SLOWING – getting to know your elephant

Welcome back Viphilus*

You haven’t been through a full month of posts with me yet … the full-cycle of the monthly process I want us to take on this learning journey. Whereas the first two posts are more didactic and informative, the third one (today’s) is an exercise to increase your self-awareness. Posts 1 and 2 will always be about perspectives, principles and prime directives. Post 3 will always be personal; I will suggest questions or contemplations that come out of the take-aways of the first two weeks that you can use as tools to dig into yourself to get to know yourself better. Hopefully, a LOT better.

Self-awareness, as I’ve read, is one of those things that set us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom; we are able to think about our thinking and we are able to contemplate the nature of the kind of person that we are. Getting to know yourself is a spiritual pursuit (not talking religion here) because it is getting to know who lives inside the tissues, bones, sinews, nerves and cells. That great existential question: “who am I?” has been asked by people since the beginning of people, along with its supporting prime directive, the ancient aphorism “know thyself” (which was already ancient when Socrates used it).

Exercises in self-awareness have multiple goals; one that I will pursue in these posts is to help you make your unconscious mind conscious to you, in order to study it, understand it, and make changes to it. Before we get there let’s just take 1 minute for a primer on self-awareness from Daniel Goleman who has written some very practical books on emotional/social intelligence.

Goleman postulates that before we can ever become an effective leader (my wish for you), we need to learn to maximize four critical skills: two about ourselves and two about how we relate to others.

The 2 personal competencies are self-awareness and self-management.
The 2 social competencies are social-awareness and relationship management.

As for the personal competencies …self-awareness is the ability to read one's emotions and recognize their impact while using gut feelings to guide decisions, whereas, self-management involves controlling one's emotions and impulses and adapting to changing circumstances. The main postulate here, driven by logic, is that self-awareness drives self-management … you can’t change (intentionally improve) yourself until you first know yourself … and self-knowledge begins with self-awareness.

Translating this into the language I’ll be using …

Self-awareness/knowledge is about getting to know and understand your rider and your elephant. Self-management is teaching your rider how to train your elephant.

Therefore, the highest personal competency of emotional intelligence is the art of elephant training.

OK, the primer is over.

Now, you are a half dozen paragraphs into this post and you might be saying to yourself, “I thought this was going to be about personal stuff. He’s still just teaching and yammering on about theories and ideologies. Harumph!”

Is that you? If so, and if you experienced the genesis of an emotional storm brewing inside of you because you never learned to properly manage your expectations, a bench-mark of maturity and high emotional intelligence, then let this mark your first self-awareness exercise:

1.    Did it bug you that after I said that this wouldn't be as much a teaching post as it would be me giving you some ways of becoming more self-aware ... but then I seemed to just keep yammering on with teaching points? Ask yourself …. “did it bug me a bit?” 

Next question: did I just offend you by asking you to query yourself by implying that you might lack a bit of maturity? If so then here is your second self-awareness exercise, in the form of another question:

2.    “Am I easily offended, by either life circumstances or by other people?”  (a corollary question might be, “Am I easily irked by people, especially if they don’t move at my speed with things?”)

Teaching point: self-awareness and self-knowledge never end, if you keep working at it. For example, it wasn’t until 10 years after I learned to understand and then manage my expectations that I learned just how closely they were tied to my urgency paradigm. Same thing with how easily I used to be offended … completely linked with my urgency paradigm. Who knew? (well, I do …. now).

OK, now that we are on a roll, let’s just keep going. Everything below is for you to use as tools to help you get to know yourself a bit better … specifically when it comes to understanding the strength of the urgency paradigm in you (your need for pleasure-NOW and no-pain-NOW).

3.    Without being too analytical about it, estimate approximately what percentage of time you spend on activities in each of the 4 quadrants (draw a blank version of the matrix that you read about last week and write these into it).

