A Self Awareness Experiment.
Self awareness is fundamental to any form of personal development. If you don’t know where you are now, it’s fruitless to chart a personal growth path.
This is a very simple exercise that’s intended to increase your self-awareness, and point up areas on which you might want to focus in order to come to a greater sense of ease with the world.
The experiment itself will only take about 30 seconds – but you’ll want to set aside 10-15 minutes for reflection and journaling afterward. Because you will get in-sights from this experiment!
Please don’t click Show the preparation below if you can’t devote the time to this now. Set it aside for now, and come back when you have the time.
To do this exercise you’ll need a mirror and your journal (or something to write on).
Ideally it’s a hand mirror – because you may decide to perform the exercise several times, alternating with recording your insights in your journal. But a bathroom mirror will do if a hand mirror isn’t available.
Ready to go?
Read all the instructions here before beginning.
- Be curious and real with yourself. Allow whatever is your experience to be just as it is – it’s the only way to benefit from this exercise.
- Look into your left eye in the mirror – for minimally 20 seconds. It’s said the left eye is the gateway to the soul. That’s what we’re going for here.
- Release all concern about your physical features. This is not so much about your appearance, but rather how you feel and what you think when you look into yourself rather than at yourself.
- NOTICE! NOTICE! NOTICE! What feelings and/or thoughts arise?
- Stop when it feels like you achieved a valuable insight about yourself.
- Record your thoughts, feelings, and insights in your journal.
Ready?
Go!
There is no good or bad experience in this experiment.
Just your experience.
If you’re like most people you may have struggled with this exercise. Being completely vulnerable to your unfiltered ideas of the person staring back at you isn’t easy. Maybe even damn uncomfortable, perhaps?
If you noticed and journaled about your thoughts and feelings as you stared at yourself in the mirror, you may have achieved a big wake-up in your self-awareness.
If your experience wasn’t entirely positive…
Welcome to the crowd. Most of us are way tougher and more judgmental of ourselves than we tend to be toward others.
Please be compassionate with yourself.
The point of the exercise isn’t to get you to feel guilty about whatever you experienced.
It’s to realize how you feel about yourself right now. Which could be different if you were to do this exercise again tomorrow.
What you wrote in your journal is a valuable guide to who you (think you) are today. It’s up to you to discern what to do with that information.
Bonus Exercise
If you’re of a mind to take this exercise to the next level, try this:
- Look at your left eye in the mirror again.
- Say these words as many times as feels good: “I love you just as you are. You don’t have to change a thing to be worthy of my love“.
- Record your thoughts and feelings during this exercise in your journal.
If you really want to boost your self-love, make this a part of your daily practice.
Will you do me a favor?
It would be very helpful to me if you’d complete a little survey about this experience. I’d like your feedback if this was a valuable and useful exercise, or if you thought it sucked big time.
If you’re willing to take a 1-minute survey to help me out, please click HERE.
Blessings,
~ Bobby
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