A Mason's Work

[00:00] So if it's very common for people to mislead themselves and again, not lie to themselves
[00:06] most of the time, but if it's really common for you to mislead yourself in your everyday
[00:10] basis or everyday kind of internal conversation, if you have those, um, it's really important
[00:18] to understand how you're going to figure out if you're telling yourself the truth or not.
[00:25] Right.
[00:25] Uh, because again, you're going to be the easiest person to mislead or the easiest
[00:29] person to lie to.
[00:31] Uh, when that happens, when you are, um, beginning that awareness phase where like there's a situation
[00:40] here that you're aware that you don't like what's going on or you don't like how it's
[00:44] playing out.
[00:46] The very first indicator that, uh, something is amiss is, um, that you have a very, very
[00:55] very quick response.
[00:58] When you're misleading yourself, you usually have a kind of a initial reaction very, very
[01:04] quickly.
[01:04] It's suspiciously fast.
[01:07] Someone asks you why you didn't fall through on something.
[01:09] And before the question's over, you're already explaining.
[01:13] You think about a situation and you're already immediately defensive.
[01:19] Uh, the conditions weren't right.
[01:20] It wasn't the right moment.
[01:21] And the, the idea here is if you have a canned explanation as to what's going on and why
[01:28] chances are that's based on a non, a not true thing you've got going on internally.
[01:36] Genuine reflection takes a minute, right?
[01:38] It requires you to actually go and look at what happened to go through a discovery phase,
[01:44] uh, rather than just kind of pick up a script.
[01:48] A pre-scripted response to a situation is a, is an unexamined one typically.
[01:54] And in that case, that is oftentimes based on whether or not you're comfortable looking
[02:02] or not.
[02:04] Don't get confused with, with default responses that you already have that are not based on,
[02:11] uh, uh, a challenge, right?
[02:14] The second sort of gateway here will help you figure this out.
[02:19] The second gateway is our second signal is the direction of that response.
[02:25] So if you do have a quick response, that's fine.
[02:28] If the sort of content of that response is, uh, points at other people or points at circumstances
[02:36] or points at situations, there's a really good chance that that is also something that's
[02:43] essentially a mislead, right?
[02:45] Or a misdirection.
[02:47] When, uh, for example, you are, uh, struggling with a situation in your home life and your default
[02:56] response is, you know, uh, well, my, my kids are a pain in the butt.
[03:00] Uh, it's their fault, uh, or that's why this is happening.
[03:05] Uh, there's a real good chance that there's something underneath there that is not true.
[03:13] You will use these things in your life, these entirely rational things that are going on in
[03:19] your life as explanations or justifications for not doing something or not getting something
[03:25] done or not planning or any of that kind of stuff.
[03:26] The third, uh, indicator that you've got kind of, uh, maybe something that's not entirely
[03:35] accurate is, um, that the feeling that you get right after you've explained yourself, right
[03:44] after you have told yourself the story of about why you're in this situation or why the world
[03:51] has put you in that situation, if that story, uh, makes the discomfort go away immediately,
[03:58] that's a good indicator that it is, um, being used as a bandaid and not as a discovery process,
[04:09] right?
[04:09] You're not surfacing new information.
[04:11] You're stamping down the discomfort or the uncomfortable feelings that come with it.
[04:16] So each of these represents effectively a way in which you probably mislead yourself.
[04:27] I know it, that's how it works for me.
[04:30] I know that that's the texture of how I mislead myself.
[04:33] There's, you know, perhaps other nuances there.
[04:36] You might find that there's other tricks that you pull in yourself on a regular basis, but the
[04:41] practice here is to look at the explanations, those cognitive, uh, stories we tell ourselves
[04:49] about why the world is the way it is.
[04:52] And the moment that they take away from your agency, the moment they make, they justify
[04:59] the world, the way it is, or the situation, the way it is, is the moment where you might
[05:06] have this, uh, erosion of self-trust where you are surrendering your capacity and agency
[05:15] to a system or to the world around you.
[05:19] And that's because it's uncomfortable to try and solve it.
[05:23] So you don't have to kind of dig in too deep right away in the awareness phase of the, the
[05:28] ARA sequence.
[05:30] This is really just about understanding the data, the input.
[05:34] Okay.
[05:35] We'll talk more about that over the next couple of days.