can be set wider. You can pay attention outside yourself – you pick up your relations’ body language and facial expressions. You notice how warm the room is and how the music in the background is quite lively and fun, in contrast to the mood in the room.
Meta-awareness is a way of experiencing that we all have to some extent. And it’s something that we can develop much further. Here’s an example that might help you to understand a little better what we mean by meta-awareness.
If you have ever travelled on the London Underground at rush hour you will be familiar with this experience. You’re standing on a station platform at 5.30 p.m. It’s hot and crowded. It’s been a tough day and you’re feeling frazzled. You can’t wait to get home, take off those shoes, get a drink and relax. A train pulls in. People struggle to get off – there’s hardly any space on the crowded platform – and others rush to get on. Pushed from behind, you just make it. You’re standing there, hot, breathless, squeezed from all sides as the train pulls out. There hardly seems to be room to breathe. You grow increasingly irritated.
‘Oh no. This is intolerable!’ you think. ‘Why am I doing this to myself? People are so inconsiderate! If another person pushes their backpack into my face I swear I’ll scream! In the morning they all stink of aftershave. In the evening it’s body odour. This is ridiculous! It’s completely intolerable …’
And on and on.
That’s one way of being with what’s happening.
Here’s another. You start to grow irritable, but meta-awareness kicks in. You notice that your jaw is tight and that you’re holding your shoulders up so they’re almost alongside your ears. You see that your thoughts and feelings have fallen into ‘unhelpful inner-rant’ mode.
So you ease your jaw, relax your shoulders and come away from the rant. ‘Gosh – I’m having such irritable thoughts!’
In this instance, the difference is between being irritable and noticing that you’re having irritable thoughts and feelings.
That moment of stepping back, ever so slightly, of seeing what you’re up to and what’s going on, is a tiny shift – but it changes everything.
One moment you’re unconsciously ‘doing irritation’ – lost in your inner rant, treating the world as if it were intolerable (it’s not – you do this commute every day, it must be tolerable). The next moment you wake up to what you’re doing and you begin to exercise some choice. You can ease your jaw, relax your shoulders, at least to some extent, and you can stand there and be with the discomfort of the moment knowing that it won’t last for more than a few minutes. Perhaps you recognise that this is part of the price you pay for living in such a vibrant city with so many great opportunities.
Meta-awareness involves waking up to what’s going on with us – with our thoughts, our feelings, our body sensations and impulses – in each moment. When we have that awareness, then we can choose what we do next. When we don’t have it, we’re stuck in the rut of our familiar, habitual reactions.
When Allowing, Inquiry and Meta-awareness come together, in any combination, they open up a space in which we’re able to respond, rather than react, to whatever situation we find ourselves in. Remember, AIM is all about choiceful response rather than choiceless reaction.
AIM lets you sit at that table with your family much more resourcefully. You see what’s going on in a much richer way. That lets you make choices. You can choose to intervene in a skilful, caring way if that seems possible. Or you can choose not to if the opportunity isn’t there. But whatever you do or don’t do, your response comes from a sensitive, kindly and informed choice. AIM is the exact opposite of the unconscious reaction that keeps family dynamics like this endlessly spinning.
It’s important to realise, though, that AIM is not the same as being dispassionate. Just because we don’t get caught up in the familiar patterns of reactivity playing out around us doesn’t mean we don’t feel for what’s going on. It doesn’t mean we don’t care, and it doesn’t make us somehow inert. Quite the opposite. AIM allows us to engage more resourcefully – to act – or not act – with care, kindness and interest, as seems most appropriate. We can respond creatively to what we find, or we can mindlessly react to whatever shows up.
By developing your AIM you can increase your ability to respond creatively. That can make a powerful difference to your life and the lives of those around you.
Learning to AIM doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll have more friends, make more money or save the planet – although you never know. But it will make one crucial difference: it will give you more choice. As your ability to choose develops, so you will find that you can begin to act in a more careful and informed way. That will lead to a happier you. In the case of that family gathering, it lets you have a much more productive influence on the people you care about, rather than just putting your head down and losing yourself in watching the drama being acted out around the table – or getting into the script and adding your own unhelpful spin to the reactive dynamic.
In short, you become wiser and kinder.
The important point is that we can all allow and inquire to some extent already. We all have some capacity for meta-awareness. But you can’t simply decide to increase these as if that will come about simply because you want it. You’ve got to do things to train your mind to get better at these activities. There are simple exercises you can do to increase your AIM. That is what the Mind Time practices are all about.
This book and the Mind Time practices help you to AIM better. Our confidence in the practices comes from our work over many years, including a three-year study into the effects that the practices had on an individual’s ability to AIM by using allowing, inquiry and meta-awareness. The findings were published as a report and a series of articles in the Harvard Business Review. (For more about our research see the box below and the section at the end of the book.)
10 MINUTES OF MIND TIME EACH DAY WILL CHANGE YOUR MIND
AIM is a form of mindfulness, which refers to the ability to choose to be aware, in the present moment, of your experience and how it relates to the situation you find yourself in, and to hold that awareness in a compassionate and careful manner. The fundamental building blocks of mindfulness, as we see it, are allowing, inquiry and meta-awareness.
THE 10-MINUTE RULE
The individuals in our research study wished to improve how they performed – as parents, friends and work colleagues. Here are some examples of issues they wanted help with. Which of these resonate with you?
‘I want to be a better parent and enjoy my time with my children more’
‘I want to be more resilient – better able to cope with work pressure’
‘I want to feel like I have more space and time to do other things besides work’
‘I want to feel less anxious – and just be in a better mood more of the time’
‘I want to sleep better’
‘I want to get the most out of my team and help them develop’
‘I want to be able to deal with my difficult neighbour/relative/boss better’
‘I
