Not All Who Wander Are Lost

Kriss

At this point you’re going to think I only know amazing women martial artists, and will never stop writing about them. Admittedly I know a lot of them. They are appearing here disproportionately for sure. Adult martial arts practitioners are uncommon. High-ranked/long-term ones are rare, and women are vastly outnumbered by men. So maybe finding Competence traits in so many women martial artists isn’t all that surprising. Succeeding in unusual and difficult circumstances, where success isn’t expected is a thing Competent people do. Having to work against structures that support some and make it harder for others forms Competence. Competent people do difficult things, break new ground, change structures, break and make new molds, and find ways to succeed over the long-term. That’s why it’s worth studying them.

Today I’d like to talk about reinvention. Take a moment to think about something you’ve “always wanted to do.” Or, if you prefer, some personality trait you have that really isn’t working for you that you want to change. Or a habit you fall back into no matter how often you make a resolution. We all have them.

If it’s easier, think about a friend. Maybe one who’s had a string of bad relationships, always “falls for the same kind of” partner. Or someone who seems to be going along well, and then ruins it. Maybe creating a bad work situation, blaming other people for it, and having to move on. Or maybe you have a friend who does for others. Not just a “shirt off their own back” person, but one who gives and gives as if they’re carving out parts of their own flesh, and only feeling worthy by being in pain themselves. If they feel worthy at all. Or maybe you know someone arrogant. They love their own ideas so much that they think their ideas are brilliant and unassailable.

These are a paltry few examples, you can think of innumerable ones. Take a moment to think of a few. I’ll wait.

It’s so much easier to see in others right? You’re hearing a friend vent about some situation they 100% brought on themselves. They’re blaming others for reacting reasonably to something they provoked. They’re exhausting themselves to give and give and give and then resented the receivers. They’ve got a lot going for them, but they’re also vain, proud, and it makes them less than they could be.

We love to look at others’ foibles and diagnose them and enjoy offering our advice, with “oh if they’d only listen.” All the while, parts of our lives don’t work for us, but we go on blithely ignoring the sage advice around us, the friends who “don’t understand.” Maybe this time what we’re doing will work. Or we’re doing the same thing over again, but we’re just sure it’s a different approach. Lipstick on the self-help pig.

Seeing in others isn’t painful to us. Seeing in ourselves…super painful. Mote in other’s eye, log in our own right? We even know it’s painful to see ourselves correctly, and even knowing it, anticipating the pain, intending our best and most determined efforts to change…we still suck at fixing what we want to change about ourselves. Enough that many people really believe “people never change.” It’s rarely bad advice that expecting someone else to change is a losing proposition. But of course, each of us is that “someone else.”

I worked once in a place where the executive in charge had long-since run out of new ideas. But darned if he didn’t manage to recycle an old one whenever we had a bad situation. Not a useful old one, maybe one that failed the first time, or one that worked once but made no sense in new circumstances. He could not for the life of him ever recognize that his shiny “new idea” was just a rerun.

After enough years of temper-tantrums and retaliation, he’d subdued anyone around him who might have told him the truth. He no longer had to worry about seeing this major personal failing, no one would tell him. So he was an anchor on that organization for a decade, dead weight, flattering and praising himself the whole time. Some people unwittingly set themselves up like that to never be presented with their own flaws. In my observation, paradoxically, it’s often people who most want to improve themselves.

Let me pause for a moment. I’m in no way saying that we bring all things on ourselves, that problems are always in our control if we only work hard enough, or any such rugged-individualist nonsense. Neither am I saying that we’re victims of circumstance. Our pain and injury all the fault of shadowy “others.” The truth is that both, and neither, are fully true. We do cause our own problems a lot of the time, but even the ones we don’t cause, the massively unfair situations, systemic problems, unlevel playing-fields, and just pure bad luck, still should trigger effort. Giving up isn’t the answer. But seeing what’s in our power and what’s environmental lets us tune our effort.

People yell at each other and hate each other all the time espousing extremes of these views. People seem too tired and frustrated to handle nuance. In my view we need to act as if only our actions can change us, our lives, or change the world. To do otherwise is to concede that the way things are is the only way they can be. We fail before we start if we assume we are helpless victims. We also need to recognize the effects of our environment and of others’ actions in order to see what to change in the world. Silence makes problems stronger. You’d never hear a coach tell you to ignore the other team arrayed against you and just play as if they didn’t exist. But sometimes you have to focus on a goal and charge for it no matter what’s going on around you.

