Growing your Self-Awareness

Getting Started

Getting to know the individual protector characters who live and work in your Inner Village increases your self-awareness. In growing awareness work these characters are known as "inner protector characters" so self-awareness is an accurate description of what you are doing.

Although you may think at the start that your protector characters are very much like those in the person next to you, you soon discover just how amazingly individual and unique each one of them can be.

Becoming aware of them, what they do and think and say and feel helps you understand them and work with them. And the only way to find this out is to arranged to interview them. Actually, you’ll need to dialogue with them lots of times and often.

Even a short conversation with each character helps your self-awareness in another way. Very quickly you will notice something happening as each character realises:

As soon as this happens it starts developing a stronger "sense of character" and in turn it will explain more about itself, what it does and thinks and feels as it works hard each day trying to protect you.

There are a number of things you can do at the start to help develop this sense of character, probably the most important is to give each character its own name and a kind of brief job description.

As you do this it is important that you keep track of each character and the best way is to make notes as soon as possible after each one is interviewed. Otherwise you quickly forget who talked and their names.

Self-awareness profile sheets  (See separate page for sample sheets)

There are three important reasons for using a self-awareness profile sheet:

1. They are the best way to keep track of your inner protector characters as you meet them.

2. They help you group characters according to their different protection patterns. It’s not important to classify their patterns accurately, most profile sheets have a very short shelf-life perhaps only a few hours and characters can change their patterns quickly. But do try to keep your sheets up to date. Start a new one as often as you need to.

3. These sheets help you keep track of different pairs of characters, many of whom operate as polar opposites is. Once you start to realise that most of the characters inside you work in pairs you are extending your self-awareness to a higher level and increasing your self-empowerment.

There is another reason though it is not as important. The characters themselves like it when you write things about them on your sheet. This helps them develop a stronger sense of being "real".