Inner Work
Part 2 of a 14-part introduction to Self-With-Others
Most approaches to personal or professional development focus on one area of our lived experience.
Much personal development focuses on changing our inner world — how we think, feel, use our body etc.
Much Professional Development deals with how we connect and forge relationships.
Organisational or political perspectives deal with changing the way systems operate.
Self-With-Others deals with all three.
I call them The Three Domains:
Inner Work
Connection Work
Systems Work.
Over the next three emails we’re going to look at each domain in turn — though of course, they interconnect.
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Inner Work.
In the last article I suggested how the ‘self’ is not an ‘isolated thing’, but is a web of interconnections inside and outside of each of us.
What does that mean?
When something happens outside of you, you experience an internal reaction. You feel a response. You form an opinion. You choose — consciously or unconsciously — how (or whether) to respond.
Where does this response come from? How do we reach decisions about what we think, feel or do?
Lisa Feldman Barrett in her book How Emotions are Made suggests an emotional response to any situation arises from the interaction IN THE MOMENT between three key elements: past experience (personal history); bodily condition (physiology); whatever stimulated the reaction (our inner or outer environment).
If any one of these three elements changes, our response changes. You respond one way when you’re tired, another when you’re not. Someone with a fractured childhood reads a situation differently to someone from a secure upbringing.
Our ‘response’ is not fixed. It’s the outcome of a dynamic relationship between different parts of the self. Change one element, you change the outcome.
This is not only true in the realm of emotions.
An optimist sees the possibilities in any situation. A pessimist sees catastrophe lurking.
What we see is a relationship between what we’re seeing and HOW we interpret.
How we interpret is a shifting result of our history, genes, bodily condition and much else.
As the writer Anais Nin wrote: ‘We see the world not as it is, but as we are’.
Recognising that our moment-by-moment experience emerges from a web of inner connections helps us make wiser decisions.
An optimist who’s unaware of their tendency ONLY to imagine the best outcomes, can act naively or carelessly. A pessimist who only sees the worst possibilities, will miss opportunities rather than take a risk.
Acknowledging that experience emerges from the interconnection between parts of our inner and outer world enables us to act effectively and without unnecessary stress.
You’re not an Isolated Self. You’re an Interconnected Self — and those interconnections are both outside and inside of you.
Nothing is fixed. We can improve any inner or outer experience by changing some of the (inner) elements that create that experience.
To do that we need to recognise the elements of an inner experience which cause us to respond and act in the world in certain ways.
Once we recognise the complex makeup of how we experience life, we can choose what parts of our inner world we want to work on.
A process of gentle self-observation is one of the core disciplines of Self-With-Others.
(continued)
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This is part #2 in a series of 14 articles, introducing Self-With-Others: A guide to living and thriving in an interconnected world.
The whole series is free. If you sign up here you’ll receive two emails a week (and links to recordings of them if you prefer listening to reading) for 8 weeks. It will give you a complete overview of Self-With-Others, guiding you to build confidence, clarity, creativity and connection
#selfwithothers #connection #creativity #confidence #calm
