I had a conversation with an old roommate a few days ago. He asked me to tell him about the life of Jim and I immediately launched into how I have run workshops in many different countries, have been struggling to make money at it, and have finally figured out how it’s going to be the thing that changes the world by building true leaders in a time when we face what I believed to be a tremendous dearth in leadership.
He replied something akin to:
“Jim. It sounds like you’re trying to convince me and to convince yourself that what you do is important. No matter what you do, or how much money you have, I will still care about you.”
Boom.
We continued to talk about how many people who are trying to do good in the world don’t take very good care of themselves. How we can be very critical towards ourselves and overlook self-compassion. This hurts to admit, because I thought the whole point of what I was doing was to be self-compassionate. I built iFeelio so I could be compassionate with myself. I built Emotional Self-Defense so I could defend my own good intentions. I built EmoFit so I could take care of my body and my soul. Shoot.
And then I remembered a framework that I created about a year ago. In it, I said that we as humans are naturally in a state of “I don’t know, I want to know.” I call this the curious state. It’s all about observing. I believe that if we go in one direction, we go from “I don’t know, I want to know,” to “I don’t know, I need to know.” I call this the critical state. It’s all about knowing. Once we know, we judge. We say it’s good/bad, right/wrong, up/down, better/worse, smart/dumb, whatever. I believe we can go into another state. We can go into the “I don’t know, I don’t need to know.” I call this the connected state. It’s all about being. Our brain shuts off and we just savor the moment.
Many of us have been taught critical thinking skills since we were young, and punished if we weren’t right, or made bad decisions. It’s all about knowing, and the internet has just provided us a lot more opportunity to know stuff nonstop. Before, when we couldn’t know what was happening with politics in Zimbabwe unless we got The Economist, now, we can follow it in real-time on Twitter (this happened yesterday). We need to know. And we need to know ourselves as well. Plato’s words resonate strongly with us and the self-development movement seems to say that we need to know who we are, what we want, where will be, where we’ll work, who we’ll marry, how many kids we’ll have, how to raise the kids, how to make the perfect logo, how to blah blah blah.
When I tell myself, “I don’t know what I want. And I don’t need to know,” my whole body relaxes and I get back to the moment. I’m gonna try it more to see how it goes, I don’t know what will happen, and I don’t need to know.