Auto-Pilot

An introduction to this platform... do you go through your day on Auto-Pilot?

Transcript

in this episode, I want to focus on the term autopilot, because I find it to be quite an interesting metaphor for how our minds work. Autopilot essentially means that your mind is going about daily activities without having to think a lot about what is going on. So that could be like walking somewhere or just practicing an activity that you've gotten used to doing. So I would say from that, I want to uncover why we as people need to continuously challenge ourselves to allow our mind to grow and not just like stay put and essentially become detached from life. And I also want to look at how we lack the self awareness to actually look at what is going on in our minds when we're not having to think so much about what we're doing, what thoughts go through our mind that we are not conscious of, because these thoughts and these things that are going on in our mind are essentially painting our vision of life like how we go through life, how we look at life. It's all determined by how you interpret it in your own mind, right? So I think this is actually a really good first episode, because it just sets a ground base of talking about our minds. It's so complicated. Ben, I think when you start to introduce a topic of like self awareness, we get to kind of see how self awareness brings so much power to our life. Like with self awareness, you're almost able to do anything. You have so much more power over yourself, over your life, because you understand the patterns that go through your mind. You start to understand yourself more. You gain an ability to just change what you are not happy about, and you're able to maintain or even grow the elements of yourself that you think are good and sustainable for the person that you want to be. And that's it. So I'm actually quite excited to talk about this. I'll be real. I want to start off by saying our awareness of our thought pattern helps us gain a clearer understanding of our lives. Much of what we perceive or experience comes from our own minds. We can go through like two months and feel like it's all merged into a blur, like of a long, long day or maybe a week. And I would say, in my opinion, that's because we are so disengaged with our reality that we don't actually set time to become aware of the things that are going on around us. Rather, we're just in our thoughts, and we are recalling things that don't actually exist in the present moment of where you are, and you're missing out on actually experiencing things that are going on externally. So when you are very much living within yourself. You're living in your own timeline. Like two months isn't really two months, it's however long you've been focusing on a specific thought and then moving on from it. That's your timeline. Whereas when we go away, when we go away to another country, to a different place of scenery, we're kind of forced to get out of our heads and look around, maybe because we just don't know where we're going. So actually forced to see where the next right is, or, like, see where the next left is, because much of what we do is on autopilot. And that is a good thing, because that means that we can keep progressing ourselves, and we can keep learning. Like, obviously, when we were kids, we don't know how to get ready, we don't know how to wash ourselves. We had to learn how to walk. But once we were able to do that, it's it doesn't take so much thinking and so much effort. We just we do it naturally. We don't really need to engage with the event to succeed in it. Like, obviously, when you're getting ready, you're not consciously thinking, like, Okay, I'm gonna put my head over my shirt now. Okay, I did it. That's a success, you know? Like, that's we don't really think we're very much disengaged with our actions, and that can be a good thing. But I think because all of us, or the majority of us live such repetitive lives. Well, we wake up, we get ready, we go to whatever we need to be, we somehow make our days merge into one fat day. We forget what we do, because we're just we are because we're repeating so much of what we're doing that we just don't really have the time to think for ourselves. I think it's very important for us to manage how we spend our time, because we are able to learn and grow like, that's, that's the whole purpose of us doing things on autopilot, like, it's a gift that we're able to do. Otherwise, we would have to keep relining, like how to fit our clothes, like we'd always just be stuck. So with that, we don't want to conduct all of our day on autopilot. We're in this state of like stagnation, almost, because we're not allowing our brains to engage with our reality. We've programmed it to do certain things, such as, get ready read, but if we're not constantly opening ourselves up to a challenge to make our brain live up to or grow, then we are not growing as a person like we are very much staying put. And I think challenge and change is such an important thing to embed in our lives, because that is essentially what life is like. Everything and everyone around us is changing all the time. And I believe that when you don't put yourself in a position where you are able to change as a person, you kind of go into this, like, self destructive mode and like, I know that term sounds so violent, and probably it sounds like exaggerated, because it is. But if I'm not allowing myself to face a challenge, like, I don't know, go on or run or like whatever. And if I find myself like waking up to have nothing to do, I'm I'm entering this, like self destructive state of being where I start criticizing myself that I'm not doing enough. And maybe that's linked to something different, but I guess, I guess that can link to our minds being on autopilot, because that comes with not doing anything with your life. And so you have nothing to challenge yourself, and you have no you're not giving yourself an opportunity to grow. And because this world is so dictated by change, you therefore force yourself to change in a route that you're not dictating for yourself, like setting a goal and setting a challenge is essentially setting an experience