Awareness: The Beginning of Everything — Beneath The Surface
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What's essential to know is that awareness is the starting point for everything that matters because you can't change what you can't see. You can't grow beyond what you're unaware of and you can't live fully if you're moving through life asleep to your own patterns.

Awareness is the gateway. It's what lets you see where you're reactive instead of responsive, where you're on autopilot instead of fully alive, where you're living from old stories instead of presenting your authentic truth. Now, awareness is not always comfortable. Awareness will confront you. It will show you where you're out of rhythm, out of alignment, out of integrity. But it's also going to show you something else.

where your power lies, where your patterns are, where your possibility exists. So in this episode, we're not just going to talk about awareness as a concept. We're going to explore how to practice it, how to cultivate it, and how to let it reshape how you see yourself, your life, and what's actually true. Because awareness, it's the beginning of freedom.

Welcome to Beneath the Surface. I'm Sean Delaney. This series is a space where I bring you the ideas I'm sitting with most, the ones I can't let go of, the ones I return to again and again in my own life, and the ones that show up constantly in the conversations behind closed doors with high performers, creatives, leaders, and people who are on the path like you, not just to do more, but to feel more alive while doing it.

Now, these episodes aren't about giving you another strategy or chasing another version of success. They're about going a level deeper, getting quiet enough to hear what's underneath the noise, and remembering what actually matters and then how to feel more alive while doing it. So if you're looking for a place to slow down, think deeply, and reconnect to the part of you that most of the world forgets to speak to, you're in the right place. Let's begin. Let's go beneath the surface.

How I define awareness is this. Awareness is just the ability to see without immediately reacting, judging, or needing to fix something. It's that simple. It's that quiet inner space where noticing happens, where you're no longer inside the thought, the feeling, the trigger, but you're aware of it, watching, listening, noticing it without becoming it.

Awareness is what allows you to pause before that reactive pattern, to witness yourself without adding the story to what's happening, to be witnessing your life without being consumed by it. This is not self-analysis. It's not overthinking. It's the moment you realize, I'm not just the one acting. I'm the one seeing. And when you have that shift, that's the beginning of freedom. That's an unlock. Because the moment you can see clearly,

You begin to choose differently. You move from autopilot to authorship. You're no longer reacting, but now you have the ability to respond from unconscious momentum to conscious presence, right? This is what Osho said. Awareness is the greatest alchemy there is. Awareness is the greatest alchemy there is.

So awareness is not just a soft skill. It's not some woo-woo mystical spiritual thing. It is the foundation of every meaningful change in your life. Let me say that again. Awareness is the foundation of every meaningful change in your life. And one of the biggest myths, one of the biggest myths around awareness and self-development is that being smart means being self-aware. That if you're thoughtful, reflective, or successful, you must be living consciously.

But awareness isn't the same thing as intelligence. And it's definitely not the same thing as thinking. You can be incredibly articulate, wildly productive, and still be completely unconscious of the why driving your behavior. In fact, so many high performers, you know, the people who are sharp, they're dialed in, they're effective.

But when you slow it down and you really get under the surface, what you find many times is that they're not always chasing purpose. I can't tell you how many clients I've worked with, brilliant, brilliant, capable, high-achieving people who thought they were being intentional. But when we slowed it down, what we uncovered was this. They were running on unconscious scripts, old beliefs, childhood patterns, internalized expectations. They were not creating from clarity, even though they thought they were.

They were moving in a direction, but unfortunately, it was the direction that they didn't want. They were just unattuned to it. This is what Thomas Merton meant when he wrote, people may spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall. Is your ladder leaning against the wrong wall or the right wall? When you're unconscious of what's driving you, it doesn't matter how fast you go or how far you go.

Because success will always feel hollow. You can be doing everything right, but it won't feel true. This is what Jung meant when he said, until you make the unconscious conscious, it will guide your life and you will call it fate. That is why awareness is so important, because awareness is not just knowing what you're doing, it's knowing the story underneath what you're doing.

Something that is important to hit on here is awareness isn't just asking a question you ask once in a while, right? You sit down for an evening reflecting your journal. Awareness is a way of seeing moment to moment that cuts through your autopilot. Awareness is the difference between living and watching yourself flip. You're in the middle of a pack calendar. You're racing between tasks, this thing to that thing. And suddenly something pauses long enough to ask, wait, what?

What am I actually chasing right now? What is all this pressure I'm putting on myself? Or did I inherit this? Awareness is that. That's awareness. It's not intellectual. It's interruptive. It pulls you out of the trance, out of the autopilot, out of the go, go, go without really being there. Because many of us live our lives at full speed, but completely unconscious of why. Why?

Why do we have all this urgency, all this speed, all of this intensity? We call it drive. But often it's just unresolved fear dressed up as productivity. And when you finally catch the pattern, when you shift from being thrown around by the storm to becoming the quiet eye of the hurricane that's perfectly calm,

That is when everything begins to change. The moment you become aware, you stop being a passenger in your own life and you start becoming the author. You empower yourself to make the choices and take the actions that are in alignment with who you want to become and the life you want to create. You now have agency when you create awareness. And with agency comes responsibility.

