Tag: curiosity

Finding Your Best Starting Point: A Simple Guide to Personal Growth

~ cafebedouin

The Big Idea

Instead of asking “What’s wrong with me?” ask “Where should I start today?”

This guide helps you pick the best place to focus your energy so you can grow and feel better.

Step 1: Look at Four Areas of Your Life

Think about these four parts of yourself:

Your Body

  • How tense or relaxed do you feel?
  • How is your breathing?
  • Do you have energy or feel tired?
  • How does your body want to move?

Your Emotions

  • Can you feel your emotions clearly?
  • Are your feelings strong or weak right now?
  • Can you share your feelings with others?

Your Mind

  • Are your thoughts clear or foggy?
  • Can you focus on what matters?
  • What patterns do you notice in your thinking?

Your World Around You

  • How are your relationships with family and friends?
  • How do you feel about work or school?
  • Does your home feel good to you?

Step 2: Pick Your Approach

Choose one of these three ways to decide where to start:

The Smart Move
Ask: “What one change could help everything else get better?”
This is about being efficient and making progress.

The Fun Way
Ask: “What sounds interesting or exciting to explore right now?”
This is about enjoying the process and discovering new things.

The Hard Thing
Ask: “What do I keep avoiding that keeps asking for my attention?”
This is about facing the stuff you don’t want to deal with.

Note: Sometimes the thing you’re avoiding IS the smart move to make.

Step 3: Try Something Small

  1. Pick one area (body, emotions, mind, or world around you)
  2. Choose something small to try – don’t go big right away
  3. Think of it as a test, not something that has to fix everything
  4. After you try it, ask yourself:
  • Did this help me feel more open?
  • Did anything shift in how I feel?
  • What should I try next?

Examples to Get You Started

If you picked your body and want to try the smart move:
Take 5 deep breaths when you feel stressed

If you picked emotions and want to try the fun way:
Write down 3 things that made you smile today

If you picked your mind and want to try the hard thing:
Spend 5 minutes thinking about something you’ve been avoiding

If you picked your world and want to try the smart move:
Send one text to someone you care about

Remember This

  • Small changes can lead to big results
  • You can’t always guess what will help the most
  • Sometimes the fun, easy thing works better than the serious, hard thing
  • You’re not broken – you’re just choosing where to put your attention
  • If something doesn’t work, try a different area or approach

The goal isn’t to fix yourself. The goal is to find the best place to put your energy so good things can happen naturally.

Cargo Cult X

~ cafebedouin

“Good listeners do often reflect words back—but not because they read it in a book somewhere. Rather, it’s cargo cult advice: it teaches you to imitate the surface appearance of good listening, but misses what’s actually important, the thing that’s generating that surface appearance.

The generator is curiosity.

When I’ve listened the most effectively to people, it’s because I was intensely curious—I was trying to build a detailed, precise understanding of what was going on in their head. When a friend says, “I’m furious with my husband. He’s never around when I need him,” that one sentence has a huge amount underneath. How often does she need him? What does she need him for? Why isn’t he around? Have they talked about it? If so, what did he say? If not, why not?

It turns out that reality has a surprising amount of detail, and those details can matter a lot to figuring out what the root problem or best solution is. So if I want to help, I can’t treat those details as a black box: I need to open it up and see the gears inside. Otherwise, anything I suggest will be wrong—or even if it’s right, I won’t have enough “shared language” with my friend for it to land correctly.”

-Ben Kuhn, “To listen well, get curious.” benkuhn.net. December 2020.

I liked this notion of cargo cult as an adjective. I was trying to think of other types of cargo cult advice. Most self-help is cargo cult advice. There is rarely one right way to be in the world, and as the rest of this text suggests, perhaps all advice given without understanding the context a person lives in has the potential to be cargo cult advice.

Then, it occurred to me that cargo cult can have more expanded use as an adjective. Facebook friends might be cargo cult friends.

Belief systems around romantic relationships and “finding the one” might be another. Doesn’t make more sense to think about relationships as a skill, and it is possible to have meaningful relationships with many “the ones”, if we could only learn those skills?

When you start thinking about it, much of what is going on in our culture is cargo cult culture. There are many people, following the same paths, subscribing to the same ideas, and it gives them a sense of belonging to a group, which helps them form their identity. But, much of it is a display that denies our experience and requires us to gaslight ourselves and deny our lived experience.

There’s to lot to unpack in this idea. Perhaps something to think on further and write a longer essay about.

Open Questions – Gwern.net

~ cafebedouin
  • “Why do humans, pets, and even lab animals of many species kept in controlled lab conditions on standardized diets appear to be increasingly obese over the 20th century? What could possibly explain all of them simultaneously becoming obese?”
  • “Why does writing in the morning (anecdotally so far) seem to be so effective for writers, even ones who are not morning persons? While programmers, which seems like a similar occupation, are invariably owls?”

—Gwern Branwen. “Open Questions.” Gwern.net. Accessed: November 9, 2018.

I like the idea of open questions. Added a category to this blog to start collecting them.