How do I grow my real authentic self?
Here are some basic keys. Each one will open a different door for you. Think of this as your menu. Each can help you grow, how and why.
There is no set sequence or order. Start with one of the list you feel like. There are so many different ways.
It’s important that you, alone choose the ways that you like best. To be real and authentic you need to make the journey along your chosen path, at your own pace, climbing up your own awareness hill not mine or anyone else’s hill.
The list below is a start. You’ll find more detailed explanations in the “Reading” section of this website, where soon there will be many pages, once I get them all loaded.
Starting point:
This is where your ability to take back control of your life begins
Here are a few basic understandings that need to be laid out clearly at the very beginning, as the starting point for each and every kind of self empowerment, or self awareness work you will do in your life.
Summary - Short list
1. Tuning in to energies and emotions makes whatever you want happen faster with less work.
2. Emotional Age awareness EA is a skill that adds understanding about everything that you feel and think and do and say.
3. Vulnerability is a core issue for everyone.
4. You have sets or pairs of opposite energies.
5. Ignoring either side of an opposite pair can lead to all sorts of problems.
6. Instead, balance the two opposite energy states. Learn how to before you need to.
7. Doing and being, are key opposites So are your personal and impersonal sides
8. You are involved every day in Power and Control issues. Pay attention and take note.
9. Welcome change, embrace your options and feel the joy
10. Embrace and protect your Reality
11. Accept, honour and protect each of your real feelings
12. How well can you Make Things Happen, Get things done? A way to check your growth.
Explanation
1. Whatever we are doing we get better results when we include our energy states, our regular behaviour patterns in the work alongside our words and logic. Adding these when we are looking at what we do helps us see more clearly why we are thinking and feeling and saying things.
Words alone don’t give a clear enough picture. Expecting to find a logical reason for so much of what people do doesn’t work. But tuning in to energies* and emotions adds a much clearer understanding and makes whatever you want to achieve happen faster with less work.
That way you connect to the parts of you that are not ruled by logic or analytical thinking, powerful parts of you that words can’t reach. We may see ourselves as ‘civilised’ but underneath parts of us are often still ruled by instinct, intuition and other energies.
Like all creatures we also tune in to the energies in people around us and react accordingly, partly out of reason or logic but often more in an instinctual way guided by one of ours and one of their particular energies that have (temporarily) taken control.
You can’t avoid them, can’t hide from them, can’t get rid of them. And you can’t use logic or reason to work them out!. But it’s so important to include them in whatever work you are doing today. They are an essential part of your life.
* Here I describe them as energy states but they have many other names. You might know them as sub-personalities, schema, behaviour patterns, attitudes, it doesn’t really matter as long as you recognise them. There’s a non technical description I prefer, the well known term ‘inner selves’* which gives you more of a sense that each one has a personality of its own, it likes to talk and dialogue freely about what they do to help you every day.
* with full acknowledgement to Drs Hal and Sidra Stone, Martha Lou Woolf, Miriam Dyak and all the other pioneers of the amazing Self Awareness process called Voice Dialogue.
2. Emotional Age awareness or EA is a skill that adds essential understanding about everything you feel and think and do and say.
Your energies are visible as repeated patterns of behaviour, and they help shape your personality. Each one has its own emotional age. Traditionally people talk about emotional ages such as parent, child and adult. That’s not very accurate because the so called ‘parent’ part is actually very young emotionally.
It’s just pretending to be grown up. The EA coloured wheel is a clearer picture of what’s really going on.
EA groups WING, STAR, PYRO and SAGE
Your STAR patterns are logical but may be a bit short on feelings and empathy. WING patterns are mature, flexible and more authentic and more grown up.
The PYRO ones developed in childhood as your first inner protector patterns when there was nothing else to protect you. They remain forever young, emotionally. PYRO stands for Protectors, Young but Ready to act instantly and inclined to Over react.
Some PYRO go to battle the world like brave but very young kids, others fight like rebel teenagers. Some play the ‘pretend parent’ role. Most of them are stuck with an attitude that there still isn’t anyone else on your team who knows how to protect you as well as they do.
Because they were there first, and have been on your team so many years, the PYRO team believe you can’t rely on newer parts like WING, or STAR. When things get really difficult for you, the young PYRO just take over automatically but they can only protect the same old way.
EA gives you the ability to see this happening and consciously connect to your more real, more powerful energy patterns, your grown up parts to then better protect all of you and specially your most vulnerable part, the PINK on the EA wheel.
EA helps you strengthen the parts of you that other people find hardest to control or manipulate. EA also helps you understand what drives other people to think and feel and do and say things to you.
3. There’s one central issue that your energies, your patterns, your behaviour, your thoughts and words and your EA teams are all working on. - vulnerability.
