Awareness vs Knowledge

As adults we are often times beat ourselves up for doing things because “we should have known better”.  We can be really hard on ourselves when we make a decision that we believe didn’t have a favorable outcome especially when we think we should have known better.  Today I am asking you to let yourself off the hook just a little bit by helping you to understand that there is a distinct difference between having an awareness of something and knowing/having knowledge of something. I know that it sounds very cliché to say that when you know better you do better, but this is in fact a true statement.

Awareness is intellectual whereas knowledge is experiential.  Awareness is simply that you have an idea or hold a concept in your mind about something. Just because you have been told something doesn’t mean you know it.  It matters not if you’ve been told this same thing over and over again, that does not indicate that you know it.  Awareness is the basis for knowledge but should not be mistaken for knowledge. For example when you were a child you were told not to touch the stove because it was hot.  Your parents would go through great lengths to keep you from touching the stove so as to prevent you from harming yourself, right.  They would say to you things like “no no that’s hot” and as a toddler for a while you would even repeat it that phrase out loud anytime you would come near the stove.  In your mind you knew the stove was hot and instinctively knew it was dangerous because of the cautionary tone in your parent’s voices when they warned you to stay away.  It wasn’t until you actually touched the stove and experienced the sensation of hot that you actually had knowledge of what “hot” meant.

Now let’s take this example to the extreme and say that as a child you had never come in contact with anything that was hot because your parents were somehow successful in keeping you away from all things hot (I said extreme) but they had always warned you that things were hot like fire, stoves, food, sun, sidewalks, drinks ok you get my drift.  Ok so now let’s say you’re 40ish and you are ordering your first cup of coffee on your own ever and in all of your excitement you drink it as soon as you are handed the cup and scorch your tongue. What do you think your reaction will be aside from screaming and cursing?  It will likely be to say to yourself I should have known better, right! Well how could you have KNOWN       better if you had never experienced any real effects of things that are hot even though you had been told things were hot all of your life and knew that hot meant bad or could have some adverse consequences should you come in contact with that sensation.  Again I know this is an extreme example but I think it helps me to illustrate my point perfectly about the difference between awareness and knowledge.

I say all of this because there are so many of us who are holding guilt and torturing ourselves behind things that we didn’t know.  Let me say that age has nothing to do with knowledge only experience does.  Just because your parents, teachers, preachers, or president have told you something a thousand times doesn’t mean you know it, it means you have an awareness of it.  Using the coffee example again now that you have had an actual experience with the sensation of hot you will use more caution around all of those things you had been warned were hot all of your life because you now KNOW what hot can do.  So what you thought was a cliché: doing better because you know better is in fact a truth. You will do better as you KNOW better so lighten up on yourself.

P.S. And oh yeah that coffee example can be applied to any situation in your life

Happy Loving xo