A Mason's Work

Behaviorally, when we talk about the senior awarding, we're talking about the sort of

evaluative capacity and design intent to close, to conclude effort to stop working to effectively

say, jobs done.

And so when we look at how that works for us as individuals, oftentimes we run a foul

of some very kind of, I would say easy and obvious things if we're not careful.

First things first, if we never define what the outcome is we're trying to work towards,

we never get to done.

So when you're experiencing difficulties in your life, it makes sense before you, before

you start, if you can, to essentially define what you're trying to do.

I realize that that sounds in some ways absurd.

But a lot of our effort is really just kind of cast into the void as it were.

We try and do stuff, thinking it's going to solve the problem, but we don't really have

a meaningful understanding of the intervening sort of milestones or waypoints in between

where we're going to conduct that evaluative perspective.

We're going to stop and say, this part of the work is done or this segment is complete

or adding additional polish to this part of this project isn't going to move the needle

and it is maybe I'm using the lack of closure as a way to essentially avoid moving forward.

A lot of stuff like this happens psychologically, kind of below the, below your levels of conscious

awareness.

So when you're trying to figure out how to suss this stuff out, you know, taking an inventory

of the stuff you're doing under the early basis, taking an inventory of the work that you,

that you're doing, what you've kind of accomplished and achieved, what remains to be done.

Those are all big steps that you can use to essentially arm yourself as the senior

warden to move the conversation forward to a place of safe and meaningful closure.

When you're closing, you know, understand too that when you say, look, I'm going to

stop working on this or this part is done, whatever that might be.

Understand that it's just a part.

You're, you may change perspectives.

You may switch to a different set of work.

You may move from one area of essentially weakness to an area of strength.

You may not be able to solve the problem in the way you would originally intended.

So you have to close that effort, close that line of inquiry as it were and move to the

next.

And this is all a okay stuff, right?

So no judgment, no sort of difficulty here.

A lot of folks will take that fear of failure, for example, and use that to avoid closing

a bit of activity, whatever that might be.

But in fact, you're essentially throwing away a lot of meaningful effort that you could

be applying towards the next task, the next goal, the next objective as you move forward.

Even if those objectives and we've discussed this before, even if those objectives aren't

sort of overly well defined, you can in the process of discovery, identify the kind of

line of demarcation.

Okay, so when I get to this part, I'm going to stop, kind of recenter figure out where

I'm at and then move forward.

This stopping function, this concluding function from a behavioral perspective of the senior

warden is something that a lot of folks tend to avoid.

But it really does give you a strong sense of I can put that stuff out of my mind.

I can put it out of my emotional sort of bandwidth.

I can take that stuff off the table so I can move forward as opposed to lingering because

I don't want things to change or because I don't know what to do next.

So don't let kind of fear and ambiguity drive your sort of drive you to a lack of closure

with the stuff that you're working on.