A Mason's Work

Your identity as a person is not as fixed as you might think.

It's a story that you tell yourself about the way you are and the way you want to be in

the world, about your intentions and desires and values and faith and all of your beliefs.

This identity that you have constructed, that some people will call the ego, but the

sort of a counter here gets messy and is less important.

It's important to understand though that the context for all of your everyday life that

you have built is all based on the story you tell yourself of who you are.

The more you understand that story, the better you understand that story.

The more likely you are to be able to eliminate beliefs or behaviors or elements of faith that

you no longer need.

That you may no longer want because they're not productive for you to move the ball forward.

We'll talk about faith in another episode.

But for now, when you're sitting there trying to figure out your story, your identity,

who you are.

It's important to disconnect in that process from your own past with a couple of key exceptions.

The chronological events of your past are not as fixed in time as you're likely to believe.

You remember everything, but memory is flawed.

Oftentimes we'll remember something favorably or unfavorably based on the sort of concepts

we had or context for what was happening at the time.

In fact, if you recontextualize those events more often than not, everyone will take their

suffering and re-tell that story as a really important part of their growth, whereas at

the moment it was abjected and horrifying.

When you are going through this process of recalibrating or understanding the story of

who you are and trying to determine what the next version of you is going to become by

virtue of crafting a new story, it's important to look back only for evidence.

When you are evaluating your past behaviors, they will oftentimes emerge from kind of

deep built-in preferences.

When you are under stress or you are under adversity of some sort, when you look at your

behavior from those times in your life, identify what happened, trying not to attach an emotional

context to it, but I'll give you an example from my life.

When I look back on the places and times where I was fortunate enough to have good luck

come my way or the results of good effort or what have you, my default modality is to

share those proceeds with the people around me.

I either share the information that I use to achieve that outcome or share the direct

results themselves.

I don't tend to hold on to that stuff and hoard it.

It's just kind of not in my nature.

Because of this, when I start looking at the story of who I am, I can put words in there

like does not cling to resources, for example.

That's different than not being frugal, but we can get into the sort of flusy mechanics

here.

When you start looking back over time, though, you'll start to notice some emergent trends,

things like under pressure, I go crazy or under pressure, I really excel.

You'll look at parts of that story that speak to how you interact with others when in an

environment where the person I'm speaking with can't possibly help me, am I kind or cruel

or ambivalent or what have you.

These kinds of repeated behaviors, if you analyze them, you'll be able to start to tell

the story of who you are in a better way, which will allow you to build a new identity

that either mitigates the weaknesses of your past behavior or removes some of the sort

of products that you've created in the past that you no longer need.

You can take this identity concept, the story of yourself and write a new one at any time.

Then from that story, determine what your values are, determine how your faith can support

those values and from there build your new set of beliefs and new set of behaviors as a result.

That whole sort of chain of change for what's going on inside of you as a person is vitally

important to start to analyze as quickly as possible because what will happen if you don't

is adversity will continue to come your way and you will not be able to see the causes

of it more often than not.

Those causes will be you.

It'll be the narrative results of the story that you have very little understanding of

if you don't do this kind of inquiry.

Take a look at mason'swork.com.

If you have any questions, there's a couple of blog that mason'swork.com.

There's a couple of analytic lenses there that you can use.

How you might use some mason symbols to solve some of these problems.

If you don't remember your mason symbols, there's also primers on those as well.

We'll see you next time.