It’s been quite a year? Wow.
> take a minute and write a page of your guiding principles
Okay.
Who do I want to be? I want to be conscientious, helpful, valuable, smart, reasonable, exciting, fun to be around, knowledgeable, kind, an expert of somethings, a jack of a lot of trades, spiritual. I want to be healthy, attractive, and artistic too!
– Clarify your goals
– Identify problems preventing their completion
– Diagnose what’s not working
– Design Changes
– Do it
Clarify your goals
Well, first I want to turn those adjectives and phrases I’ve enumerated into principles. My guiding principles seem to fall into some broad strokes. I’m an aesthetician of sorts, material and immaterial. I like good design and good storytelling. Abstractly, maybe this is a sort of optimization principle? It can create the hiccough of paralysis because “perfect is the enemy of good enough” … perfectionist paralysis?
Next, I’m struck by a seemingly paradoxical situation. I want to maintain a high degree of openness in my life, while also committing enough to occasional mastery. Balancing this will be a problem. Investing broadly, but according to some distribution where the big payoffs are the bulk of the portfolio. This is worth saving and unpacking more I think.
Third, I’m struck by an acute awareness of my impact on other’s lives. I realize I must interact with others and there are karmic ripples in every interaction. I can be a “shining light” in the lives of others if I commit myself to it. It seems oddly egotistical put this way, but I stand by the sentiment. The fallout of this is the behavior/pattern I’ve done a few times now of cutting myself off from everything outside my immediate environment. I become overwhelmed, again paralyzed but this time by a sort of anxiety, that I won’t be understood, I’ll be imposing, perhaps even put down or ridiculed upon opening up.
Identify problems preventing their completion
While I haven’t really clarified my goals, I’ve accidentally started unpacking this question already. The motif I’ve uncovered again and again is paralysis, by either feeling ill-equipped and imperfect, endlessly weighing decisions, and getting “lost in the sauce” of telling myself stories and never taking action, or in some cases, a pattern of isolation and anxiety spirals into a bad place. The new strategy seems to be that when I identify these sort of spiral patterns and this “paralysis” flairs up, it’s a sign. I need to get counsel, and the way to get counsel is to be transparent. Being transparent is scary because it comes at the cost of potentially being mocked for revealing my inadequacies, my insecurities, myself.
Diagnose what’s not working
So, I see this theme of openness cropping up. It’s the times that I’m so afraid of transparency that I freeze up that I’m trying to eliminate. A bunch of cliche statements come to mind. Just do it. Something about not failing, but finding a thousand ways to not do something before finding the right way to do something. Practice makes better. There’s my ego in the way. I’ve got to accept that sometimes I’m stupid and sometimes I need help.
When I am paralyzed, I will ask for help. The consequences of asking for help are far less scary than the consequences of not asking for help. Sometimes it takes a bit of time to realize that, but the sooner I can, the sooner I can get back on track.
Design Changes
I felt great when I wrote that. Like damn, there’s something there, isn’t there?
> When I am paralyzed, I will ask for help. The consequences of asking for help are far less scary than the consequences of not asking for help. Sometimes it takes a bit of time to realize that, but the sooner I can, the sooner I can get back on track.
So, I need to be able to identify when I’m “paralyzed” and who to reach out to for help in that instance. Some guiding principles…
* I need to be aware, awareness is key
* as is Transparency
* Throw a big net, not a small net
Some real changes that I can enact right now are the following:
* Write often in an honest diary format (thoughts, actions, feelings)
* Reflection
* When things are going well, share, and ask for feedback and improvements
* When things are going poorly, share, and ask for feedback and improvements
This is a real process, that by design, should help me get out of these anxiety-paralysis-spiral-aaaaaaaaaa-things… Right?
Cause here’s something interesting to note, my first audience is myself. That reflection mechanism is so cool because it lets me inspect my past while removed some distance in time and to reassess and revise and refine my processes for navigating and understanding this world and my life in it. Only by leaving a real, honest record can I do this sort of scientific process. And science demands peer review, no?
Do it
Okay, I shall.