What Are My Personal Blind Spots That I Have Been Unwilling To Look At?
Questions have power! 32 Questions: A Personal Quest Through Questions is my book. This is your invitation to engage with important questions to ask yourself. This week is all about Question #7 in 32 Questions: What are my personal blind spots that I have been unwilling to look at? {ALSO- As we enter the Christmas Season, be sure and check out my E-book Christmas Presence{Linked here} It includes simple questions, a few reflections, to bring more {Purpose} {Pause} and {Presence} to your holiday season. This is a tough question. It is a question that we should gently ask ourselves, with curiosity. With the expectation that we will learn something that can be helpful. Let’s embrace that we have room to grow! Room to grow means we are alive and engaged, that we care about ourselves and how we interact with those we love. Growth is good! Looking around with courage AND grace to see the opportunities for personal growth means we are engaged with our lives and not living on autopilot. The people closest to us could probably answer this question with great ease. It is a “blind” spot because we cannot or choose not to see it. We all have blind spots, it is not something that is unique to only you. It is a universal truth; a part of our shared human condition. Observing life has been a theme in conversations and reading over the past week. I was talking with a friend who has a lot of BIG things happening in life. After getting caught up on an overview of all “the things.” I asked him, “How do you manage all this and not go crazy? What tools are you using?” His answer was surprising, and not surprising all at once. He said, “I am a curious observer of my own life.” I could immediately see how that position was helping him be engaged and supportive; yet detached and not a victim of circumstances beyond his control. “If we can’t self-observe, we can’t self-correct.” Christopher L. Heuertz The Sacred Enneagram How do we identify and find our personal blind spots? These are a few questions that may be helpful. I heard someone talk about an exercise that could be another tool towards uncovering personal blind spots. He said that he wrote down all of his “self-talk” for a day. It is one thing to catch yourself, yelling, shaming or chastising yourself; it is another level to write it down. The step of writing his self-talk down was when it started to sink in that he often treated himself with great unkindness. After listing the ways that he talked to himself he had to imagine saying those words or phrases to a close friend. He said, “I would never say to a friend what I say to myself.” It is a difficult, but powerful exercise in self-observation. Perhaps listening to how we “speak” to ourselves for a day would start to provide some hints to the blind spots in our lives? Thinking about blind spots is not always easy; but, it is a tool for growth and awareness. It is how we grow, and growth means we are LIVING life, not letting life pass us by. Blind spots, like any of the 32 Questions is a question that we get to carry with us and let it roll around in our head and heart and observe what we learn as we live with the question. “Time is what we spend our lives with. If we are not careful we find others spending it for us. . . . It is necessary now and then for (one) to go away… and experience loneliness; to sit on a rock in the forest and to ask of oneself, ‘Who am I, and where have I been, and where am I going?‘ . . . If one is not careful, one allows diversions to take up one’s time—the stuff of life.” ― Carl Sandburg Enter your email to subscribe– It’s only ever used to notify you of new questions from The Art of Powering Down. Don’t forget to download Christmas Presences {Here}!!
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