything else in their entire life is,paradoxically,themselves.
And the problem is that they can't see how they're doing it because they lack self-awareness.
Now, this is a question that I wish I got more often — "How do I be more self-aware?"— because without self-awareness, you can't see your own failures and shortcomings and you'll have no way to catch your own blind spots which means that in certain areas of your life you're gonna run in circles giving rationalizations and excuses for why you're stuck and missing the real point which is why in this video I want to give you some mindsets and exercises to increase your level of self-awareness and get out of your own way.
The first mindset that is absolutely essential is to recognize that in your life, the person who is most likely to lie to you beyond anyone else is yourself.
We have some very,very complicated booby traps up here; we have ego defense mechanisms that want to keep us — A — safe from a survival perspective but B — safe from a self-image perspective.
So if we get evidence if we behave in a way that doesn't suit our self-image and we don't like the story that it creates about us,we tend to discount that evidence.
So for instance, if you're in a relationship as I was at one point that isn't working out but you're afraid to end it, you are unlikely to admit to yourself that you're a person who acts based on fear.
What you will instead do is discount all the reasons that the relationship might not work and create rationalizations for why those don't matter for you.
This is why your friends can often see flaws in the way that you behave and vice-versa much more easily than you can see them yourself so step one — recognize that in all sorts of emotionally-charged areas of your life,you're likely lying to yourself.
The second thing to help us get past that initial fact that we have to accept is to put honesty before integrity.
