A Mason's Work

Today's episode is a bit of a two-parter.

I want to talk briefly about being productively unproductive and even more about when you've

identified some behaviors you want to improve.

How do you go about it and where do you start?

So when we talk about being productively unproductive, we talked about it a little bit in the last

episode.

And the big thing with productively unproductive and being easy is all get out to full yourself.

Is you're going to easily think you're solving one problem by undertaking a different activity.

So you'll go, for example, and maybe if you're trying to stop overeating, for example, and you start

locking up the food, that seems like it's going to mitigate root cause, but it is not.

That's just symptom management, right?

So when we lock up the food because we're overeating, without understanding the causes of our

overeating and why we're avoiding something or why we feel disappointed or depressed or upset

about something such that we need that dopamine hit from the food, we're not really solving

the problem by putting the food under lock and key because it doesn't address the root

cause.

If we don't understand some level of the root cause, we can't get to the next level of

fix.

So productively unproductive comes in when you start doing things that seem like your

address when we cause, but they don't.

They actually just cut off a symptom or they move the distraction from one place to another.

And again, we talked about this a little bit in the last episode, but I wanted to make

sure that for folks out there that have spent years maybe diluting themselves as I have

to that you're going to fix it this time for real by locking the food up.

Or you're going to fix it this time for real by making sure that you have a treadmill at

your desk like I do, for example.

This is great at your desk, but if you don't use it, it's not going to do anything.

So that level of, again, going back to the first episode of the week here being honest

and then on to attempting to find root cause, it's not until you find root cause, can

you meaningfully address the problems now.

But I'm not talking about here as some sort of psycho Freudian like regression therapy

where you try and figure out, you know, which one of your parents did this to you and why.

That root cause is interesting, but not important for us.

What we're really looking for is the direct behavioral cause and effect from you recognizing

or not recognizing a situation or a problem you're trying to solve when you're on psychology.

So it doesn't matter necessarily how the sort of behavior got there.

What does matter is how you're going to address it moving forward.

And if you don't get to the root causes like for example, I eat every time I feel rejected.

If that's a thing that you do, then you're going to need to find a better way with deal

with being rejected.

Doesn't matter necessarily that you feel rejected because you had some sort of trauma in your past.

What does matter is if you don't handle the symptoms or the the the triage from feeling, you know,

a lack of approval, you're not going to get anywhere.

Right. So it's not just locking up the food because now, you know, I have this, this lack of approval.

I'm going to go find something else to get it from somewhere else.

Right. That don't mean it. This is one of the underpinnings of addiction.

So the other thing I want to the sort of part two of the episode today that I want to be very mindful of

because I can tell you a thing that I have learned in my years.

You can't fix it all at once.

There is no sweeping grandiose single act that's going to pull you back from the breach on some of these behavioral issues.

It's it's it's not even a function of whether or not you could.

In many ways, it's a function of whether or not you should even consider it.

And the answer is always no.

Behavior is built. It is a it is much like we talk about in Freemasonry.

Behavior is a built sort of structure.

It's a it's a process that you're going to build to create a consistent outcome.

If you don't get to a built set of behaviors, it doesn't matter if you go and wrestle all of this, you know, all of the stuff you have to do to the ground once.

And say, hi, one, if you're going to continue to live, it's going to continue to get messed up.

And that's just the way it is.

So if you don't figure out how to sort of create these iterative step changes, these process improvements, you're never going to get to close the gap.

Whatever that gap might be.

Let's say you're avoiding looking at your credit card bills, for example.

I know people that struggle with this, there's no amount of like, well, I'm not going to I'm just going to eat ramen for three months and pay off my credit card bills.

Because the not looking at your credit card bills is has really very little to do with what's on the bills.

It has everything to do with, you know, you avoiding the financial impact of all of that stuff.

Again, even if you were to solve it all at once or an instant kind of model where you, you know, again, start yourself for three days and, you know, then you can pay all your bills.

If you don't triage the root cause of this that puts you in that situation to begin with, you're going to be forever behind that behavior.

You're always going to be doing this and that bringsmanship that pulling yourself back from the breach does isn't free.

It has a cost and it has a huge cognitive cost.

It has some upsides. I'm not going to lie to you, but they are few and far between compared to consistent small behavioral changes you can make along the way.

It should help you a whole lot more and be a lot more effective as you start to engineer and architect a life that's richer and fuller and better.

So, so note well how you're going to start solving some of these challenges that you're surfacing through the work we talked about this week and little bites, little bites.

And that's a little tidbit. The best thing you can do is figure out your protocol for getting back on the horse, whatever it is.

You fall off for whatever reason. Don't worry about architecting the perfect day, architect the solution for how to get back on the horse.

That's going to save you so much time and so much headache. Ask me how I know.