A Mason's Work

Brian
00:02

One of the things that's gonna happen as you start doing the work is you're going to want to find out in a lot of cases why certain things happen. Now, the why question is huge, and so when we talked about in our recent episode about starting with why, we were talking about kind of a, a forward approach on the why you're doing the things you're doing. But when you start doing analysis using the the working tools, it is very common to want to look backwards and try and find causes for things. And I wanna give you a little bit of insight here as to when that's appropriate and when it isn't. In a lot of cases, it's not appropriate to be honest. And so here's why, because if the cause of a given behavior or a given event is a one-off, I turned left in this situation because oncoming traffic was headed my way and I had to turn left. That's a, that is a one-off situation and circumstance and knowing why in that case isn't necessarily useful. It's the view's not worth the climb, if you will. It takes a, sometimes it takes a while to figure out the step by step and what happened and the, and the root causes. And in, in fact the, the time is better spent developing a program or developing a, you know, if this ever happens again, here's what I'm going to do.

Brian
01:40

When it really makes sense to start looking at the why and the causes and reasons behind your behaviors or just as importantly the behavior of others, it's important when the symptoms of of suffering that come with their behavior or your behavior start to repeat themselves in a way that is either self-destructive for you or destructive for them. And so, you know, and, and obviously this only applies to the folks that you really, really sort of genuinely care about, doing a root cause analysis on someone else's behavior that you can very easily just eliminate their influence is, is probably you just eliminate the influence and be done with it. But for people that you care about, including yourself, hopefully, right? Then what, what you're really gonna wanna do for the root cause conversation is when these repeated behaviors emerge, start to analyze what are the proceeding factors for those behaviors. I overeat when I am anxious, this is the problem I have. And so how can I get ahead of being anxious a little bit so that I don't then

Brian
02:59

Demonstrate the behavior of overeating? If I can get ahead of that and move that a little bit further backwards in the sort of food chain or the pipe process pipeline, I will be better be able to solve the problems in my everyday life. So as you're busy determining root cause you, you know, start with the end in mind. Am I interested in changing a long-term behavior? If so, I need to understand the patterns that caused it. Am I interested in having a better way to adapt to immediate changes in circumstances? How am I gonna resolve those problems? And then apply the, the process of root cause judiciously so you're not perpetually looking for causes for things that are all one-off situations or that are repeatedly something that's easier to triage just by preventing the issue entirely. And this is where just, just a bit of reflection will help quite a bit using your masonic symbols to, to identify, you know, is there a way to solve this problem a little bit better? Can I go to bed earlier? Can I do this, can I do that? Whatever those sort of personal behaviors are that you're trying to, trying to adjust with that, we'll see you next time.

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