Ep.20: Questioning you way to Clarity
In this episode, we delve into the foundation of self-awareness, a pivotal skill that can revolutionize how you perceive and navigate your life. It's not about absorbing more information or relying on...
Episode Transcript
The One Skill That Gives You Your Own Answers
Welcome back to the Wisdom Practice Podcast. In today's episode I want to go over something that is the foundation of self-awareness. The brilliant thing about it is it doesn't need you to research, doesn't need you to learn anything, doesn't need you to rely on gurus or what other people are saying.
It is something that will give you your own answers, which means you can reclaim your own power instead of getting more confused about where to start. I know how big a topic self-awareness can be, and it's difficult to know where to start.
By using this skill properly, and it's a lot simpler than you think, you can start to understand why you do certain things and take control back so that you're not operating from your conditioning. That's when people feel lost or like they have no control over their life, because the truth is they don't. We're just acting from assumptions and beliefs we're not aware of, and so we feel a bit lost, because some part of us knows something isn't right.
By doing this, you can start the process today of taking control back over your own life.
There is one part of self-awareness, one skill, that is probably more powerful than anything else. It will give you the most realization and the most understanding compared to anything else. Self-awareness is a huge topic, so understanding how to start is not easy, and there's so much out there that it can get confusing who to follow, what to do, how to think. The beauty of what I'm about to tell you is it doesn't require any of that.
It doesn't require you to research, watch YouTube videos, listen to gurus, or rely on anyone else's answers to start practicing it. It's one of the core parts of my process, because it doesn't require outside knowledge, which means you can start to take back control over your life as soon as today - you're coming up with your own answers for your own problems. That skill is learning how to properly question things.
That might sound anticlimactic after the intro I gave, but it's not. Learning to question things is the most fundamental part of self-awareness.
Self-Awareness Starts With Two Things
Self-awareness starts with two things, and the key distinction I want to make is questioning things outside of your beliefs about them - questioning things objectively, if you will. There's no benefit to believing "this person is really rude" and then spending an hour at night journaling about why this person is rude, or what his parents did to make him rude. It's not going to help you.
You have to be able to take the personality aside for a second and start to understand what's going on from a different perspective.
Self-awareness starts, first, with space - the space to see things differently. We all know what it's like to get triggered, to be in a thought loop you can't stop, or to feel a certain way and not be able to stop it. In that moment you are completely consumed by that emotion, by that thought. There is no you left; you are just the emotion, the thought. Then you wake up five hours later - and by "wake up" I mean you get space back - and you're like, what the hell just happened? Where was I for the past five hours?
That's what I mean by space, because in those five hours there was no potential or capability for you to question yourself. There wasn't the space, there wasn't the different perspective, because in that moment you were what you were experiencing. So self-awareness requires space - that's the first thing.
After that, this is where the questioning comes in. Okay, fine, you have the space, which is an amazing first step - but what do you do with it? It doesn't give you any clarity on what's going on. You can see it from a bit of a higher level, a broader view, but you still have no clue what's going on. This is where questioning comes in.
Questioning, critical questioning, allows you to make sense of what you're seeing. Technically all you need is space and questioning and you're fine - there's no need for anything else in self-awareness. But you may question something and get triggered by it. You strike a nerve, get pulled into it, and lose the space completely. So it's not just about uncovering stuff - it's learning how to be okay uncovering stuff, and being neutral while doing it. That's the tricky part.
So if you start questioning things after this episode and you find yourself getting really emotional or your mind going crazy, that's okay. Don't expect to know exactly what's going on the first time you do it. Questioning, or critical analysis, is not something we're really taught at school, unfortunately, or by society or by our parents. It's not a skill we've developed. We're told the way things are and expected to believe them, and then we build our lives on assumptions we've been told by teachers, parents, and society - we build a house of cards on something we just assumed was true because an authority figure told us so. That's where things go wrong.
In the Presence of Masters
If you're around kids who are two, three, or four years old - if you're a teacher or a parent, you'll know exactly what I mean - they ask questions non-stop. They want to understand everything, and it's amazing. If you're trying to learn this skill of questioning, you're in the presence of masters, because they're really trying to understand the world and they're not yet taking things at face value.
If someone tells them, "this is just the way it is, in life you have to get a job, you have to do this," they're not going to just accept it. They're going to ask why. Why do I have to get a job? Why do I need money? What is money? From their perspective it's pure curiosity, and it's fun. There's no reason you can't get that back wherever you are in your life.
