Awareness Archives - Page 2 of 7

September 2, 2023August 10, 2023 by Pete Wiley

Big Impacts of Little Things—Getting a Handle On the Everyday

The stresses of daily life can feel overwhelming. Over time, the impact of everyday problems can accumulate and feel unsurmountable. Everyday stress is not about any single, intense, or life-changing event—instead, it’s about the daily headaches, hassles, and dramas. The effect can be hard to pin down. You start feeling tired, irritable, and anxious. You may feel like talking it out with someone, but you don’t quite know what’s going on. The impact can become overwhelming, and eventually, you may feel like it’s all too much and you’re dealing with it alone.

July 22, 2023April 20, 2023 by Pete Wiley

Mindful Existence—Learning How to Live in a World Full of Distractions

In the modern world, we have amazing technology that would have seemed like magic centuries ago, and like science fiction only decades ago. We’re connected with other people around the globe in an instant and think nothing of it. This past week, I was on video meetings with people from Hawai’i, New Caledonia, and Alaska and across the continental US, and it didn’t even warrant a passing mention. We also have literally every movie or TV show ever made available at any time. And if all of that doesn’t satiate our desire for distraction, we have a near infinite stream of opinions, status updates, shares, clips, and fails available from multiple social media sources, all the time. For people born in this era, it’s very easy to never have a time when our brains aren’t occupied by external stimuli, and as a result, to never learn how to live without distraction.

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June 10, 2023April 14, 2023 by Pete Wiley

Knowing People—Incorporating Empathy into Our Interactions

How much time do you spend getting to know people? Not just what they did over the weekend and how their kids are doing, but really trying to get a feel for who they truly are and what drives them. Most interactions take place on a very surface level. We engage in small talk or interact on the basis of what we’re intending to accomplish, and the rest is often just minimal politeness. There’s nothing wrong with a pleasant passing of the time, but if we become closer with people, we might have deeper conversations and get to know them better. We can learn to guide our interactions based on that knowledge and those insights. However, unless we make a consistent effort to get to know people andincorporate that knowledge into our interactions with them, we aren’t taking advantage of opportunities for much more meaningful and rewarding relationships.

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Indifference. Painting of a figure shut off from the world.

May 13, 2023April 6, 2023 by Pete Wiley

Why Should I Care? The Nature of Indifference

When we swat a mosquito, we don’t necessarily have any hostility toward it or its actions; we are indifferent. We are merely getting rid of an annoyance. That may be our attitude toward a great many things in the world—we don’t give them much thought, and we don’t care that much, if at all. For us to care about something, it must have some kind of emotional connection to us. We must have a reason for feeling something, positive or negative, about it and how we interact with it. Sometimes our indifference is affected for a purpose, sometimes it is genuine. Sometimes indifference is intentional, while sometimes it is due to a lack of awareness. Sometimes we are aware, but there is no emotional connection—there is no common frame of reference that would make us care. We can know something or someone well but still be indifferent due to how little they are involved in our lives. And, in the same way that we should be aware of why we have strong emotions about something, we should be aware of when and why we don’t.

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April 15, 2023March 30, 2023 by Pete Wiley

Understanding Intimidation—Why We Are Intimidated and How to Handle It

We all get intimidated from time to time, even the most confident among us. Sometimes we are intimidated for good reason, and the feelings of fear, anxiety, and apprehension are important survival tools. Other times, we are intimidated by bullies, and learning their psychology and motivations can help us to deal with those situations. But there are also times when we are intimidated by well-meaning people who, for some reason, scare us, make us nervous, or put us off our game. It is important to understand all of these sources of intimidation, where they come from, and why and how they affect us.

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