By responsibility, I mean, will you make the courageous choice? The one that goes against some of the conditioning and the patterns, the one that really calls on all of your inner resources. Makes me think of the great line by the poet David White, the price of our vitality is the sum of all of our fears. Awareness gives you the ability to make the courageous choice, but you need to be courageous to do that. You need to be courageous to live in alignment with who you want to be.

So when you cultivate this type of awareness and this type of courage, you stop chasing what never needed chasing. You stop performing roles that were never yours. You stop clinging to that momentum that was really taking you in the wrong direction. That's what I mean when I say you move from reaction to intention. And this can be startling. This can really be startling at times. You might wake up in the middle of your life and realize, huh, my ladder is leaned up against the long wall.

This career path I'm going down is actually the one I really hate. This is not for me. So it's not always easy. On this episode, I'm not going to dive into how to make some of those big changes. I might do that on another episode. But I just want to make you aware of what awareness can do. So if you're thinking I'm pretty self-aware, I just invite you to look again. Because awareness isn't how good you are at analyzing your thoughts.

It's how honest you're willing to be about what's driving them. Here's something people also don't realize. Awareness, it does not begin in the mind. It begins in the body, in sensation, in breath, in subtle language of your nervous system. It's before your mind forms a thought, before your emotions really start to take shape. Your body already knows. The body speaks first. The mind explains later.

Awareness means you listen before you translate, before you create that story in your head. Because your body always knows when something feels off. It knows when you're forcing it. It knows when you're pushing past your truth just to keep up. And if you pay attention,

It's speaking to you all day long, right? When you've got that clenched jaw, when you've got that shallow breath, when you open your inbox, you know, it's that subtle flutter in your chest before you say yes to something that you actually don't want or don't want to do. That's where awareness begins. Not in thinking about what's happening, but in feeling it in the subtle, quiet, easy to miss things when we are moving too fast.

But the moment you start to track those micro signals, that's when you begin to change your relationship with yourself because most of our patterns are just unexamined reactions.

Think about that. Most of our patterns are just unexamined reaction. You know, tension has become our new baseline in life. We feel it should be that continual state. And overriding our instincts, everything I was just talking about, those body signals, that just becomes completely normal. We've trained ourselves to ignore the signals until they scream. But what if you didn't wait for the scream? What if you caught it, those subtle signs when they were still a whisper?

What did you learn to listen when your life begins to whisper? Totally seamless plug for my book, When Life Begins to Whisper, but it really is all about deepening our relationship with pain, awakening, awareness, and love. So if you're interested, you can check that out. But back to whispering, back to that awareness.

All it is is about can I catch the moment before the old reaction takes over? Can I feel the heat rising before I lash out on my partner or kids? Can I notice the collapse in my chest before I just naturally people please? Can I sense that restlessness before I reach for my phone and endlessly scroll instead of being here? This is what it's about.

When you catch that moment, the moment before the moment, you shift from autopilot to agency. You step off the track you've always run on and you give yourself a new option, you know, a choice to breathe, to soften, to enter the moment now instead of just reacting. So here's a little practice invitation. Start tracking the moment before the moment.

that small shift, catching the buildup before the behavior or the reaction, that is where transformation begins. Because once you feel what's true in your body, I mean really develop a relationship with that feeling in your body, you don't need to mentally convince yourself anymore. You know. And that knowing, that's your compass. That's where presence begins. That's where your life begins. That's the root of every sustainable change that's ever lasted.

So slow down, tune into those signals, start listening to the signals underneath the noise because your body has always been speaking. Awareness just asks us, are we finally ready to hear it? Okay, so now that we've slowed down, now that we're listening, let's talk about what awareness reveals. Because once you begin to notice, I mean really notice what's happening inside you, things start rising to the surface. And not to punish you, not to overwhelm you,

but to free you. Awareness, it's like turning on lights in a room that you've lived in for years, and then all of a sudden you start noticing, oh, huh, there's all that furniture I've been tripping over. Huh, you know what? The walls, the layout, this doesn't fit. The stories on these walls, they don't work anymore. And you start seeing your blind spots, you know, those micro reactions you didn't know you had. There's subtle little habits you thought were, hmm, this is just how I am.

But are all just survival strategies. They're coping mechanisms. You start to see your default patterns. The times you say yes when you would love to say no or meant to say no. You know, when you're shutting down because all of a sudden you're starting to feel vulnerable. Or you're over explaining just to avoid being misunderstood. Because gosh, God forbid someone misunderstands you. It's when you start filling every silence because stillness is just too much to handle.

Do you see how awareness unlocks so much? Awareness is what you want to train. It's what you want to cultivate. You see, most people, what they're going to do is they're going to focus on these one-off strategies on how to change a routine or this pattern.

What I care about is unlocking the principle that shows up in a million variations. Awareness is one of those principles. It is the gateway to unlocking all of those patterns and behaviors. Makes me think of the line by Bruce Lee. He said, I don't fear the man who's practiced 10,000 kicks, but I fear the man who's practiced one kick 10,000 times. Awareness is the kick you want to practice 10,000 times.

