A Mason's Work

These three mental or conceptual roughions are exploited not only by your own internal

psychology, which prefers the sedentary non-changing kind of setup over the difficulty and

adversity of change.

They're also exploited from forces outside of you, namely the sort of the marketing environment

commercial enterprise in the United States for sure.

But they'll be exploited by others to essentially help you self sabotage such that you don't

become a credible threat to the situation or the status quo or what have you.

So when we look at how this happens more often than not, the best place to look is any advertisement

you've ever seen.

Any commercial on television, every one of those pretty much without exception is designed

to exploit fear, uncertainty or doubt.

There are very few that are designed to enobl or elevate you.

They all have either the explicit like look better by doing this or feel better by doing

that, which essentially says that you're in sort of in Gestalt, not those things, right?

By saying, hey, feel better doing this, what it means is you should feel bad because you're

not.

And so when we look at the advertising world, we can find tons and tons and tons of examples

of people talking about and manipulating those three ruffians such that you against

a paralyzed or give up your resources to effectively make those things go away as a sort

of a personal note.

For me, one of the big applications of this or one of the big realities that I have kind

of discovered in my own life over the past couple of years was that my anxieties, my fears

and uncertainties drove just a ton of my behavior on a regular basis.

It led to a whole bunch of approval seeking and this sort of perpetual inquiry so you kind

of would take the knowledge you've gained from that to then again get more approval seeking.

It was basically outsourcing a ton of what should have been sort of positive emotional

regard for myself and essentially turning it into something that I used to enslaved myself

to the will of other people.

When we look at this and again, your mileage may vary so to be clear, hopefully, hopefully

your experience is not as pathological as mine was.

But when you look at these things and you go, hey, how can I overcome these ruffians?

How can I not let them drive my behavior so much?

We talk quite a bit about this week and there's the role of noticing.

And then again, what is the other thing that's kind of the most important to understand

in this entire quest is the objective of all of these ruffians is to keep you from moving.

You let them win by standing still.

There is a fundamental reality that you should find in every major religious text if you

look and that is that the nature of the world is change.

And if you are not changing, if you are using these things, we are uncertain to end out

to allow you to try and not change.

You are effectively being sabotaged on the regular by these ruffians.

And we want to overcome that process by first accepting that you don't have to change

everything right now.

You're not going to make any of these ruffians go away by making them stronger.

Making fear is not going to improve your sort of situation.

And it's not going to make action more likely.

So to decrease fear, the best thing to do is to reduce the perceived risk.

When we talk about what that looks like or when you reflect on what that looks like,

it may be what is the single small step I can take right now to move the conversation

forward to stop being afraid, etc.

And take that step or that action or that small single thing you can do.

There are other ways to go about this.

What is the one friend I can call on to help me feel less afraid about the situation?

Or what is the single thing that if I knew it, I would be able to take action easily

and resolve that uncertainty.

Or what behavior am I avoiding by moving into this perpetual investigatory kind of doubt

cycle?

What is the one thing that I could do to solve this problem?

Or at least, you know, lighten the load.

Again, we're not looking for magic bullets here.

We're looking for small, single behavioral changes we can take over time.

One of this stuff formed instantly and none of it will go away instantly as we work

through this stuff together.

And as you explore this in your internal landscape, you'll find that the best approach to solving

a lot of these problems is very small, very subtle and very sort of fault tolerant changes

where if you miss it for a day, you're okay.

If you miss it for two days, again, you're not using that to weaponize it, but yourself

up.

So as you move through this, as you understand that those three roughions are probably

like most people driving a lot more behavior than you'd like, that noticing process and

then the kind of what small step can I take to help should be a great way to move the

conversation forward.