What Is The Most Powerful Force In The Human Condition.
Who am I?
The quality of our answer to this one question in life, will ultimately determine, the quality of our experiences in life.
The answer to this question is the most powerful behavioural force that exists in the human condition - our identity. We will do anything we can consciously and unconsciously to remain consistent with our identity. Our identity is a bunch of convenient assumptions we have made up, our beliefs, of what we think we are, what we think we are capable of and not capable of, what we think we do and don’t deserve., what we think we are worthy of and not worthy of. Our identity is our self concept. It is the way we see ourselves.
Our identity ultimately is, the essence, of what it is, that attracts things into our lives. Not in a magical or mystical sort of way but through our experiences we attract in life.
The quality of our life experiences is either amplified or minimised and is completely influenced by our emotions and feelings.
People sometimes mistakenly think emotions and feelings are the same, but they are different. Scientifically, they have shown, they each stimulate two different parts of our brains.
Emotions stimulate the amygdala which is part of the limbic brain which is located in the centre of the brain and our feelings stimulate the neocortex part of the brain.
Our emotions are unconscious, they just happen, they are our response to a stimulus, an experience, an event. Emotions live in our bodies. We have no choice over the emotions we experience. There are no good and bad emotions, there are just emotions that we all have.
But then we have a thought, about the emotion, we just experienced, and this is where we create our feelings. Our feelings are our interpretation of what our emotions are and what we think they mean. Our feelings live in our heads. We have the choice over what we make our feelings mean.
Our emotions and feelings combine to create our emotional state or our emotional range.
Our emotional range is created by the meaning we give our thoughts. What we are focusing on, what we are thinking about, is what we attribute meaning too. The quality of the meaning we place on it, generates our feelings which then flavours and colours every nook and cranny of our experience in life.
But what influences our thoughts and our focus? According to Carl Jung’s work into the human condition, it is our perception.
Jung’s view was - all perception is a projection and I will explain what he meant by that.
We have all heard the saying that “What we see or are triggered by in others in a projection of what is in us” but very few people actually understand what Jung meant.
When we were born, we were whole and complete. We are born with all our emotions, our soul and our purpose intact.
Then as children, most of us enter the mainstream schooling system between the ages of 4 to 7 where in order to meet the three universal fears that we all have of:
1. Not belonging
2. Not being loved
3. Not being enough
We consciously and unconsciously, begin to dump parts of us and those emotions, that we as young children, didn’t perceive or think would be useful in in order to fit in or belong to this new group, tribe, community we had.
Those dumped emotions whether they be positive emotions like kindness or negative emotions like anger, don’t just disappear they are sent back to the unconscious mind, but they are still part of us.
What children don’t understand is, there is a massive difference between fitting in and belonging.
When we belong to a tribe there is a genuine cross over of values. To belong is to be accepted warts and all. For the good and bad parts of us. To find our purpose in life, the one we came in with, we need to be ourselves.
When we sacrifice parts of ourselves in order to fit in and to be accepted, we are setting ourselves up for a life that is emotionally isolating.
Our perception is influenced completely by the health and cleanliness of our perspective. Our perspective is our philosophy on how we view life. It is where are values are, our priorities are. It is the meaning we give things. We are all meaning making machines but nothing in life really has meaning except for the meaning we give it.
So, building a healthy perspective is ultimately what life is all about as it has a ripple effect all the way down to the level of what we experience.
Jung also theorised, that there are fundamentally four different life stages or phases we go through. The first 3 stages are psychological stages.
We initially define ourselves by what do you think of me? My body, my hair, my image, my car, my house, what you do think about my clothing, my whatever. We define ourselves through how others see us.
Then we evolve into defining ourselves by our results. How are we doing in comparison to others, to our colleagues, family, friends in all areas from financial success, to how we are doing with our health and fitness, where are other families at compared to ours - all that sort of comparison stuff.
Then that evolves into the third psychological identity state where will define ourselves by our legacy and the contribution we are making to the world and to others.
Then at some point, we will let that go where we will evolve into our 4th stage of identity which is our existential identity. Who we become when we cross over, our spirit / essence / soul / consciousness / awareness whatever that looks like to you.
Emotional unfitness of anxiety and depression can be caused when someone has an “Identity Crisis”. It is incredibly difficult to maintain emotional fitness if we are not clear on who we are, or who we want to be, or what we stand for. We will experience gross inconsistencies in our life and that can drive us around the twist.
It is important that we don’t put all our identity eggs in one basket. For example, if someone completely defines who they are, based on their career or what they do for a living, if they see themselves as only that pilot, that doctor, that nurse, that teacher , insert that role here, when something goes wrong in their career which undoubtedly does happen in life, then they will experience an amplified level of stress and anxiety, because they have associated most of their identity into their vehicle of their career. They will take the experience personally as they have defined themselves purely on the one vehicle of what they do to generate income.
Our careers are only one vehicle in the human condition, a vehicle is something we use to express ourselves. Another example of a vehicle is our marriages or romantic relationships. Friendships with close friends is another vehicle, hobbies we have that we love and do without needing motivation is another example of a vehicle we can use to express ourselves. If you can dilute and spread your identity concept across many different vehicles, then you won’t take things so personally in each of those vehicles when things don’t go to plan as you are diluting your identity into different aspects.
Our identity is our most powerful behavioural force and more we get crystal clear and clarity around our identity, the more quality experiences we will have in life.
If this article resonated with you, please let me know in the comments or please share this blog with others, so they too can create a life of their choosing.