The Expand Your Awareness Five Week Challenge.  Week one challenge: Choosing awareness over judgement.

In this five-week series of articles, I will help you to harness your awareness. Through a weekly challenge, you can learn more about awareness, and yourself. By having awareness, you can see situations in a different light, with new and different perspectives. This can help you to make better decisions, feel more in control and ultimately happier. Awareness can help you to consider the various options in front of you that you may not have realised are there.

How I use awareness

Many clients come to me when they are facing a difficult situation or problem. My clients can often feel trapped by their situation. They may feel unable to see a way out or see that there is more than one answer. Usually, the only solution they see is one they do not like or want to proceed with.

To help my clients see past their problem and find a solution that works for them, I often ask them to see a situation without a particular mentality that they may have. This mentality could be jealousy or fear, for example. With this exercise, it can really help to open your mind to new possibilities. Through this weekly challenge, I hope I can show you an alternative approach to tackling problems so that you can feel happier and more in control of your life.

To start the first week of this five-week challenge, I have chosen a difficult concept to tackle: judgement.

Challenge one: Drop your judgement

Judgements are so easy to make but can often cloud our decisions. Many of us fear judgement. We worry that other people will not like us. Also, we can be anxious that people will negatively judge us for something we say or do.  We even harshly judge ourselves. It can impact our confidence and make us afraid of saying what we want, doing what we wish to and expressing how we really feel. However, by choosing awareness over judgement, we can begin to shed these fears for our own happiness and freedom.

The problem is judging ourselves and others can have many negative consequences. Furthermore, it can distort our vision of the world, making it difficult to make the right decisions and be the person we want to be. However, there is a way to change this habit and choose awareness over judgement for your own happiness and wellbeing.

Consider this:

When you picture a glass of water, what do you see? There may be many different answers depending on your perspective. The glass of water may look different when you look at it on the side, from above or even from ten feet away.

When you have a decision to make or face a difficult situation, it can help for you to take a step back and look at the situation from the many different angles it has. Just like a glass of water, there are different ways to see a situation. By taking away one mentality you have, you open yourself up to seeing more angles and more opportunities.

Why choose awareness over judgement?

Judging a situation or person is common. Your judgement will likely come from a past experience that you have had or a situation that you may have seen before. With this in mind, it will shape your response to the current circumstances, and you will realise an emotional trigger. This can impact your flow of energy as you start to focus on the emotion. It will then affect the perspective you have of the situation you see or are in.

In contrast, choosing awareness over judgement will enable you to have further knowledge of a situation. It allows you to take a minute to consider the different angles, much like the glass of water analogy.

How to drop your judgement

This week’s challenge is to drop judgement in favour of gaining perspective or awareness so that you can have a fresh take on a situation.

1. Start noticing when you feel stuck, limited or facing a difficult situation.
2. Ask yourself whether you are observing the situation or whether you are making a judgement.
3. If it is a judgement, ask yourself what judgements you hold of the particular situation.
4. Next, rate your awareness on a scale of zero to ten. Ten will be the highest level of awareness you hold.
5. Take your challenge to the next level, ask yourself the three following questions;
   • What is making me judge the situation?
   • What keeps me in judgement mode?
   • What can I do to gain more perspective?
6. Bonus! Help to keep your awareness going. Email me at info@hypnosis-in-london.com for your free meditation download which can help you to reduce judgement and increase your awareness.

You may find it useful to jot down your notes in a diary. With practice, you will find that the number of judgements you make decreases. Furthermore, you will be able to see new perspectives that you may not have considered before.

The benefits of choosing awareness over judgement

By changing your view, seeing different perspectives, and banishing pre-existing judgements to simply having an awareness, you give yourself freedom. Instead of feeling boxed-in with preconceptions, you allow yourself to see the situation exactly how it is. You do not conclude and predict how something will unfold. Instead, you get to choose your response. Therefore, you can feel more in control of yourself and how you react to events.

This can then help you with your decision-making as you can make an informed and proactive choice with many more options in front of you.

Let me help you to choose awareness over judgement

For further help to increase your awareness and support through difficult situations, then book an appointment with me where we can spend the time addressing judgements and help you to experience more freedom and better decision-making.

I would love to hear your thoughts on the challenge and look forward to bringing you The Expand Your Awareness Five Week Challenge, Week Two.

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References:

Accessconsciousness.com. (2018). About Access Consciousness | Access Consciousness. [online] Available at: https://www.accessconsciousness.com/en/about/ [Accessed 14 Apr. 2018].

Accessconsciousness.com.  Are You Choosing Awareness Or Judgment? – Access Consciousness Blog. [online] Available at: http://access-consciousness-blog.com/2014/12/are-you-choosing-awareness-or-judgment/.

Psychology Today. 4 Ways to Stop Fearing Other People’s Judgment. [online] Available at: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/having-sex-wanting-intimacy/201701/4-ways-stop-fearing-other-peoples-judgment.

Psychology Today When Others Judge Us. [online] Available at: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/acquired-spontaneity/201307/when-others-judge-us. Why Judging

Psychology Today Others Is Bad for You. [online] Available at: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-addiction-connection/201505/why-judging-others-is-bad-you.