A Mason's Work

[00:00] so far we've been talking about opening up and learning how to take the mask off that we put on
[00:08] our own behavior and to say the slightly more true thing the slightly truer thing and what that tends
[00:16] to cost and what happens when you get the responses that inevitably you're going to get
[00:22] i want to talk about a couple more things here that are really important
[00:27] first what does it feel like when this starts to happen and second is ironically a bit of a caution
[00:37] when the people around you start to learn from your example and understand that it's okay to be open
[00:47] you're going to elevate a relationship from this casual mask meeting mask to pure person meeting
[01:00] person and as this happens through these small repeated opportunities you begin
[01:10] to build a relationship that develops trust
[01:15] most of the time that happens i have to say most of the time because some folks are dealing with
[01:25] their own stuff and sometimes you're dealing with your own stuff some stuff particularly the hard
[01:32] stuff hurts a lot to surface and that's okay when you know what's going to happen and people start to
[01:44] reciprocate and that relationship gets simultaneously heavier and easier at the same time the silences
[01:55] and the breaks you have will stop being awkward and they'll start being comfortable there will start to be spaces in the
[02:04] conversation that neither you nor the other person feel like they need to fill with stuff
[02:12] a sense that you're actually with the person in the room rather than just near them
[02:19] you're building this mutuality and this shared of experience of being known and knowing it's not the same as an
[02:27] agreement or similarity or even just friendship although it often produces some of those things
[02:34] it's specifically the experience of having let someone else see something real in you and you seeing something
[02:42] real in them finding that the relationship survived both of you being real which feels threatening sometimes
[02:51] and it gets stronger
[02:53] that is the opposite of the loneliness we talked about at the start of the week
[03:01] that loneliness lives in a crowded room where you feel like you're moving through the world instead of living in it
[03:08] being surrounded by people who don't know you that mutuality closes that gap kind of from all sides
[03:15] simultaneously and as you're starting to live your authentic self you'll find that your relationships
[03:27] start to take on an ease that doesn't mean you don't have difficult conversations difficult interactions
[03:36] but you don't have to put the mask on anymore and when you don't have to put the mask on anymore you have
[03:43] more energy and we talked about what it's like when that happens you have friends like this now where you don't
[03:50] have to put it on for and it feels like you could talk all night and it feels like the things you do
[03:57] all the quality moments that you have you don't have that weight as we work through this as we
[04:06] work to get there um you have to understand as well and here's the caution
[04:12] other people are going to want to be vulnerable too when you become vulnerable with someone else
[04:20] they're going to want to be vulnerable back and your reaction can't be
[04:27] adversarial or you're not going to get more vulnerability
[04:33] an adversarial looks like a lot of things right it looks like judgment it looks like guidance
[04:40] and advice i can't tell you the number of times i got that one wrong it looks like um helping where
[04:46] help isn't the answer
[04:47] when you can't allow them their truth in whatever way it is you can't expect other people to allow yours
[05:00] and this rebuilds the walls so when you find somebody says something that you don't know how
[05:08] to deal with it's okay to say i heard what you just said i'm gonna need a minute to figure out
[05:16] what that means i don't understand it or i don't understand how i feel about what you just said
[05:22] and i don't want you to take that as anything other than i don't understand how to feel about what
[05:26] you just said as you work through this as you work through these kinds of conversations
[05:31] you're going to have to understand that your responses here are not permission to be scorched earth
[05:41] saying your truth doesn't mean no one else gets to have theirs
[05:47] and someone else saying their truth doesn't mean you have to take that and jam it right into your heart
[05:54] i know that this sounds like you couldn't possibly do this like nobody does this
[06:02] i will tell you i have lived this way for a long time every every whiff of criticism
[06:10] i gained i took it out of the air of the conversation and directed it straight to my own heart
[06:17] every opportunity for rejection i found reasons to make it my fault
[06:23] as you start working through this you have to work on both sides of that skill
[06:30] if you don't you'll find that your need to be vulnerable is another way that you use perhaps
[06:40] to bully other people so be careful or worse you use any feedback you get from anyone
[06:46] and turn it into a flail you use to beat yourself with i recognize that a lot of this may not apply
[06:53] to you and that's okay but for the one person out there that was like me that hears this
[06:58] it's you've got to you've got to be able to kind of work through this in a way that doesn't
[07:05] ironically always demand the worst responses out of you and the best responses out of everyone else
[07:15] as you work through it we'll talk more about this tomorrow we'll talk about what it really feels like
[07:20] when it's all said and done and you've got a relationship that you can stand the test of time
[07:24] uh you'll you'll begin to see why it's really important for you to be able to talk about
[07:32] even your own processing at that level of vulnerability so that you can again strengthen
[07:38] those relationships to the point that they will be effectively bulletproof we'll get there see you tomorrow
[07:45] so
[08:02] you