You’re either handling your vulnerability (positive) or hiding it (not recommended).
The reality is that all living creatures are vulnerable. We are all vulnerable all the time, at ever-changing levels anywhere from 1 to 100 (nobody ever gets to zero). Recognising this is happening and working with it is part of the work you need to do every day.
Show your vulnerability in grown-up ways.
Acknowledge it, accept it. That increases your personal power and your intimacy skills. Hiding it blocks your authenticity and limits intimacy.
Sharing your vulnerability (but only when it’s safe or with safe people) is a key to increasing your personal power. You are then many times more powerful than people who bottle up, hide or mask their vulnerability.
Example: You make a mistake. Acknowledge it in a grown up way then get to work fixing it in grown up ways.
4. You, like everyone else, have sets or pairs of opposite energies.
Patterns or energies, or thoughts or feelings that are most active inside you, each come in pairs and the two that make up a pair are likely to be two that hold the strongest opposing energies. Think of this as a bit like a ‘law’ of nature.
“For each of your energy states or personality patterns within you, there exists an opposite energy or an opposite personality.”
That’s why they are a pair.
Your pairs are unique to you alone, not the same as anyone else’s. Sometimes one of the pair is outside of you or seems to be outside of you, at other times both are inside you.
5. You can never get rid of either of them but hiding, blocking, or ignoring one side while giving too much attention to the other one can lead to all sorts of problems.
You can’t remove either one of them and if you try to, that’s the one that will then cause you problems. It may appear to be safely hidden but it will still find ways to rock the boat until you reconnect with it again. What you can do is balance the two.
6. You can balance any two opposite energy states. Most times it’s quite easy.
If both opposites are focused on the same issue, but taking opposite sides, your job as a grown up is to hold them apart, linked but in some kind of energetic counter balance.
As soon as you identify a pair like this you’re on the way to balancing them. The more times you balance any two paired opposites the less the problems and the better your life becomes.
Balancing isn’t difficult. It’s really a natural process. But it needs to be flexible, like a see-saw not a fixed 50/50. Learn how to do it before you need it.
7. Doing and being, the difference
Let’s start with two key opposites. There’s an important difference between you, being you and you, when you are doing things. The clearer you are about this difference the harder it is for anyone else to control you or stop you being who you really are.
Being you and what you are doing each happen daily in so many different ways. You may need to work on balancing each way quite a few times until they all settle down.
Another pair are the parts of you that hold you in personal or impersonal energies.
8. Like it or not, your are going to get involved every day in Power and Control issues. Keep an eye on what’s really going on. Pay attention, notice and take note.
Those two factors are at work inside you, outside you and all around you all the time. Power and control issues are at the heart of every relationship, personal or impersonal. If you don’t see what’s happening clearly you can’t protect yourself or your reality. You will lose some power.
Worse, unless you are keeping track of what’s going on, other people can be taking power and control from you even stealing your sense of being who you really are. You need to prepare ahead to have enough protection ready when you need it, which you will, sooner probably rather than later.
Whatever patterns that are the energetic opposites of Power and Control can be very unique and you need to know what yours are like and how they work.
9. Welcome change and embrace your Options.
There are almost always more than two possible ways of making a change. Those ways are there waiting for you to notice them. Options are a significant part of your personal power toolbox. They not only add to your power, they’re also more enjoyable because they increase your sense of self empowerment and highlight the freedom you have as a grown-up to choose what you can change and how you change.
Looking at options frees you from thinking you can’t change and polarised (black or white) thinking.
10. Embrace and protect your Reality
Your reality is your personal property. It will be accurate most of the time, but if, sometimes, it’s a bit off target doesn’t mean you should let anyone else tell you their reality about what you do or who you are being is any better. Usually theirs will be at least as out of touch as yours. Embracing your reality consciously and balancing it with whatever opposite gets in the way of your reality adds to your sense of reality. Protect it. One opposite of reality is denial.
11. Accept, honour and protect each of your real feelings
That makes it much harder for anyone else to undermine or unbalance you. They can’t get at you at that point any longer.
Blocking your authentic emotions so other people can’t see them, especially your vulnerability, hides your real self from them and from you too. It doesn’t make you safer or stronger. See the list of authentic feelings click here
12. How well can you Make Things Happen, Get things done? A way to check your progress
How good are you at making changes in your life? Can you consciously work with choices and options while you stay in your power. In the end this is the best measure of how well you are doing your work.
These are your twelve basic keys.
Work with them and you can look forward to many positive and powerful experiences. Keep in mind that every one of these is a do-it-yourself process. No one else can them it for you. No one else can really tell you about the best way for you to be the real you.
