Pull Your Whole Self Together
What happens when two or more parts of you want different things? Nothing good.
No one likes being wrong.
Many people will do everything they can to avoid it.
Even carrying on with a point past the point of realizing they were mistaken.
It takes strength to stop and re-align.
Agreed?
Okay cool, because…
Here’s An Uncomfortable Truth That Will Alter Your Reality
When you read this sentence is there a voice in your head?
Whose voice is that?
Yours?
Does it sometimes tell you things you don’t agree with?
How could that be?
Does it tell you things that end up being true, but you didn’t know it at the time?
Again, how could that be?
The truth is, the thing most people are mistaken about is who they are.
The Problem That Is Self-Awareness
A now famous study by organizational psychologist, Tasha Eurich, tells us that even though almost everyone thinks they are self-aware…
In truth, only about 10-15% of people are measurably self-aware and emotionally mature.
Almost everyone who reads this will think they are in the 15%, but that’s the rub of self-awareness.
You really don’t know what you don’t know.
Very tricky.
The reason for this is that the brain evolved to lie to itself.
When it comes to your survival and the continuation of the species your brain and instinct are a brutal combo that will keep you alive at the cost of pretty much everything else—if you let it.
Your brain can’t risk you getting in your own way when it comes to survival, so it helps you do what you need to do by making sure you’re not even aware that you’re doing it.
This is why people can sometimes sincerely believe what they’re saying while they’re lying because they aren’t in on it either.
This is one uncomfortable truth about what it means to be human.
Your Self is not just one ‘Self.’
But multiple Selves.
Who may want different things—and will lie to you, if it helps them get them.
Many people don’t want to think about having multiple selves, because ideas of split personalities and all the Freudian modern-school system psychology impressions come to mind.
They think they must be going crazy if they even start to consider they may not be the only ones in their head.
But if you want to achieve your potential, heal your wounds, and evolve your consciousness then you don’t really have a choice.
Raising awareness of the rest of you is the essential first step to getting them aligned, unified, and on your side.
Especially, when those parts of you, are the roots of self-sabotage and stand in the way of you getting what you want most.
So, if there’s more than one you the question is…
Who Lives in the House?
The lights are on, but who is home?
First things first, all the parts of you are still you.
And you’re not going to start hearing voices when you look at yourself differently.
But you may better understand the inner critic, rumination, and other thoughts that are definitely coming from you, but aren’t the conscious you.
All the parts of you are you, but you can engage with these parts of yourself as separate entities because, for all intents and purposes, they are.
They have different identities, different intentions, and different methods of achieving them.
Even often strengths you don’t have access to anymore.
Out of all your ‘Selves,’ you are the one with the least amount of awareness of what’s going on.
That’s because you have an unconscious, which is just everything in your mind you can’t be aware of—no matter how much you try.
And that’s for your benefit.
This helps you stay in balance, moving forward and adapting regardless of your circumstances, and bring experiences up from the depths only when you have space and time for them.
Some of your Selves help with this dynamic, guiding you from above, with greater levels of awareness—knowing all about you, what’s good and right for you, and even how you’re uniquely capable of getting it.
Like your own guardian angel.
Ancient philosophers like Aristotle and Plato wrote often of their Daimon, their inner-attendant, guiding voices, and good spirit.
A part of you, which has full awareness of everything about you, and wants what is best for you.
And helps you get it.
Sometimes, in the form of tough love.
But the point is if you can become sensitive enough to hear the voice of your Daimon, and its hidden wisdom, your inner ambitions can become outer realities.
And getting this part of you back on your side is the key to unlocking your intuition, new creative solutions to getting what you want, and advanced levels of insight.
But to get to them, you first need to become aware of another part of you, and that’s why most people don’t have access to their intuition to the level they could.
A part that is basically the opposite of your guardian angel—your Shadow.
Which is the part of you that needs your attention most.
Your Shadow
Your Shadow is what Carl Jung, the founder of analytical psychology, called “The version of yourself you least want to become.”
Your Shadow is a conscious aspect of yourself that is outside your awareness and is comprised of the parts of yourself you have rejected.
Why would you reject parts of yourself?
Usually not intentionally, and often it’s not you rejecting them, but others.
All you have to do to reject a part of yourself is accept when someone else does.
While everyone’s Shadow is unique, there are many common traits that most people have in common in their Shadow.
Stuff like confidence, assertiveness, or strong boundaries.
Because when those tendencies start showing up as kids, they don’t always look healthy or self-serving.
A good way to imagine the Shadow comes from poet and author Robert Bly, who teaches a way of imagining the Shadow as a bag that one carries behind them all their life.
The first things to go in the bag are the aspects of yourself that weren’t easily accepted, or outright rejected, by the world and those who raised you.
