Hello to all my new and old subscribers alike. My name is
Welcome to part 3 of my 5-part series exploring Expanded Awareness.
Read all the way to the bottom for a small piece of bonus content!
To avoid repetition, I won't redefine Expanded Awareness here. I invite you to review the content and podcasts that I shared with you on my first post in the series - Stack 13 of Insight Axis. Moving forwards, I assume you broadly understand the ideas around Expanded Awareness.
This week I want to talk about Conscientiousness and Expanded Awareness.
First things first
I will no longer be referring to these concepts as Alexander Technique (Expanded Awareness). From now on, it’s just “Expanded Awareness”
I've edited the titles of my previous posts to read "Expanded Awareness" rather than Alexander Technique. As I continue on my journey, I realise that my main inspirations (Michael Ashcroft and Peter Nobes) stand independent from mainstream Alexander Technique. They take their work beyond posture, and I think their ambition aligns with what FM Alexander (the creator of Alexander Technique) intended. So much so, in his latest podcast with Tasshin Fogleman, Peter Nobes went as far as saying that he is considering renaming his teaching to not be called Alexander Technique, and instead something like "Mindfulness in 3D". See the 27 minute timestamp below.
With that clarification out of the way, it's time to dig into this post - as usual, starting with definitions.
What is conscientiousness?
There are many ways to skin a cat. And there are many ways to dissect personality traits. Many psychologists now favour using 5 broad personality traits, which have been extracted through empirical study. Each of these 5 characteristics can be represented on a sliding scale, and everyone has a particular (generally static) position on each scale. In combination, the levels of these 5 characteristics can be used to describe someone's personality. Conscientiousness is one of these "Big Five" traits. The other four are: neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness and openness to experience. I'd recommend you read "Understanding Human Personality" from Mind and Mythos (by
) for a comprehensive overview of the “Big Five” as well as other ways to "skin the cat", so to speak.Essentially, high conscientiousness describes people who are are careful, diligent, industrious, hardworking, and disciplined. Taken to its pathological end, high conscientiousness can lead to obsessiveness, perfectionism, and workaholism. Low conscientiousness describes opposite traits, and can be symmetrically pathological if it starts to affect a person's ability to live the life they want.
My experience of Expanded Awareness changing my conscientiousness
My practice of Expanded Awareness has somehow increased my conscientiousness where it was lacking. It's also decreased it where it was pathological.
Generally speaking, I am a conscientious person; I work hard, I am disciplined in focus, and I'm quite organised. But over the years, I've become messier. I leave things lying around, and whilst I keep on top of my work and intellectual pursuits, "life admin" gets left to the wayside. After practicing Expanded Awareness, I started to notice the other "unfinished" parts of my life for what they were, and not just as vague objects in my periphery that I grew to habitually ignore. Let me give a simple example: I know that I value living in an aesthetic space, so why am I becoming less tidy? Collapsed Awareness. It’s only after Expanding Awareness that I noticed my surroundings were not tidy. I then had the conscious option - I could leave it. Or I could do something about it. And the choice to tidy my space from an Expanded Awareness state made it feel effortless and almost playful. It was just one of the many things I could do.
Interestingly, Expanding Awareness has also helped me overcome perfectionism and workaholism in my job. I’ve perniciously developed a bad habit of over-analysing minor and irrelevant details, to the point where my industriousness has diminishing returns. By Expanding Awareness, I can more clearly notice my overbearing focus on minor issues. This mere act of noticing helps me focus my attention more gently on things that matter. It prevents me from getting hooked. This state of expansion lets me then take my attention to solving the next important task, by letting my creativity and intellect out to play.
I'll take these personal findings and now abstract them into more generic rubrics.
The case for Expanded Awareness increasing positive manifestations of conscientiousness
Expanded Awareness allows you to notice things in your awareness space that you otherwise wouldn't have noticed. Only by first noticing something can you attend to it. I gave my example of tidiness, but let's take another one: writing. With collapsed awareness, someone might be overly focused on getting their point across - with less capacity to notice style, tone and even syntax. By Expanding Awareness, you can allow yourself to give more intention to the way you write, by giving more conscious thought to the particular words you choose and the cadence you set. These things can often be ignored in the compressed focus of trying to get a point across.
The case for Expanded awareness decreasing pathological manifestations of conscientiousness
Expanded Awareness allows you to notice when you are engaging in pathologically conscientious behaviours, by showing you all the other things you could do within your expanded awareness space. Only by first noticing an action can you consciously choose to disengage from it. I gave my example of perfectionism at work, but let's take another one: creativity. When it comes to creative outputs like music, writing or art, sometimes pathological conscientiousness gets in the way. The search for perfectionism can lead to paralysis. Expanding Awareness and allowing natural flow of words, sounds or brushstrokes allows something creative to happen, rather than forcing it through guarded, disciplined channels. It's ok to break the rules, and Expanded Awareness helps you see that.
Conclusion
Essentially, Expanded Awareness might almost act like a buffer to conscientiousness: boosting the positive aspects, and dampening the negatives. By becoming more aware, you give yourself the option to consciously choose an action, rather than getting hooked by it at the expense of ignoring everything else.
You can direct your diligence with finer aim.
BONUS
What is Openness to Experience? Is it related to Expanded Awareness?
Although the focus of this blog has been on the intersection between Expanded Awareness and conscientiousness, I'd like to make a brief detour to explore whether Expanded Awareness actually describes a part of "Openness" - another one of the "Big 5" traits described in the table above.
Openness can actually be divided further into 2 traits (or "latent factors" for the academic reader). This is superbly described by
in his Substack post from Mind and Mythos: "Cybernetics: The Key to a Unifying Framework for Psychology":"Openness to Experience can be sub-divided into two distinct dimensions (or ‘aspects’): Openness, which involves cognitive exploration of perceptual and sensory stimuli, and is associated with the experience of apophenia (inaccurate pattern matching, as in psychotic delusions); and Intellect, which involves exploration of abstract and semantic information, and is linked to intelligence/IQ."
Part of me wonders whether Expanding Awareness is perhaps related to magnifying one's Openness sub-aspect of the Openness to Experience trait... But that's an exploration for another time.
Interesting post! Thanks for the shout out.
The link between AT/EA and Conscientiousness makes a lot of sense. Someone high in Conscientiousness is able to focus really well on one thing, but is also often managing many things at once, so needs to be able to hold all of that in mind. It seems like EA is good at improving that ability. Your point about Openness is really interesting, too. There's a pattern-matching element to it that requires an awareness of many things and how they connect, and again, EA is all about that.
I think what C and O traits have in common is a stronger reliance on what cognitive scientists call 'executive functions', things like attention, memory, and processing speed. There's some about things like EA, mindfulness meditation, and similar practices that improves or refines these processes to some extent. I want to write more about this at some point, but it might be a while!
Really interesting, thank you