It’s a precious gift, and you can only give it to yourself…
I’ve been sick this week. An influenza virus knocked me flat. Nothing dramatic, but enough to stop me in my tracks and force me to rest, slow down, and listen. And in that stillness, something important came through. Something I’ve taught for years and yet, like most of us, sometimes forget.
Self-awareness is a precious gift.
But it’s not something someone else can give you.
It’s a gift you can only give to yourself.
Human beings are self-forgetting machines. We mean well, but we wake up and the autopilot kicks in. The day begins, and before we’ve even had a conscious thought, we’re already in the pattern. Running scripts we didn’t choose. Responding the way we always do. It’s not our fault. It’s just how the brain tries to save energy.
But it costs us a lot. It costs us choice.
So how do you break the loop?
How do you remember who you really are, not who you perform as, or who you’re expected to be, but you?
Here are four practices that have helped me, and continue to help my clients and students step back into their own authority.
First, listen to your body.
Let me tell you about my former NLP mentor, Derek Balmer. Brilliant thinker. A true master of language. But he had a blind spot: he lived almost entirely in his head. He was blissfully out of touch with his own body. He didn’t notice the signals. When he got sick, he thought it was just the flu.
But it turned out it was pneumonia. By the time he paid attention, it was too late, and it took his life in 2000. The body whispers before it screams. Tension. Fatigue. Tightness in the chest. That weird heaviness in the gut. These aren’t random. They’re messages. And most of us are trained to ignore them.
So what if you didn’t ignore your body’s signals?
What if you paused, even for a minute each day, and asked, “What are you trying to tell me?”
What if you listened?
What might you notice?
Second, scan your mental field each morning.
Before your feet hit the ground. Before the demands of the day rush in. Take two minutes and check in: What’s bubbling up in the background of my mind? What am I carrying that I haven’t named?
This could be an unfinished conversation, a decision you’ve been postponing, or a feeling you don’t want to feel. You don’t need to fix anything. Just notice. Awareness dissolves distortion. That quiet act of observation is often enough to bring relief, clarity, or the next right step.
Third, start noticing your unresourceful patterns before they slide back into the unconscious.
We all have them. The knee-jerk reactions. The story we tell ourselves about why things always go wrong. The avoidance move. The critical voice. The small betrayals of our own values. These patterns are rarely monstrous. They’re usually subtle. And they become toxic not because they’re loud, but because they’re quiet. Familiar. Automatic.
The trick is to catch them in the wild.
To name them, gently but firmly.
To say, “Ah. There you are again. That old coping mechanism. That old defense.”
You’re not shaming yourself. You’re staying conscious.
From there, you can choose something new.
You can ask: What might be more useful, because you can interrupt the loop and install a better one.
You can literally rewire your brain through repetition and attention.
That’s how change happens. Not through willpower alone, but through bringing the unconscious into the light, over and over again.
Fourth, know your Enneagram type.
And if you’ve never heard of it, it’s an ancient Persian way of uncovering who we are, and it’s something so powerful that priests, psychiatrists, and psychologists are using it with their patients.
I used to think of the Enneagram as something akin to the Myers-Briggs system of personality. But the Enneagram is not a label. It’s a lantern. It reveals the unconscious drive behind your behavior: the core fear, the core desire, and the shape your ego takes to survive.
It’s not about putting you in a box. It shows you the box you’re already in, and how to get out.
There are nine types. Each one is a distinct strategy for navigating life.
A Type 1 strives to be good and right. They can become perfectionistic, rigid, or self-critical.
A Type 2 wants to be loved and needed. They can lose themselves in taking care of others.
A Type 6 seeks safety. They scan for threats and rehearse worst-case scenarios until they’re exhausted.
And each type has a gift when conscious, and a trap when unconscious.
To find your type, you can take a test at the Enneagram Institute (www.enneagraminstitute.com), but don’t stop there. Read the type descriptions. Watch how your mind responds. The one that makes you feel a bit exposed, a bit annoyed — that’s probably you.
Once you know your type, you start to see yourself.
You start to catch the trance you run in real time.
And once you can see it, you’re no longer being run by it.
That’s freedom.
These four practices — listening to your body, scanning your mind, spotting your unresourceful patterns, and knowing your Enneagram type — are a way you reclaim your awareness.
Not once and for all, but moment by moment.
Because we drift.
Because we forget.
Because we’re human.
And because we are, by design, self-forgetting machines.
But every time you pause and remember, even briefly, you reclaim a piece of yourself.
You restore your freedom.
You come home to who you really are.
And that’s where everything begins.
- Mike Mandel
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