The importance of introspection. Changing Lives, Episode 7

How we feel underpins what we think, which then becomes our life experience. We only listen for 14 minutes at a time, not 45, not an hour. So, we have a 14-minute attention span. And what we think about something, about anything really, determines how we experience it, or impacts our success.

Let us take money, for example. If I am going to feel great about it and I am going to tell my brain that I feel great about it, my brain in turn is going to send out enabling hormones into my body, which give me something called “attentional awareness”, which will enable me to see opportunities around me.

If I use the same word, ‘money’ and I have a bad relationship with it, I will send that information to my brain. I will go into the fight or flight of every segment of my brain and send out debilitating hormones. And the brain cannot differentiate between ‘money’ and a ‘sabretooth tiger’, so it pushes it (money in this instance) away in fear.

We can do the same thing in every aspect of our lives. We can do things like eating disorders, exercise relationships. So, when you say where people say thoughts are so important and they are because you have got to be aware what you are thinking. I don’t disagree with that. But what is more important is that you have got to be aware of how you feel about that thought.

Sometimes we are more conscious in certain areas in our life and sometimes we are unconscious in other areas of our life. In this episode we chat with psychologist Louisa Niehaus about conscious thought.

Consciousness is a state of being, which is the state of awareness that exists in ourselves and in relation to us and our environment, and consciousness can change depending on what or whom we meet. So, for example, you can reach an altered state of consciousness through meditation, through prayer and through psychology. Consciousness is metastatic and we are constantly evolving in a state of flux around consciousness.

William Shakespeare was correct. All the world’s a stage and the men and women merely players. We wake up in the morning, as our authentic selves. And even before Covid, we still put our figurative masks on. We put a personality on, we put a certain way of dressing on. And depending on how we showed up after this, was our mask we were wearing.

“So, we might have done our hair a certain way or worn sports clothes or corporate clothing or whatever it might be. And that was the mask. And when you meet different people, you projected what you wanted them to see about you, hear about you and feel about you.”

If we superficially putting on clothing, makeup, hair, attitudes, position to show up, surely there is a lot more behind the mask. So, ask yourself, regardless of what face you have got on for the outside world, who’s behind the mask?

What if you are a Gollum, the cave-dwelling character from Lord of the Rings, and you are so miserable and so angry and so scared and so fear based, but projecting this incredibly wonderful exterior? Others may look inside and see a tiger bouncing around, so bored and you just do not want to be in a suit, but life demands that of you. “It is fascinating for me how different people project an image of who they are, but behind the mask, there is so much more going on. This is Changing Lives Episode 12.

The power of an image can be immense. Photographer and artist Angie Lazaro, Tanya and Thabo discuss the move from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age in Changing Lives, Episode 11.