Making the unconscious conscious

This week, I had a conversation with someone who, among other things, is working on being more present moment by moment in her life.

This sounds like an insignificant thing, but being present requires incredible self-discipline and deep internal work and awareness.

Turns out one of the things keeping her from being present was that she didn’t have a designed time to check her e-mail, and instead compulsively checked it on-the-go.

This is one of the surest ways I know of to not be present for your life.

So she created a designated, bounded time each day to check e-mail, and now she gets to track progress with this.

Defining your outcome goals & process goals

In this example, being present is an outcome goal.

But there are process goals that enable that outcome.

And one of those process goals is being disciplined with technology.

Outcome goals are necessary because they provide direction.

Process goals, however, are key, because they determine what actions you need to take to realize the outcome goal.

Tracking builds awareness

You can track your process goals, because they are things you do on the way to achieving your outcome goal.

And when you track, you can see where you meet your process goal, where you are falling short, and what adjustments need to be made.

I cannot overemphasize the importance of tracking.

It needs to become a habit for you, like breathing.

Track, track, trackity track.

Tracking is the name of the game.

Once you have a few weeks of accumulated data, then you can see trends.

You can see if you’re hitting the process goal you have for yourself or if you need to adjust.

Without this awareness, you just have a vague sense if you’re on track, but no specific data to point to.

A created life

When I speak of living a created life, I mean a life that you intentionally create all the way from your identity to your daily habits.

Most people never do this, and instead, live a default life.

When Carl Jung said, “until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate,” I think he was referring to tracking.

That’s what tracking does for you. It makes the unconscious conscious.

Photo by Audrey Donnell

What process goals do you have?

Track your way to a created life.

Love,

Audrey