But the issue is that an authority figure gets tired of the questioning, which is understandable, and just says, "this is how it is - I'm your teacher, I'm your father, I'm your mother, you have to listen to me." Do it enough times and they'll stop asking, and just assume it's true, or be scared to ask again because they'll get the same answer.
Recovering this ability to question everything will transform your life. If you feel trapped, if you feel like you have no power or control over your life, like the world is just dictating what you do, how you react, where you go, who you see, what your life is about - it's because at some level you haven't taken your personal power back. And you can't take your personal power back if you don't understand what's going on or why you do certain things, because you're operating from a subconscious belief, an assumption, and some part of you isn't okay with that. That's why your life feels shaky - it's literally built on a house of cards.
Reclaiming Your Own Power
When you start to dig deep, question these things, and come up with your own answers - and this is a journey for you to go on, not for you to listen to me or anyone else about what to believe - you start to reclaim parts of yourself. You start to reclaim your power, because finally you're making your own, conscious decisions instead of automatically doing things. Things get uncomfortable when you're doing something and some part of you doesn't know why, but you're still doing it.
That's why this skill will help you more than anything else - it's your ability to reclaim your power in a way that you see fit. After questioning a certain part of your life, you may end up with no change at all - you go into deep reflection, deep questioning, and ask yourself, why am I doing this? Do I want to be doing this? And you come out the other side thinking, actually, I do want to do this, I'm okay with it. So you may see no change in your physical life, but you're more comfortable with it, because now you can say this was a conscious choice.
Take a job you don't like. Why am I at my job? Why am I doing this? Before you question it, it just causes frustration, annoyance, irritation - dealing with annoying people, dreading going in - because you didn't know why you were doing it, you were just doing what you were told to a degree. But when you ask yourself why, you might land on: okay, I do hate this job, I get nothing out of it, but right now I need to support my family. When that becomes a conscious choice, the next time you go into work it's not "I have to go into work," it's "I'm going to support my family right now, that's what I'm doing." You become aligned with your power because it's a conscious choice. It's still annoying - that doesn't change the emotion - but you're aligned with a bigger purpose, your own purpose. Even if it's still irritating, at least it's your conscious choice, and you feel like you have more power over your life.
How Do We Actually Question Things?
You could question anything, so I want to make sure this stays practical so you don't feel overwhelmed.
Don't feel pressured to start by questioning the painful things, the things going wrong in your life. Firstly, it's not fun, and a big part of this - being genuinely curious like a child - is fun, and if we can approach it that way there's a better chance you'll keep doing it and turn it into part of how you think. Secondly, it's very difficult to question things objectively when we feel hurt, guilty, or ashamed. The most important thing with questioning is having the space to look at things from a different perspective, which is difficult when we're attached to the event or situation as our personality.
So don't feel pressured to start there just because you want to fix something - the aim of this isn't to fix anything, it's to uncover and be curious about your own life so you can make conscious choices and reclaim your power.
The best thing is to start with something you're actually interested in, something you're genuinely curious about, and just start asking questions - going deeper and deeper into why this happened, then why it's like this, and why it's like that. Be a kid and ask everything, even if it seems like a stupid question. The only reason it seems that way is because our mind has already assumed the answer.
When we ask something and the mind says, "that's a stupid question, it's just because of this, it's just the way it is" - you know you're on the right track, because as soon as the mind says "this is just the way it is," it's because we don't actually know the answer.
So: first, find something you're curious about, genuinely interested in - if it's about people or about yourself, even better. Second, you don't have to start with the painful things, even though it's natural, because part of fixing something is understanding it - but if you find it too difficult or too painful, you don't need to start there.
Is There Any Other Explanation?
Third, make sure you're not questioning things as yourself. Whatever answer you come up with when you ask a question, ask yourself: is it true? This weeds out whether your answer is a belief or a fact.
Say you're walking down the street and someone gives you a weird look, and you ask yourself why that happened. If your mind says, "because you didn't do your hair this morning" or "because you're not wearing makeup," ask yourself: is that 100%, undeniably true? Your mind might still say yes, because it wants to stay attuned and aligned with that belief - it's part of who you are. A better way to ask it is: is there any other explanation for this? Could it be that person just looked at a shop window behind me and didn't like what they saw? Could it be that I reminded them of an ex, or someone they don't like?
The more you go through this process, the more you start to depersonalize yourself and your reactions, because suddenly things don't feel so personal.