3 Critical Things Society Falls Short on Teaching You (And What You Need to Know Instead)
When you were born, you existed in a box of a worldview and were given your place in that worldview. You were given your mission and your role. And then you experienced the hierarchy of relationships and realized where you fit in that.
Over time you also begin to realize there isn’t just the box and worldview you grew up in, but there are also other boxes and worldviews that other people grow up in. And as our society progresses, the number of different boxes and structures is increasing exponentially. Now, our kids are growing up on devices and can see an infinite combination of ways to construct a worldview.
Why do we have such a crisis of direction and leadership and purposelessness?
Because those three things (our worldview, our mission, and our relationships) aren’t being given to us anymore. Instead, we are filling the vacuum with three anti-skills that hurt more than they help.
To recapture our direction and purpose and become the type of leaders our world needs today, we need to learn three skills and reject the three anti-skills.
Skill 1: Make your own meaning or worldview
Anti-Skill: Focus on building self-esteem
The way society fills this gap is they focus on just building your self-esteem. If you feel bad about yourself, then you just need to be encouraged. You need to be boosted. The problem is this diminishes the importance of performance and results in an unhelpful way. In reality, performance and results do matter. If they didn’t, you would never grow and learn.
Consider when you were learning to walk. What if, every time you stumbled, people encouraged you by saying, “It’s OK. You don't have to try to walk. Just lay there. You’re great just as you are.” Maybe your self-esteem would be boosted, but you would never learn to walk!
The problem with this approach is it never teaches you the subtle transforming nuance of separating who you are from what you do. At SightShift, we refer to this as separating “identity” from your mission and community. There is a common misunderstanding around the concept of identity, though.
If I use the word identity in our culture, we tend to think of it as race, gender, creed, sexuality or any of these markers. The problem is if you make a specific marker the whole of your identity, then you never realize the depth and fullness of your identity. For the ancient wisdom traditions of the world, “identity” would have been thought of as an ineffable is-ness, the beingness that is you.
So, the key skill to learn here is to learn to make your own meaning. To work on your worldview is to separate who you are from what you do so that when you fall down, you can say, “OK, I fell down. I'm a human being. I'm still worthy. I'm still loving to myself and others, but I need to learn how to…”
This worldview then translates into the second skill.
Skill 2: Persevere in your mission
Anti-Skill: The need to be present
Everybody wants to get focus, impact, and intention to improve their life. The reason they can't get it is that they don't get the first skill. When you walk through the identity journey, you become unshamable. You know that no matter how much you fail or struggle, you don't have to carry personal shame. You can feel bad about what you've done, but you never have to feel bad about who you are.
After you learn to make your own meaning, then you learn to persevere or focus in your mission.
Whenever you feel overwhelmed or stressed, you’re often told to “just be present”. But on its own, this is actually an anti-skill. Don’t get me wrong. It can be helpful, but it’s just a starting point. The stress and overwhelm tell you what isn’t working. It’s a starting point for knowing what’s broken or wrong and what can be improved, but it’s not a finishing point. Instead, you want to learn to cultivate two dynamic states at once.
The true skill is learning to be present engaged and future-focused.
When you learn the depth of your identity, you no longer live in a state of focus that analyzes your way into wholeness. You learn how to access your inner wisdom and live life as it’s unfolding. You're not the causal agent of all your circumstances. You're just cooperating with what's unfolding and learning how to nurture momentum out of what's happening in your life for your growth and for the advancement of your mission.
The way that you persevere in your mission is not through discipline but through desire. You have to have a vision that captures you more than anything else in your life. Not just a vision of what you want to have in life or what you want to do in life, but who you want to be.
You become unshamable. Then you become unstoppable.
Skill 3: Building our community
Anti-Skill: Learn, play, and win status games
As we persevere in the mission, as we access our inner wisdom, and as we cooperate with the unfolding rhythm of our life, then it takes us to the third skill. It's the result that comes when we're secure in who we are and clear in what we do.
We advance the people around us. We progress our people. We build our community.
You'll never become the most full, developed version of who you can become without close vulnerable relationships. But it also expands beyond even the people that you know because your life has a reverberating impact.
Society used to give us our worldview, our roles, and the hierarchy of relationships. You knew how to play along, get along, and fit in. Now, it teaches us that we evolve by learning, playing, and winning status games. Do you like me? Do you approve of me? Are you happy with me? Are you happy with my opinions? Do you like my performance? Have I achieved enough to belong here? Do you think I've made good decisions?
Most of us don't even realize that this is the context of our brain. Our brain is a narrative machine and it will force a false narrative to keep us in a victim mindset where everybody else is wrong or we are just stupid and flawed.
But when we become unshamable in our identity, we become unstoppable in our mission, and we become uncancellable in our community. We don't try to win status games. We transcend status games.
We are experiencing this existential crisis in our world because there are now so many different ways to conceive of a worldview. To thrive in this crisis, you have to learn how to make your own meaning, how to find your vision, and then out of the overflow how to find and build your community.
Society will fall short of helping you develop these three skills. They will boost your self-esteem, encourage you to just be present, and teach you how to win status games, but they will never get you to the fullest expression of what your life can become. That’s why we created SightShift. It’s a platform of content, coaching, and community, working together to help you become unshameable, unstoppable, and uncancellable.
To get your master guidance with these three skills, visit www.SightShift.com.
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