One of the most important skills in Heart iQ is tracking. I want this to be a daily practice, not because it sounds good, but because tracking is the most essential part of my own awakening process. It gives me awareness of what is actually moving in me. Without that awareness I cannot act well, I cannot make good decisions, I cannot know what is holding me back, and I cannot communicate honestly with others.
Start with your own experience
There are two kinds of tracking. External tracking is what I notice in another person, sometimes called a read. Internal tracking is what I notice in myself. The practice I want you to build is internal tracking, because many people want to read the room, read a client, read a partner, before they have any real sense of what is going on inside themselves.
I see this often in the coaching world. People get skilled at reading others but never learn to track their own internal state, so they confuse what they are reading with what is actually happening. They bring their own agenda into the moment without realising it, because they have not tracked what belongs to them. Then they cannot tell whether what they are picking up is the client's material or their own projection. Learning to track yourself first is what makes a read trustworthy rather than a guess dressed up as insight.
Distinguishing a thought from a fact
Part of tracking is discernment, the ability to tell the difference between what is genuinely true for you and what is conditioning, the voices handed to us by family, religion, school, or culture. We are told plenty of things that were true for someone else but were never true for us. Because we heard them for so long, we can mistake them for our own truth.
In the recording, I demonstrate how the way we speak can change what listeners experience. Their responses can be useful feedback, but a group’s feeling is not proof that a statement is true or false. It is something to explore alongside the speaker’s own understanding.
A live example
In a live demonstration, I worked with a participant who told me, "my tracking always gets derailed, and has done for fifteen years." I asked them to notice that this sentence was not a fact but a belief, and to step back and track the thought itself rather than stating it as truth. So instead of "I never complete," the shift is to something like "I notice my mind wanting to hold the belief that I never complete." That small shift, from being inside the thought to watching the thought, is the whole practice.
From there I asked what was happening in the body. The participant described pressure, pain in the heart, tension along the spine, hip and wrists. As they spoke, I noticed their energy dip again, a sign they had slipped from tracking back into being consumed by the story. I asked them to describe the sensations with a sense of fascination, as though observing from a small distance, rather than collapsing into the pain. When a feeling of paralysis came up, I asked them to say "I'm noticing a paralysis" rather than "I am paralysed." The participant felt the difference immediately: in the act of noticing it, they were no longer stuck inside it.
Returning to choice
That is the shift tracking makes possible. It will not remove every difficult sensation or belief, but it changes your relationship to it. When you can watch your resistance to a thought or a feeling rather than being fused with it, you move a step closer to accepting yourself as you actually are, rather than as you have been conditioned to believe you should be. And self acceptance, in my experience, is what increases our capacity to be present with, and to love, other people.
Internal Tracking vs External Reading
Internal tracking
Noticing what is actually moving in your own thoughts, feelings and body before responding to anyone else.
External reading
Sensing what is happening in another person, which becomes unreliable if you have not first tracked your own state.
