And it’s gonna be you.
That’s the truth of it. And yet we fight ourselves all the time. We force ourselves to be in relationships and work roles that constrain our Essential Selves, we make ourselves do stuff we loathe doing because a part of ourselves is concerned with what everyone else thinks about us, we deny ourselves pleasure and punish ourselves with guilt, and we berate ourselves with our unkind self-talk. All of this makes for internal conflict, a war inside, and the longer the war goes on, the more confused we feel about who we really are and what we really want in life.
Your divided Self
Martha Beck has written about a really useful model of the self as two parts – an Essential Self and a Social Self. Your Essential Self is the part of you that’s spontaneous and creative and playful, the part that knows what’s most important to you. Your Social Self is the part of you that developed since the day you were born, taking in the rules of the tribe and working hard to make sure that you’re safe by making your follow the rules of the tribe and avoid any threats. Your Social Self wants you to be safe, and your Essential Self wants you to be happy. When you feel conflicted, it’s because your Social Self is pulling you away from the direction your Essential Self is wanting you to take, and there’s a little war going on between the part that wants you to be happy and the part that wants you to be safe.
Personal development, productivity and success theory has been feeding the war
We’ve grown up in a very left-brain-directed world of boxes and ladders, where we’ve been taught that we need to be specialized and one-dimensional and incredibly focused in order to create happy and successful lives. We’ve been fed the story that if we just get more done, make our goals happen and achieve more, the internal conflict will go away. So we seek to end the war by doing more and being more productive.
Unfortunately, so much of the personal development and goal-setting literature and talk out there focuses only on getting stuff done and increasing efficiency – domains of the Social Self. A lot of the time this just serves to amplify the internal conflict, by denying the natural spontaneity and creativity within your Essential Self. You’re using methods that focus on pushing harder against your Essential Self and so your Essential Self will just increase its resistance, because its job is to push back at anything that doesn’t serve your happiness. And that’s when you find yourself de-motivated, unclear, foggy-brained, clumsy and forgetful, and unable to channel your energy and attention, no matter how nifty your planning system is. And perhaps worse still, you’ll be unable to enjoy any of the results and rewards that you do create along the way, because of the perpetual internal conflict.
How to end the war
Your Social Self and your Essential Self are both important parts of you. It’s good to be safe and its good to be happy. And you can have both. You don’t have to sacrifice your happiness for the illusion of the safety and predictability that boxes and ladders offer.
1.) Learn The Dojo
My friends, Charlie and Jonathan have created a very powerful program called The Dojo – Do More of What Matters, which seeks to help people with this very thing – dissolving internal conflict and helping you to drop the boxes and ladders and find a way of working, doing and making things happen that allows your Essential Self to determine the direction so that you’re not just being busy – you’re doing what’s really meaningful and important to you.
The Dojo isn’t another productivity “system.” It’s a set of values (they call them “tenets”) to guide you in the art of meaningful action. It’s a very intuitive, whole-minded and agile approach to getting stuff done. It’s not going to give you “five steps to getting stuff done,” or calendars or planning systems – those are just more of the ladders and boxes that restrict us. Instead, tenets like, “momentum is everything,” “use all of your resources,” “keep some margin,” “listen to your intuition, ” “acknowledge your complexity,” and “leverage your high value activities,” will help you to integrate your Social Self and your Essential Self, find your inner guidance system and get stuff done gently and gracefully (well, mostly!)
My sense is that this program is best for people who find that they’re very good at left-brain-directed analytical, rational thinking and controlling and managing, yet have been frustrated with traditional goal-setting and productivity methods because they haven’t helped them get results or because, even if they did get some results, they never enjoyed the process or the rewards of their success, because of the stress and internal conflict in the way they went about it – Kyle’s story comes to mind. If you’ve spent your life developing your left-brain-directed thinking and you’re wanting to develop your right-brain-directed, intuitive and creative thinking and get stuff done without stress and internal conflict, then this is a good program for you.
