WHO ARE WE REALLY?
Let’s explore this question with a commitment to uncovering an Empowering interpretation. An interpretation that leaves us being and acting effectively in life.
This trip is going to get dark and ugly before the light. From the word en-lightenment. So fasten your seat belt. It’s not personal. We are all in this together.
If you want to hear it or see a video go here:
My Default “I”
I innocently turned the eye-level door-knob to my parents bedroom door and walked in, to discover them in the midst of an intimate adult moment. They moved faster than I had ever seen before. I was shocked and knew there was something terribly wrong. I immediately turned around and closed the door. In that moment I became separate from my previously safe and secure world.
I needed a strategy to deal with my break in belonging. In the magical thinking of a 5 year old child, I arbitrarily concluded that, if I had only known, then that would not have happened, and so, I need to know everything so I don’t get caught like that again.
My illusion included that it would fix this break in belonging. So my life became about figuring out everything.
This is me already at 7 years old first grade:
To this day I have not stopped and that is part of what I am doing here is making sure you also know everything so you don’t have to suffer the embarrassment and humiliation of surprise events that could be prevented by simply knowing…everything. Besides, I’m a nice guy.
There are other events that shape our lives. Like the time I was winning all the prizes at my birthday party. It was my dart board and I could beat everyone, so why not? Well my mother bent down to my 10 year old height and discreetly whispered in my ear: “Let them win.” I was mortified and embarrassed and from that day on, I made sure people around me always won. I became a nice guy.
In high school I could have gone on to be state champion in wrestling. Of course I knew everything about it and used exotic pinning combinations the others had never heard of such as the guillotine, and figure four grapevine. But my best friend was in my weight class and his father was the coach and it wouldn’t be very nice if I didn’t let him win. Same thing with a girl I liked in grade school. I knew Patsey liked my friend Jack. I gave Jack the confidence and encouragement he needed. I stood aside as my beautiful redhead crush faded into the sunset.
There were many other times but since I am so nice I won’t bother you with them.
One last notable event happens when we are on our own. The moment we realize nobody is going to be there to bail us out, pay the bills, take care of things. Maybe they would but nevertheless it seems like it is all on my shoulders now. I put together that I am going to have to do things myself, all alone. No cavalry is going to come. I am where the buck stops. I become the proverbial lone-ranger. What happened was I got my highschool sweetheart pregnant during my first year in college. And since, as we already established, I know what is to be done and being a nice guy, we ran away to get married. I even figured out how accomplish it while being underage. To spare you the soap operatic details which are many and make an interesting story, my drama is not the point.
I became a figure-it-out, nice guy that does it by himself. Smart, nice, and alone.
As you may have guessed I have figured it out for all of us, being the nice guy that I wound up being. (I admit I didn’t do it all by myself which is a shortcoming I will endure for your sake). If you are interested, here we go.
We All Do This
We all do this. We were all too small, not enough and didn’t belong, once-upon-a-time. You don’t have to believe me now, but just watch.
We all have made compensations for being too small, not enough, and not belonging and then we forgot that we did that. The good news is all you have to do is look around your life to figure out who you became by your ideals, habits, possessions, friends,education. In my case, I happen to have a degree in organic chemistry (figure out the physical world), then a Masters in Social Work from the top social work school in the country (figure out the psychological world). I called on physicians to convince them to prescribe certain psychoactive pharmaceuticals. I worked in the lab at Mallinckrodt, Monsanto (Bayer). And I own a construction company where I do nearly all the work myself. But while the guys were working, I was off getting trained in transformational technologies. What else would you expect out of a know-it-all figure-it-out, nice guy, doing things by himself?
I have studied (figure-it-out) people enough to know how they wound-up-being. But before we get into all of that, it is supremely critical and immensely important (I can’t emphasize this enough) to know that the knowing-it-all figure-it-out, being nice, and doing it by myself. Compensations DO NOT FIX my breaks in belonging. In fact, not only do they not cure them, I just do it more because that is all I know to do. (If you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.) Then, the bigger the breaks in belonging become calling upon us to use more of our compensations. Spiraling on and on, larger and larger with no real relief.
To make matters more tortuous and convoluted: Since my brain knows how to survive in a world where I have to figure things out, be nice and do it alone, it creates a reality in which it can use those compensations since it would not know how to survive in a world where I don’t need those encoded neuronal responses. Our brain’s job is to make sure we survive, period. When it comes to survival it will sacrifice love and compassion in a heartbeat. It’s not automatically encoded to go to love and caring when there is a threat and the whole world is a threat to be compensated for. For now I ask that you assume this is valid. In a later video I will prove it.
