Spawning Self-Awareness

This article is an excerpt from my book, From The Inside Out: A Counterintuitive Approach To Re-Attracting An Ex.

The more aware you are of how you come across when interacting with your ex, the likelier it is that you’ll create a deeper emotional connection, harden their trust and respect for you, and get them more sexually attracted.

Whereas the less aware you are of how you come across, the likelier it is that you’ll stymie your emotional connection, blight your ex’s trust and respect, and lower their sexual attraction.

This is how self-awareness fundamentally plays out in re-attraction. Without much of it, a person hardly ever notices things like when they’re being too saccharine, pushy, self-indulgent, or how they’re droning on an irrelevant tangent that doesn’t interest their ex or even turns them off.

And since the person doesn’t notice these sabotaging behaviors and fails to change the subject or their approach soon enough, they usually just talk their ex out of liking them.

Now there are many ways you can develop adequate self-awareness and avoid these unnecessary blunders and the drama that comes with them.

You can reflect on how you carried yourself after every date or interaction. You can date a lot of people and accumulate a plethora of unintuitive experiences on how you should present yourself. You can ask your friends for honest feedback about how you behave around people you fancy and optimize from there.

This is all obvious. These pieces of advice always follow the tried-and-true method of trial and error — and you should be utilizing them often.

But what is not always so obvious is just how much a video journal accelerates things when added to the mix. While awkward and difficult, this is arguably the best way to spawn self-awareness.

A video journal provides a unique opportunity to see yourself exactly as your ex sees you — physical warts, behavioral tics, confidence gaps, and all. And once all these humanly flaws get illuminated, you can individually lock onto each one and try to resolve it.

So here’s how to create your video journal.

First, set aside about 5 to 15 minutes every day to record a video of yourself talking. Keep this up for the next 30 to 60 days. Use your phone’s camera or your computer webcam for recording.

And don’t worry about editing the footage. While you’re welcome to do it, it isn’t required. Just be sure to save it somewhere so you can review it later.

For the first minute or two of recording, talk about whatever you want — no matter how trivial or unimportant. The point is just to get some initial momentum. Then transition to talking about what’s going on in your life.

A few ideas: how’s your dating life going, how’s your career unfolding, what’s important to you at the moment, or how you feel about your ex and the breakup. Be sure not to only talk about facts and random thoughts. Rather, mix the two with interesting stories and reasoning.

Once you’ve recorded your video, play it back to yourself and observe how you come across.

• Are you presenting your thoughts well?
• Are you drifting to random tangents mid-thought?
• Is your delivery impactful?
• Could your rhetoric be more engaging and lively?
• Could your posture be more confident?
• Could your voice tone be more natural?
• Are you emphasizing your ideas with conviction?
• Are you transitioning from point to point elegantly?
• Is your thought flow crawling with fillers like “ums“ or “ahs?”

After pinpointing how you could sabotage your dates and interactions, pick one flaw and work on it on camera.

So if your problem is that you’re talking with a meek voice tone, for example, that’s probably because you’re breathing with your chest. Therefore, try recording a video of yourself speaking while only breathing from your diaphragm. It also helps to have vivid hand gestures and the proper posture.

Or if your issue is that your storytelling ability isn’t lively enough, put more energy into your delivery. It also helps to find a story you can narrate instead of relying on telling one solely based on memory and on-the-spot improvisation.

So open up a book or a magazine, pick a few paragraphs, and start narrating them. Bonus points if you’re passionate about whatever you’re narrating. And once you’re done, ask yourself if you’d be interested in listening to yourself tell that story. Why or why not? Reflect.

Once you’ve got better in a particular troubling aspect, move on to overcoming your next big flaw. Just be sure you’re only working on one or two at a time. Otherwise, you can quickly get overwhelmed and lose motivation for further improvement. You’ve been warned.

If you’ve been repeating this activity for about 30 to 60 days — the approximate number of days it takes to form a habit — you’ll notice that the same self-awareness you’re generating by making engaging videos will spill into re-attraction as well.

Consequently, you’ll begin to find yourself more observant and in control of your behaviors when conversing with your ex, whether online or offline. And that’s the point. That’s what we’re looking for.

In time, you’ll also start noticing things like when you’re oversharing, being too schmaltzy, or needy. And that’s when you can begin pulling off pivots that completely change the trajectory of an interaction or a date for the better.

Now for the dark side of self-awareness. Oh yeah, it’s there. Once you spawn a large degree of it, it’s easy to start beating yourself up and feeling like an absolute piece of shit.

This is because you’re able to suddenly notice all of your internal flaws and unproductive or sabotaging behaviors that you didn’t know were there before.

And this often leads to shame and disappointment. And then that shame and disappointment lead to unwarranted self-critique, self-judgment, and even self-hatred.

This is why whenever you’re working on becoming more aware, you’ve got to simultaneously work on becoming more empathetic and accepting of yourself as well. Besides, self-awareness never results in self-acceptance in a vacuum. And if it doesn’t, it’s wasted effort.

Therefore, the sooner you accept yourself for not being perfect, the faster you’ll cut down on the negatives of spawning self-awareness without stifling the positives.