I’ve been having a pretty profound experience helping someone on Reddit recently because I’m realizing more and more that I’m not really helping them so much as they are helping me.
In effect, my experience trying to teach someone my framework is actually teaching me.
The reason for this is because I’ve had a profound realization recently about this person that mirrors a realization about myself.
I basically told the person that whenever their larger sense of Self is trying to help someone to just listen to their own words that they’ve communicated to that person and then turn around and apply them to their own life.
Why? Because those words they are communicating are often the words of their larger sense of Self. So it’s a Self who is caring and loving and wants to help others…including themselves.
So with this process, one is able to start leading themselves and overcome their base “self” who often beats themselves up and sees themselves as worthless or without value.
This is the same very thing I need to be doing myself.
While I’ve made huge improvements in not beating myself up as much as I used to do a decade or more ago, shifting to a Self-Transforming Mind often puts greater perceived expectations on my “self” that often can seem monumental in the moment.
But if I take the same stance and learn from what my deeper, larger sense of Self is trying to communicate to others, I can also learn and grow from the experience and my Self as well.
It’s funny. In the book Anti-Hero by Richard Wilson (along with Matthew Kálmán Mezey & Nick Nielsen), there’s a diagram that shows the differences between a Socialized Mind, Self-Authoring Mind, and a Self-Transforming Mind.
In terms of the Self-Authoring Mind, the focus is on being “independent,” whereby the “leader learns to lead.”
In comparison with the Self-Transforming Mind, the focus is on being “interdependent,” whereby the “leader leads to learn.”
That’s effectively what it feels like for me right now, even though I’ve been in leadership positions before in my life, at least from a Self-Authoring Mind perspective.
But it feels like I’m walking out into completely unknown territory now from a Self-Transforming Mind perspective. So I can’t really think my way through this experience so much as I have to feel my way through it.
So I need to intuitively probe my way first and then rationally make sense of what’s going on afterwards (which relates to the Complex domain of the Cynefin framework).