Self-awareness is the first step in self-alignment. When you are aware as to what you feel, you will be able to choose to act according to your conscious, and not according to your unconscious, desires. Self-awareness is a skill that can be learned, but it is also something that can never be taught. There is no such thing as a “right” way to think.
When we are aware of our unconscious desires, we are able to choose not to act on them. We can’t consciously choose not to like a product or to not get something in our car. We can only choose to act on what we are aware of – our desires. But we can never choose not to act on our desires. The best we can do is to just be aware that we don’t like it.
Self-alignment is the process of discovering your unconscious desires so you can take proper action on them. Think of it like a “self-check” where you check your unconscious desires against your conscious desires. If you don’t like something, you don’t like it, you don’t like the feeling of the thing, you are aware of that. It is the same as the unconscious “self-check” when you are trying to find a new job.
Many people are good at this, but not everyone is. In particular, people with a severe case of personality disorder are often extremely difficult to self-align. We are not talking about a person who has a personality disorder, but the person who is completely unable to self-align. It is more common among individuals who are highly impulsive, who feel that they do not have the willpower to act on their desires, or who are extremely emotional.
Self-adjustment can be quite dangerous. A person who wants to become a programmer or an architect or an engineer may not have the willpower to do it. The person may have a lot of trouble with self-awareness, the person may have a lot of trouble with self-determination, or both.
There is some evidence that a lot of the people who self-adjust can, in fact, not only self-align but become really good at it. I was a self-adjuster when I was in college. I worked for a while as a teacher of engineering and I did really well there. After I got out of college, I worked for a while at a software company, but I just couldn’t find it in myself to stay there.
In that time I had a lot of self-doubt and a lot of self-loathing. I was always making excuses for myself and thinking I needed to prove people wrong. I was always feeling like I was failing at everything I tried.
Some people find it really hard to adjust to change, but as a person who has always been the same, I think I actually did quite well adjusting to it. When I went from college to working for a software company, all I did was get bored. I just couldn’t feel like I was making any real progress. When I started working for a software company again, the whole learning curve was so steep that I was just trying to keep up.
I think this is mostly because people tend to compare themselves to other people, instead of to things they are already doing. If you look at how many people have been successful, it’s pretty clear that this is not a big problem. But it helps to see it from another angle.
If you look at successful people, it’s really easy to see the differences between them. When you have a successful person, you have a lot of things going for you that aren’t there when you’re just trying to get a job. You have a lot of things that your job doesn’t offer, and your success is based on all of these things. So you’re not really comparing yourself to things that you already have.
