Self-awareness

I try to ask myself, “why?”

November 20, 2022

Contribute your suggestion without having built a body of work, without evidence of significant expertise and without being willing to take responsibility for what happens next.

It’s a form of yelling from the bleachers.

~ Seth Godin from, The grandstanders

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I was totally this person. Once I saw what was going on and I could work on owning and eliminating this aspect of my behavior. Awareness (after discovery), ownership (after reflection), and efficacy. The red-flag is when I’m queueing the words, “You know what you should…” for speaking. Stop. Stop stop stop. It’s like the humorous but often–true aphorism that nothing you say before the word, “but” matters. I never (okay, fine, I’m still working on it) say whatever was about to come after, “You know what you should do…” Because why ever say that?

I like to give a hat-tip to Angie Flynn-McIver any time I start talking about intention, as I’m about to. I realized that my intention behind that thing I no longer say was to demonstrate how much I knew. It doesn’t matter to the other person how much I know. What might matter to them is whether or not I can help them. It’s potentially better if I engage with the intention of being helpful. How would saying, “you should change your menu…” ever be helpful to the wait-staff, to the manager, to the chef or owner? The menu is beyond their control, or they have already thought about it way more than I have and have vastly deeper domain knowledge. If my intention is (as it now is) to be helpful, I should be paying attention for signs subtle or direct that someone would like help. Only then might I have something useful to add, but probably not.

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Emotional turmoil

November 15, 2022

Interactions with people are the major source of emotional turmoil, but it doesn’t have to be that way. The problem is that we are continually judging people, wishing they were something that they are not. We want to change them. We want them to think and act a certain way, most often the way we think and act. And because this is not possible, because everyone is different, we are continually frustrated and upset.

~ Robert Greene

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An addition to your knowledge

November 12, 2022

If you come across any special trait of meanness or stupidity […] you must be careful not to let it annoy or distress you, but to look upon it merely as an addition to your knowledge—a new fact to be considered in studying the character of humanity. Your attitude towards it will be that of the mineralogist who stumbles upon a very characteristic specimen of a mineral.

~ Arthur Schopenhauer

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Microstructures

October 3, 2022

We are well aware that structures such as buildings and organizational policies and operating processes support and constrain our activities. We tend to be much less conscious of smaller structures that influence our interactions with other people. In contrast to more tangible macrostructures, we call them microstructures. You have no choice. Every time you have a conversation or a meeting you are using microstructures.

~ Keith McCandless from, Liberating Structures – Microstructures & Design Elements

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Once you see the solutions, you can’t unsee them. You—like me—probably think you do a good job of engaging other people. But there’s a great explanation in this little introductory article. It listed off all the ways… ways for which I was congratulating myself knowing… in which the microstructures we use today fail. And then it goes on (in brief in the article and at length through that web site, and a book) to show some beautiful ways to create and use structures which liberate us. That’s rather nice.

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Balance

September 29, 2022

Once we feel like we’re a little good at something, we cling to that. We cling to wanting others to think we know things and are good at things. We cling to the feeling of knowing what we’re doing.

~ Leo Babauta from, Destroy What You Know – Zen Habits Website

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Balancing continuing to work on what I know, and single mindedly focusing on something new, is the challenge I can never seem to resolve. Destroy all the things I know? …that doesn’t end well. Destroy some of the things I know? …sure, but which ones.

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In the end

September 27, 2022

Nine years ago I wrote a journal entry containing this quote:

At the end, when your legs are tired
and your arms are giving out,
GET ANGRY.
Get angry that you are tired.
THEN HIT IT HARDER.

~ unknown

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Although I still like that quote, I no longer find it inspiring. For me, the time and place for that mindset are behind me. I’m not quitting. Rather, when I get tired and my arms and legs give out, I now think: I misjudged the goal. I can access that other mindset if I choose to go on, but I’m also serenely happy to rest.

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Not so easy

September 14, 2022

The answer depends on whether he recognizes that though he may have subdued his external obstacles and enemies, he must overcome psychological foes — depression, anomie, angst — which are no less formidable for their ethereality. He must embrace the fact that though this world may be thoroughly charted, explored, and technologized, there remains one last territory to conquer — himself.

~ Brett McKay from, Sunday Firesides: Man’s Last Great Conquest — Himself | The Art of Manliness

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I would argue that all the external conquering and subduing was the easy part. That existential dread? That’s not so easy. The first part of solving that problem is of course realizing it is a problem for oneself. Yeah, I’m working on that.

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Cool-Whip

September 10, 2022

Later, when the Doritos were reduced to crumbly fragments barely worth fishing out of the bag, I reflected on what had gone wrong, and remembered something I discovered years ago about resolutions but forget constantly.

