I’m going to be honest, I wasn’t sure whether to write this blog or not. It’s not because of worrying what others will think, fortunately I have put out hundreds of posts, podcasts and articles over the years to get over that degree of fear of rejection, although I do have a fear of rejection on some other levels. It’s because my mind is coming in to dominate again and try and logically tell me ‘this makes no sense to be using my time with’, I should be focusing on my sales work and podcast strategy (which I do also enjoy of course). My heart feels a lot more called to share this and says it is not a waste of time.
My intention is to share more of my mental health journey as a man and in particular today I wanted to talk about how my growth in self awareness has significantly improved my mental health. I first of all, will share a little bit of what’s been going on for me and then how I’ve been able to improve some of my challenges with self awareness and the tools to do so.
First of all I wanted to share just my view about what mental health is to me as I know it’s a sensitive topic. I believe we all have mental health, just for some of us it’s not where we would like it to be, just like physical health. I feel for the sake of keeping it simple it’s how mentally healthy I feel in order to deal with the demands of every day life both internally (within myself) and externally (everything else). I won’t go down the rest of that rabbit hole.
I’ve shared a few times in the last year, yet just to share again that most of 2022 and 2023 were probably the hardest two years of my life. A mixture of personal and professional challenges, which in themselves weren’t the actual pain rather that they were activators to a lot of internal challenges I had repressed and suppressed over the years.
As a result I’ve done a lot of work on myself, reading, giving up things, coaching and generally exploring new experiences. There have been times I’ve felt amazing and other times I’ve felt really down whether that was intense sadness, anxiousness or pure anger. To be totally honest though I sometimes enjoy the feeling of anger as I feel I can convert it into something healthy when channeled correctly like working out for example.
Self awareness has proved to be an incredibly valuable thing to consider in my life for both when I feel awesome and not so awesome.
Some examples of what makes me feel awesome:
- Writing and making content
- Exercise – especially hard workouts
- Being around certain people
- Learning from certain people
- Reading
- A nice coffee and walk (although not too many coffees)
- Breathwork
- When I don’t eat anything, but fruits and nuts until dinner by energy is through the roof
- Having supportive coaches in my corner
Plus a few more things…
Some examples of what makes me feel awful mentally (things in my control):
- Alcohol – which pains me to say even a little can severely make me sad and down, when I partied away through my twenties
- Being around certain people, even if well intentioned can drain me
- Too much sugar
- Too much coffee
- Looking too much at social media
So how do you put this into practice? Well that’s how my mind thinks all the time. When I hear or learn something I always want to create a system so here is what works for me:
- Every single day at the end of the day I will score the 6 areas of my life: physical, emotional, spiritual, relationship (friends and family), relationship (dating) and financial/business/career. I will have the current goal in each area e.g physical health, have 10/10 energy as much as possible or financially making x amount a month. Then under each score I will write what I did each day and why that score is why it is. This allows me to consciously see what has improved me or not.
- Twice a week I do breathwork, this allows me to go deeper into the body and feel stored emotions and release them. I also have a 1:1 somatic coach I work closely with to go deeper into my emotions looking at a variety of breathwork practices, nervous work regulation, inner child connection and more.
- Once a week I do a deeper journaling session, usually with one of the breathwork sessions (typically on a Sunday). I go through all my learnings and reflections from the week and some great questions to ask myself I’ve pulled together from one of my mentors Joseph McClendon and a lot of questions from the book From The Core by John Wineland
- Throughout all of these and day to day life I note a series of ideas that I could do and how I implement them into life. Each week I then organise my week and fit in the ideas into my routine and life.
Ok this might seem a bit excessive, it’s really not though I make sure I just have things scheduled and I have time realistically what works for me. I believe you don’t plan your life your life will plan it for you and you might not like what gets put in. Although I find it important to plan, sometimes life will come in and give a different turn, direction or opportunity. The old me used to fight and resist this, guess what though? You can’t win a fight against life or reality…. It will keep winning! So instead I readjust my plans.
Overall though self awareness practises like these have dramatically improved my mental health. Having a list of things I read daily massively helps for self awareness. I’m by far not 100% consistent all the time with doing all the things that are amazing for me and avoiding the things that aren’t. Yet being on top of this the majority of the time has done wonders for my mental health.
How can you improve your self awareness and make changes in your life?
Jonny
By Jonny Pardoe
©The Self Esteem and Confidence Mindset Ltd 2024
