A Mason's Work

[00:00] Learning to trust yourself is a very challenging proposition for a lot of really good reasons.
[00:09] One of the problems that we have when we're busy trying to figure out what that means and how it works is we're given a lot of guidance from the outside.
[00:21] For any of us, that guidance may seem legit.
[00:26] It may seem entirely valid to have someone say you learn to trust yourself by getting in touch with this or by finding the work or whatever the case may be.
[00:41] And I want to speak to this today because we are having socially a bunch of problems.
[00:50] One of those problems, one of those real meaningful challenges or maybe a byproduct that we're dealing with is that men in general struggle with purpose and direction.
[01:01] And in that context, it erodes or damages their capacities for social interactions.
[01:07] So if you don't understand your place in the world, it's really quite difficult to build relationships with other people while you're on your quest.
[01:16] And when people go through these inflection points in their life where their roles change or their meaning changes or their purpose and direction change, for example, when they retire or when the kids move out or when they just leave college and they're now adrift in the sort of everyday life.
[01:36] Those inflection points become very, very difficult to navigate because we don't cultivate an underlying meaningful sense of self.
[01:49] And as you learn to trust yourself and figure out what that means, you'll begin a foundation that essentially you carry with you wherever you go until you get there, until you can learn to trust yourself and what that really genuinely means.
[02:07] You're going to be perpetually kind of at the whim of whatever society tells you the right answer is absent any other conditions, right?
[02:15] Society meaning, you know, the relationships you have in your life, your parents, your friends, your kids, whatever.
[02:22] They're all going to tell you, oh, you should do this.
[02:24] You should do that.
[02:25] And again, that's just well-meaning advice without the grounding of a strong sense of self and being able to trust what that is.
[02:33] You can't meaningfully filter that guidance.
[02:37] So you end up kind of just doing it, whatever other people are telling you to do.
[02:43] So we can get into, you know, more apparatus on that.
[02:47] That's a relatively obvious and sort of common reality for most people.
[02:53] But we're trying to improve.
[02:54] We're trying to become better.
[02:56] And in that process, the only place that makes sense to start is an understanding of self.
[03:04] To do that, we have to acknowledge some realities.
[03:09] One of the most difficult realities about understanding a sense of self is that you are not always truthful.
[03:20] And in fact, that reality, the fact that we tend to mislead ourselves, we'll say we're not going to say lie because lying implies malintent.
[03:31] I will say that we are not overly truthful with ourselves or we're not honest about what's going on internally because there are some uncomfortable realities in life about the way the world works.
[03:44] And most people, most people tend to avoid discomfort.
[03:49] What that does is it creates a bunch of sort of navigating processes internally that your sort of consciousness is following and avoiding.
[04:03] It's like, I can't go.
[04:05] I can't go deal with this because it means I'm going to have to go do extra work or I don't want to touch that because it means I may have to face things that are make me uncomfortable, like my own mortality or whatever.
[04:14] So, so, so understanding first that in order to become kind of on your own team and trust yourself, you have to acknowledge that you're going to mislead yourself on a regular basis is critical kind of to understanding where this goes.
[04:32] That it is entirely okay that that happens.
[04:40] So long as you don't settle for the answers that are given the initial answers, right?
[04:45] You're not going to trust yourself.
[04:46] If you believe everything you say, you have to test it in the book that's coming out.
[04:53] I have a process for this.
[04:55] I'll tell it to you right now.
[04:57] I'd love for you to buy the book, but the process is fairly straightforward.
[05:00] It's awareness, reflection, analysis, and then action.
[05:06] A-R-A-A.
[05:11] And as you take this process and put it in place in your life, that awareness and coupled with reflection, then analysis, and then action essentially begins the process by which you can cultivate a trustworthy, a self-trustworthy existence.
[05:30] When you take the things that you say to yourself internally, you become aware of what those things are, reflect on them, analyze whether or not they're accurate, and then take action based on that input.
[05:43] You begin the trust cycle, that self-trust cycle.
[05:46] We're going to talk about ways that we're going to overcome some of the hurdles that we come up with and maybe a couple more sort of given realities about the way self-trust works in forthcoming episodes.
[06:00] Stay tuned.
[06:01] Thank you.