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The Authentic You

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How many times have we found ourselves in a conversation with someone that is full of it? Unfortunately, it is likely we all know at least one person, family member or coworker. Someone always trying to sell you on who they are, or promote themselves with every chance they get to speak. But this piece is not to complain about others.

It is about you. How do you know that’s not you?

How do you know how you are coming across to others? Who do they think YOU are? I have three things.

One: Get to know yourself how others know you.

Well first, you’d need to ask. The fascinating thing about feedback is that it is totally necessary and crucial to our progress in life yet most of us have learned how to totally avoid it. For those of you that love giving honest feedback, you know that it doesn’t “make people happy”. Remember that critique is an art though and it is important to understand that if someone doesn’t already respect you or have that relationship with you, then they won’t be able to receive your feedback.

So whose feedback do you respect? Who gives you the real answer and doesn’t sugar coat it or try to manage your feelings? Are the people around you dedicated to pleasing you or building authentic connections?

Therein lies the primary issue with getting to know ourselves, we may have surrounded ourselves with a lot of “yes sir”, “yes ma’am” followers and nobody that gives it to us straight. 

“Fake friends write the wrong answers on the mirror for me” -Lil Wayne, Right Above It

Find a few real friends and and get some real feedback… ASAP.

Two: Be thankful for the honest feedback. 

Imagine yourself at the dinner table and your mom or dad is telling you all the things that they are worried about… Do you get defensive?

Why do you think that is? If what they were saying really was crazy and off target, then why did it provoke such a response?

Here is a better response: Thank you for caring enough about me to be honest with me. 

Often we are defensive after we get some feedback, but, in my experience, the more triggered I am, the more true the feedback. If someone were to call you what you are not, then you would not experience emotion. You’d think “who cares?” But when someone says something that lands, we can feel our response build and grow inside of us. I.e If you call an honest man a liar, he will be indifferent but if you call a dishonest man a liar, he might try to hurt you. 

The point is that we have conditioned ourselves to react a certain way to our emotions and our beliefs about ourselves. So when someone critiques us, instead of accepting it, we deflect it and continue on being whatever we are being. It feels like they are attacking our identity when, in essence, they are merely critiquing a set of behavior that is bothersome.

Try saying thank you instead, even if they are dead wrong, it is good practice for patience. Also, take feedback for what it is: words.

Three: Be consistent and be committed moving forward. 

In scientific experiments there are dependent variables, independent variables, and constants. The dependent are dependent upon the outcome, the measured data. Whereas the independent variables are manipulated in the experiment.

As humans, free will enables us to view everything as impermanent, ever-changing. Constants are the most important variables to focus on though, this helps scientists to further understand results and also enables replicated and repeated testing. Or, in our case, replicated and repeated failure and success. You would like to repeat the latter, right?

In science, this might be temperature, size, pH, or instrumental measures, but in everyday life, we use values. Things like integrity, confidence, passion, love, courage, etc. The level of alignment we feel internally with these values are our objective data on which we can understand ourselves.

How we stick to our values is how we are typically judged inaccurately. Often we try to connect our head to our heart by putting our heads up our you know what. Similarly, as an experiment can be unreliable, our judgement of ourselves can be just as untrustworthy. The way in which an experiment can be inaccurate, we can have unrealistic beliefs about ourselves and our abilities. 

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” -Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

We might not be able to choose what happens and we end up having, we may not even be able to choose what we are forced to do to get by and make ends meet, but we can choose who we are going to be, what attitude we are choosing to have in any given set of circumstances. Perhaps the authentic life we want to live can be replicated, refined and repeated. We can maintain that consistency today, tomorrow and even long after our time here.

Seeing Ourselves in Others

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 If we are able to accept the set of circumstances that have transformed us to who we are, we are enabled to accept how others exist too. A practice of self tolerance unlocks our tolerance of others.

Imagine you wake up less energized than you wished. It could be that you ate late the night before, too much caffeine, maybe too much TV. But then there is a cause for those actions, an argument at work, a scuffle with a friend. Something that caused you to unwind with food and media. Even the confrontation arose from a previous state that might have been built over weeks of physical neglect or bad diet. Each experience we have is the result of so many circumstances that preceded it, that it would be impossible to keep track of each little cause.

Our problems are very complicated, but there is no need to focus on the irreducible questions of how they came into existence. We can only look at them, how they are presently, and be mindful of our efforts to improve.

