Knowledge + Experience = Wisdom helps people realize their unique importance. Using my knowledge of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, my experience with therapy, coaching, somatic healing, and personal growth I create products to help you discover, develop, and express the elements of your identity critical to your health and your contribution to our world. My goal is to research, develop, and disseminate these materials so that every individual can reconnect with their uniqueness, realize their passion and purpose, and live the life they were born to live.
So, yeah, something real, or representative of something real. But most interesting is that many of these depict a thing REPRESENTING another thing. And that RESEMBLANCE is either good (authentic, real, conforming, true) or not (not authentic, fake, different, false). And remember, a dictionary is book of what we THINK words mean, not what they necessarily mean.
In the context of the Are vs Should Problem, authenticity is behaving in the world the way you feel/want/believe you behave in your head.
On the surface, this may seem like it means you must live in your Are to be authentic. I don’t believe this is true, however.
I think we all exhibit a certain amount of Shoulds throughout our lives, no matter how hard we try not to. We are going to slip. We are human.
The goal is not to live 100% Are and 0% Should, it’s to do the best you can. I don’t see any other way around it. We always build in an error term. A human error term. Which provides a degree of . . . . missing the mark. Failing. Being Inauthentic. It’s ok!
So there’s two points in this Episode, really. One is that the Are is your Authentic Self, and we have been discussing authenticity for the past twenty or so episodes – to point out and use the common vernacular. And the second point is that we are not trying to be 100% perfect, or 100% anything. The utility of a concept like authenticity is as a target to aim for, not something to become.
Much more in this Episode, available as a direct podcast download here:
To be real. To be yourself. To be congruent. To have integrity. Lots of definitions and we all think we know what it means. And, to some degree, we probably do.
To be authentic generally means to not lie to the world. To not wear a mask, or pretend to be someone else. I think you probably try to be authentic. But if you’re like me, you probably miss the mark now and then.
Why is it so hard to be ourselves?
We’re scared of what people will say. Or that we’ll be shamed. Or because we ARE ashamed.
So being authentic isn’t easy – but it shouldn’t be so hard. This week I’ll examine authenticity, the ‘movement’ to be more authentic, and why we shouldn’t be ashamed of how difficult it is to be ourselves.
Remember that time when everything seemed perfectly clear?
Yeah, me neither.
But once in awhile things DO seem clear. And it feels good. There’s no doubt (Episode 28) and things just make sense. Though these moments are fleeting, I think we can learn to maximize the amount of clarity we see in our lives.
And by clarity I mean more the ABSENCE of stuff rather than the PRESENCE of something. Clarity, to me, is really just a lack of noice. A lack of disturbance. A lack of . . . . . conflict.
So, yeah, clarity is PEACE.
But it’s also a feeling. An emotional state, if you will, where the calmness takes over and we are filled with confidence and knowing. And how do we know if we really know what we think we know? Clarity.
But in my life, and maybe in yours, and certainly in many peoples’, there is a distinct LACK of clarity. In truth, life is more like a game of telephone where whatever messages we receive from the world are many times adulterated so what we hear is wrong. Even if the game is only played by two people
I seriously wonder how any conversation between any two people ever results in both parties simultaneously being understood and understanding. It’s amazing we can understand each other given our propensity to interpret each other, insert our subjective biases, to be poor communicators, to define words differently, and any other of a multitude of elements that complicate communication among humans.
But, generally, we can actually talk to each other. My use of the term CLARITY is simply to suggest that we could be much better at it. And that’s what I talk about in this video.
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[Please note, this episode has no video associated with it as I was unable to process my video files. So the YouTube episode is just audio this week. I apologize, and thank you for your patience.]
Many KEW episodes and posts refer to things I learned in the past that maybe don’t help us any more, are outdated, or were simply wrong to begin with. From thinking Competition actually regulates our markets (Episode 6), wondering how Old Beliefs (Episode 9) hold us back, to the idea that we all feel different, but that actually makes us the same (Episode 21). Under all of this there is a theme of having to learn new things.
But before we can learn new things, we have to Unlearn the old things. And this may seem like a silly thing to say, but it is often a critical step that can prevent us from growing. See, these old beliefs, the old ideas, the old information that is stored in our biological hard drive gets in the way of new learning.
It’s almost like your old ways resist the new ways. Like a stodgy old neighbor that wants you to stay off his lawn, our old strategies, the old knowledge, the past approaches to life stand in our way of the new. Until we address what we were wrong about, it’s hard to be right.
Or, in a better way, until we shed the old information and address why it doesn’t serve us we can’t possibly hope to truly understand and integrate the new.
This Episode originally aired in May of this year, or about six months ago. You can find the entire post here with links to the full podcast and YouTube episode. Note the second sentence is the Title of this weeks upcoming episode. At least my ideas are consistent:)
To some, this is a ridiculous question steeped in pointless naval gazing. To others, it’s a comedic take on people who ask the ‘big questions’. To others this is a reasonable assessment of what we want to understand. To me, it’s all three at the same time. And maybe that’s the point.
And like most rhetorical questions, I don’t really want to KNOW if I really know what I think I know. Rather, I’m curious about how this questions makes one think a few steps ahead. It’s not about what we know. It’s about the idea that we think we know in the first place. Like, what makes us think we are so awesome that we can understand the very nature of a thing? What makes us think we are so special? Why are we the only living thing on the planet that can ‘know’? Or is that even a logical thought in the first place?
