Stages Of Awareness, Making Lasting Changes In Life

The most difficult thing about being successful in life is to make and adhere to the personal changes required to both attract success (whether in business or in this context, in a long term relationship that serves to lift all involved and is happy for the majority of its days), and then to allow it in.

As social beings in Canada and the US (and other places too, I just can't speak for their cultures), a lot of the information we receive about how to behave as we're growing up doesn't aim us towards these goals, however. We're not taught to "attract" success, we're taught to charge in after it and to "fight for it". And anyone who allows success into their lives suddenly gets labeled as a "bad guy" in some way, usually by pointing at how the "little people" are doing all the work and the successful one is a societal leech or predator.

The combination of these two modes of thought is a motivation killer, and creates a society of people who talk about working hard for success on one hand (while simultaneously sabotaging their own efforts so they're not REALLY successful) but who actively refuse to accept the benefits of success out of guilt or fear on the other.

Not all people are like this of course, but if you've been locked in between that "rock and a hard place" feeling, you know what I'm talking about.

For me, in the journey towards self-awareness and personal success in being able to keep in a positive state the majority of the time, I've spent a lot of time dwelling on the topic of Motivation, and how it interacts with its opposing forces.

In my growing awareness, this one story has been more useful to me than any other in explaining the inner process we all go through as human beings when we decide to make a change in our lives, to counter-act some motivation-killer or to find a way to augment the motivation we already have. It is a story of the Stages of Awareness, but unlike the rest of the references I see when I search in Google.

It is written as an autobiography, but I did not write it originally. Yet, it can still be used as an autobiography of any of us, because what the author speaks of is the universal truths and patterns behind making a real and lasting change in your life:


AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN FIVE SHORT CHAPTERS

by Portia Nelson

I. I walk down the street. 
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. 
I fall in. 
I am lost … I am helpless. 
It isn’t my fault. 
It takes me forever to find a way out.

II. I walk down the same street. 
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. 
I pretend I don’t see it. 
I fall in again. 
I can’t believe I am in the same place but, it isn’t my fault. 
It still takes a long time to get out.

III. I walk down the same street. 
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. 
I see it is there. 
I still fall in … it’s a habit. 
My eyes are open. 
I know where I am. 
It is my fault. 
I get out immediately.

IV. I walk down the same street. 
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. 
I walk around it.

V. I walk down another street.



My next entry will provide a Real Life example of someone progressing through these phases of awareness as he removes toxic influences from his life in favor of healthy, rewarding ones. Getting divorced, recovering, and finding the love of his life who treats him exactly as he wants to be treated.