Every once in a while we confront this bankrupt approach and have a meltdown, become unhinged, use psychoactive agents, do a Forest Gump run, or worse. A few of us are lucky and we manage to work through it or get some serious assistance from others.
What’s Yours?
We can all see this in other people, we just can’t see it in ourselves very well. We become obsessed over our physical beauty, how big the house and manicured their lawn is, how much social traction our transportation accrues, our work position, social status, prestige, education and whatever else, to gain admiration that we use to compensate in a world where are too small, not enough, and don’t belong.
We try to belong and we delude ourselves that it’s working, hardly noticing that it’s not working since we are so heavily invested in this bankrupt path. In our not being able to acknowledge that it doesn’t work, we ultimately doom ourselves to the hamster wheel of life. The expression comes from somewhere, and is celebrated in the movie Groundhog Day.
We judge others for being so shallow which is but a mere reflection of our own futility. We begrudge the ones that are just a little bit too high on the ladder for somehow not belonging. We have a bit more tolerance for those that have similar pursuits, status, and ideals. And still you know what we say behind their backs.
OK, I admit, I’m being harsh to make a point. If we can rub our noses in it, it will provide a bigger opening later. If we defend against it, that is simply more of what I just distinguished.
We Are the Same
Of course, we all belong, we just have no experience of it. We all do this same stupid shit. That makes us more alike than is apparent.
We are all confronted with the same debacle and the harder we try to get out the more estranged we are to ourselves and others. Let’s do an experiment to put a fine point on it. Escaping the point just ensures more of the same disempowering, stuck, survival-ish ways-of-being.
An Experiment to Drive the Point Home
Pick any example from the ways in which we ‘wound-up-being’, to borrow a term-of-art from the Being A Leader Course (2009).
Let’s say you consider yourself to be your beauty, attractiveness, sexiness. Now what happens when you get older? At some point this will likely have to be confronted. If you are your beauty and you are no longer the stereotypical ‘looker’ it ‘10’, that is a problem and we are left disempowered. Our Self disintegrates if we consider our Self to be our beauty.
Let’s take our intelligence. At some point we just aren’t as sharp as we used to be and those other smart people around us are leaving us in the dust. Our chess ELO score falls and we are done. Or once you reach the top, like Bobby Fisher did, our false Self disintegrates.
We can map this onto any way we wound-up-being. Pick anyone of yours, if you can’t see yours, use someone else’s that you can see and discover for yourself that any way-of-being that we put together to compensate for being too small, not enough and not belonging (and we all did), whether you know how you did it or not, you will end up self-disintegrating as long as you consider yourSelf to be those things you identify with that you put together unwittingly as a child.
Some of us have reached extraordinary pinnacles. This explains why it is not satisfying although it sure seems like it should be. The rest of us suffer while trying to make it. And our life is used up in the process.
OK. well done if you can let yourself sink into the unworkableness of the ways we put together to survive.
So Now What
And by the way we will never stop using it, except for one exception which we will be covering after we put in a few more fundamental elements. Better to say it is not going to stop using you any time soon. Trying to get out is just as much of a trap. Just own it, embrace it. Share it with others as I have done. There is nothing wrong although it may seem like it. Our being authentic about it actually winds up being endearing and is one of the four foundational elements of being a leader and the effective exercise of leadership. Erhard et al (2022).
There is one thing that will work to empower us in the face of these scripted ways of surviving. We can constitute ourselves as a kind of Self that will not dis-integrate. This will empower ourselves in creating another possibility. A transformed Self.
In this YouTube playlist I have laid it out from several different directions. It is worth mastering and is yet so straightforward and simple.
In our inquiry into “Who are you?”, “Who am I (or me)?” “What is a Self?” to leave us empowered, there are still a few more distinctions to draw, which are on the drawing board. Stay tuned. Your input is very important and requested. While I would like to think my ‘nice, figure-it-out, all-by-myself’ self, it’s not going to work so well.
A spoiler alert. The one exception that will leave us empowered, involves being up to something bigger than ourselves. It will cost us these ways we would-up-being.
Join the Team
It’s obvious I can’t do this alone and will need your genius too.
If you are still here, I acknowledge you for the courage to confront our humanity. It’s not pretty. Well, not yet anyway.
If you make the choice, You are part of the Team. Take another cut at it here.
Wound-up-being is a term-of-art used in the following academic publication:
Erhard, Werner and Jensen, Michael C. and Zaffron, Steve and Echeverria, Jeronima, Course Materials for: ‘Being a Leader and the Effective Exercise of Leadership: An Ontological/Phenomenological Model’ (October 4, 2022). Harvard Business School NOM Working Paper No. 09-038, Simon School Working Paper No. 08-03, Barbados Group Working Paper No. 08-02, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1263835 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1263835