What’s awareness got to do with it?!
Autobiography in Five Short Chapters
By Portia Nelson
I.
I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I fall in. I am lost. I am helpless.
It isn't my fault.
It takes forever to find a way out.
II.
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I still don't see it. I fall in again.
I can't believe I am in the same place.
It isn't my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out.
III.
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it there, I still fall in.
It's habit.
It's my fault. I know where I am.
I get out immediately.
IV.
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.
V.
I walk down a different street.
Clients often doubt the importance of building awareness about our feelings, thoughts, and behaviors in the coaching & counselling process. I get it - it calls for a lot of effort, time, and energy, yet it too often feels like there is no immediately traceable effect to it. Our behaviors do not change over night after all.
It is not seldom that after some repeated efforts to build such awareness in our sessions, clients reflect back and almost in a surprise realize that they actually made use of that awareness. They managed to catch themselves in a moment when they were about to step into an old behavior that was recognized as unhelpful. In other words, only when they were able to see the hole and consciously choose another street, they realized the effect of what initially seemed to be close to wasted effort.
Such moments of realization are precious - they are crucial for cultivating hope that change is, indeed, possible, and as such, they also reinforce our efforts to maintaining such desired changes.
For any change initiation and maintenance to happen, though, such building of awareness needs to be accompanied by a willingness to take responsibility for the content of that awareness. In fact, awareness and responsibility are tightly coupled. In other words, if we see the hole on the street and know the consequences of walking down there, then we also own the responsibility for choosing that very same street over exploring an alternative path.
Awareness + responsibility allow us to initiate change.
Something I would add to these ingredients highlighted in the poem is patience and self-compassion. Personal development and change take time and no matter how hard we try to remain aware and how willing we are to take responsibility, life can bring along new demands that can cloud our awareness or take from our energy. In other words, we can find ourselves slipping onto the sidewalk with the deep hole all over again. In those moments, it is important to account for the internal and external context within which we are operating and offer some understanding and compassion to ourselves. A little encouraging nudge in those moments can take us a long way and away from the old path, one small affordable step at a time.
And don’t forget, we are all just walking on the streets of life sometimes managing to find the ones with fresh new concrete, at other times slipping onto familiar streets with old holes in the sidewalk, and again at other times we get surprised by discovering brand new holes in yet underexplored streets.