     I – doing things which are both important and urgent
     II – doing things which are important but not urgent
     III – doing things which are urgent but not important
     IV – doing things which are neither important nor urgent

Ponder your results. For now don’t judge them … don’t ask whether or not you are content with what you see … just ponder them.

How to use these tools

Read through the reflection exercises below. In my training I refer to such reflections as disciples of thought … all aimed at helping you understand your rider and elephant.

Read all of them and note which ones make you pause, wince, cringe or heave. Did you find one that stirs the greatest reaction / resistance in you? If so, congratulations … you just found the starting point for a self-awareness sprint … you will grow quickest by digging into this one right away.

John Ortberg was the literary mentor who helped me most with this more than a dozen years ago, so I’m going to let him guide you as he did me. Here are things that I pulled out of his teachings … things that helped me just by their contemplative power alone.

4.    When you are behind the wheel of your car, do you curse those who pass you or do you have noble thoughts that every other driver on the road has an equally valid claim on that piece of road just ahead of you?

5.    At the grocery store checkout, do you rush to get in the shortest line, and then continually monitor and evaluate your choice, sometimes even switching lanes … but then keeping an eye on that woman with the green coat because I would have been in her spot had I stayed in that lane?

6.    On an elevator, which do you push first, the button of your destination floor or the “close door” button?

7.    Back to the grocery store because it is a wonderful place for developing self-awareness. When you are in the checkout line, are you spending time in contemplation about your day and chatting with the people around you … OR … are you 100% in vigilance-mode about how quickly your line is moving, and do you become easily exasperated when the cashier or person ahead of you or the checkout technology doesn’t operate at the speed required for your current need?

8.    John says that, “hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day (because it kills love); it can keep us from living well … it can destroy our souls.”

Q: Is this true in my life?

9.    Does just the thought of going one day without a watch create anxiety in you?

10. Dr. Ortberg says that many of us suffer from “hurry sickness.” Examine his list of some symptoms of hurry sickness to see how badly you suffer from it. If you are a person of faith, ask God to help you diagnosis yourself honestly (since we all have a tendency to shine ourselves on):

          I.    Speeding up daily activities – the hurry-sick person reads faster, talks faster, and when listening, nods faster to encourage the talker to accelerate; they will speed up the activities of their children for no reason other than to get them over with ("OK kids, let's see who can get ready for bed the quickest?"); and, of course, the whole grocery store thing discussed above. 

          Q: Do I speed up daily activities unnecessarily?

        II.    Multi-tasking – in their desperate need to hurry, hurry-sick people find themselves doing or thinking more than one thing at a time; psychologists call this polyphasic activity (if psychologists have a name for it, that’s usually an indication that it’s not a good thing); if you have ever tried speaking with a multi-tasker you’ve already learned that you never get their full attention.
Q: Do I multi-task (perhaps even proudly)?

       III.    Clutter – the lives of the hurry-sick lack simplicity and order; they buy stacks of books and magazines but don’t find time to read them; they acquire countless time-saving gadgets but don’t have the time or patience to read the instructions and figure out how to use them.
Q: Does clutter describe my home or office? 

      IV.    Superficiality – this is the result of hurry because depth always comes slowly; character depth is the casualty of hurry-sickness; we have traded wisdom for information and depth for breadth.
Q: Am I superficial … content to put in half-hearted efforts in all that I do?

       V.    Inability to love – the most serious sign of hurry-sickness is a diminished capacity to love; love and hurry are incompatible because love always takes time, and time is the one thing hurried people don’t have; hurry-sickness often manifests itself in “sunset fatigue” … the condition which renders a person too tired, too drained, or too preoccupied, to love the people to whom they have made the deepest promises; a by-product of this is a loss of wonder and gratitude [and ultimately, if you are a person of faith, this includes a loss of the ability to love God]
Q: Is it difficult for me to love/care?

Happy reflections.

See you next week when we start taking action.

Blessings Viphilus,

Your friend, Omega Man

OCA Training

* Viphilus means, "lover of life"