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Nespresso, what else? Keep exploring at nespresso.com. This is Optimal Living Daily, episode 2308, Self-Consciousness and Flagging Fear, both by Colin Wright of ExileLifestyle.com. And I'm your very own personal narrator, Justin Malek, reading to you from some amazing blogs and books to help you optimize your life.
Topics include personal development, productivity, and minimalism, mostly. Some of the authors I feature with their permission include Zen Habits, Mark and Angel, The Minimalists, and a lot more. Today's two posts come from popular minimalist writer Colin Wright. So with that, let's get right to it as we optimize your life.
Self-Consciousness by Colin Wright of ExileLifestyle.com. A heightened awareness of what we're doing, how we're doing it, and how our actions and words and public persona might be interpreted by others can be a source of satisfaction or shame. And the line between one and the other can be razor thin. The term self-conscious can refer to a feeling of awkwardness or an empowered sense of awareness and self-worth.
I have regular periods of self-reflection baked into my schedule, and one of the benefits of this routine is that when I'm feeling stressed or anxious or out of sorts, I can often trace any low moods or negative feelings I might be experiencing back to a moment of unproductive self-consciousness. I did or didn't do something, said or failed to say something, responded or neglected to respond appropriately because I was feeling self-conscious. There are conversations I should have had that I put off because I worried about how I might be perceived. There are gestures I could have made and wounds I could have healed or preempted had I faced down certain fears and frets and flusters.
That's when I find myself fruitlessly ruminating, I sit, relax, and trace my tension backward, seeking a source, and I almost always arrive at some speck of distress that, splinter-like, has hooked itself into my subconscious flesh and caused the well-meaning denizens of my subliminal immune system outsized alarm. A variation of this process is part of my daily, informal meditation routine. I take stock, mentally pat myself down to see if I'm harboring stress or guilt or worries, and I tug on any threads I find until they unravel and reveal their source. When referring to an ever-growing sense of oneself, one's capacity and goals, one's value, and how much one has left to learn, however, self-consciousness is important for personal development and psychological situational awareness.
Lacking this cognizance, we tend to depend upon external reflections and loose caricatures of ourselves, both of which depict superficial sketches of who we are rather than the more accurate blueprint we can render when we've taken the time to understand our holistic push-pull tensions, our load-bearing elements, and what we're really made of. Flagging fear by Colin Wright of ExileLifestyle.com Over the years, I've learned to run toward foreboding feelings when I identify them. I've consistently found value in noting and confronting things that scare me— small things, substantial things, dangerous things at times. Much of this value is derived from the process of picking at the aversion or worry and slowly coming to know it, understanding its origins, what it is I find so disconcerting about it, and in some cases, finding I'm actually afraid of something else and have, for whatever reason, misattributed my misgivings.
It's natural to deny and deflect and to thus never get an accurate lock on things that cause us any amount of disconcertion. It's easier to just decide our fears are a law of nature and move on. Allowing ourselves to say, oh yeah, this freaks me out, is fundamental to moving forward, though. Without such an admission, it's difficult to get an accurate sense of what needs to be scrutinized.
After this initial acknowledgment is accomplished, I find it's useful to carve the fear-inciting concept into pieces to determine which of its components are causing psychological strain. From there, I almost always need to dig around a bit, because what initially seems to be the issue often isn't. It's a reflection of a reflection of a reflection of the real concern. After traveling full-time for the better part of a decade, for instance, the idea of settling in one place for more than four months terrified me, and I wasn't sure why.
A long period of introspection led to the realization that I was afraid I might not recognize myself in a context not predicated on regular travel. I was afraid I'd be a flattened-out person without anything to offer the world, and I'd be incapable of happiness and fulfillment, and would lack creative drive if I wasn't tapped into the inescapable novelty of the road. Superficially, though, before I started digging, I thought I was afraid of owning a car, buying furniture, and receiving mail every day. These more visible aspects of a staying-put lifestyle circled the core issue, but they were not in themselves the issue.
It took months of thinking and assessing before I was able to pinpoint and affirm my actual fears, and the better part of a year before I was able to reassure myself I was capable of not just being happy, but also remaining creative and productive and fulfilled while not in a permanent state of transit. It can feel like a weakness to flag and follow up on these sorts of internal barriers and conflicts, and the process of tracing and unraveling and, with time, plucking apart the knotted threads of self-imposed inhibitions is seldom pleasant or straightforward, but it tends to be worth the energy and effort invested because it allows us to perceive ourselves with greater accuracy and clear away piles of psychological detritus before they accumulate into cumbersome, seemingly insurmountable barriers. You just listened to the posts titled, Self-Consciousness and Flagging Fear, both by Colin Wright of ExileLifestyle.com. I'm constantly thinking about how to optimize my health, what supplements to take, hours of sleep, what my diet should focus on.
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I'll leave it there for the middle of the week episode. Hope you're having a great day, and I'll see you in tomorrow's show, where Optimal Life awaits.