for you to be able to change into. And so when you don't actually plan and actually set a conscious decision to put yourself through an experience where you are able to change if you don't do that, you kind of like let life take you. And you kind of let life change you, because whether or not you want it again, like life will change you. Like events will change you every day you are slowly changing into the person that you will be in the future tomorrow. But if you don't plan that, and if you don't actually sit down and decide where you want to go, your brain will continue. University, float in a state of autopilot, where you're not really aware of your reality, and you're kind of letting life take you, and you're letting experiences happen to you, and you just won't really come out as the best version of yourself, I would argue, and you'll enter this place of just self destruction, because, again, like you're not, you're not so engaged with the world. And if you're not engaged, you're like you just your life would just lack meaning, like you become very disengaged with yourself. That that is what will happen if you live life on autopilot. You don't have control of your mind. You let your mind travel through thoughts, engage with your day to day life, and you therefore become disengaged with yourself. You don't actually know yourself. You're just entertaining your mind with thoughts that don't really matter, and you just live a meaningless life that can spark up like so much shit for you, which is probably why I say you go into a state of self destruction. Because when you're disengaged with yourself, you are so susceptible to like, insecurity, envy, or just overall, like just depression, because if your life is not meaningful, unless you're okay with that, you're not going to be happy with yourself, especially if you don't understand yourself either. If you compare that to someone that is very conscious with themselves and tries to challenge themselves, you just don't get the same result anyway. I kind of want to move forward, and I want to talk about something that I've been observing in my life. And I kind of, I just want to call it a time scale, because I'm also, I think we all run our brains on autopilot, like it's it's a daily thing. Like, I don't think a lot of us can escape from it, but we can try avoid it as much as possible. So when I started, like, observing what's going on around me, what I started doing was in the evenings, like before I go to sleep at night, I would kind of write down what made my day. I do that because it's a kind of self awareness. It's a type of self awareness strategy that makes you think about the experiences that you've gone through in the day. And what I found was that what I started writing like two things and simply through writing that I remembered so much of my day that I've just forgot. And if I didn't actually start writing it down, I would have just forgotten everything. And I ended up writing like, almost a whole page of like, what's just happened in my day. And it kind of shocked me, because I'm like, How did I go through so many different experiences in one day and not be so conscious of that, and not be so, like, aware of it or or feel it, if that makes sense, like, how did I go through a whole day and feel like I haven't really, like done anything when really, like, I have done quite a lot. And that to me, like, that question in itself, like to me, it means that I just was not engaged with anything that was happening. My brain was not so connected with my life at that moment, I was somewhere in my mind thinking about something stupid that I cannot even remember. And I start to think, like, How many times have I gone through a day where something really good has happened to me and I was just not engaged to even, like, be grateful about it, I didn't, I wasn't present enough to actually take that as an experience. What I feel like, I'm trying to say, is that you need to be 100% or you need to be, to a high extent, engaged in your reality for it to feel like you are experiencing something. Things can be happening in your life, but it can only be defined as an experience when you are engaged in your life, when you want to accept the experiences, because you can go through your life in your mind, and therefore you don't actually experience anything. You just experience what is going on in your own head that comes with self awareness. That's why self awareness is so important to know and so important to practice. I try practice that all the time. I try be as focused and as present as I can be just so I can be learning and experiencing different things. Do. Every day, it's a very I feel like it's a very powerful thing, like, I think it helps you question your reality, because also another thing that makes us kind of turn off our minds is the idea that we think we know everything around us right, like we've seen trees, for example, so many times, like we see them every day, we don't really need to, like, look at them or observe them, whereas when we are like, really, really little kids, we want to stare at them like we want to look at them. We want to gain something out of them. And we do, and because we've done that in the past, we think that we don't need to do it anymore. But in fact, like, we don't really, it's not just trees, it's just a basic example. Like observing the things around you, it helps you see the things that you don't actually see initially. When you are being self aware with yourself, if it takes you, like, a minute to think, fuck, like, what did I do yesterday? That should be a lesson to you that you did not engage with your life. This does lead to another topic that I'll briefly touch on in later episodes. I would want to talk about self belief, self image, our energy perspective, I would like to say, and I would say that all of that pretty much links to your own self awareness of who you are. I guess that's why I wanted this to be your first episode, so we can, kind of like, explore our minds habits in this perspective of not putting ourselves into a challenging or a place where you need to think more than you do, a place where you can grow develop your skills that you already have.