If you agree with that premise, or are willing to kick the tires on it, read on.

In the grey hazy realm between “only I have power” and “only the world has power” is where magic can happen. The magic that drives people to spend billions on self-improvement to find the key to unlock a different person. 

Today I’d like to tell you about Kriss, who has a skill, and who makes that magic happen for herself. She creates ripples of magic for others when she does it. And the magic can be yours for the low low price of…

…not fooling yourself. C’mon.

I’ll leave your path to this magic to you, in my observation you can find it all sorts of ways. Your religion, your passion, your avocation, your path, are yours. But lacking this trait we’ll discuss today, you can spend until you’re poor and your house is made out of books you bought on late-night infomercials. You can pray to anyone you want, night and day, until your bead-hand is callused and your voice is gone. And you’ll still be fooling yourself.

With this trait, you stand a chance, but probably still a slim one. (This is the part where I’d sell you a subscription to get the key. Feel free to buy one if you’re into that sort of thing. I promise no magic answers will be in the paid articles though.)

Ok, so what’s this trait?

Nope, more background. Feel free to skip ahead.

Humans are funny. We have these big brains, full of ways to protect us. Often they protect us from things we’d really rather they not. Ask anyone if they’d like to know about their own flaws and self-defeating behaviors and of course they would. They believe they would. They say they would. But do they really?

That next step is a cliff. That big brain of ours will f us up every time. In a number of ways that keeps the whole discipline of Psychology afloat.

“Lack of discipline.” That’s a good one. I know what I need to change, but I’d rather do anything other than work on it. Our brains offer us happy chemicals for doing things that hurt us, like sitting around not changing, but those brains are so stingy with the chemicals when we do things we “should.”

Or it’ll be a weasel. Our brains will create a whole reality where the thing we do that hurts us is well actually a great thing. We’re headed around the same cycle of stupid, but this time the cycle looks completely different.

I could write books just on this, but fortunately many more-competent (and not so competent) people have done it to death. Go read one of theirs.

If you’re someone invested in reinventing yourself, who studies it, you may think you’re ready to wrestle your demons. You know it’s going to hurt. You know that you’re going to be different when you’re done. You know it’s going to take time, and work, and effort. You’re willing to put in that pain, time, boredom, whatever it takes.

Have you ever watched one of those movies where someone is trapped in their own mind, in a nightmare, and they realize they’re in it, so they fight their way out. They suffer, they strive, they spot all the inner demons and defeat them, and they come out of it into a happy place. Mission accomplished! Enlightenment achieved!

In the audience though, you see it. They don’t realize they’re just in another dream world. A subtler one. One made to look like the end goal. The “Good Place.” You see the character relax in self-congratulation, but you know they’ve only dug in deeper. Our brains, man. They’re trippy.

So let me tell you about Kriss.

When I met her, many many years ago, She owned a martial arts school in my primary art, and I was a newb. I was always looking for role models, and always willing to learn from anyone senior. The first few times I interacted with Kriss, I seriously didn’t like her. At all. Kriss seemed arrogant. She seemed to care about herself, and not much about the people around her. To some extent she would put herself out for her own students, but only in a way that appeared to be competitive and show-offy, as if her students were an extension of herself.

In seminars, when asked for help, Kriss was condescending to me. She’d help because she seemed to see herself as awesome, and teaching as a way to show it. After a couple of times asking, I stopped.

We’ve all known those folks, right? Executives, managers, assholes in all walks of life. Kriss was not alone. In a profession/avocation full of people trying to better themselves, trying to see their own flaws, I’ve watched more self-deluded senior folks get it wrong than I can count on both hands and feet. More than ones who get it right by a big margin.

I’ve seen people get to a rank and believe that that means they’ve broken through the delusion, and happily live in that more subtly-deluded (or over-the-top deluded) state. I’ve seen people come to a point where they believe they have some quality, like “integrity” or “honor” for example, and twist themselves around it so much that they decide they’re the actual definition of it. No matter what they do, it must be “honorable” only because they’re doing it.

Self-improvement can be a trap.

But some few folks do escape that trap. 

But if that was the end, obviously Kriss wouldn’t be a subject here. Over the course of years, I watched as Kriss became an entirely different person. It was not a movie-style awakening. Not an apple falling on head moment of epiphany. A slog. A grueling march. For years. I watched her break down in tears at a seminar once, suffering the pain of genuinely seeing her own flaws and self-delusion. Kriss is a strong person, keeping a mask on is well within her capabilities, but at that moment she took it off. It wasn’t serving her. I saw her uncertain. I saw her relearning. I live far away and only saw her a couple of times a year. So how much must have been going on all of that time.

