A Mason's Work

[00:00] And so we kind of know what happened right in the conversation.
[00:04] We figured out, you know, with ourselves, we figured out what is preventing us from trusting ourself, whatever that might be.
[00:11] It's the gap between our behavior and identity that has led us to this, essentially this mistruth that we keep repeating internally and probably externally as well.
[00:23] When you find that gap, the hard next steps sort of start to come in.
[00:33] And this is where we want to take action.
[00:36] Now, a couple of cautions about action in this phase.
[00:40] A lot of folks, myself included, my younger self, we'll put it that way, want to make a essentially an unsustainable amount of change in a very short period of time.
[00:53] Well, now that I know what this is, I'm just not going to do it anymore.
[00:56] Or if you've ever had too much to eat or drink, the next day you're like, I'm not going to eat ever again.
[01:04] Good luck with that, buddy.
[01:05] Let's see how that goes.
[01:06] So, you know, when we started this analysis phase, right, this is where we start to run into or we finish the analysis phase and we start in the action phase.
[01:17] This is where we have to start doing something meaningfully different right away.
[01:21] But in order to do this differently, we have to start with, again, another truth.
[01:28] And the truth is that self-trust, this thing we've been working towards all week, is not something you arrive at in a flash.
[01:38] It's something you build.
[01:40] And the same way you build anything, by doing repeated work under tension.
[01:47] The material here that you have to overcome, the kind of tension is this discomfort, whatever it is, the discomfort that you rather would not face.
[01:58] This behavior would say about me that I really am callous or that I do have needs that aren't being met or whatever that gap is that you've discovered in your analysis phase.
[02:12] You want to start nibbling away at building trust in that space.
[02:19] And you're going to do that with repeated, small, sometimes infinitesimally small actions over time where you test yourself with, can I do this?
[02:36] Can I do this?
[02:37] Can I do this?
[02:37] Can I do this?
[02:38] And as you go through that process, as you rise to that occasion in these small instances, maybe when it doesn't seem to matter all that much in safe environments, in little ways, maybe I can have this conversation.
[02:52] Maybe I can take on this risk.
[02:55] Maybe I can be in public in this way.
[02:59] Maybe I can be vulnerable in this way.
[03:01] Whatever that is, whatever your gap is that you need to close to stop lying to yourself about this thing is always going to be addressed in small, small points.
[03:16] As you build up this track record of solving this problem, making these little left slipper promises to yourself and honoring them on the right slipper later, where you try a little thing, do a little thing.
[03:32] Try, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, small actions, right?
[03:36] Try this kind of repetition is where trust builds, right?
[03:42] If you look at an athlete, this is how they get to know what they're doing, how they get to evaluate their performance because they've done the little movement a million times.
[03:54] So that when the big movement comes, they've got all of the tiny pieces strung together in a way that makes sense.
[04:02] This is how we're going to do this as well internally to build this trust.
[04:08] So any one time that you may not meet the challenge, it's important to understand that, uh, you know, if you, if you do put yourself in these situations, then you go, ah, well, I, I screwed this one up.
[04:21] Um, try again, go again.
[04:24] Give it another shot.
[04:26] Be vulnerable again.
[04:27] Be, you know, whatever, whatever that gap is, uh, do it again.
[04:32] If you find yourself demoralized when you aren't successful, make the work smaller, drive the work to even smaller pieces.
[04:45] We want the discomfort here to be tolerable so that the sort of inoculation, the behavior that you undertake, um, doesn't send you spiraling.
[04:58] And as we do this, as your trust builds over time, what's going to happen is you're going to have a part of you, a part of who you are that is built on a foundation of essentially true to you.
[05:14] This is, this is your truth.
[05:16] You're going to need your truth.
[05:20] To be real to you.
[05:24] If you're going to build relationships with anyone else in the world, if you can't be true to you, anything that you're going to build is going to be on shifting sands.
[05:34] Your relationship with your family, your kids, your job, all of those things, your entire life.
[05:39] If you're not true to you, the moment you change.
[05:44] And you don't know why the rest of your life kind of is on this unstable, this unstable ground.
[05:51] And you're not going to have, uh, it's all going to feel like it's got tossed up in the air all at once.
[05:57] So we want to avoid that.
[05:59] And that's what we're going to get by building this self-trust over the course of, you know, what we talked about this week.
[06:06] Repeat this process, go through this cycle, the awareness, reflection, analysis, action cycle.
[06:13] Uh, and that's going to be the foundation that we're going to use to start solving some of the, you know, the other epidemic level stuff moving forward.
[06:23] See you next week.