Awareness is a tricky thing. Sometimes we think we are aware of what’s happening, but we are not.

The difficult part is that awareness runs deeper than our conscious state, so we must reflect on our experiences to go a little bit deeper. You can build a deeper level of awareness by asking yourself the right questions and listening to realistic answers. In a conscious state, we can change what’s not working and learn to respond in a different, better way.

Deeper level of awareness

We cannot get at the root cause of what’s happening by allowing things to just happen to us. This unconscious response happens without us thinking about it. At this level, we cannot change our response.

When we start to become aware of what we are doing we still need to go a level deeper to self-reflect. It’s in this place that we learn to understand what is happening, why it’s happening, and the impact of this current chain of events. For example, you serve the tennis ball and it always goes into the net, and you keep doing the same thing over and over – that is your unconscious response. Or this could be anything in life. What is something you do over and over that does not give you the results you want?

“insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result”
-by Albert Einstein

In order to change this cycle, you need to be aware that something unconscious is happening, either mentally or physically. Something is happening with your serve. One thing is happening that isn’t obvious. You might be thinking negative thoughts just prior that is getting in the way of you being able to get the serve in.

To increase your awareness, you need to self-reflect and drill down to what that negative thought is. You need to replace it with something more positive and train yourself to use that more positive phrase every time you serve the ball.

Questions to ask yourself

Here are some questions you can ask yourself to get to the awareness level and the self-reflective level. Think of the tennis example above, and ask yourself…

1. Awareness questions
   a.  Where do my thoughts go at the end of each point?
   b.  Where do my thoughts go as I prepare to serve?
   c.  What am I thinking about as I serve the ball?
2. Self-reflection answers
   a.  At the end of the point, I am thinking about not double faulting.
   b.  As I prepare to serve, I am thinking about how I need to put a lot of pace on the ball.
   c.  As I am serving the ball, I am worried about it being in.

Now, do the same thing for something that challenges you over and over. Write down three questions about that event you would like to have more awareness around. Now, take a minute to self-reflect and write down the realistic answers. It might be obvious or it might take some practice to dig deep into your unconscious and realize what is happening.

Make change

It’s important to dig into the awareness and self-reflective levels of your situation. Without these levels, you don’t have a clear picture of what’s going on and can’t act to create change.

Now, let’s figure out what to do different –

3. Solutions
   a.  I am going to develop a between point routine that helps me reset, stay out of my head, and get ready to serve the ball.
   b.  I am going to develop a pre-serve routine that helps me stay out of my head and allow my muscle memory to serve the way I know I can.
   c.  I am going to decide where my focus needs to be while I am serving (which is not in my head) and flow through my service motion away from any continued thinking.

It’s your turn to think about the questions and answers from above and write down the solutions that can make change for you and give you new perspective.

Guidelines for lasting change

• Write down your thoughts on the awareness, self-reflective and solution aspects of your situation as we mentioned above. This takes it out of your head and makes it more concrete.
• Talk to a someone you trust – a parent, coach or friend about what you’ve written down. Sharing it and getting some good feedback can make a huge difference and potentially provide you a sense of accountability if that’s something you want. This also helps you lead conversations around your own process of change versus others telling you what they think you should do.
• Listen to the answers – we sometimes ask ourselves but don’t listen. Ask. Stop. Say out loud. Listen.
• Create a plan to move forward – Once you have these three written down you can set some goals as a roadmap to utilize the solutions you came up with. Whatever solutions you come up with, just know you can’t try it once and throw in the towel. You must commit to the process and use the solutions you came up consistently every day – for instance, every serve for at least a week.

Awareness is your friend for life

It’s important to ‘peel back the onion’ in order to get at the root cause and to make change. You can do this…

• Ask yourself AWARENESS question.
• Dig deeper around what is really going on and answer with some true SELF-REFLECTION.
• Develop SOLUTIONS that resonate with you.

Lasting change takes a little bit of a concerted, consistent effort and it’s not always certain what IS going to work for you. The exciting part is that awareness and self-reflection are hard but once you have that foundation then you get to play around with the solution that’s best going to help you. Usually it’s a couple of small things.

Remember, just because something doesn’t work the first time, don’t give up. Hang on for a bit and then if it doesn’t work, make very small changes. Tweak it until it does work.