Want To Embrace The 4 A’s Essential To Increasing Your CQ (Centeredness Quotient)?
- Brainz Magazine
- Jan 31, 2022
- 5 min read
Written by: Ragini Elizabeth Michaels, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Conscious leadership embraces many qualities and skills. This includes meditation, kindness, authenticity, presence, compassion, empathy, humility, and mindfulness. It also requests resilience, flexibility of viewpoint, integrity, accountability, mental agility, and acting from a centered perspective.
Actualizing these rests upon the degree of your self-awareness and willingness to face what you find.
The development of self-awareness seems complicated. But paradoxically, it’s much simpler than you might think. Here’s the bottom line.
Self-awareness is the requirement for introspection and reflection, and a disciplined control of where you place your attention.
Focusing on these four A’s supports your embodiment of these traits.
Awareness Comes 1st
Awareness is like the scout in the pioneer days. Its job is to scope out the landscape of a topic or issue just ahead. Then it can inform your attitude, behavior, and beliefs toward your best success when face to face with its challenges.
For example, I often strive for increased visibility, recognition, money, or success. But I’ve found it valuable to stay aware of my unconscious penchant for remaining invisible, anonymous, poverty minded or destined to failure. If my unconscious mind believed I already had what I wanted, I wouldn’t be striving to find it. I’d be delighting in the joy and happy contentment that comes with having secured what I want.
This means your unconscious mind could become your biggest supporter in these endeavors. But when left out in the cold to fend for itself, it can be your greatest enemy.
The key to greater conscious leadership is learning how to befriend your unconscious mind. And that can only be done with awareness. The unconscious mind is a significant source of power. And you want that power on the side of building your mindfulness and presence in daily life, not disrupting it.
Awareness is your best friend and ally. It shows you where you’re living from moment to moment. Paradoxically, this is usually determined by the unconscious mind alone. Our conditioning, programming, beliefs, and sense of identity can wreak havoc when there is no conscious awareness present to redirect it toward the behaviors in alignment with who we want to be.
Attention Comes 2nd
Attention acts like a flashlight. Wherever you shine the light of your attention, consciously or unconsciously, determines what you’re going to do, think, and feel.
Often the light of your attention is focused on, say, either success or failure. This means you’re going to behave either as a successful person, or as one who’s a failure. In either case, other ways of behaving will remain out of view. This restricts your flexibility in adjusting your behavior, which is the hallmark of conscious leadership and conscious living.
If your attention is more like a floodlight, you receive a variety of ways to respond. This is because you’re privy to the bigger picture before acting.
Intend to use your awareness to locate where you’ve placed your attention: Sensations in your body? How you’re going to get in trouble if you don’t get the job done? The perks waiting around the corner if the big boss (or your spouse) is happy with you?
Once you consciously know where your attention is resting, you’re free to move it back to your breath or body or whatever mindfulness practice you’ve chosen to use.
This ability is fundamental to the skill of expanding your conscious leadership.
Attitude Comes 3rd
Attitude is a perspective rooted in judgment. It involves deciding whether you like or dislike, approve or disapprove of some person, action, or situation.
Without being aware of your attitudes, you’re subject to their conclusions.
And the conclusions will be good or bad based on your decision to accept or reject yourself, others, or a situation.
Attitude is determined by where you’ve placed your attention. Notice how your perception of the moment differs when you’re present to what is unfolding vs. focused on your stirred-up mind and flustered emotions.
Assumptions Come 4th
Assumptions are your beliefs. What you deem to be true and want to live by. Without inquiry into your assumptions, they remain automatic. That means they rest outside your conscious awareness.
This point is extremely important.
If there is no awareness of an assumption’s presence and power,
it will rule you with an iron fist.
Assumptions generate the perspectives at the root of your attitude or perception of anything (positive or negative, for or against).
Conscious awareness of your assumptions playing out in the moment results from an awareness of your attitude, which results from an awareness of where you’ve placed your attention.
To check out your assumptions, notice where you stand on any of these issues: politics, abortion, climate change, the death penalty, racial injustice, financial inequities, etc.
You’ll find it may be time to question some assumptions. Others you might defend with your life. Simply ask why you believe that assumption. Perhaps you’ll sense that some no longer seem correct, truthful, or perhaps aren’t as intelligent as you first thought.
This is the hard work of building conscious awareness. But the payoff is that every step of the way brings a greater freedom for you to show up in the ways you now desire.
Make Awareness Your Best Friend & Constant Companion
Awareness is the bottom line for conscious leadership and conscious living. I imagine you’re already practicing meditation, contemplation, or awareness of your breath and body. If so, you can expand that awareness to new inner landscapes and higher dimensions of possibility.
Here’s the route I’m suggesting will eventually grant you access to all the qualities and abilities listed at the beginning of this article. This happens when you’ve earned that A in conscious leadership and a much higher rating of your CQ (centeredness quotient):
Purposely call forth your conscious awareness.
Invest time and energy using your awareness to discover where your attention is resting moment to moment.
Consciously search for the attitude being generated by the power of your attention.
Use your conscious awareness to uncover the assumptions resting in the unconscious mind that are at the root of your current experience.
If that assumption limits your conscious leadership, revise it. And then reverse engineer your life from your newly created assumption.
A final note: I’ve found it makes all the difference in the world when you give faith and love a seat at your inner conference table. Give them a voice and listen. They have the power to grant you courage and resilience, no matter how many times you feel you can’t, or you’ve failed, or it’s an impossible dream.
The proof of your success is not in the outside world, but the inner one. Inner transformation comes first. Outer transformation follows. Not the other way around. So be kind to yourself and practice, practice, practice.
Ragini Elizabeth Michaels, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Ragini Elizabeth Michaels, founder of her international training company in 1988, Facticity Trainings Inc. is an internationally acclaimed trainer of NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming), Ericksonian Hypnosis, and Paradox Management, her original contribution to speeding up personal transformation. Having run a successful private practice specializing in Behavior Change for over 4 decades, paralleled by her deep dive into meditation and spiritual inquiry, Ragini began focusing her expertise on the question of how to live daily life with greater conscious awareness. Driven by her desire to understand how to be happy, she traveled around the globe in search of answers. Unraveling the mysteries of the personality via the Enneagram, and the challenges of transformation through mindfulness and reflection, Ragini was called to combine her expertise in Behavioral Change, physiological psychology, and the insights granted through her spiritual journey to create Centered No Matter What. This is an empowering online program offering her 6-step consciousness-expanding process to find greater happiness and peace of mind while meeting the challenges of living in a complex, uncertain, and dualistic world. Ragini is an Amazon.com best-selling author with 5 books on the psychology of paradox, including 'Unflappable – 6 Steps To Staying Happy, Centered, Peaceful No Matter What'; 'The Jewels Of Here & Now: Awe, Reverence And Ever Deepening Gratitude'; and 'The Wildly Quiet Presence Of God: Musings Of A Modern Marketplace Mystic'
