A Mason's Work

[00:00] Today's episode is going to be really tough and it's going to be really tough because
[00:08] we're going to start looking at the data that we get back when we've found out that we lied
[00:16] to ourselves in some way or another, some mislead, some misdirect, some extroversion
[00:21] of the way the world works that justifies our internal behavior of not moving or not
[00:26] solving the problem or whatever. The analysis phase is really quite dangerous for lack of a
[00:39] better way to say it. And the danger is that you don't do it correctly. There's a couple of key
[00:49] risks. And when I say correctly, I quite literally mean that there are some outcomes here that feel
[00:55] super satisfying, but are just kicking the can down the lane. So there's a right way and wrong
[01:01] way to go about this. Anything that essentially doesn't move your understanding forward productively
[01:08] is effectively the wrong way to do it. So when you jump to judgment, for example, when you look at
[01:16] the situation where perhaps you are lying to yourself in some capacity or another, and you
[01:21] start to use that, use your performance or use the situation to beat yourself up, that is basically
[01:32] judgment wearing the Sherlock Holmes outfit, right? That is like masquerading analysis as a beating,
[01:41] right? You don't want to do that, obviously, because it's super bad for you. And the more you beat
[01:47] yourself up, the worse you get, the deeper the avoidance goes. And over time, as that sort of
[01:53] edifies into your behavior set, you won't even be able to see that you're lying to yourself anymore.
[01:59] And it'll kind of go back into the woodwork. The second meaningful challenge in the analysis phase
[02:07] is a rationalization where you rationalize and justify the things that you're doing, the position that you
[02:16] have that essentially further allows it to not change. Where you look at the situation and you go,
[02:22] well, that is what it is. That's exactly what happened. And I wouldn't do anything different.
[02:29] That's just rationalizing. You're just taking what you've done and making it okay.
[02:35] When we meaningfully begin the analysis process from data about what's going on in the world,
[02:41] we have to move to a completely different place where in many ways your identity is not involved.
[02:49] Okay. If your identity is involved in analysis phase, you're not going to fix anything because
[02:53] you've got too much writing on the line, as it were. When we want to move to this place where we're
[03:02] trying to figure out what's going on, you're going to bring all of that data into the examining.
[03:07] And you're going to look for some of the themes that maybe you're going to look at these themes
[03:14] you've noted in that reflection phase, some stuff that kept showing up some stuff like,
[03:20] Hey, every time somebody brought this up in conversation, or every time I was confronted
[03:24] with this type of situation, I performed this misdirect, or I told myself this story to justify
[03:32] in action or whatever. This is where that analysis gets to happen. Now, independent of the two kind of
[03:42] false analyses are another set of risks as well. And that is overuse and underuse. So overuse of analysis
[03:55] is rumination, where you essentially will sit there and go over the same territory over and over and over
[04:00] again, looking for a different result. You'll add more nuance, the story will get richer, but
[04:05] not really meaningfully change at all. That's kind of a meaningful abuse of the analysis process.
[04:14] And underuse is like the, you know, the first pattern that comes up, you kind of just, well,
[04:20] yeah, I guess that's it. Peace, I'm out. It feels like progress. And then six months later,
[04:25] you find yourself in the exact same position. So when we're looking at these behaviors that we have,
[04:31] these challenges we're trying to overcome, where we have essentially told ourselves something that
[04:35] isn't true, what we're trying to find is underneath that, what is the thing that we are either avoiding,
[04:48] right? What's the, what's the discomfort? What's the truth there? Sometimes it's, what would this say
[04:54] about me if I, if this were true? Or sometimes it's, um, what would this mean if I genuinely acted in
[05:01] this way? More often than not, when you start looking at these things, there are questions about
[05:08] who we are as people. There's a, uh, unresolved ambiguity about where behavior is versus who we think
[05:18] we are. It's a identity behavior conflict in a lot of cases. We have options in those situations.
[05:26] And we'll talk about those a little bit more in the action phase tomorrow, but in this analysis phase,
[05:32] look for that gap, look for what is the thing that we're trying to, to essentially justify,
[05:41] legitimize or make okay by virtue of this lie that we tell ourselves or this misdirect.
[05:49] There is where the seed of the work for tomorrow will come from.
[05:53] Thank you.