Relationships
Goethe:
“I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration, I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person is humanized or de-humanized. If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming.”
Time / Results
Character
Decisions / Chakra
Choice
Intelligence
Identity
Self
This reminds me of the place in Genesis 4 where God looks at Cain, who is full of self-pity, and says to him, “Cain, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must master it.” What’s important to understand is that the principle of self in your life is crouching at your door! It wants to have you, it wants to pounce on you, it wants to devour you. And it’s up to you to do something about it. God asks that you deny yourself, that you lose yourself to find yourself. If you try to do this without the work of the Spirit, and without belief in all Christ has done for you, then simply giving up your rights and desires will be galling and hardening. But in Christ and with the Spirit, it will be liberating.
Traits
Skills
Goals / Wants
Inner / Outer
Magic:
High Agency:
Attraction / Manifestation
Alter Ego / Multiple Personas
The author F. Scott Fitzgerald once said that the sign of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. Two opposing ideas? Come on, Scott! Take out your tampon! Two?! How about ten! The more the merrier, I say. — Ari Gold
TAKEAWAYS
- The self is a complex and dynamic construct influenced by personal experiences, cultural background, and beliefs about oneself and others.
- Our interactions with others can affect our sense of self, and there is a tension between the desire for coherence and the desire for freedom in our self-perception.
- The concept of self is not static, but rather constantly evolving through social interactions and the ongoing construction of our identity.
In every interaction, others—your partner or friend, a neighbor or a stranger, a delivery person or a police officer—offer up their view of your self. They may not directly say “this is how I see you,” but they show you in the way they treat you, the way they speak to you, and even in subtle body language. In every interaction people say something about who they think you are. Do they smile, do they seem fearful, are they rude or respectful? Every interaction offers you a chance to “see” your self. In fact, the only way to see your self is through social interactions.
What people reflect back to you isn’t some “true” representation of what or who you are, nor of what they are. It’s a construction filtered through the self of the person you’re interacting with. As is their self, in that moment, co-created by you. In the hall of mirrors, we see our selves reflected, or perhaps refracted, in the multitude of people who surround us.
This leads to an important question: When you wonder whether what you say or do is best for your self, you must ask: Which self? This might sound like something out of a psychological thriller, wherein one person is both sweet and murderous. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—one body, but two (or more) distinct selves. Turns out a version of this plot device, though a much less sensational version, is true for all of us.
We all have multiple selves (parent, child, employee, athlete, lover, etc.). And each of these selves is defined in a web of relationships and has particular attributes. What determines which one we are in any given situation? The biggest determinant of who you are is probably where you are. And by “where you are” I mean all the features of your situation: physical location (restaurant versus home), company you’re with (friends versus family), nation you’re in, and even the time of day. You are a different self at drinks with college friends than at drinks with family after dinner. Think of the last time you were out with close friends. Think about the way you spoke, the language you used, how loudly you spoke. Think about what a stranger looking at you might have thought. Now think about the last time you were in a professional setting, maybe an office meeting. Almost certainly you behaved differently. At least I hope you did. You might think you were the same self, but is that really true? Did you feel the same way? Probably not. Both of these “selves” are you, but consider the possibility that they are different yous.
Here is the kicker, which probably won’t come as a surprise: the contents of our identities are sometimes in conflict
To see how people manage conflicting identities, social psychologist Margaret Shih designed a study that examined AsianAmerican women’s relationship to math. As Asian Americans they are stereotyped as more proficient at math, but as women they are stereotyped as less proficient at math. To study this, Shih and her colleagues asked a group of Asian-American women to self-identify differently: sometimes as Asian American, other times as women. And then they gave them a math test.
When asked to provide their ethnicity before the test, the participants in the study performed better than those asked to identify their gender. All that had changed was a shift of the mirrors around them, a shift in their reflections. And yet, real outcomes shifted.
This underperformance is most often attributed to the cost of knowing that people expect you to underperform. But that is a change in self: the anxiety that affects performance is tied to a change in relationships that define the self. When people thought about themselves as Asian American or as women, their relationships with others shifted and their test performance changed—a tangible result. And that is a literal change in their selves.
SELFLESS by Brian Lowery.
So much of what people call “conviction” is actually a willful disregard for facts that might change their minds. It’s dangerous because conviction feels like a good attribute, while its opposite – being wishy-washy – makes you feel and sound like an idiot.
There’s this thing in psychology called the end of history illusion, which is the idea that people are aware of how much their personality has changed in the past, but they assume it will be stable in the future. I laugh at who I was at age 20, but I assume that by age 60 I’ll roughly be the same person I am today. Part of the reason it occurs is because it’s too painful to accept that the beliefs I hold today might be wrong, temporary, or subjective.
Beliefs take effort and investment, and it hurts to realize that there may be limited ROI on your hard-fought convictions. For a lot of things in life – particularly politics, investing, and relationships – people don’t necessarily want the truth; they want certainty. Changing your mind is hard because it’s an admission that the certainty you once thought you held was an illusion. The path of least resistance is to cling to beliefs for dear life.
Visa founder Dee Hock had a great saying: “A belief is not dangerous until it turns absolute.” That’s when you start ignoring information that might require you to update your beliefs. It might sound crazy, but I think a good rule of thumb is that your strongest convictions have the highest chance of being wrong or incomplete, if only because they are the hardest beliefs to challenge, update, and abandon when necessary.
Be careful what beliefs you let become part of your identity. Religion and politics are contentious because almost by definition your beliefs are part of your identity – you’re not just dealing with ideas and philosophies, but tribes and belonging. Another Dee Hock quote applies here: “We are built with an almost infinite capacity to believe things because the beliefs are advantageous for us to hold, rather than because they are even remotely related to the truth.” Things get dangerous when people let their investing and economic beliefs fall into the same category.
Most fields have lots of rules, theories, ideas, and hunches. But laws – things that are unimpeachable and cannot ever change – are extremely rare. Some fields only have a handful. A big problem arises when you try to force rules and theories to become laws. The few laws tend to be the most important things in any field. But everything else, like Einstein said, is just a theory of maybes.
Attraction