Whether you are a student or new graduate undecided on how to begin your career; an associate ready to set out on his/her own; or you have been operating your own practice for years, you must begin with the simple but difficult task of getting to know yourself. It’s hard for many of us to believe that it would even be possible not to know yourself. Yet this is the greatest challenge you will face in this journey.
Know Yourself, Throughout History
So challenging and so important, we find the advice “Know Thyself” or some variant encouraged by great thinkers throughout history even engraved on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. Socrates reminds us that knowing ones self is the only starting point for good things and failure to know ones self is the start of delusion. The Buddha included self understanding in The Eightfold Path.
Jesus said, “Examine yourself & understand who you are… Whoever does not know self, does not know anything. But, whoever knows self, has acquired the knowledge of the universe.”
Lao Tzu: “Knowing others is intelligence, knowing yourself is true wisdom.”
And Marcus Aurelius is clear on self-knowledge, “These are the characteristics of the rational soul: self-awareness, self-examination, and self-determination. It reaps its own harvest.. . . It succeeds in its own purpose . . .”
“Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakens.” said, Carl Jung. It is with this dream, this distorted view of reality that we accept that our knowledge and our understanding is complete, that we are right. Lack of self knowledge leads to conceited opinions and acceptance of flawed paradigms. We follow rather than lead. We repeat what we have seen others do without due consideration. Like wearing someone else’s glasses and expecting them to help us see better.
Question Everything
We begin by questioning. Everything is on the table. All that you think you want and all your measures of success must be examined. You must become comfortable with your flaws and your strengths. Be aware of your own irrationality. In Laws of Human Nature, Robert Greene explains that our emotional response to any situation precedes any chance of a rational response. Our emotions get such a big head start in fact that our rational brain often struggles to keep up. We skip feeling, and move right to explaining away the emotion in a way that will satisfy our ego. We feel contempt for a successful person and rationalize that they are dishonest. However if we look into ourselves honestly we may find that our contempt stems from jealousy.
Be aware and examine your own biases. Greene suggests that we remain deluded because we are deeply biased in our thinking. We seek confirmation, constantly focusing on evidence that confirms our beliefs. We become emotional and adamant that we are correct. We believe that we are more aware and can understand others’ motivations more than we really can. We believe that we are thinking freely and independently when we are often motivated by group-think. We tend to believe that we are more intelligent, more rational, more considerate than others and therefore our opinions are more righteous. And finally, we believe that our failures are the fault of others or circumstances outside of our control.
Yet, most often we spend time and energy thinking about and focusing on things that are outside of our control rather than those things that we can control. Stephen Covey describes the Circles of Concern and Influence in his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. The Circle of Concern encompasses everything that concerns us either emotionally or mentally. These are things like the weather, other people’s behavior, markets, and the culture. Within this circle is the Circle of Influence, it is the subset of our concerns that we can influence, like our attitude, work ethic, and decision making.
The Chief Task
Stoic philosopher, Epictetus said, “The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control.” The chief task! You must look at every situation with this test in mind. Ask yourself, and honestly answer the question, “What about this is under my control?”
Your task now is to examine how you respond, how you think about challenges, situations, and problems. Do you focus on things that you cannot control? Do you ignore those things that you can control? First, examine what you spend your time and attention on. Do you obsessively watch the news, check Facebook? Do you get angry about politics? Are any of those things within your circle of influence?
Then, start out controlling the one thing you have the most control over: your own mind. “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”, Victor Frankl. Sometimes the space between stimulus and response is great and sometimes it is very short. Either way we must do what we can to control our response. If we use the space to lament about the situation (stimulus) or look to blame someone or something, our response is based on our anxiety, sense of powerlessness or anger. Instead, focus on the one thing you can control — your choice in how to respond.
You might say that only through the knowledge of oneself can we apply wisdom. Through wisdom we can focus on what lies within our circle of influence and act in ways that allow us to live well.
