Once a skill is mastered, it becomes a subconscious competence. You could say it dives beneath the surface. You don’t need to think about it anymore – you just do it. These subconscious competences guide our actions at each step along the way. We hardly remember we ever mastered them in the first place.
As with any skill, people vary in how good they are at it. One person may be better than another at balancing cognitive, emotional, and behavioral aspects. Some people are very good at self-motivation, getting themselves into action with ease. Others are less good at it. Some people are better at decision-making than others. Top athletes, successful professionals, and entrepreneurs are more competent at self-guidance than the average person. A few hints are all they need to decide on the right course of action. Perhaps you have excellent self-guidance in some areas, even though you are less competent at it in others.
Are you aware of the difference between what you do and how you do it?
We often don’t use the track of reflection and self-guidance until some- thing starts to go wrong. At that point, engaging in self-guidance becomes a necessary detour on the way to success.
I advise you to choose this track consciously, so that you will discover the treasures it has to offer for your development. Too much of our attention gets caught up in what we do. Reflecting on how you do it is about being aware of your relationship to what you do. It is about the underlying choice for critical thinking, listening to your own conscience, and being aware the way certain events have an effect on you. You become an ‘agent’, a being with the will to shape life in a conscious way.
You can choose to stop fighting for something and just wait patiently instead. You can choose to go through life with optimism. You could even choose to approach a conflict in a beautiful way. Self-guidance is a way of emancipating yourself from overpowering circumstances. We used to be much more dependent on such circumstances, such as labor conditions, family patterns, dictatorial politics, or patronizing religions. Today, the main challenge for emancipation lies in economic and political patterns. Nobody is forcing you to live expensively or to be busy all the time. When you think about it, all individuals in our western society are free to arrange their own lives, but this hardly becomes apparent from the way we behave. There is far more space to move around within the limits of freedom than the space we allow ourselves. Even though the idea of free will is subject to debate, it is still a value worth defending: be critical about what other people tell you to do, and start taking your life into your own hands.
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