When we are unaware of our own actions, we neglect the points of view of others as well. We cannot understand and sympathize with the multiplicity of causes for how they arrived to this moment if we cannot also grant ourselves some slack. If we have to idea what is happening in our mind most of the time, how can we assume to judge others? We can always assume others have lives just as problematic as ours.

If we write off, with no uncertainty, that wants are just wants, likes are just likes, and that feelings are frivolous– it is then that the source of our suffering becomes entirely uncertain. Our impatience to go somewhere else is barring us from seeing where we are.

Like how distracted drivers cannot recall details of the road for miles while they are on their phone, if our attention is not properly directed towards our actions then we will also miss quite a bit.

Advanced empathy, an alternative introspective approach:

Oftentimes when we are lonely, it is not because we are alone, but that we are absent from the companionship we desire. In times of company, we are aggravated because we cannot find the silence that was once present before our time of companionship. We see this back and forth in our lives a lot.

Likewise, when we have a full stomach, we wish to feel lighter. When our bodies are empty and light, we crave the fullness and richness of a nice meal or tasty drink. 

The problems that we face and the discontent that arises is less a question of what is absent, but what is being refused, prohibited, and disallowed from becoming present. Within each of these moments are opportunities to engage with ourselves, others and our existence as a whole and to enjoy each respective time. This string of moments becomes our life. 

Bad days and good days are just 24 hour increments of the Earth’s rotation around the sun:

If the day is filled with happy moments and the unhappy moments seem brief or rare, we call that a good day. If it is the opposite, then we call it a bad day, but this is all perception and likely to change. For each moment of happiness was as much of a choice as each of the unhappy ones. Each good day as much of a choice as the bad days. Moments in time are neither happy nor unhappy, good nor bad– they just are. Like us. We bring good and bad to a neutral world; we bring good or bad to a neutral self. 

The most that we can do is be thankful when circumstances turn in our favor and resilient when dealt a bad hand. When we can acknowledge the grace of our good times, we can overcome each ‘bad’ moment as our opportunities to grow. If you view your suffering as permanent, then it will outlast your happiness and you will not grow. Similarly, if you view your happiness as what is permanent, then it will far outlast your suffering.

C.S. Lewis once wrote, “All that can be shaken will be shaken and only the unshakeable will remain.”

Our happiness is our natural state of being. The only thing getting in the way is our struggle to let the suffering fall away from our unshakeable self.

Curious is the cat:

As humans, our yearning for the “next big thing” is the source of a lot our suffering and also tremendous joy. Our ambition has pushed us to do incredibly humanitarian things, and our biology and psychology always seem to align to push us beyond our limits. These moments are notable. Civil rights activism, calls for awareness, and selfless aid from local communities wherever tragedy arises. We really are built for each other. 

Likewise, our ambitions have drawn us historically to unequally proportionate oppression. The same human innateness to build things brings upon atrocities like ethnic cleansing and genocide, tribal wars, and violent outbursts from those that wish to seek power over others.

There is a yang of order, a yin of chaos. A neat balance within our own bodies as well as our politics. So it becomes increasingly necessary to become attuned with where our ambitions are leading us. To shake the unneeded, shakeable things away and leave us with the joy we deserve.

So how do we tame a world so volatile and complex? How do we lead?

The first step that must be taken to see monumental change, is with your foot:

In both our greatest and most sinister ambitions there lies an equally terrific disrespect of the present moment. Each requires a false belief, a deceiving promise that the grass is greener on the other side; That happiness will result from all the hard work; That the next rung on the ladder will be high enough. But see, it is not the next invention, the next promotion, the next award and especially not the next war that can bring upon lasting happiness. 

The sense of fulfillment you are reaching for is within you always.

When we find ourselves in a state of discontent, it is not because something is missing, it is because many great things are not being acknowledged. The first step you can take today is into a life that sees things as they are, not how you wish them to be. To step into an abundant life, where your dreams can breathe and each moment can be fully absorbed. Where every perceived bad day can be good and each perceived good day can be better. 

Negativity is not a giant force in our lives, but it does grow the fastest. It is much easier to be negative, critical, and pessimistic. Misery will always have company, and blame always has a name. Negativity proliferates throughout our lives and poisons each consecutive day. Positive thought can stop this train completely. Try it. One amazing thing that happened to you, feel it and experience it. The most brief escape can change our entire view.

There is a reason that the present moment is called the present moment and not the IOU-moment. You are rich right now with time and opportunity and you just have to have the courage to pick up the gift life has given you. In a world where everyone is bidding for your attention, time, energy, and love– you can give all of it to yourself first and find yourself wealthier than royalty. Happiness is not easy to cultivate. If it were, we wouldn’t want it.

