What do you think? Or to put it another way and practice this rule: what am I, as the author of this project, not aware of so far?
You may not be aware of how important monitoring your feelings and your feeling about those feeling can be to becoming more self-aware. Some people would argue that feelings don't matter—only facts do. But feelings are facts.They are nature's fast path to telling us what is really important. For instance, when I'm aware of my anger triggered by someone saying something derogatory abut my character, I could become angry about that anger, without knowing it, and lash out at the person with a "YOU don't know what YOU are talking about." But when I am aware of my anger and accept it as a natural and okay fast path response, I might respond, "I was angry hearing about my character deficiencies, but now I recognize I do have deficiencies. Would you share some more feedback?" My hypothesis is that when I am behave congruently— equally balancing my needs and desires, the others' needs and desires, and the interaction context—I am optimally self-aware.
I think there's a strong correlation between being self-aware and world aware.
I decided long ago that I don't quite trust people who, to use my metaphor, don't have their scanners scanning and sensors sensing. Because if they are oblivious then they may act as if they don't care about the world and me. My metaphor for them is going around with little pig eyes.
As for meditation, that specific example taught me something: For a college class, I was trying to set up a reinforcement schedule for me to achieve a goal of meditating. I failed. I formally concluded that a goal was not appropriate for me if I was not motivated enough to go home and tell people about it.
Thanks Sean. How do you identify people who "don't have their scanners scanning?" - I think I know what you mean. But I try (at least I think I try - haha) to keep room for people who are just strange to me on first impression, or operate differntly, but are actually aware and observant.
To me there are the pig eye-ed ones, and the innocent (not selfish) ones. The former are hard to describe, so I won't try. The latter would include a pretty lady who can walk the downtown length of my city and not have anyone talk to her. According to a mutual friend, she has a closed body language, marching along and stiff eyes, as if she was in her own world, in contrast to my friend and I who look around as we walk, more sauntering than marching, with soft eyes, which makes us seem approachable.
It occurs to me that people who render a business meeting dysfunctional, say by shooting from the hip, might be people who are oblivious to others. I guess you would know more about that than I would, as my own company has functional meetings that people don't hate. (I went around asking)
We say MORE self-aware but we mean LESS self-aware, I think. Less full of myself. More attentive to the things round me and attuned to the moment. Less tossed around by amygdalic impulses. When I lose myself in things like a walk in nature or an intense coding session or an interesting book, I am less aware of self yet more intensely conscious. Isn't THAT what we want? The term self-awareness puzzles me because we actually want to have less awareness of self and more awareness of "the other".
Thanks for calling this out. I think you're right that the language is clumsy.
Maybe it's "more self aware AND less self centered"? Or something like that. It's another kind of paradox.
I guess one point I was trying to make is to be less full of ourselves we have to first do the work of being more self-aware of how self centered we are (among other things)?
It seems to me that perhaps the concept of what rules themselves are might be flawed. We say things like, “rules to live by”, or “one needs to follow the rules”. And this perspective is useful to governmental, religious, and cultural organizations that define rules to maintain a sense of order and coherence in their followers and citizens.
But what if instead, we looked at rules as more like guardrails or guides? They can more or less keep us on a pathway safe and protected. But not all rules apply equally to all pathways (context is king). And as you’ve pointed out in earlier posts, sometimes one “rule” contradicts another (the context part?).
The above is what came to me as I was thinking about how to develop self-awareness. But I also thought about the self-awareness part too...
Learning to meditate was useful for becoming calmer, but in and of itself I didn’t find the self-awareness component. It wasn’t until I started studying Buddhist psychology coupled with the meditation practice that my self-awareness really seemed to expand. Part of this was learning to recognize the recurring negative mental traps and mind patterns, and learning to short-circuit the mental dialog (delusional or fantastical stories) that typically follow if one doesn’t “kill them in their crib”.
Another thing I learned from Buddhist psych was to see and appreciate the conditionality manifested in all things, ex: how many steps, processes, and people does it take to get the food you’re about to eat from its origins to your mouth. We can ask the same kind of questions about own selves, and those around us, ie, what are all the steps that led to this moment. If we do this honestly, we might end up seeing that we literally have no frickin idea what is really going on here. IMO, these kinds of thought experiments can help to keep us all a bit humble, and hopefully a little more self-aware.
Keep in mind though that these types of activities are effortful, type 2 thinking (as per Kahneman), so it takes time and energy to pause, reflect, and think it through. IOW, it’s not necessarily easy, and heuristics let us flow more automatically through life, albeit less self aware perhaps.
Oh, and on journaling…I personally found this activity to be totally useless for self-awareness…that is until I was introduced to decision journals in Michael Mauboussin’s book, Think Twice. Suddenly this type of journaling became very helpful and led to more self awareness.
What do you think? Or to put it another way and practice this rule: what am I, as the author of this project, not aware of so far?