That’s not all unique to you, all children are born with hundreds of thousands of years of wild instincts that without regulation don’t gel well with modern suburban life.
Imagine kids drawing on the walls of a suburban home with crayons and Dad coming home from work to see this…
While innocent enough, and even necessary, these wild instincts are some of the first things to go in the Shadow. And anything else that others reject and you accept.
“You’re not good at math.”
“You’ll never amount to much.”
“You can’t do this.”
Then big first experiences—first loves, first jobs, first trips.
All your life, “discovering who you are” and who you aren’t—and all the while the bag gets bigger and bigger and bigger, getting packed with all the parts of you that don’t easily fit into the world.
Not having access to parts of yourself is punishment enough, but these aren’t just accessories to you, they are living, conscious, parts of yourself.
And there’s a cost to being disconnected from them.
What Goes in the Bag Becomes Hostile to You
The thing about your Shadow is that it’s not just moping in a dark corner somewhere in your psyche.
It’s conscious, intentful, and rightfully pissed.
They’re you, but only the aspects of your Self you’ve rejected, disowned, or not allowed yourself to embody.
Jung tells us, “What you resist persists, and grows in size.”
The growing in size part is the problem.
If you don’t address Shadow, it gets bigger. It gets smarter. It adapts its sabotage to your growth.
It grows with you, alongside you, but its intentions run counter to yours.
For every gust of wind at your back, it puts downward pressure.
For every hope, it prays on your downfall.
But luckily, hate is much closer to love than most people think.
And what holds you back, can be what gets you ahead when you bring these parts of yourself on your side.
Opening Rooms in the House
The thing about Shadow is that it’s you but it can do things you cannot.
It has strengths that you don’t have access to.
Some of what you find in your Shadow may still be difficult to integrate with your life and the season of it you’re in now.
But just having awareness of it can help you prevent reoccurring problematic patterns, reduce self-sabotage and create a more peaceful co-existence with yourself.
So, even though you can’t be fully aware of your Shadow, you can live knowing they are there and that alone can create more peace and reduce self-sabotage.
However, other parts of your Shadow will be immediately useful to you now.
This is called your Golden Shadow and common strengths for people to find there are: assertiveness, confidence, and charisma.
Parts that are easily rejected by others early in life and often hard to win back as adults.
It sounds involved, but you’re doing this all the time, it just doesn’t look like this outwardly.
And understanding this interplay of light and dark, self and other, inner and outer can help you not just get what you want, but become your best self in the process.
How to Get What You Want and Grow
What stops people from achieving their potential?
In a word, self-sabotage.
Different parts of you have competing interests.
You want, aspire and dream.
While other, darker halves, conspire and breed contempt.
For you to get what you want, you’re the first one you need to convince.
From this perspective, many cheesy aphorisms begin to drip with juicy truth.
“Before you can love others, you must love yourself.”
“You must help yourself before you can help others.”
This is because the changes you want to create outside yourself start within.
And they stay within, locked up and limited until you can pull yourself together.
Your whole Self.
You can get all the parts of you on the same side, you can lead them toward what you want to create.
Once you realize it’s not just you, you don’t need to know all the parts of yourself.
In fact, you may never be able to.
But you don’t need to have full awareness of all the parts of you to better lead yourself.
You Are A Team—Lead Yourself
Any organization is only as good as its team.
And the team, specifically the dynamics of the people on it, are what causes well-laid plans to go belly up.
The most common cause of business failure is partnership disputes.
If the two people in a marriage stop getting along, clearly that’s a road to divorce.
And if you’re a house divided?
You’ll fall.
It’s easy when times get tough to feel like you’re against the world.
But you’re not.
It’s never you VS. the world.
It’s always you VS. you.
If you want to end a war, start with the internal one and the rest won’t matter.
If you want to succeed, bring yourself into alignment.
It’s probably one of the most difficult things to do, but the reward is being able to accomplish something greater than the sum of your parts.
Being able to do new things, and old things in new ways.
Collaboration is the most powerful creative force on Earth.
So, just imagine what you could create if every part of you contributed…
How much easier would it be if the part of you that sabotaged your best efforts finally stepped out of the way? Or even got in line to help push?
When Being Wrong Is Good
Sometimes it’s good to be wrong.
And when it comes to knowing who you are, sometimes it’s very good to be wrong.
Philosopher Soren Kierkegaard once famously penned, “To label me is to limit me.”
Once you have an idea of what you are, you block your perspective to other sides of you.
Once you believe you are one way, it is difficult to be another.
If you experience lots of self-sabotage and confound yourself, often feeling like you take one step forward and two backward—then I have good news for you.
The more self-sabotage you experience, the more you stand to gain by pulling yourself together.
And when you know for certain what you cannot do…
There may be other parts of you who can.
If you can pull yourself together, and bring all parts of you back on the same side.
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