A Mason's Work

So an obvious question based on the last couple of episodes, one, that everything's happening

in your mind and two, that you predominantly interact with people's ideas of who they

are as opposed to their actual selves, leads us to the obvious question, I suppose, which

might be, how can we then help others?

When it comes to helping someone who's in genuine distress, what does that mean?

What does it look like?

And how can we do it given some of those sort of conceptual constraints that we've talked

about?

The first thing's first, if you haven't listened to the episode about you interacting with

other people, how you typically interact with the idea of that person as opposed to that

person themselves, you want to go back and revisit that as a kind of concept piece for

how we might then go to help other people.

The first thing you can do to help other people is as many as much as possible, you want

to eliminate your idea of who they are.

What that does, and we talked about this in the last episode a bit, is enslave that person

to conformity to your concepts.

What it does is creates this framework that they then kind of like a cookie cutter cutout

that they have to then kind of fit inside in order to make you comfortable.

So you have to eliminate that kind of early on if you want to make any progress helping

other people.

When you do that, when you eliminate that sort of idea of who they are, you give them the

freedom to act in any way that they want, and you don't have an emotional response to

those interactions.

This allows you to allow them to essentially do what it is that they are going to do.

And you can observe that behavior and interact with that person at face value.

Then when you look at the situation at face value, you can essentially then start to figure

out how to best help.

And someone is stuck.

Oftentimes it's stuck, they're stuck in the same way that you might have been stuck.

They are stuck in a mental framework about the way the world operates that no longer

is serving their needs.

Maybe they need to do something different.

Maybe they need to respond in a different way.

Maybe they need to pursue their own growth.

As you separate your projection onto them, their behavior will start to in many ways become

almost obvious.

You'll be able to see patterns in their behavior that indicate an underlying belief or an

underlying behavior that is not serving them in some way or another.

But you can't get there again if you are busy trying to superimpose your idea of what

they're doing and why onto because you have this preconceived notion, you're not separate

that first you're never really going to make any headway.

But once you have, once you've taken your idea away and can watch their behaviors and

start to see the patterns underneath them, then you can start to really meaningfully point

out opportunities that they might go and find new perspectives or new ways of thinking

or ways of behaving to help them achieve their goals.

For example, if you see someone who is complaining that they're having maybe a hard time with

a friend or a loved one, you might point them at the last episode where we talked about

your problem with a friend or a loved one is probably your problem with your idea of

that friend or loved one and not the loved one itself.

When you start to see these things though, you can start essentially triaging the real

behavior and the real actions and then helping them get sort of the cognitive toolkit

that they're going to need to move forward.

When someone's complaining, for example, that they are maybe having trouble with diet,

for example, you might point them towards resources not about what's healthy and what's

not healthy to eat.

That seems important.

But most diet problems, like I say, in the episode a couple episodes ago, all of the challenges,

all of the things that happen all start in your mind.

You might point them to that conversation first as a way to start pursuing some self-development

or self-improvement.

As you're going through this and as you are working to help others, again, separate your

idea of who they are from who they actually are and how they behave.

Then understand that most behaviors that other people have just like you are all the product

of this mental construct.

If you can identify what behaviors they have that indicate sort of what mental construct

that they believe that may or may not be true, then you can route them towards behaviors

or sort of cognitive toolkits that they can use to help sort of get through some of those

challenges or issues.

With that, we'll see you next time.