I don’t know where Kriss found her mirror, or how it reflected to her what she needed to work on. I don’t know where she found the strength and determination, or her ability to say “not today brain, I’m doing this.”

Reinventing herself looked to me like someone performing surgery to remove their own appendix. It looked messy. It looked agonizing. At times I wondered if she was moving forward or backward, and I’d bet my last dollar she wondered that a whole lot. I could see why most of us stick with whatever picture of ourselves and the world our brain chooses. Our brains do it to keep us in line, to keep us from operating on our own internal organs.

I’ve watched a whole lot of people try and fail. Who doesn’t fail at self-improvement? I’m a big “misery for the sake of it” mistake-maker myself. I spent years thinking that if I was just miserable enough, I must be making progress. Others think whatever way feels “right” (aka “comfortable and delusional”) must be the way to better themselves. Lots of folks are serial self-improvers. It fails more than it works.

I’ve watched some folks make a few inches of progress, then get satisfied and stop. Some get so stuck that they’re worse than if they’d never tried. I’ve seen a couple of unfortunates follow their delusions down to pure, avoidable disaster for themselves and others. I’ve observed plenty who started a path, who suffered, paid in blood, sweat, and tears, and thought that meant they’d gained what they wanted, only to have missed the mark and ended up Twilight-Zone style, starting the real cycle of stupid over again with the same fatal flaw. It’s a knife-edge we walk when we try to reinvent ourselves. Our own knife edge. Different for each of us.

Reinvention is a Competence trait. No one is born with most of these skills and attributes. No one is born Competent. To be as effective as a Competent person is in the world requires reinvention. Without the ability to rip out what doesn’t work and replace it with new parts, I think we’re only ever going to be competent, at best. If that. Never Big-C Competent. 

Kriss now is not the Kriss I first met. She’s now a person who analyzes her own thinking. She couldn’t be called arrogant. She’s there for people, and meets them where they are. She wants their own path for them, not some reflection of hers. She’s generous. She’s the right amount of vulnerable.

Not done with her path, not gloating over her wins, not a sopping mess, Kriss is what strength looks like. It is so common to see people become worse. Get power or position or rank and be arrogant, surround themselves with yes-men. Force their view on the world. It is impossibly rare to see the opposite. Gaining power, and then improving. So much so, that I’ve saved this topic until I could write about Kriss. I have no other examples to offer you. I have several examples of change, but no other examples of pure reinvention of this kind.

I’m happy to know Kriss now, and am fortunate to have her occasionally offer me a mirror I can trust. Though she and I see the world quite differently, I can rely on her to have considered her ideas and to truthfully reflect what she sees and thinks. If she tells me to reconsider something, I’m going to reconsider it hard. Fifteen years ago if asked to recommend a teacher, I might have omitted Kriss from my endorsement list. Now, I’d say anyone would be lucky to have her. Her role and work in the world hasn’t changed much, but she has. I wish I was closer geographically. I would give a lot for an up-close case study of what changes when you substitute failure modes for a whole lot of Competence skills in the same context. Applying some data analysis to her business records would be fascinating.

I look forward to what Kriss will do with herself, but I don’t worry that she’ll fall into stasis or get stuck in poor thinking. Like a climber who sets a new anchor point. She’s seen what fooling herself brings, and I think she’s a match for her demons.

Many of us say “I’d like to learn.” Some people work to learn, and believe they have. Which is like giving up at the finish line (or believing there is a finish line). But very few people see when they’re only telling themselves they’re learning. So few earnestly cut through the brambles, finding a way through to what’s real. Competent people reinvent themselves. Competent people pull out what’s not working, even when their brains tell them “It’s fine, this is fine.” They use skills to identify what would work better.

This series of articles describes a few functions I think we could all stand to install. Competence isn’t the end-all/be-all, you may have other wonderful unrelated traits to explore as well! Competent people work through the pain to build a more effective, even-more-Competent person. To do that, they have to do the work without fooling themselves. How you make that happen is on you. But there is no finish line.

I have paid subscriptions available for people who want to engage in discussion. I post very occasional articles for subscribers on how to spot Competence, how to hire and retain Competent people (if you’re a manager), and how to cultivate some of the traits I’m discussing. I’m donating most of the subscription fees to good causes that promote competence in the world. So if you feel like giving someone a subscription, awesome.