Mastering others is strength, mastering yourself is true power. -Lao Tzu

Radical Open-Mindedness

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Social conflict  is a part of any relationship on the planet between individuals or groups of people. In the age of globalization and media, we are especially attuned to these conflicts and often overwhelmed by the seemingly terrific magnitude of them. 

The question we will focus on today is: How can we make a better effort towards conflict resolution? 

In the 1970s, yes a long time ago, Kenneth Thomas and Ralph Kilmann developed a model of conflict, describing conflict as “the condition in which people’s concerns are incomparable”. If the things which two people care about are opposed, then there is conflict. 

There are two ways to approach conflict according to the Thomas-Kilmann Model: 

1. Assertiveness

2. Cooperativeness

Assertiveness is the degree to which you wish to satisfy your own needs while cooperativeness is the degree to which you work to satisfy the other person’s concerns. 

Beyond this, there are 5 strategies to employ in any conflict, those of which I hope can shed light and prove useful in today’s turbulent social scene. 

  • Avoiding = sidestepping the conflict
  • Accommodating = satisfy the other person’s concerns at expense of your own
  • Compromising = find an acceptable settlement that only partially satisfies both people
  • Competing =  satisfy your concerns at the expense of others
  • Collaborating = find a win-win solution

We don’t even have to engage but if we do, then we need work to find a compromise or collaboration. They are the only two sustainable methods.

Avoiding will not solve anything. There is no “head-in-the-sand” model for finding solutions. So if you are to avoid, make sure that there is absolutely no way to find a positive outcome. Avoidance is a last-resort. Darryl Davis, an african american musician and activist, converts even the worst of us. He attends KKK rallies and has given countless talks and advice on the potential for even the most indoctrinated among us to radically change their minds. So before you deem someone or something as a lost cause, give them another look. 

Accommodating and competing. Think: Why does someone have to lose? We need to approach every conflict and every situation with a positive psychology. We need to think abundantly and optimistically, not win or lose. Be curious, not competitive. Our approach is often the outcome in everything that we do in our daily lives. If you dread the work day, it will be dreadful. If you are anxious about tomorrow, tomorrow you’ll be appropriately filled with anxiety. So if we approach a conflict with an idea of winners and losers, then there will be losers and those losers could be us. If we have an idea that people have to lose when they talk to us, who is really the loser?

Compromise. In Kentucky, there is a famous statesman by the name of Henry Clay. But he had a nickname too, “The Great Compromiser”. Clay brokered some of the most controversial deals in history and is regarded as one of the most influential leaders of his time. There are also many issues in our time as well that need skillfully addressed. Perhaps we should all tap into Clay’s mindset when we approach our conflicts. If we can approach every conversation with the intention to find common ground, we have a better chance of finding it. But if our approach is one of animosity, we will just as easily find that too. It is our moral duty to assume that another person is somewhat justified in where they are coming from. We have to give people a chance for them to give us one too. Compromise often requires a heightened sense of compassion. 

Lastly, the best turnout we can get is a win-win. A win-win situation looks like compassion followed by correction. Human conflict with race or socioeconomic disparity is a long and tragic story in western society. But there are heroes along that journey too.

There are people that led and progressed their relative times to a place of understanding and marked change. They did not do so with animosity or a scarce mindset. They did so with a sense of curiosity, courage and compassion. It takes courage to find a win-win solution where we can find love and progress.

The main problem with conflict, in my opinion, is our failure to delineate our beliefs from our identity. When someone disapproves of our opinions, we are quick to believe that they disapprove of who we are. But this is simply untrue. When someone doesn’t like our social media post, we assume that they dislike us or completely lack respect. Many then act the same in return. The importance of the ideas that we need to discuss are being undercut by immature personal attacks. Which is why we need to solve a lot of our conflict with ourselves before we can solve conflict with others. If we are not forgiving or compassionate towards our own mistakes or ignorance, we are led to condemn others likewise for their own. This cycle creates more conflict!

So the next time someone says something that provokes you, be mindful and analyze why you were provoked. And when you assume someone is so very wrong, examine why it is that you believe you are so right. An admittance of our own arrogance prevents us from being offensive while the mindfulness of our provocations keeps us from acting rashly. 

