A couple of days ago I headed out an hour early for a meeting due to ice, snow and high winds. I hit the traffic just right and arrived half and hour early, since my throat was a bit scratchy, and I was beginning to cough, I stopped in at the grocery store across the road from my meeting venue.
I took a cart and since I wa not familar with the store, I had to stop and look up at the signs over each isle navigating my way around and thorugh the isles. As I looked up a sharp pain hit my heel and and lurched forward, my shoe came off and I knew that I had been rear ended by a cart behind me. Before I could find my shoe and regain my balance I got hit again from behind from a cart in my lower back.
OK….what would you have done?
This post is about awareness. What were my choices?
If I whirled around and glared at the person who just hit me twice, what would I have gained?
If I stayed forward, finding my shoe, regaining my balance and continuing on, what would have happened?
I know this is a “trigger” for you and most of you would go into “default” mode…right?!
I recently learned something that has really given me additional insight and deepened my understanding of some of the basic principles that I teach in my “Discovering Eve” program.
When we get “triggered”, we do absolutely go into “default” mode, and that process and behavior goes two more steps. This new knowledge hit me like a brick. I immediately knew that I was a victim of my own behavior, triggers and defaults in one area of my life. The A-HA Light Bulb went off big time for me!
Let me paint another picture here for you. Your triggers (or entry points) are your weakest points of entry into your mind, heart, soul, and behavior patterns. These are the moments when your default behaviors show up. We normally “lash out” in order to make ourselves feel good and vindicated. The other person volley’s back with their own lashing out or excuse. You both feel like you got something for your actions and the whole thing starts over again the next time the trigger is fired.
How great would it be not to get to the trigger at all? What would being strong through a specific skill-sets of using your own thinking and decision making to not go through this draining racket each time you were “not triggered”?
Need another example? OK, at this writing it is December and you know what that entails? You are down to the wire, and you still have things to do and shopping that must be done. You head out the door with a limited amount of time and cash. Parking in the next zip code you struggle through the parking lot to the Mall, and you are immediately assaulted by perfume bottles, music, messy display rounds and no clear way to your destination. You are fully engaged with all of your senses and perhaps in just these first 5 – 10 minute about to go into sensory overload. You become distracted and start picking up all the items that the store has so craftily placed to tempt you. You purchase, you become distracted and you are now close to the time you must leave.
What has just happened? How much of this is true? A small bit of this is true – but – the rest of it is the lure by sales, lights, color, smells, and sounds which take us off track and later when the bills come in January, and the impulse items are long since discarded or abandoned where is all the lure that put you in this place?
This is where raising our own awareness with a set of questions, a list, a focus and some grit and determination we can make it through. Now, I know it is so much fun to do that spur of the moment shopping and to be “in the spirit” of the season. OK…so you can do that…BUT, plan the time and the day. Take all your credit cards out of your wallet and take only a set amount of cash and the purpose for going.
These two things will actually strengthen you and raise your awareness.
