#oneappleaday

This is fascinating. I picked a BeTheChange card this morning. One that says "Being Creative by BEING who you are". This card is an invitation to explore my bigger me. It challenges me to think about when I'm most of who I am.

I started writing about the quest for who we are. But words weren't flowing. I wrote and rewrote each sentence.

How do you handle boredom? Do you ever feel bored? I do. Like in those weekends when the weather is grey enough to take away every desire to set a foot outside, and I want to lie down and do nothing.

I love doing nothing. I'm never tired of doing nothing. But my mind plays tricks with me. In those days when I'm doing nothing, my mind starts whispering.

"You're wasting your time again." "Shouldn't you do something meaningful?" "Why aren't you doing that work you've been procrastinating all week?" "Many things are happening in this city, and you're missing them all."

Journaling is one of the most common practices for self-exploration. I've been writing in my journal every morning for the last two years. It has been a vital component of my journey. Through this simple morning practice, I've learned more about myself, and I became more aware of my thoughts and actions. Though, lately, I felt a stuck as if I had peaked in this practice. The morning ritual of journaling was becoming almost mechanical, and my writing wasn't giving me any valuable insights about myself.

In her book Insights, Tasha Eurich warns us about the risks of introspection and self-reflection if we don't do them in the right way. It is easy to get trap in our thoughts becoming blind to our behaviours and how they are affecting our life.

So, a week ago I decided to shift from introspection to observation. While the first is about going inside and dig deep into thoughts and emotions, the second is about observing my behaviours, words and actions. It's like taking a step out and observe myself from the outside. I use my journal to ask straightforward questions such as:

Did you do your best to live your values, today?

Were your actions aligned with your long-term vision?

Have you done anything to serve the person you want to be?

If the answer is yes, I write about how I can keep doing it. If it's no, I write about what I can change or how I can do better.

What makes something important? This is the question that summarises yesterday.

Importance is very subjective. What’s important for me, or for my team, can be entirely irrelevant for someone else. Though, do you know what makes something more important than something else?

When you don’t have clarity about your metrics, you end up using other’s scale of importance, or urgency, or the emotions of the moment. In any case, you won’t be effective in your action because you won’t feel it as essential for yourself.

My measure of importance is informed by my destination. I start by where I'm going. My goals or, even better, my aspirations. I found that the most useful metrics is the one that helps me understand if I am moving, not just forward, but closer to my destination.

When I have to decide if something is important, I asked myself two questions:

Does it help me advance towards my destination?

In the last three days, I had at least three conversations about the awareness, knowledge and understanding. I'm reading this as a sign that I need to dig more on the subject.

The dictionary is always the right place to start.

Knowledge: facts, information, and skills acquired through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject.

Understanding: the ability to perceive the intended meaning of something; comprehension.

Awareness: knowledge or perception of a situation or fact.

The first thing I notice is that knowledge requires understanding. We can't really say that we know something if we don't understand it. David Weinberger says that "Knowledge without understanding is like, well, information". So, my "understanding" is that knowledge is not objective. Facts and information are objective, but knowledge requires me to perceive the intended meaning of those facts and information. My knowledge may be different from yours even if we start from the same information.

But what about awareness? Awareness is all about the experience. It is our unique experience of a fact or information.