Whenever you learn something new, you also develop self-awareness. Asking yourself questions allows you to bring thoughts and connections to the surface. Learning new skills lets you observe yourself as you face challenges and choose to work through them or get frustrated. Meeting new people allows you to see yourself reflected in new ways.
Our NLP courses build self-awareness, but so do many other things you might do. Where we make a difference is building on self-awareness to develop self-knowledge.
Self-knowledge is the ability to give appropriate and useful meanings to what you observe of your own thoughts, behaviours, and reactions. It seems easy. Your brain is a prediction machine: it’s obvious that it should have access to all of your thinking and use it to predict what you will feel or think in any situation. It’s obvious, but it’s not entirely true.
The first issue is that you need your conscious mind and your brain to cooperate for you to be able to predict yourself. While your brain can predict your automatic, unconscious responses, it cannot predict the choices you will make consciously. You mind can intervene in automatic behaviours, and it can set directions based on emotion and curiosity. It can seek connection to something bigger than yourself, and can over-ride automatic patterns to sacrifice for that something bigger. But your mind is distinct from your brain, and because it is not automatic, it can be hard to predict. It is hard to know.
Sometimes you will hear yourself say “I don’t know why I said that” or “I just had a feeling it was the right choice.” This is sometimes evidence that you are connected to your intuition. At other times, it is evidence that your left hand doesn’t know what your right hand is doing.
Self knowledge makes the same requirements of you that other knowledge does. You need to seek information and then you need to put in an effort to understand how that information fits together and how it is useful to you. It’s hard work, and it’s the only way that learning happens on purpose.
We will put you in connection with the people and processes that grow your self-awareness. But what’s more important is that we will provide you with a community that will nudge you to do the hard work so that you learn more about you.
