Conscious Acts, part 1

Hey, name’s Dave. I’m a guest columnist here on “The life ledger”. In reading Cris’s article about Point of Awareness and how it’s an important part of fitness, I recalled similar thoughts I had when loosing all my weight.

Becoming aware of what drives you allows someone to be able to change their life for the better. This is especially critical in telling the difference between wants and needs. And strange thing is Cris isn’t limiting this to just health. People can usually tell you what they have in their wallet. Or what they had for breakfast. But if you ask them how much they have had to eat all day or where they are in making progress towards retirement and you get a confused look.

So I’m going to talk about the other side of the equation – Conscious Acts. Can you recognize that moment at which you can resist an impulse. Stop yourself from buying that snack or DVD. Glad to hear you’ve learned that. But now what? Well that depends upon your goals. You have those defined right? Written down somewhere? While having that goal is good, you need to make active progress toward achieving it. It’s not going to happen on its own. So your course of action is…

Well, sometimes there’s an easy answer. That single clear choice that brings you closer to your goals. But sometimes the PoA and resulting Conscious Act can be subtler.

You’re out to lunch with old friends at the nearest Greasy Spoon. After placing your order, Gertrude asks from behind the counter “Whatcha want to drink hon?”. Without breaking your conversation you say “Mr Pibb.”

Habit just bit you in the ass.

Eating is not an activity that Americans typically do by itself. We eat while running errands. We eat going from here to there. Because of this, ordering of lunch is typically regulated to impulse (bad) or habit (worse). It’s that impulse that (future link)Fast Food Frankie(/future link) takes advantage of when they ask : “Wanna supersize that?”. And if a goal is to loose weight you have to fight your habits. Mentally and physically you know what eating that meal entails. How long it takes to eat. How full you feel afterwards. In changing your (future link)diet(/future link) you may feel off balance, craving more food. That’s where the PoA catches the habit/impulse and Conscious Acts, what you do, work in tandem. Given a goal of Losing weight your Conscious Act could be to drink more water or reduce later caloric consumption. A goal of eating better could be to buy some roughage like lettuce, or even filling up on water, when you are still hungry.

These ideas are not just limited to health. Say something appealing shows up on a deal news-feed, say from Hot-deals.org , which happens to be one of my weakness. Or maybe a bad day at work and causes you go to either the mall or one of the Big Box Stores looking for stress relief. Both rely on impulse for that sale. By being Aware you can using that shopping venture to find out what specs exist instead of purchasing on impulse. Or if you have a particular item in mind, set aside money specifically for it.

The purpose of Conscious Acts is to take that awareness and move towards your definitive goals.