Create Awareness, Create Change

Most people this time of year usually start off the year with the intention to lose some weight and to live an overall healthier life. In my opinion, when you are serious about accomplishing this goal, this is the greatest gift you can give to yourself, your loved ones, and your career and activities. The reason is this: the better you take of yourself, the healthier you become. The healthier you become, the stronger your relationships will become and the more satisfying your job and other activities become. Not because those things change, but because you change.

Living a healthier life and one of wellness is a goal I wish everyone would try to accomplish. It can be overwhelming; especially if you know that you are not very healthy in the moment you make the decision to live healthier. However, you don’t have to make huge changes right away in order to accomplish your goal. It is really about making small individual changes that add up to one big change overtime. Each individual change creates momentum for the next change. To make changes though, you need to create more awareness.

Many people are not even aware of the fact that their physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health affects the rest of their lives. Many people believe that their lives are a struggle because of all the things that have happened to them. They don’t realize that their thoughts, feelings and behaviors create much of what does happen “to” them, which means for the most part they create their own realities, however, painful they are. They also don’t realize that even while things might happen to them that they cannot control, they don’t react well to that situation, which creates more problems down the road.

To live a healthier and happier life, means you must make changes. In order to make changes you must become more aware of your thoughts, feelings and behaviors. The awareness you have of yourself holistically, the more you will respect yourself. The more you respect yourself the more likely you will be to participate in behaviors and activities that protect who you are and reinforce your health and wellness, and the less likely you will be to do the opposite. This awareness alone is usually the key ingredient that is missing for most people when they are living an unhealthy life. For example, if you smoke cigarettes on a daily basis, you may not be aware as to how badly cigarettes make your body feel, because for you that feeling is normal. You may even believe that cigarettes make your body feel better because physically your body craves the nicotine so much. However, the less you smoke and the more you exercise, the more aware you become as to how badly cigarettes really make you feel, therefore, the less likely you will be to smoke as much and as often.

Awareness is key for most of us when making changes we want to stick. You will not make changes if you are not convinced of the long-term benefits. However, becoming more and more aware of long-term benefits takes time. Learning to create awareness around the benefits of healthy behaviors and activities, as well as to the detriments of unhealthy ones, is what will eventually help a person make the shift from living a primarily unhealthy life to a healthier one. It takes time and patience because you will have to forgive yourself for falling off the wagon because we all fall off. But the difference is if you get back on it and try again because you know how much better you feel and how much more enjoyable life is when it is healthy.

Creating awareness is done mentally, emotionally, and physically. All of these components affect each other, and they all integrate to affect the body as a whole. The more aware you are of what thoughts you have, the more aware you become of your emotions. The more aware you are of your emotions, the more aware you are of what behaviors you will engage in. Usually, negative thoughts create negative emotions, which then usually lead to us participating in some negative behavior that can have a negative effect on us physically.

For example, many people think certain thoughts continuously throughout each day of their lives and they are not even aware of them. These are usually old tapes that were recorded years ago by significant others in that person’s life, and they are usually negative in nature. Take for instance if a woman was told continuously that she was fat as a child, this might be something that she still tells herself today, whether or not she is really fat.

However, as she goes through her daily adult life she thinks this to herself. Each time she looks in a mirror, or puts on clothes, or gets in her car, she thinks to herself unknowingly, “I am so fat”. Just that thought then makes her feel bad, depressed, or even frustrated. When she feels depressed she is more likely to engage in behaviors that she believes makes her feel better, while it is usually only for the short term. Behaviors like eating certain foods that comfort her, drinking alcohol, buying clothes, and even working. As these types of behaviors are done continuously over time, they then create other problems, many of them physical. Problems like being overweight, abusing alcohol, having too much debt, or working too much, all create physical problems in some way. The stress alone that some of the behaviors create lead to heart conditions, high blood pressure, cancer, and having a weakened immune system just to name a few. Everything is connected.

Awareness is key to realizing all of this, as well as making healthy changes. As a wellness coach, I help people assess their lives and help them create awareness around how they are treating themselves mentally, emotionally, and physically. I then help them identify what small changes they can begin implementing into their daily life. As they make these small changes I then help them become more aware of the positive affect those changes are having on their lives and their wellness as a whole. I also help them connect their negative behaviors to the areas of their lives they feel are not working. The more changes they make, the more they see and become aware of. It takes time, and it takes determination, but it really is not as hard as people believe it is to make changes and live healthier. Once you become aware of the benefits and actually feel and see the benefits play out in you own life, you don’t want to ever go back to where you came from. Why would you when your life becomes so much more enjoyable, more energetic, more fulfilling, more meaningful, and overall better?

The exciting thing to recognize is that whatever in your life is not working is something you have complete control over. You cannot always control what happens to you or around you, but you always have control over how you respond and what you do with your circumstances. You have control over so much more in your life then you believe you do, we all do. You just have to believe, acknowledge the truth about where you are, hold yourself accountable for your own problems, and then decide to create more awareness around what you think, feel, and do, and finally begin to make changes. Small changes at first, huge changes in the end. This is how creating awareness, creates change.