*No dad jokes were harmed in the making of this post.

Awareness is just a loaded-potato of a word nowadays.

Every mommy blogger, travel couple, entrepreneurial podcast and everything in between talks about awareness in some form or function. Because of it’s popularity it’s easy to dismiss and roll your eyes over towards something else, with a ‘yeah yeah yeah’ type of attitude. But doing so means you’re missing out on the benefits of what awareness can bring to your life.

I define awareness as the ability to understand what’s going on around you. And if you can understand something, you can act upon it.

Awareness is a tool to help us see, feel and live a life true to our purpose.

It’s also a tough nut to crack.

Why is it so difficult to carpe the diem?

Is living in the present moment only for yogi’s or goat monks**?

(**Monks with goats, not goats who also happen to be very in-the-moment monks)

One thing to consider is that awareness It’s something we all have, yet don’t always have it turned ‘on’. This is natural. Doing 100% of anything is a sure-fire way to overwhelm your senses and cause your brain to melt. As you look around where you are, your brain is hard at work. Your subconscious is picking up every little sense going on around you, but is locked into passive mode. Something colorful, weird, or threatening might turn up your awareness or even put you on high alert, like the bygone days of seeking fruit and food in the wild or avoid predators. But typically your brain is just filtering out most of your input. Too much input is a great way to paralyze yourself from working on your goals or handling problems.

If we think of awareness — or seeing, noticing, feeling, understanding — as a state we can dip in and out of, we can practice using it as a way to tap into natural-born wisdom and understand more about what’s going on around us and within us.

Think of awareness like a pair of glasses we can put on to see better. It’s always within reach, but not always on. Not wearing your glasses makes things murky and less clear, but not necessarily bad. Wearing your glass makes everything look like it’s in 4k OLED HD Super Retina.

By setting periods of time to practice or focus on what’s around you and what your feeling, the more you can heighten your ability to understand and see. Awareness gives you the ability to slow things down and break them down into their components of information quickly.

Awareness gives you solidity — people can feel the calming weightiness of your presence.

Awareness grounds you — it gives you a foundation to stand on, even when everything is not going well in your life

Awareness gives you wisdom — it grants you pause and clear headed thinking and heart before doing.

It’s not an absence of the future or ignorance of the past but a way to channel and focus on what’s important right now.

STAY BOLD,

Keep Pursuing,

— Josh Waggoner