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Originally posted by BLAKE
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re: self awareness-
LEVEL 3 – WHAT THE HELL ARE YOUR BLIND SPOTS?
The more you become aware of your own emotions and your own desires, the more you discover something terrifying: you are full of shit.
We realize that a large percentage of our thoughts, arguments, and actions are merely reflections of whatever we are feeling in that moment. If I am watching a movie with my wife and I’m cranky because I had an argument with my editor that afternoon, I’ll decide that I hate the movie. And the more my wife tries to convince me the movie was good, the more I’ll relish the fact that I get to argue with her about it – because it suddenly becomes a way to justify my anger.
(By the way, if you ever wondered why we tend to fight the most with the ones we love the most, this is partly why: we can use them as an emotional punching bag to validate all the crap that we are feeling, whether they deserve it or not – usually not.)
We all think of ourselves as independent thinkers who reason based on facts and evidence, but the truth is that our brain spends most of its time justifying and explaining what the heart has already declared and decided. And there’s no way to fix that until you’ve learned to recognize what the heart is saying.
I’ve written quite a bit about how flawed our conscious minds are, both in my book and on this site. But to give a quick synopsis:
I could keep going, but I’ll stop there. Basically, the point is that you suck, I suck, everybody sucks. Humans kind of suck. All the time.
And that’s OK. The important thing is just that we’re self-aware about it. If we know our weaknesses then they stop being weaknesses. Otherwise, we become enslaved to our mind’s faulty mechanisms.
The more you become aware of your own emotions and your own desires, the more you discover something terrifying: you are full of shit.
We realize that a large percentage of our thoughts, arguments, and actions are merely reflections of whatever we are feeling in that moment. If I am watching a movie with my wife and I’m cranky because I had an argument with my editor that afternoon, I’ll decide that I hate the movie. And the more my wife tries to convince me the movie was good, the more I’ll relish the fact that I get to argue with her about it – because it suddenly becomes a way to justify my anger.
(By the way, if you ever wondered why we tend to fight the most with the ones we love the most, this is partly why: we can use them as an emotional punching bag to validate all the crap that we are feeling, whether they deserve it or not – usually not.)
We all think of ourselves as independent thinkers who reason based on facts and evidence, but the truth is that our brain spends most of its time justifying and explaining what the heart has already declared and decided. And there’s no way to fix that until you’ve learned to recognize what the heart is saying.
I’ve written quite a bit about how flawed our conscious minds are, both in my book and on this site. But to give a quick synopsis:
- Our memories are unreliable and often flat-out wrong, especially when it comes to remembering how we felt at a certain time or place. Our ability to predict our thoughts and feelings in the future is even worse.
- We constantly overestimate ourselves. In fact, as a general rule, the worse we are at something, the better we think we are, and the better we are at something, the worse we believe we are.
- Contradictory evidence can often make us surer of our position rather than inspire us to question it.
- Our attention naturally only focuses on things that already cohere to our pre-existing beliefs. This is why two people can watch the exact same event and come away with two completely contradictory memories of it (think of two opposing sports fans both convinced they saw the ball land in or out of bounds.)
- Most of us, when given the opportunity, will tell small lies to improve our results. Sometimes (i.e., usually), we’ll even tell these lies to ourselves.
- We are abysmal at estimating statistics, making cost-benefit decisions, or reasoning about large populations of people. It’s actually both depressing and hilarious how bad we are this.
I could keep going, but I’ll stop there. Basically, the point is that you suck, I suck, everybody sucks. Humans kind of suck. All the time.
And that’s OK. The important thing is just that we’re self-aware about it. If we know our weaknesses then they stop being weaknesses. Otherwise, we become enslaved to our mind’s faulty mechanisms.
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