So, yeah, wondering whether we can even really know things is interesting in and of itself. Perhaps even more interesting than the simple question of whether we are right or wrong. Because that’s the nature of knowing, I think. Knowing implies we are correct. And like my buddy Paul Gadola says, we all think we are correct. So knowing is a bit biased to say the least. We ALL think we know. And we often disagree. And modernity has brought, if nothing else, an ever increasing number of potential explanations to things which means the options of knowing what is right are becoming more and more infinite.
In other words, knowing, or being right, is increasingly more impossible. And, more importantly, does it even matter? If there are ‘subjective truths’ (which I believe are really subjective realities, and not truths at all) then REALLY what does it matter? Can’t we all be right? Doesn’t everyone get a trophy?
What follows, then, is my curiosity in the knowing itself. Not whether or not I know. And how did I arrive at that knowing? One of the major assumptions of the Are vs Should Problem is that much of what we think and believe was simply inherited, so why do we connect so much of our identity with this inherited ‘knowledge’?
Moreover, isn’t it the capacity to think we know stuff far more interesting than actually knowing the stuff? Were the ancient Greeks correct to ‘know thyself’? Isn’t that the first step, anyway? How can we know ANYTHING without first understanding how we would even begin to know in the first place?
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I’m not sure where I heard this phrase but I always thought it had a nice balance of being both funny and thought provoking. Like, many a truth comes out in jest. It sounds like I’m kidding, but this is a serious question.
How do we ever ‘know’ anything? Go back to my very first Episode 1: Facts. This is part of what I was getting at. Humans just don’t have the capacity to know all the ‘truths’ and many things we think are ‘truths’ or ‘facts’ are just potential explanations or even just opinions.
Now I’m looking at the flip side of that. This episode is about our ‘knowing’ rather than the knowledge itself. I’ll discuss choice, belief, and reality. I talk about manifesting. In the end I wonder whether or not we have become distracted by the choosing and have forgotten about the action itself. Isn’t moving through life the goal? Rather than trying to get it ‘right’?
I am making progress toward some ‘to-do’s or action steps for the Are Vs. Should Problem and in this Episode I developed some clear pathways to next steps. I hope you enjoy it.
Full Episodes release Fridays at 5 AM on YouTube and your favorite podcast host. I also post here on my blog in honor of new episodes. Mondays are flashback episodes and Wednesdays are previews like this one:)
In the 9th installment of my Curiosity interview series I talked with Mindset Architect, Marcas Hemmila. You can find out about his multiple YouTube channels, podcast, blogs, and consulting at his Linkedin page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/discoverignite/
He’s been through a lot, learned a lot, and has a lot to say about the role Curiosity plays in healing, growing, and becoming a better human.
Marcas helps people discover what it is they are curious about, and helps them ignite the flame so they can continue on their own.
I’m using the Forest for the Trees metaphor to suggest that humans have become exceptionally myopic. The only reason I know what myopic means is because after defending my Master’s Thesis a professor proclaimed that I was very myopic – meaning I had a terribly narrow view of the question I had asked and answered. I thought I was being pretty broad and was a bit hurt by his statement, but I also understood his point. I could have taken a ‘bigger picture’ approach, but by the time I realized that I was too far along to expand my view.
Anyway, I realized recently that myopia was again affecting my life.
During the decade I spent in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy I didn’t really change. And I knew I wasn’t changing, but couldn’t understand why. Sure, I learned a lot, but my problems stayed the same. At some point I realized that I understood what I was doing, and how to fix it, but only in an analytical way. My mind understood the logic, but my behaviors, attitudes, and habits weren’t changing.
I was still anxious although I understood how irrational many of my fears were.
I still believed I wasn’t good enough despite understanding where those beliefs came from.
I was still angry about many things, though I knew that energy didn’t solve any problems.
I understood why I was the way I was, but I’ll be damned if I learned anything about changing.
Until I realized I was looking at the trees.
In my metaphor, and maybe in yours, my logical, analytical brain was a tree. And it’s all I saw.
Recently, I came to understand I was not only a physical body and an analytical mind, but also an emotional and feeling body with equivalent mental and spiritual elements.
And my anxiety, depression, feeling not good enough, and angry parts were spread across all of these different trees – and together formed my forest.
In order to heal, I had to form a real forest, and not just a bunch of trees.
Paul Gadola calls this Integrity – and I needed some.
A stand of trees does not a forest make. They must integrate. Together. With all parts having meaning. And seeing and feeling each other.
In the context of the Are vs. Should Problem, the analytical mind and the physical body are where a lot of the Shoulds are aimed. The Shoulds bully us into forgetting about the Ares, which lie within our other parts. Our Ares are whole. We used to be whole. We are becoming quite splintered. Myopia is stealing our wholeness.
I love the ‘forest for the trees’ metaphor because it describes a fundamental facet of human nature.
Most of the time we tend to be myopic, only seeing what is right in front of us. For whatever reasons, our species is great at believing what our eyes see. Our ‘field of view’ seems to be ‘all there is’.
I don’t know about you, but I tend to think of ‘myself’, my ‘self’, the ‘real me’, whatever, as being a combination of my eyes and brain.
Like when I meditate, I close my eyes but still think of ‘me’ as being my brain and my eyes. And I guess the rest of me is just the rest of me.
Despite having four other completely developed and incredible senses, we default to our eyesight as telling us what the world is.
And, even further, we tend to believe the world is only what is within our field of view. Or right in front of us.
So, yeah, a lot of the time I’m not really aware of the forest because I believe the handful of trees in front of me is all there is.
To see the world more completely I try to be aware of my other senses and the other parts of the world that exist whether I see them or not:)
More this Friday. Thanks for following, subscribing, and commenting! Help me keep this a discourse by sharing your thoughts however you feel comfortable doing so.
