Work With the Way You Are to Uncover Your Missing Superpowers
You’ve gone to school, university, and held down a few interesting jobs. Life is difficult, but hard work and graft are rewarded. You’ve heard this all your life, but you’ve seen that some are rewarded more amply than others. The world just isn’t fair, and if you’re a creative, you just see this with a clarity that often has you wondering if only you saw it and they didn’t or whether you are you insane and they are simply ‘normal’ and sane. But you’ve seen it and can’t unsee it. You just can’t. Yes, our world is deeply unfair, and it is often quite destructive, especially in the psychological toll it exacts out of us just battling to live.
How do we deal with this? How do we thrive in an environment that may at times seem quite hostile? If you’ve never read Nassim Taleb’s book ‘Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder’, then I suggest that you do. We are living in an increasingly stressful and unstable world. In order to survive and thrive within it, we actually have to learn to grow stronger, more responsive, and wiser as a result of it. As Taleb highlights, this happens all the time in nature. He gives the example of our immune system, which when exposed to pathogens, responds by producing antibodies and a host of other defence mechanisms. By being exposed to pathogens, your immune system actually strengthens itself, making itself more resilient to future attacks. In contrast, if the immune system is not exposed to pathogens, it tends to become weaker and less effective. So your immune system becomes stronger by being exposed to stress and uncertainty. What if you could consciously tap into this kind of response in your everyday life?
The Know Yourself Framework teaches you to identify your own pattern of thought responses, emotional responses, broader dramatic patterns that you have acquired in your relationships based upon your temperamental pattern and life experiences. You learn that some types begin with doubt; they are even driven by doubt, and that other types are just naturally optimistic and deeply trusting. You learn not to make simplistic moralistic judgments about your patterns but to observe them, embrace them, understand them, and develop your grasp of how to use these reflexive responses appropriately. You could see it as coming to terms with how your operating system works, not with the view to just trying to hack it and change something that you scarcely understand, but to actually explore how you are – without judgment. You will really learn to spend time observing, understanding and accepting yourself as you are, because you need to accept what you are working with.
If I had a penny for every time a Melancholic has complained to me about their suspicion and procrastination, or a Sanguine for constantly saying the wrong thing, or a Choleric for the fact that they feel too combative, or a Phlegmatic who simply can’t figure out what they want to do, I would be a rich man (I’m not). Often what is offered are boilerplate popular psychology approaches to their problems that begin from the premise that there is something deeply wrong with these responses and doesn’t encourage them to explore the role that they play in the complex, knotted web of your psychology. With the Know Yourself Framework, you learn to explore that before just launching into a knee-jerk reaction against your own self. You begin to understand the role that this aspect of you plays and how it works, and this allows you to discover things about yourself that are hidden in plain sight because you never look. Then, like your immune system does, you begin to engage your own natural operating system to address your challenges, based upon your own natural responses. This is the essence of antifragility, and this makes you more flexible, more resilient, more appropriate, and just stronger. This, for me, is Radical Self Acceptance, and it makes you healthier, robust, more integrated, and enables you to develop a truly rooted sense of self. You find what was missing while it was always there, and as Bob Marley sang in the song Rat Race:
“In the abundance of water, the fool is thirsty”
Sign up for the May 2023 Workshop series to begin exploring your own connection with the deep transformative waters of your own being. There is where your superpowers lie.
Find Out More
Don’t get trapped in a never-ending cycle. To learn more about Self Development Journeys and to discuss your journey, DM me on Instagram @alexander.carberry or book a Discovery call, but most of all, don’t forget to read my Know Yourself books, which are available on Amazon. Follow the link in my bio to find out more. Or follow this Link to connect