The Art of You-ing

Self-Awareness

Looking back, we often thought of self-awareness as the ability to view one’s self objectively. This was an instance of being painfully half-correct. It is true that seeing oneself from an objective point of view will help create the right environment for self-awareness. There are a few problems that follow, however. How do we decide which perspective is objective? Which of our “selves” do we look at? We don’t have the answers to these questions but we can offer some ideas and practices that may make them easier to wrestle with.

Most of us probably think of our “self” as a singular entity. You might be thinking, “There is only one me!” And to that, we say: “You contain multitudes.” All of the parts of ourselves could be referred to as different “selves”. A great deal of the world’s religions and spiritual practices operate based on the reconciliation of all our different “selves”. While there are many useful frames of thought, we prefer to think about these “selves” in terms of layers.

The first layer is our biological self — or as we endearingly call it, “The Meat Suit”. This term, though crude, translates well across cultures and languages in its intent. Our Meat Suit is the body we’ve been wearing since the day we were born. It is constructed of atoms that create cells which turn into organs and add up to a functioning organism. In this regard, there is virtually no statistical difference between you and any other human that has lived for at least the last 50,000 years.

As a by-product of the existence of our Meat Suit, there is a layer we like to call our “Core-Self”. Some traditions refer to this as awareness, others call this presence. It is often referred to as the soul. Our Core-Self processes our somatic and emotional experience and uses it to build the self from which all the following selves stem. The Core-Self is unencumbered by the noise of ego and fear. Simply put, the Core-Self is the receiver of your inner critic. When Scott first started meditating, he felt frustrated by his inability to quiet his internal voices. His meditation teachers asked, “Who do you think is listening to those voices?”

Our Core-Self understands something crucial. At any given time, two things are happening inside of you — you are processing the objective information of your circumstances and, in parallel, you are processing your feelings about those circumstances. The goal then is not to be completely objective or unemotional but to understand that there is a difference between what is happening and what you feel about it. Humans are all the same at this level and remembering this is crucial to accessing self-awareness.

Here is where we begin to deviate from one another. On top of your Core-Self there is the layer that most of us commonly think of — the self that carries our name. The self that other people recognize as us. We will call this highly conditioned self an “Avatar”. An avatar is a projection of our Core-Self. It is an outward self. It is how we connect to people and how people recognize us.

An avatar is distinct from the Core-Self because it is not a product of biological sentience but rather a product of socialization. Our parents and our community painstakingly created it to ready us to be part of our specific society. Due to all the conditioning involved, it’s easy for most of us to lose sight of our Core-Self within our avatars. As you may have noticed, in our definition, there is room for each of us to have multiple avatars. We are not positing that everyone has multiple personalities. Instead, we are saying that our Core-Self can project different avatars depending on the situation.

We wear our avatars like a uniform to help our Core-Self perform a designated role. We present our athlete avatar when we play a pick-up basketball game or run a marathon. We present our manager avatar when supervising an employee and our student avatar in a classroom. Each of these avatars may have slightly different qualities or tendencies - and this is good! Our avatars are meant to help us navigate the social mesh of society and it’s important to remember that underneath each avatar is our Core-Self. If presenting an avatar means changing completely, we lose contact with our Core-Self and become inauthentic.

This begs the question, is there a problem with presenting inauthentically? At first glance, it seems to have the benefit of keeping our vulnerable Core-Self safe from the perceived threat of other people. Nonetheless, deviating from our Core-Self in this way is exhausting to uphold. It often makes us irritable and defensive. The trickiest part is that sometimes we get so attached to one of our avatars that we consciously or unconsciously decide it is better than our Core-Self. At this point, we begin to lose sight of who we really are.

If at this point you’re looking for a practice to help build your self-awareness, our best advice is to carve out time each day to be still and listen. Some people call this meditation. If that sounds too esoteric you can call it rest or self-care. There is no right way to do this, just find a way to be with all of your selves. And it doesn’t have to be literal stillness. You can go out for a walk or you can lay on your couch practicing with a mantra. With regular practice, you will build self-awareness that will allow you to move through the world with more ease and grace.

Empathy

The term Emotional Intelligence was coined in the 1990s by two researchers, Peter Savoy and John Mayer, which they defined as, “a set of skills hypothesized to contribute to the accurate appraisal and expression of emotion in oneself and in others, the effective regulation of emotion in self and others, and the use of feelings to motivate, plan, and achieve in one’s life.” More simply, emotional intelligence is the understanding that everything we discussed above applies to everyone you meet. We believe that the most critical factor in emotional intelligence is empathy.

Empathy is often assumed to be inherent, and in some ways it is. Certain emotions like shock and fear are recognized across cultures. That doesn’t mean empathy is a gift you either have or don’t have - empathy is a finely tuned skill. Empathy is highly impacted by our environment, culture, and most importantly, our family dynamics. Some people are raised with empathy as an important value while others are raised with the implied or outright idea that empathy can lead to weakness. For this reason, it’s more useful to think of empathy as a skill that can be developed or focused.

It is a common human experience to feel like we are the only ones experiencing confusion, fear and pain. The idea that other people are getting along more easily is a fallacy that happens when we compare our inside or our Core-Self to other people’s outsides — their avatars. Empathy is not mind reading. It is an indicator that something is being communicated nonverbally that we ought to consider. When we feel a “pang” of empathy, we should consider that a signal to listen more closely and ask more questions.

As you become more thoughtful about your self-awareness, it becomes much easier to use it as a pathway to empathy. Other people’s specific circumstances and feelings may differ but the mechanics are nonetheless the same. Managing and understanding all of our layers is our common struggle. Empathy is like a door to getting along with others. Once you become willing to open it, you have access to a new space of collaboration.

With a keen sense of self-awareness and well-developed empathy, we can interact more successfully with our co-workers, family and community. We in turn create more authentic relationships. As a social species, this is of the utmost importance in feeling successful.

The Emerging You

We aren’t claiming to have found ultimate state of self-actualization. What we have found is a set of principles and practices that provide us some relief from the constant dissatisfaction that previously plagued us. We believe that at the centre of today’s success is collaboration.

The topics and practices we will discuss are tools to help position you to be a more collaborative person. In Western culture, individuality is highly valued, and being collaborative may seem like a painful sacrifice. But life is a team sport. We have been unable to find anything you can do in this world without the support, resources, or labour of others.

If we work to become more collaborative, we offer ourselves to something greater than our individual parts. Collaboration is at the centre of all innovation, creativity and progress. The most beautiful parts of being human come from collaboration. Language, art, technology, spirituality — these are all miraculous examples of collaboration.

The you that is “you-ing” right now, as you read this, is a dynamically emerging result of all of your layers interacting in real-time. The you that engages the world, that people see and speak to, that experiences and processes thoughts and emotions, that “you” is mercurial. The world is constantly full of people “you-ing” and when we can successfully turn each of our “you-s” into an “us”, we create emergence.

Emergence in philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, occurs when a complex entity has properties or behaviours that its parts do not have on their own, and emerge only when they interact in a wider whole.

Collaboration is the ultimate manifestation of emergence.