It’s a really concise, clean and clear program that gets straight to the point, so it won’t overwhelm you with more information, but this is not a program for the people who like to just scan or get quick fixes or people who are looking for quick, easy procedures they can cut and paste into their life. To get full benefit from it, you’ll need to be willing to slow down a little, get into a reflective space and take time to answer the powerful self-coaching questions that Charlie and Jonathan pose. The Dojo is more of an expedition than a tour, so in that sense, it’s a program for grown-ups who have enough experience and maturity to understand that the “5 steps to success” programs out there are empty. They know that being happy and successful is not a cut-and-paste job and they’re up for thinking for themselves rather than following procedures – in fact they prefer it that way. The power of the program is in your applying the tenets and answering the questions that Jonathan and Charlie pose, so don’t get it if you are looking for someone to give you answers and aren’t going to take the time to reconnect with your Essential Self and discover your answers.
2.) Say Fuck It!
This month’s Bottom-line Bookclub feature – the Bottom-line on John Parkin’s Fuck It, The Ultimate Spiritual Way,” is the perfect compliment to The Dojo. You’ll learn when to breathe in and say, “fuck it” and go for it and do the stuff that scares you shit-less and you’ll learn when it’s time to breathe out and say, “fuck it” and let go of the stuff that you’ve been telling yourself you have to force, rather than trying to fight yourself and force life. Most of all, you’ll learn how to release tension so that you can stop fighting yourself and fighting life and start living more intuitively and co-creating more comfortably with reality.
If you get The Dojo through my affiliate link, drop me an email with your receipt and I’ll send you a complimentary copy of The Bottom-line on Fuck It. Actually (fuck it!) even if you don’t get it through my affiliate link, drop me an email with your receipt and I’ll send you the Bottom-line on Fuck It anyway.
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This is the first of a series of affiliate reviews that I’ll be doing. Having worked through this program myself, I can tell you that it’s aligned with my values and a lot of the stuff that I teach my clients, and so I’m very happy to give it the Agile Living stamp of approval!
I think there are two types of fighting with yourself. There is the kind where you fight yourself out of bad habits, in order to make something better out of your life. But this is the rare type.
The more common type is when you stop yourself from doing what you like, what would benefit you, you compromise pointlessly based on irrational fears like loosing approval. This one is just silly.
Hey Cath, It seems to me that you are always one step ahead of the curve. most of us were raised in a left brained society, and by you offering an opportunity, a logical sounding opportunity (ironically!), to open up the right brain a bit, I think this product will appeal to the left brained majority.
I just read back what I wrote and I’m a bit confused by it, but I hope you get my point. There is a coherent compliment in there somewhere!
See ya
Mike
Mike´s last blog ..Hello world!
@Eduard: Are you suggesting that if you’re fighting yourself, it’s okay, so long as you’re working on making a better life for yourself? My sense is that any time we’re fighting ourselves, we’re going to lose – in some way or another, because it’s really stressful to fight yourself. We’ve been taught very aggressive forms of personal development that encourage us to fight ourselves. You don’t have to fight yourself. You can get on the same team and work on your changes without the aggression and stress. That’s what The Dojo and The Bottom-line on Fuck It are about.
@Mike: I think I get what you’re saying – I do tend to attract and work well with people who are strong at the left-brain-direction stuff, and I give them left-brain-directed ways of crossing over to the right-brain. Perhaps I need to say something about that on my coaching page
Thanks for the compliment!
Hey Cath,
You pointed out “where we’ve been taught that we need to be specialized and one-dimensional and incredibly focused in order to create happy and successful lives.” No kidding! I’ve spent years trying to erase all of the counter productive things I’ve been taught, whether by teachers and parents, or so called “experts”.
I think this is where many struggle, by focusing in the wrong thing. It’s kind of a dichotomy to want to live lifestyle X, but have to do more of Y to get there with Y being those things we don’t want to be doing as much of. Where were you years ago to explain this stuff to me?
I’m glad you talked about The Dojo. Charlie is awesome so I’m sure this project will be outstanding!
[...] play. You can’t be in the optimum creative zone all the time (Charlie talks about this in The Dojo. Actually, he talks about this ALL the time – thanks, Charlie!). Dan Coyle says we seem to be [...]