Where are YOU?
Do you ever frustrated or confused about undesired results you're getting in your life?
Sometimes unconscious habits can silently lead us in circles and suggestions and advice don't necessarily help us get to the root of the issues.
We've all heard the words:
Listen to your body
Take up your space
Be true to yourself
All good advice, but good advice can be misleading and frustrating if we don't know how to put it into practice. Here's what I mean...
If you listen to your body, what do you sense? What areas? What sensations? How should you interpret what you feel?
How would you go about taking up your space?
Try it. See what you would automatically do. Are you lifting your chest? If so, is that really your space? Did you know that lifting your chest can actually shorten your spine and make it hard to breathe?
You also have space in your back, sides, legs and feet. You have space in your arms and hands. The top of your space is the top of your head, which is several inches higher than your head and your head takes up space behind your neck as well as in front of it.
Most people don't feel internally what their space is and they actually shrink their bodies when they think they're standing tall.
And the last one...be true to yourself. Who is yourself? Where is YOU? Is it related to the where you sense your body and where you feel you take up space?
Whether you're trying to get ahead in business or as an artist...
you have an important message that you'd like other's to hear...
you want to be taken more seriously...
you'd like to have better posture to look more confident...
you'd like to not be overwhelmed by stress and anxiety...
or you're on a self-improvement or spiritual journey...
knowing where you are -- like literally knowing where you are physically provides a really solid foundation for moving forward in any endeavor.
No matter how you look at your dreams, goals, problems, stresses -- it is YOU experiencing them and if you don't really sense YOU fully in your space, in real time, you're missing out knowing what YOU are doing and that you can have agency over what you do from moment to moment.
Many of my clients contact me because they saw a photo of themselves and couldn't believe their posture, but the puzzling thing was that they realized that in the moment that photo was taken, they were not conscious of their body or posture at all.
There's a mismatch between what they sense and what's really happening.
What I can help you with is to get the outside eye to match the inside eye. I help people sense themselves from the inside. Our habits actually dull how well we can sense where are body parts are in space.
I can help you sharpen this sense.
Improving your body awareness helps with posture, but it also helps with the reasons that people end up with "poor" posture -- That they don't know where they are. That they don't sense themselves three-dimensionally, fully, in real time.
Once you sense your body fully, you know where you your body literally is, so it becomes easier to listen to your body and to be true to who you are moment to moment because you are aware of your whole self being there.
Learning this fundamental skill helped me to go from feeling insecure, lost, and helpless --
to confident and in command of my body and mind by being able to change unconscious habits that were affecting how I felt and came across to others.
My relationships with others improved
I felt like I had power and wasn't just reacting to what was in front of me.
And I learned how to sense ME from moment to moment.
And these subtle and powerful behavioral shifts corrected my posture
It might be surprising if you thought posture was something mechanical. It's much more than that. It's your physical state moment to moment and has an impact on everything you do.
TIP OF THE WEEK:
Here's one thing that you can start doing right away to get you more in touch with where your body is:
The next time you feel that your attention has gone completely onto something other than yourself - sense the contact of your feet on the floor. Don't tense anything or make this a distracting thought. Just a quick connection to the fact that you can feel your feet on the floor and then continue what you're doing.
If you'd like to take this experiment a step further, see if that feeling of your feet on the floor can stay present in the background while you're doing something like typing an email or talking to a friend. Think of this awareness like background music playing, peripheral vision, or sensing the temperature of the room.
How do you feel when you take one small step to stay connected to yourself and to remind yourself where YOU are?
Interested in expanding your awareness to transform your posture and presence? Check out my Free Training.