Get Lost

By EVELYN TEH

No, I don’t mean to be rude, though really, I think we say that a lot sometimes, and most of the time, to ourselves.

In my past article, it was mainly about finding yourself lost (pun intended) when you least expected it. This article talks about purposely losing something, or getting something lost. I reflect a lot, and I need to think, it is part of who I am so naturally self-awareness is something less challenging for me.

The world advocates self-awareness because it’s supposed to help you look inside, look within to understand what you want, but more often than not, no one talks about what happens when the awareness actually occurs. In my recent times of self-reflection, I realise that this was the case for me.

The reflection has been fruitful, I have a certain level of awareness of what I’m searching for, and yet I’m asking it to get lost. Why? Because it is something that is so new, so different, I am not really sure I am ready to “be aware” of this awareness, if that is even possible.

And I think for a lot of us, it is not that introspection does not work, heck, it probably works so well we realise so many things that we are not prepared to realise. No one told us what to do when that happens, so we just tell this awareness to “get lost” and we continue brooding about how introspection is not working, not yet working etc.

Yet, that’s not really the case is it? It is not that we can’t do introspection; we just don’t know how to deal with this new discovery which may not even be as serious as realising your need to live in the mountains of Peru but more of realising that you want a slightly different life trajectory – that is scary enough thank you.

Question is, what happens now? To be honest, I am not really sure about myself. But I am thinking that being aware about how awareness scares us teaches us to be more authentic with ourselves. To tell ourselves that our “internal searching” has worked, and stop using the excuse that self-reflection is a waste of time and perhaps, just perhaps, listen to what you have realised and actually acknowledge it. How we work towards it is material for another article ;)

Evelyn Teh is part of the Leaderonomics Talent Acceleration team. For more information on our talent acceleration programmes, contact people@leaderonomics.com. Click here for more articles like this.