If you keep thinking, saying, doing the same things every day over and over, my friend, you are running on what I call autopilot. And it’s very reasonable that you as a human being would do so. About 97% of our functioning as a human being— these are things that are autonomic and automatic.

Autonomic are the things such as digesting, blinking, and breathing that happen without our conscious awareness and without the need of our conscious awareness. And that’s great news! Please body keep breathing and blinking and digesting without my intervention or involvement. Automatic things are typically things that we have learned and so deeply ingrained into our daily processes that they occur without conscious awareness. That can be very vast in nature. Think about being able to drive several miles from one location to your home and really not even pay attention until you pull into the driveway—that kind of thing. Those can be on an automatic tasks. It can be brushing your teeth. It can be walking the dog and just intuitively knowing when certain things happen on rhythm within your day. And then there can be many things that are automatic functionings like our opinions and our biases that we have ingrained over time.

Our brains want to function efficiently so that 97%—that I typically call your support staff—wants you to run easy-breezy without too much thought. The reason behind that is complex thought actually takes a lot of mental energy,—caloric energy, actually. Your brain takes about 20 to 25% of your energy expenditure in any given day. So the autonomic and automatic functioning of your body is intended to work in your favor. But again, if you’re running on repeat, these loops, these actions, these thoughts, these emotions, these perceptions are just redundant and you never wake up and question them.

You’re pretty much living in Groundhog Day.

I want to invite you to greet each day with just 10% more awareness, to be 10% more awake in how you approach your days. What autopilot things that may be limiting can be questioned and altered in a way that can improve your life. Just give yourself 10% more awareness in wakefulness in the course of a day and see what happens.

As I’ve mentioned, the 97% support staff, that part of you that just wants you to stay on homeostasis and keep functioning with familiarity because that is efficient and change can be scary, well—that 3% that remains is what I call your “Chief of Everything, COE.” I’m not talking anything related to the workplace or business here. This is you as chief of everything in you, the wakeful part of you, that aware part of you. So as you’re dialing up the wakefulness 10% in the course of your days, that engages your 3% chief of everything to be aware and pay attention, and then take action to improve your daily functioning.

This is a capability that pretty much all of us have. We just might not be aware of it. So consider this your wake-up call, your notification that you can do this!
I don’t know about you, but there are many things that I do with kind of an autopilot mode that I know are not the best. There are some that are great and they’re helpful. And it’s a routine that gets me simply and easily through my day, but plenty of that should be up for scrutiny and questioning and can be an improvement. So I’m applying this 10% more awake, 10% more aware in my days, to my own life.

And that means it can be incremental changes that ultimately make big differences, like waking up a little earlier to give myself more time to go on a walk, go for a run, sit outside and watch the birds on my bird feeder.It may be 10% more wakefulness so that I delegate better to my team and free up more time for other endeavors in ventures that are better uses of my time. That kind of thing. It can be 10% more awake so I’m more aware as I interact with the people in my life and make decisions about who I engage with and how I engage with them and the projects that I take on for my business and the way I spend my time in the evenings.

10%, it’s not much. And you could start with a 1 or 3 or a 5%, but I invite you to challenge yourself to just dial it up to 10% more wakefulness each and every day, and demand a little more of you. This is a reasonable amount. It’s definitely requiring your executive functioning to lead that 97% support staff to help you.

And the cool thing is over time, you can make those 10% better choices and functioning automatic and part of what happens without your conscious awareness. It’s kind of amazing how that happens.

So here I am, it’s a normal workday; I’m in between two Zoom calls right now, and I felt led to have this discussion or me and for you about being 10% more awake today. Tomorrow, every day, let’s do it, y’all!
Thanks for listening and being here with me.