Understanding our own tendencies is a matter of awareness in practice. We all have an idea of our shortcomings, deficiencies, blind spots, and areas for improvement, but it's whether or not we apply that fair understanding of ourselves to our continued growth in those areas.

One of the things that afflicts many of us, is the tendency to lock into a certain narrative about how we tend to be in an area of our lives.

If we have fair and critical knowledge about where we believe we have room to improve, we have to give ourselves a chance to do that work. Old narratives are about heading those off immediately, and we've all gotta work on setting them aside.

If we can develop the practice of awareness by hitting the pause button when one of those narratives pops into our head, the following questions can help rebuild our approach:

Why do we keep rehearsing the same narrative? ANSWER: Because it's easier to not do the work, and if we're being honest about where we lack then at least we can act as if we've given full disclosure, for better or worse. This is a pure cop-out, we all know it is.
What would it look like if we redoubled our efforts to improve this area of our lives and ditched the old narrative? ANSWER: Fucking awesome.

Our tendencies tell us a lot about where there is room to uplevel. Which means that's probably a pattern worth bookmarking.