A Mason's Work

[00:00] Yesterday, we talked about the kind of chains that you've built for yourself.
[00:05] So today we're going to talk about what they are and what it would cost to put them down.
[00:10] But before we can talk about any of that stuff, we need to talk about something that you may
[00:17] have never really looked at, and that's the ledger.
[00:20] There's kind of this accounting happening inside you right now.
[00:23] It's been running your entire life, and it doesn't appear in any account.
[00:29] You can log into or any reports you can pull, but it is precise in its current, and your
[00:36] body knows the balance even when your mind does not.
[00:39] Every time you calibrate, every time you read the room and adjust, every time you swallow
[00:45] a genuine response and replace it with a strategic one, every time you perform the version of
[00:52] yourself that gets the result you need in a particular room with those particular people,
[00:56] a transaction posts, something gets spent.
[01:00] Not a huge cost.
[01:01] It's almost like a token cost with an AI.
[01:04] It's not in a way that you would notice in any single moment.
[01:07] It's just a small withdrawal from this kind of reserve that doesn't fill between meetings.
[01:15] The currency is somatic.
[01:17] That's a clinical word for something simple.
[01:19] Your body is the bank.
[01:23] The fatigue at the end of the day, where kind of nothing physically demanding happened, that
[01:29] flatness after a conversation that went well by every external measure, the way you need
[01:35] 20 minutes alone in the car before you can walk into your own house, not because you don't
[01:40] want to be there, but because the performance requirements haven't fully stopped and you need that
[01:45] transition space.
[01:46] Those are the receipts.
[01:48] Those are proof that the transactions your conscious mind is made over the entire day
[01:53] or authorized or maybe not authorized, but your nervous system process anyway.
[02:02] The scales of justice are one of the oldest symbols in human civilization because they represent
[02:07] something we understand instinctively, that everything has a weight and the weight accumulates.
[02:14] And if you've, for those of you that may be not familiar with it, there's a, uh, usually
[02:19] in the front of every courthouse, a blindfolded woman, and she is holding up, uh, what looks
[02:25] to be these two plates suspended by a bar.
[02:28] And the idea is that those plates are supposed to balance that the scales of justice are impartial.
[02:33] And that's why she's blindfolded.
[02:35] And that those weights, whatever weights are on these scales should equal out.
[02:40] What happens though, is you are adding stuff to those scales every single day, every sacrifice
[02:48] you make, every little adjustment that handcuffs you and changes the way you would normally respond.
[02:56] Now, to be clear, a lot of this is super healthy in terms of getting along with other people.
[03:05] But when it becomes this sort of self-subversion, you're adding these little weights to this balance
[03:12] that never rebalances, that one side is always out of whack.
[03:18] And the other side is the story that's told in your body.
[03:21] Most men aren't watching the needle because not because they're careless, but because no
[03:26] one ever told them this scale actually was working, that the depletion that happens during
[03:32] the day is real.
[03:34] And it shows up in life because we're told to tough it out.
[03:38] And in toughing it out, we bear this cost.
[03:43] Our body keeps score.
[03:45] What makes it really hard to see is how efficient it is, how automatic it is, and how a lot of it
[03:53] feels like good behavior.
[03:57] It feels like I'm going to not fly off the handle here because it would be socially inappropriate.
[04:05] It would be bad for my career, all that kind of stuff.
[04:07] The thing about all of this, about all of these behaviors is they're kind of like, again, this
[04:16] story that you've told yourself that is so integral to the way you operate and perpetually
[04:23] depleting this account.
[04:28] This isn't that there's something wrong with you.
[04:31] This isn't that you're weak.
[04:32] It's you've been running this tab for so long without looking at the cost that you are just
[04:38] regularly running out of the currency you need to be successful here.
[04:45] Look at the emotional reserves, the physical reserves, the cognitive space.
[04:51] Sleep doesn't refresh your batteries in the same way.
[04:54] The time alone doesn't necessarily always fix it.
[04:57] We talked about those experiences yesterday.
[04:59] When you put the ledger down for real for the first time or the one time occasionally
[05:04] where you hit this flow state or you're in the conversation of a lifetime or you're with
[05:09] your friend and you don't have to put all that stuff on.
[05:12] That's all kind of examples of what happens when you put these things down.
[05:18] There's a skill for kind of figuring out where all of these hidden costs are being calculated.
[05:24] It's called interoception and I've got a full video of that out on my YouTube channel.
[05:29] So you should definitely look that up if you're not familiar, but it's the ability for you to
[05:35] sense your own sort of body's internal states, your heart rate, your muscle tension, your gut
[05:41] response, the quality of the tiredness that you have, the tensions in your muscles and all
[05:48] of the stuff you carry in that furrowed brow or whatever.
[05:53] It's all part of data that's being fed to you on a regular basis that you are taught in a lot of
[05:59] ways to just completely ignore.
[06:02] You've taught yourself this to ignore it.
[06:05] Society has told you it's not important by telling you to tough it out, by telling you to walk it off.
[06:11] Over the rest of the arc here, we're going to try and help you reassess and recalibrate to read this
[06:20] instrumentation that your body's providing so that you can begin to find out where you're paying these
[06:28] costs, what behavior it is, how much it's essentially depleting your accounts, and what can we do when the
[06:37] time comes to try and change that behavior in a way that doesn't undermine or damage your ability to
[06:44] respond productively.
[06:46] We'll talk more about it tomorrow.
[06:48] See you then.