Join me each week as we explore awareness, human behavior, and the small daily choices that shape our lives. As a thank-you for joining, you'll receive my free guide, 13 Hidden Patterns that Quietly Control Your Life, to help you begin recognizing the hidden patterns that quietly influence your thoughts, habits, and daily decisions.
October Awareness Challenge: Find the Pattern
Find the PatternsYou can’t consciously choose what you haven’t learned to see. Not a complicated system. Not another list of things you’re supposed to do perfectly. Notice what’s happening. Create a little space before reacting. Use that space to participate intentionally in what happens next. Because sometimes we notice. Sometimes we pause. Sometimes we even tell ourselves that this time we’re going to choose differently. Welcome to October. It's Time to Find the Pattern Why do I keep doing this? Maybe you procrastinate on the things that matter most. Maybe you say yes before you’ve even decided whether you want to. Maybe you spend money when you’re stressed. Maybe you avoid a conversation because you’re afraid of how the other person will react. Maybe you reach for your phone the second life gets quiet. Maybe you wait until you “feel motivated” before starting something you already know you want. Or maybe your pattern is something completely different. Don’t immediately try to fix it. I know. That sounds backwards. But before we can make a different choice, it helps to understand what we’re actually choosing between. So October isn’t about fixing the pattern. It’s about finding it.
|
What happened right before this?
What was I feeling?
What was I thinking?
Was I tired, stressed, bored, afraid, excited, lonely, frustrated, or uncomfortable?
Was there a person, place, situation, memory, or emotion involved?
And here’s one of my favorite questions:
What did this behavior seem to offer me in that moment?
Relief?
Comfort?
Safety?
Approval?
Distraction?
Control?
Avoidance?
Pleasure?
Habits and recurring behaviors don’t happen in a vacuum. Research into habit formation consistently finds that behaviors can become associated with cues and contexts until the response begins happening with surprisingly little conscious deliberation. (PubMed)
That’s why noticing the pattern matters.
You can’t examine a decision you don’t realize you’re making.
Don’t Turn Awareness Into Another Reason to Beat Yourself Up
This part matters.
Suppose your pattern appears seventeen times this month.
That doesn’t mean you failed seventeen times.
It means you had seventeen opportunities to observe it.
That’s different.
We’re not keeping score.
We’re gathering information.
There is a reason I keep returning to awareness before talking about change.
If I only focus on the behavior I don’t like, I can spend years fighting the final few seconds of a process that actually started much earlier.
But once I begin recognizing what comes before the behavior, something changes.
Now I have somewhere to look.
And eventually, somewhere to choose.
The National Institutes of Health offers a useful guide to changing habits that includes something especially relevant to this month’s challenge: track your progress and pay attention not only to what you did, but also to how you felt while doing it. Those observations can help reveal strengths, obstacles, and places where change might become possible. (NIDDK)
I Built Something to Help You Do This
If you’ve been reading A Message from Magus G.Mack, you may already know about my free guide:
13 Hidden Patterns That Quietly Control Your Life.
Until now, it has been something you could read and download.
I’ve been working on something new.
I turned it into an interactive workbook.
No download is required.
Instead of simply reading about the patterns, you can choose one, work through the questions, reflect on how it appears in your own life, and save your progress as you go.
And that makes it almost perfect for this month’s challenge.
If you recognize your October pattern among the 13 in the guide, use the workbook to explore it.
Don’t race through all thirteen.
Don’t turn this into homework.
Pick the one that makes you think:
Yeah…I do that.
Start there.
Try the Free Interactive Workbook
Prefer something you can download and keep? The PDF version will still be available too.
One Pattern. One Month.
That’s it.
There won’t be a mid-month Awareness Challenge check-in this time.
I want to give you some room.
Watch the pattern.
Notice when it appears.
Notice what seems to wake it up.
Notice what it promises you.
Notice what it costs you.
And most importantly, notice the moments when you suddenly realize:
There it is.
That moment matters.
Because yesterday, the pattern may have simply happened.
Today, you saw it happening.
That’s movement.
And movement creates momentum.
At the end of October, we’ll come back together and ask a different question.
Not:
Did you fix yourself?
Not:
Did you finally stop doing it?
Instead:
What did your pattern teach you?
Because you may discover that the behavior you’ve been fighting isn’t the beginning of the story at all.
It may just be the part you’ve been able to see.
And once you start seeing what comes before it…
you may discover there are more places to choose than you thought.
⸻
Keep Exploring
If you’re new to A Message from Magus G.Mack, you can explore more of the ideas and Awareness Challenges we’ve been building together here:
https://asdabbi.com/posts/september-awareness-challenge-what-did-your-choices-teach-you
We’ll meet again at the end of October.
Until then, don’t worry about becoming a different person.
Just pay attention to the person making the choices.
Find the pattern.
— Magus G.Mack
Don’t Be Like Me…Be Better.
A Message from Magus G.Mack
Join me each week as we explore awareness, human behavior, and the small daily choices that shape our lives. As a thank-you for joining, you'll receive my free guide, 13 Hidden Patterns that Quietly Control Your Life, to help you begin recognizing the hidden patterns that quietly influence your thoughts, habits, and daily decisions.