When you do this, you also start seeing the beliefs that you inherited, but you never chose, right? Those conditioning patterns and awareness is how you unlearn them if they're no longer serving you at this stage in your life. We have to remember certain beliefs, certain ideas, certain routines, certain patterns served us and we needed them at a certain point in our lives.

But it might be time that they're holding us back and we need to unlearn them because they're no longer serving us or the life we're trying to create. Something incredibly important to hit on here is when you're aware of these triggers, you need to meet them without judgment. When you meet them with judgment, you start being at war with yourself. What you want to do when you cultivate awareness

is allow the thoughts to come. Allow them, meet them with curiosity, with intrigue. The way I think about this a lot is you almost want to be like a detective of your own thoughts with the lightness and the idea of like, huh, that's interesting. Because what happens when you try to meet them with force or you become even more angry by the triggers, all of a sudden you're at war with yourself and you want to avoid that at all costs.

So how we start cultivating awareness in our daily life. Like I said in the beginning, awareness isn't a breakthrough. It's a practice. It's not something you unlock once and you're done.

It's something you return to over and over, moment by moment. Because awareness doesn't live in the dramatic moments only. It lives in the in-between. The spaces that always seem so ordinary but actually matter and shape everything. The way you breathe before that challenging call. You know, the pause or maybe even the lack of it before you respond to your partner. Or maybe it's the story that you tell yourself when you mess up or you fall behind.

These small micro moments, they are the front lines of awareness and they're training grounds for who you're becoming. So let's talk about what cultivating awareness really looks like day to day. Number one, slow down before you respond. This is the concept I call slowing down to speed up. When you slow down, even for just half a second, that pause, there is so much power there. It's the difference between just reacting emotionally from an old wound and responding emotionally.

to who you want to be now. When you slow down in the moment, you speed up to living in integrity with who you want to be in the life you want. Next, use your breath as a check-in, not just some coping tool, right? It's not just in meditation, not just when you're burnt out, you take a deep breath, but before the moment builds, before the meeting starts, before the big decisions, before you pick up the phone out of habit, take one breath.

Let that one breath be the entry point that lets you settle into your body. So when you take that breath, just relax your shoulders, loosen the jaw, soften the belly, and just really think deeply. Am I connected to myself right now? Is the action I'm about to take in line with who I want to be? That breath creates the pause. And in that pause, you can make a choice. Next,

Track the story you're telling yourself because you are always telling yourself something. You might catch yourself saying, oh, this always happens to me, you know, or no, no, I can't slow down or I'm going to fall behind. Or you know what? Yeah, I've got to prove myself here. Awareness. You start catching those narratives and you start to notice them and you don't want to notice them to shame yourself. But like I said, be the detective to question them because the moment you ask, is this actually true?

gives you the space to figure out if you want to rewrite that script. Next, remember that awareness should be more like a light switch, not a floodlight. You do not have to see your entire life clearly all at once. That's not how transformation is going to work.

Flip the switch in one room, one moment at a time, right? One breath, one pattern, one truth at a time. And guess what? Over time, your inner landscape, it begins to change. What was unconscious becomes conscious. Where we were reacting before, all of a sudden, we get to respond.

Autopilot no longer. Now we are attuned to ourselves and to our life. And this is how you build awareness in your life. Not by mastering it, but just returning to it again and again. And over time, mastery may occur. But mastery never occurs if you try to fast forward too much. Just begin building awareness in this moment.

It's not about being perfectly mindful. The goal is not to never lose presence. The goal is to lose it less often. And when we do, come back faster. Because that's how awareness gets embodied. That's how it stops being a concept and starts being a way of life. So let's bring this full circle.

Awareness isn't the end goal. Awareness is the beginning of everything. Because the moment you become aware, you are no longer living on autopilot. You're no longer running programs you didn't choose. You are no longer mistaking the momentum you're building for real meaning. You start waking up inside your own life and you begin asking, is this worth my time and attention? And there is that choice where you no longer have to react. You can respond.

Now you're not pushing. You are attuning. You're moving from a deeper place and not the one that the world expects you to move from, but from a place that's true within you. That is where clarity emerges. That's where life starts to feel like it's actually yours again. And here's the thing to remember. You don't have to become perfectly mindful. You don't have to see the whole map. You just have to start paying attention consistently.

moment to moment. Let that noticing guide you. Let that rhythm build. Enjoy the next breath. I'll see you on the next one. If this episode resonated with you, if it stirred something, opened something up, or even challenged something, I'd love to hear about it. You can connect with me directly at whatgotyouthere.com. That's where you'll find my writing, my books, more about my executive coaching work I do with the people who want to live and lead from a deeper place.

And if this episode made you think of someone, a friend, a teammate, a partner, someone who's been in the grind and might need to hear this, send it to them. Because sometimes all it takes is a single conversation to shift the direction we're heading in. Again, it's whatgotyouthere.com. You can reach out, learn more, or just say hi. I always love hearing from people walking this path. Thanks for listening, and until next time.