ars heroica

by Nagath

Awareness. Keeping it real.

Most people go about their day, never once thinking about why they do the things they do. Which is understandable, we don’t learn to do this in most schools. In most professions it’s not required.

But in the hero business, we need to question ourselves, so that we know what we do is real. A hero not only needs to be a good person, he also needs to do good deeds.

Here at the School for Heroes, we have a great opportunity to spend time on this topic that addresses both jobs.

If we really want to improve ourselves, we have to be critical of our performance. We have to make sure that we spend a lot of time and effort on what we want to accomplish and we have to make sure that the time and effort we invest is very effective. How do we get a sense of what we do is really effective? In sports, we look to trainers and coaches to guide us. For many other aspects of life we don’t have such services available to us. You’re on your own most of the time. But there are ways to still be able to increase effectiveness; for instance, looking at yourself in a mirror while practicing a presentation is a great way to improve your presentation skills. If you can’t stand in front of a mirror all day doing what you do, set up or ask someone to make a video of you in your daily routine, or while doing something that you would like to increase your performance in. Ask your friend to say a few good things about it because you will need it, you will deliver plenty of points that didn’t go so well. Next time around, you can spend effort in changing the things you didn’t like and stop worrying about the things that did go well.

Looking at yourself is a great way to improve yourself. What about your day to day habits, doing the things you do without putting any conscious effort into it? Unfortunately, you can’t have someone record everything you do all day long. 95% of what we do is automated and unconscious, habits that have formed by repetition. Something worked, well enough, and we stuck to it until we don’t know we’re doing it anymore. Luckily we have memory, we can stop and back track the sequence of events and how we responded to it. If you’re honest to yourself, you will find many things that you wished you had done different. Once you’ve been made aware, you have the opportunity to consciously respond to a situation that before you would have done on autopilot. This diminishes the strength of your habit. don’t worry if it pops up again, just keep on diminishing while your new response grows in strength.

Even more difficult, are our thoughts. we can’t write down our thoughts and moods every moment of the day. In fact, it’s quite hard to backtrack our train of thoughts to find the culprit that sent it off. Shortly after the moment, we can feel which thoughts we didn’t like, and at that point we’re in the opportunity to write down the thought and decide what to replace this thought with. Next time, we can break the train of negative thoughts by sticking something positive in there. This train will get shorter and shorter until finally we’re rid of it.

The culprit that sends off our thought trains is removed by knowing our responses. It is important because it shows us that we can choose how we think. we’re rarely taught how to think. Its easier to be taught what to think. We’re often not aware that we can choose our responses, and the emotions and actions that come from that. We can easily imagine an important event before it happens and prepare our responses ahead of time.

Awareness is a factor in all these parts of our life. Its in those moments that we get to see the truth about a part of ourselves and following that we will automatically adjust. No need to bang your head, let your awareness do all the work. It’s all you need to keep it real.