~ David Cain from, You Don’t Need a Promise, You Need a Plan

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The other day, I finished off the remaining more–than–half of a can of Cool-Whip. To be clear: I mean that I ate it directly. It’s not terrible as far as things go. But it’s absolutely not the sort of “food” that I want to eat. It definitely doesn’t move me towards my goals. I knew I was going to do it, weeks ago when the can appeared in my refrigerator to be used with some dessert or other. I knew I was going to do it when the can went back in the fridge after dessert. Sure, it took a couple of weeks, but then after an entire day of being stressed out, things played out just as I knew they would. Cain has a plan. I should probably get a plan before the next can of Cool-Whip is left like a lamb for slaughter.

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Some ironic distance

September 9, 2022

Finally, when it comes to your own self-opinion, try to have some ironic distance from it. Make yourself aware of its existence and how it operates within you. Come to terms with the fact that you are not as free and autonomous as you like to believe. You do conform to the opinions of the groups you belong to; You do buy products because of subliminal influence; You can be manipulated. Realize as well that you are not as good as the idealized image of your self-opinion.

~ Robert Greene

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Named your fear must be

September 9, 2022

Sometimes, our heads won’t stop thinking about something. Our thoughts will spin around and around, not willing to let go, obsessing. It might be about another person, a big event coming up, or about ourselves. It might be overthinking a decision, big or small.

~ Leo Babauta from, How to Let Go of Obsessive Overthinking – Zen Habits Website

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I read this the other day after its being queued for ages. It was eerily apropos of a really bad mood that I was in. Except I read it just after I had deployed Babauta’s “face the fear” strategy that he describes. It definitely works. And for some reason, Yoda’s admonishment that, “named your fear must be, before banish it you can,” sprung to mind.

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A rare repeat

August 30, 2022

Because sometimes I experience small periods of blissful serenity. I’d particularly like to be able to go there on a more regular basis. It seems to me that spending about 10 days doing nothing but meditating in silence would be a delightfully mind-altering experience.


~ Me from, Waiting for the next one – Craig Constantine

I’m a process maniac. I have automation that feeds me links to my historical blog posts. This one from three years ago was something I really needed to reread (and was therefore very glad I was given the nudge to do so.)

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The message

August 26, 2022

There are mountains of content. None of it is new. How do we decide what to practice or teach? A message can clarify this. There was a time when I did not have a message. I delivered great content, accumulated from various teachers I’d studied from. The participants had fun, but my lack of messaging left me without answers to questions like, “Why does this much strength (or mobility) matter?” or “Why have you chosen these moves and not those moves?”

~ Kyle Fincham from, What’s Your Message?

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It used to be, that when I read things like this article, I would be launched into deep thinking. It’s nice to know what my message is. It’s nice to know why, specifically, each piece of my menagerie is in my care, why I continue feeding it, and what my hopes for it are. It’s nice. I point this out not in some attempt to jump on my soapbox about how everyone should sort their own menagerie out… no. I’m literally just pointing out that my experience of it is nice.

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That says it all

August 20, 2022

And worse, when something truly significant does happen, it blends in seamlessly with the continuing shitstream that is information in the social media age.

~ Mark Manson from, The Outrage Cycle

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Manson lays it out pretty much as he always does. He’s not swinging a baseball bat; No it’s one of those bats from a zombies movie with nails sticking out of it. But the point is valid none the less.

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Your best

August 11, 2022

To me, quality means doing the best you can with what you have to work with. Your environment. Your equipment. Your voice. Your experience. Your level of comfort. All of those things are part of your overall “working with” toolset.

~ Evo Terra from, «https://podcastpontifications.com/episode/making-your-commitment-to-quality-podcasting»

This is something I often struggle with. Terra is writing about podcasting specifically—something I spend a lot of time doing—but I have this problem more generally. It would serve me well to be thinking: Is this the best I can do now, with the tools, knowledge, situation, and skills I have now? If so, terrific! That’s great enough.

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Forgetting

July 26, 2022

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.

~ Joan Didion

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One reason why I journal

July 16, 2022

When we conjure up what it will be like to start a new practice, form a new habit, knock an item off a bucket list, we see the fun but not the work. We see an image in which all the drudgery has been edited out, and only the montage of rewards left in.

~ Brett McKay from, «https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/advice/sunday-firesides-do-you-like-the-idea-more-than-the-reality/»

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Great points from McKay. I often enjoy inverting problems like the one he’s describing. Let’s say I thought a lot about the idea and the reality and decided far in the past to start something—for example, a daily podcast of me reading quotes. Then the inversion of the problem McKay is writing about would be to figure out, in the present, if my current experience of the reality matches what I expected the reality to be, back when I made the decision. Because, if I don’t do that, how do I get better at making the idea/reality choice McKay is discussing?

This is one reason I journal. For every project (and much more) in the last decade I’ve journaled about it. An idea begins to appear repeatedly in my journal entries. Sometimes it grows into my laying out the expected reality—the work this is going to require, the physical and emotional costs, the expected outcome(s), the rewards, etc.. Then I regularly reread my old journal entries and see how much of an idiot I was. ;)

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