A Mason's Work

So when you start to deconstruct your internal behavior, which is the vital part of the

work that we do, one of the things you're going to notice is that the behavior you're

trying to analyze kind of will be cognitively slippery for lack of a way to describe it.

You will, as you review the sort of symptoms and signs of what you're working on, not all

of it will appear all at once.

There's a level of magnification involved just like operating a microscope with the depth

of field.

You can't really see all of it all at once because your mind and the parts of your consciousness

that are protecting you are hiding bits of cause and effect relationships between the

behavior you have and the outcomes you're creating.

First and foremost, it's important to understand that that sort of hidden behavioral mechanic

is natural.

So when you are a child and you are unaware that every time, for example, you develop a

habitual response to being scolded every time you're scolded, you go and let's say you

hide under a table or hide in a closet.

And over time, what will happen is those closets are under the table, those confined spaces

will bring you comfort.

And when you start talking to yourself later on in life about why, for example, you really

like those tight closed spaces and they make you feel safe and comfortable, it's going

to take a ton of unpacking to figure out where all that comes from because more often than

not in those internal conversations, some of the original source material effectively

is lost.

You've lost the reason why that recedes this or what have you.

But for the big behaviors, some of the ones that really are maybe holding you back or

informing your behavior in a different way, it's really easy to kind of recover some of

the idea behind root cause without digging too deep.

And one of the techniques that you can use is basically arithmetic.

So if you're familiar with math and algorithms and all of that kind of thing, what you'll

find in a lot of the equations or in a lot of the mathematical operations is the equations

typically need to balance.

Now that goes, that need to balance kind of goes away in your mind to a degree and we

can talk more about that in another episode.

But in the case of analyzing some of these behaviors you're trying to work on or surface,

you kind of, you notice the symptoms of what's going on or the wise and where for us.

I don't like the way this is going.

I keep doing this whenever I should be doing that.

Whatever those behaviors are, break out your basic, basic mathematical symbols, your

addition subtraction multiplication division and the equal sign, et cetera.

And start to kind of tease out what the parts of that equation look like.

For example, we'll use the hiding under tables or hiding in closets kind of example.

Every time I, let's say, every time somebody gets loud around you, right?

There was about to yell at you.

You have a tendency to want to retreat and you need to unpack that.

So you take your stimulus, they get in and yell at the internal response that you have

might be.

So getting yelled at plus the feeling of frayed, the alert mechanism inside your brain equals

hiding in the closet or equals an adult behavior where you can't maybe hide in a closet

because it's less convenient to do so.

Maybe it's going into your favorite room in the house and shutting the door and going

full goblin mode.

So when you start to use the mathematical kind of operations, you might find that that

is a useful mechanic.

It may not be always effective, but maybe a useful mechanic to help you deconstruct some

of the kind of interplayed parts of your behavior set so that you can sort of reprogram it

and where the behavior is appropriate, kind of reintegrate it back into your subconscious.

This process that we go through of self improvement for all the IT folks out here is really just

a process of refining the algorithms that we have.

We take an algorithm from the unconscious that we become aware of when it impacts our behavior

in a negative way.

We look at the algorithm, we attempt to find out what the variables are, how are those

things related, what's integrated, what's not, what's causal, what's not, and then put

the algorithm, you can put it right back into the unconscious and kind of let it auto execute.

This is how we learn to do anything and how our conscious behaviors become unconscious

and vice versa.

So use the tools at your disposal and see if you can't work on the next best version

of yourself using math.