It is not often you find someone that is a renaissance person or well-rounded genius and expert. Most of us know a little about a lot, or a lot about a little. There is a high probability that they and you are ignorant to some degree about something. It could be race, it could be biology, it could be psychology, accounting, feminism, whales, trees, chess, or 19th century existentialist literature. You name it. There are things some people are familiar with and others are not. So we need to accept we do not have the full story of other people’s life experiences or education, and this disconnect could be the cause of even more conflict. 

We are always working on our own knowledge. Learning more, experiencing more, seeking more, earning more, creating more. So let’s seek not to condemn or compete, but to learn and teach with compassion and co-create a newer more positive mindset and achieve real progress. 

Dealing with the Undealt

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Intention is of key importance. Let’s use the example of a murderer.

Imagine you are the murderer.

To start, simply, you just murdered a person. Because they made you mad I guess and, in the raw spiraling emotion of that moment, you murdered them for whatever reason. Now, you feel bad and regret it, but you run from the scene. Uh oh. Naughty…

You spend days rolling inside with guilt, but surprisingly, there is no police knock on your door. Weeks go by and it becomes a cold case. Soon, you are well in the clear. You are the only one that knows what you did. 

What can you do, outside of turning yourself in, that can quell this feeling inside yourself?

One idea might be to throw yourself into community service. Perhaps helping enough people might mitigate the fact you are a killer. Or you could become a vigilante, hunting murderers in hopes that their justice also counts as your redemption. You might even become a cop bringing legal justice to the wrong doing in your community. There is an opportunity for you as a preacher or spiritual leader to bring life lessons of sin and wrongdoing to a congregation of people in your town. You may even just shove it down and become a regular person in the hopes that time will erase the feeling that resides deep in your gut. 

But despite all of these empty efforts, the feeling still comes up. That feeling still rises like a strong acid up your into throat and into your idle mind.

There is not a religious lesson here as much as there is a logical one, a psychological one: That we have to address our feelings straight on. We have to deal with our undealt, directly. We cannot dance around these feelings or they become even more inflamed and undealt with. Much like a garbage bag nobody wants to take out, these bad feelings begin to swell and smell and become more of a problem than they ever were originally. 

Dealing with the undealt has become a staple of fields like psychology and coaching for years. Unconscious forces as they are more familiarly known. Carl Jung, the famous early 20th century philosopher and psychologist used the analogy of our “shadow self”. He firmly believed through his experience that if we don’t accept all of us, we don’t really accept ourselves at all. 

So what are your shadow forces? Your undealt? How do we free those suppressed feelings and let them go?

Here are some ways that have worked for me, maybe they’ll help you too.

Talk to someone that you trust.

It is important to talk to someone that you can confide in like a best friend, family member, a coach or trainer or a therapist. This allows you to get it off your chest, and it is also to help them really help you and deal with root causes. Honesty out loud can be the cure itself. 

Gain some perspective.

There are plenty of books and movies that hit on these feelings. There are also adults that have lived these “scenes”, you could say. One of the hardest things that I have ever done is to devote some level of faith to the lessons I have learned from art and older people. Life is short, and older people know this, let them help you so you don’t make the same mistakes that they have. 

Find a way to talk to yourself.

This is the most important and the easiest step to take. It requires courage to ask questions or meet people, or to be vulnerable in front of others. Being upfront with yourself, though, is between you and you. For most of us, this is a required first step. Find a journal, take time in the park, go on a walk, sit down in the shower, turn off the radio in the car. Wherever you can be with your own thoughts, make it a point to understand yourself first. 

Make sure you are not doing good deeds to make up for a bad feeling you have inside. 

It is hard to build your future if you are always filling the holes of your past.

Live abundantly, discover your true intention, leverage others for progress and become more.

Finding your “IN” from Intention

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In an attempt to connect the chaos and divide it into our little folders, we overlook a lot of important truths about the nature of who or what we are dealing with, ourselves included. If you spend enough time thinking about anything, your brain takes off and creates patterns. After enough hibernation inside, those random patterns start to look a hell of a lot like facts and we risk forming our entire lives around these patterns. We may even nurture them and look after them. This certainty we desire is dangerous to the open mindedness that we value.

This is what I think we are talking about when we say ‘egocentric’. To be egocentric is to let your stories spill out into the realm of opinion, all dressed as facts. In an attempt to be kind to our egos, we sometimes lose track of what it means to be right. Right is situational and requires higher processing, compromise, time and tact. If you make the target big enough or become close minded enough then anyone can make their ego smile. Let’s ask more.

What about making the REAL you smile? 

