The more aware you become, the more choices you have.

When you become aware of yourself, your surroundings, your environment, and the people around you, you begin to gather information that helps you navigate life more effectively. Awareness doesn't give you complete control over what happens around you. Instead, it gives you more options for deciding how you will respond. It's your response to any given situation that will hurt or help you. The good thing is, you can control how you respond, and with enough high-quality information, you can practice making each decision the best it can be among the options you have.

Imagine, if you will, Sherlock Holmes and his ability to seemingly predict people’s moves, motives, and come up with amazing solutions to problems. Loads of movies, books, and TV shows portray this quirky, strange, but very capable intellectual solving seemingly impossible-to-piece-together crimes, murders, and uncovering deeply hidden conspiracies.

Obviously, he is a fictional detective with a cool hat and pipe. Yet, you can still have a similar suaveness yourself through knowing and practicing awareness. Maybe not his borderline-supernatural talent, but regardless, the character of Sherlock Holmes is an extremely aware sleuth, which makes for a wonderful portrait of what an astutely aware person is.

I think of awareness as a continuum made up of four interconnected areas.

First is intrinsic awareness: awareness of yourself—your spirit, soul, mind, will, and emotions. Before you can understand the world around you, you have to begin understanding the person experiencing it.

Second is conscious awareness: the awareness of your thoughts, body, actions, senses, and environment. You are constantly bombarded with information through your senses as you process what is happening around you.

Third is social awareness: awareness of other people; their actions, words, attitudes, intentions, and emotional states. Other people can seem incredibly complicated, but understanding yourself first gives you a better foundation for understanding them.

Finally, there is situational awareness: the ability to bring everything together. You, your environment, the people around you, and the larger situation all become pieces of the same puzzle. Protecting you and allowing you to make successful moves and choices. A lot of failure comes down to not being aware enough to consider better options. Which may have been there the whole time. You just didn’t see it.

These four areas don't operate independently. The awareness continuum’s cycles are connected like a spider’s web and are ever-changing as new and old information rushes into your senses. It starts intrinsically with your inner self, but without a conscious mind, or in other words, a computer to process reality, the continuum falls apart.

Sometimes the opportunities we need are already in front of us. Sometimes the danger we need to avoid is already visible. Sometimes the answer is sitting right there, waiting to be noticed.

We simply don't see it.

The purpose of developing awareness isn't to control everything. It is to see more clearly, recognize more possibilities, and make better choices.

So before we go any further, ask yourself:

How much are you actually seeing?