You may not be aware of how important monitoring your feelings and your feeling about those feeling can be to becoming more self-aware. Some people would argue that feelings don't matter—only facts do. But feelings are facts.They are nature's fast path to telling us what is really important. For instance, when I'm aware of my anger triggered by someone saying something derogatory abut my character, I could become angry about that anger, without knowing it, and lash out at the person with a "YOU don't know what YOU are talking about." But when I am aware of my anger and accept it as a natural and okay fast path response, I might respond, "I was angry hearing about my character deficiencies, but now I recognize I do have deficiencies. Would you share some more feedback?" My hypothesis is that when I am behave congruently— equally balancing my needs and desires, the others' needs and desires, and the interaction context—I am optimally self-aware.
I think there's a strong correlation between being self-aware and world aware.
I decided long ago that I don't quite trust people who, to use my metaphor, don't have their scanners scanning and sensors sensing. Because if they are oblivious then they may act as if they don't care about the world and me. My metaphor for them is going around with little pig eyes.
As for meditation, that specific example taught me something: For a college class, I was trying to set up a reinforcement schedule for me to achieve a goal of meditating. I failed. I formally concluded that a goal was not appropriate for me if I was not motivated enough to go home and tell people about it.
Thanks Sean. How do you identify people who "don't have their scanners scanning?" - I think I know what you mean. But I try (at least I think I try - haha) to keep room for people who are just strange to me on first impression, or operate differntly, but are actually aware and observant.
To me there are the pig eye-ed ones, and the innocent (not selfish) ones. The former are hard to describe, so I won't try. The latter would include a pretty lady who can walk the downtown length of my city and not have anyone talk to her. According to a mutual friend, she has a closed body language, marching along and stiff eyes, as if she was in her own world, in contrast to my friend and I who look around as we walk, more sauntering than marching, with soft eyes, which makes us seem approachable.
It occurs to me that people who render a business meeting dysfunctional, say by shooting from the hip, might be people who are oblivious to others. I guess you would know more about that than I would, as my own company has functional meetings that people don't hate. (I went around asking)
We say MORE self-aware but we mean LESS self-aware, I think. Less full of myself. More attentive to the things round me and attuned to the moment. Less tossed around by amygdalic impulses. When I lose myself in things like a walk in nature or an intense coding session or an interesting book, I am less aware of self yet more intensely conscious. Isn't THAT what we want? The term self-awareness puzzles me because we actually want to have less awareness of self and more awareness of "the other".
About rules, are you thinking to keep a focus on rules for usefulness or explore the concept of rules, more broadly? https://chatgpt.com/share/673bc9ed-f900-8012-a6b1-2fa4bb8ab7d7
Thanks for calling this out. I think you're right that the language is clumsy.
Maybe it's "more self aware AND less self centered"? Or something like that. It's another kind of paradox.
I guess one point I was trying to make is to be less full of ourselves we have to first do the work of being more self-aware of how self centered we are (among other things)?
It seems to me that perhaps the concept of what rules themselves are might be flawed. We say things like, “rules to live by”, or “one needs to follow the rules”. And this perspective is useful to governmental, religious, and cultural organizations that define rules to maintain a sense of order and coherence in their followers and citizens.
But what if instead, we looked at rules as more like guardrails or guides? They can more or less keep us on a pathway safe and protected. But not all rules apply equally to all pathways (context is king). And as you’ve pointed out in earlier posts, sometimes one “rule” contradicts another (the context part?).
The above is what came to me as I was thinking about how to develop self-awareness. But I also thought about the self-awareness part too...
Learning to meditate was useful for becoming calmer, but in and of itself I didn’t find the self-awareness component. It wasn’t until I started studying Buddhist psychology coupled with the meditation practice that my self-awareness really seemed to expand. Part of this was learning to recognize the recurring negative mental traps and mind patterns, and learning to short-circuit the mental dialog (delusional or fantastical stories) that typically follow if one doesn’t “kill them in their crib”.
Another thing I learned from Buddhist psych was to see and appreciate the conditionality manifested in all things, ex: how many steps, processes, and people does it take to get the food you’re about to eat from its origins to your mouth. We can ask the same kind of questions about own selves, and those around us, ie, what are all the steps that led to this moment. If we do this honestly, we might end up seeing that we literally have no frickin idea what is really going on here. IMO, these kinds of thought experiments can help to keep us all a bit humble, and hopefully a little more self-aware.
Keep in mind though that these types of activities are effortful, type 2 thinking (as per Kahneman), so it takes time and energy to pause, reflect, and think it through. IOW, it’s not necessarily easy, and heuristics let us flow more automatically through life, albeit less self aware perhaps.
Oh, and on journaling…I personally found this activity to be totally useless for self-awareness…that is until I was introduced to decision journals in Michael Mauboussin’s book, Think Twice. Suddenly this type of journaling became very helpful and led to more self awareness.
You are not aware that… you are a fantastic writer.
I started reading your stuff because I know you, I keep reading it because I enjoy it, your ideas and your writing style.
Yes are not a famous A-list writer but you are… well known to a group of amazing people.
I would read your book of life rules no caveats given or gotchas needed. You got this or you got that! Whatever you want to write, write it.