Tony Robbins always had a saying, “In your head, you’re dead.”, and as a rampant thinker myself, I try to refer to this when I reach that state of analysis paralysis. This doesn’t mean not to think, that would be absurd. But when the time comes to make something happen, if you’re in your head, you could be in big trouble. Conversations, stock buys, coffee drinking, oncoming traffic– it all has its time. You could end up lonely, broke, burnt or run over by a car. There are consequences if action isn’t taken at the right time.

To my knowledge, time doesn’t slow down or speed up for any of us. We can’t herd all the follies of the past or predict the future to any avail. It is action, present movement, that sets us free and makes things happen. Making things happen is what intention is all about. I believe that it is called “the present” for a reason… perhaps because it is a gift to be here, wherever we are, right now. How many coincidences and ambiguous turnouts have placed you in this absurd present moment you are in right now? The more often we choose to accept the presents that we are always being provided, the more present we are, and the more we have.

Back on the previous podcasts and blogs, we talked about intention a lot. We talked about how the motivation from within is what makes our work meaningful. If we intend on doing things to please other people or to conform to someone else’s standard, then we won’t enjoy our results. 

Then we continued on, and talked about how our stories determine where we go and how honest feedback can untie us from those runaway trains we have created. Honesty pokes holes in our delusions and frees us to see the things we care about. Honesty puts the truth right in front of us. That’s why there is nothing more honest than taking action and seeing how it goes.

“I believe that it is called “the present” for a reason… perhaps because it is a gift to be here, wherever we are, right now.”

Today, though, I think it’s great to get out of our heads and talk about where to start out in the world, unchained from our thoughts and introspection. Let’s wander a little bit and leap out of the pages of the books we read. What can we do to set ourselves free and gain some momentum? How do we turn intention to action as quickly as possible? How do we start to see intention and action as nearly the same exact thing?

How do we find our “IN” from our intentions?

Pioneering our Purpose

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Growing up in Kentucky, I was raised around the story of Daniel Boone. A raccoon hat wearing badass with a knack for blazing trails. And although, as a Kentuckian, I learned the many insignificant details of Boone’s life, an underlying theme started to connect with me over time. I thought, in some small way, his story was just the story of humanity. The story of humans is the story of pioneers. Pioneering our way from ape to man, east to west, canoes to ships, earth to space, even from humanity to gods and the discovery of something greater than ourselves. We are our own heroes on our own pioneering journeys if we can perceive it. There is something, strange, yet inherent to our soul, that craves the sensation of uncovering the beauty within nature and within ourselves.

Often we shoot ourselves in the foot before we even begin this adventure. It starts up top. Our brains are tireless story-tellers holding the material for a thousand years of hollywood-caliber scripts. We can architect any real or hypothetical scenario down to the finest details and emotions. But another story of mankind is that we don’t always take advantage of this creativity for good. We could always simply choose to envision hope or wonder, yet we imagine terrible scenarios and cast fearful shadows over our futures with exaggerated obstacles. Sometimes this attitude manifests into blaming others, making temporary things last forever, and occasionally just lies, all to get ourselves out of taking action towards our goals and making our way.

“If anyone on the verge of action should judge himself according to the outcome, he would never begin.” -Søren Kierkegaard

So why do we become our own enemies? Do we hate ourselves? Like failing? I don’t think so. It may have something to do with how our goals scare us half to death. At least any of the good ones should, and I think we have a right to feel this way about our ambitions. We are scared because although the landscape of pioneering has changed over time for most of us, from bears and dangerous uncharted terrains, the sentiment towards blazing a new path has hardly changed a bit. Perhaps it has even gotten more terrifying to many people. It’s a frightening ordeal to become something new. Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”  And, to me, that is our greatest accomplishment because no matter what titles we hold, trophies we accumulate, or money we hoard… all you will ever be able to become from the time you are born until your death– is you. 

We are always being marketed, told, even just plain coerced into believing someone else’s story for who we should be, how we ought to think, or what we should do with our time. But we have to remember that all we are responsible for during the course of our lives is the effort we expend and the purpose we attribute to our experiences. It is all up to us as individuals to pave our own roads. The degree to which we steer ourselves is up to us, the trajectory is in our hands, and as long as you have breath in your lungs, you can tell a different story of who you are. “You” is always in a state of change and flow, so don’t anchor yourself to certainty and safety when there is so much left to discover, so many new paths to pioneer.

Who knows, maybe you’ll find your real self somewhere along the way.