Being weird, building a tesseract, and honing your intuition.

What is wrong with me??? I am weird. But at least I know it, right?

Don't I care more about what people think? Sure I care what people think about me. Sometimes. But I can only imagine what my neighbors think of me. My summer routine on the weekend has included at least one evening around the fire pit. I place the bluetooth speaker under my chin and I wail. I mean wail. I sing with abandon. I am in the band. 

My wife texts, "I can hear you in the house." One weekend she let me know that when she was in the neighbor's backyard (three houses down and across the street) she could hear me all the way from there!

I love being me. I also love the movie Interstellar. It's my current fave yet to be dethroned. In fact defining SightShift at its deepest level would be like the movie Interstellar. I teach you how to build your own internal tesseract as you become a 5th dimensional being like Matthew McConaughey. Except for the hair. I can't pull off the hair. 

See? Weird. 

I LIKE BEING ME

I don't always like my reactions. I for sure don't like all my circumstances. But the more challenging the circumstance the more I learn about myself. 

Maybe you're in a challenging circumstance right now. It's a great time to learn who you are and how to like yourself. Learning your story and how to figure out who you are in the midst of the life you're living right now is critical. This is your moment to hone your intuition. 

I talk about this in my book Figure That Shift Out. I describe it like a War of Voices. 

A WAR OF VOICES

As you learn your story and pay attention to what’s happening, you’re going to notice a war of voices within yourself. I want you to pay attention to that. I know it sounds weird, but stay with me. You can break it down if you think about it as three competing voices: the voice that pressures you to project, the voice of shame, and the voice of who you are. I am not saying these are audible voices, but pressures at an intuitive level. Let me be your trail guide on this and see if it matches your experience. 

The first voice is the part of ourselves that we want to project to others. We want to make people think something about us. This is the proving or hiding. We’re trying to control their perception of us. Our internal chatter in this voice is constantly consumed with what others think. 

The second voice is a shaming narrator. We end up being driven by a false story that we feel we have to live up to. Whether or not we are aware of it, the narrator is harnessing voices from our past that spoke in a voice of shame. We talked about shame in the previous chapter. Shame is when you feel like you will never have a place where you are accepted and can feel at home. We have an image we want to project (the first voice) because this internal narrative of shame (the second voice) is driving us. The image we want to project by proving or hiding isn’t who we really are. The driving narration of shame isn’t who we are. Both of these voices are clues and signals to who we are. We need to learn why the shame is there and where it came from so it will stop blocking the truest expression of who we are and thus the uniqueness of our leadership. 

We want to find our third voice: who we are. Who we are at our core is free of the pressure and the shame. 

How are you going to do that? How are you going to separate the image shame drives you to project from who you actually are? The answer is simple but difficult to practice especially for high performers: Pay attention to your emotional state.

This is awareness. And it's only the beginning.

See you around the fire pit, 

Chris