Becoming Yourself

Developing a Better You

Month: March 2021 (Page 1 of 2)

What an Upside Down Pyramid Taught Me About Perspective

March 27, 2021 / / 0 Comments

I live across from an upside down pyramid.

On a recent nighttime stroll, I stood with my back to the building and looked up at wall sloping out over my head.

To my surprise, I slowly started leaning forward from my ankles to the point where I had to catch my balance. It was completely subconscious. Experimentally, I righted myself and looked up again. The same experience occurred, as if an invisible hand was pulling me forward while my feet remained planted. I realized the unusual slope of the wall above me was tricking my perspective, forcing my brain to compensate by leaning my body to match the angle.

It got me thinking about the power of perspective. A false perspective can fool our minds, manipulating us in ways far more subtle than I experienced with the pyramid. It can lead us to adopt beliefs that aren’t true because they’re based on poor data. This highlights the importance of being committed to facts and truth. Inaccurate perspectives – about ourselves, others, and the world – can have a dramatically negative impact on our quality of life and on the lives of those around us. They can make us angry, jealous, arrogant, entitled, depressed, the list goes on.

So how do we find and maintain an accurate perspective? Here are some suggestions:

  1. Be aware of your tendency to have a false perspective. It’s not just you. It happens to all of us.
  1. Seek out and consider a variety of perspectives from reputable sources. Read, watch, and listen to people who see the world differently than you.
  1. Accept truth even if it means changing your perspective. Burying your head in the sand when you discover facts you don’t like just makes your head dirty.
  1. Practice a daily refocusing habit – meditation, podcasts, prayer, reading, etc. Something that realigns your perspective and gets you back on course from your inevitable drift. I have a morning routine of meditation, prayer, and spiritual reading that I find hugely helpful.

Where to Begin

If you’re wondering where to begin, start by examining your current worldview, the foundational way you perceive life, others, and yourself. What lens do you look through to see the world? What ground do you stand on? We all ground ourselves somewhere and believe in something, whether we acknowledge it or not. It could be in yourself, another person, your career, financial stability, pursing pleasure, helping others, etc. Personally, I find my deepest grounding in my relationship with God. Not in the trappings of any one religion per se, but in God Herself. What grounds us is foundational to our sense of identity and informs our biases, both of which significantly impact our perspective (for more info, see my posts on Identity and Biases). 

Examining your perspective choices can bring further clarity. Do you see the glass as half-full or half-empty? Are you an optimist or a pessimist? Do you see yourself as a victim or as being responsible for your own experience? I’m not lobbying for only the “right” answer here – optimism needs to be balanced with realism and personal responsibility balanced with acknowledging your trauma. The trick is not to get trapped on the dark side of the equation and let it control your perspective.

So how about you? How do you perceive yourself? Others? The world? Where might “slanted walls” be throwing off your perspective? Keep your radar up. Consider different points of view. Be willing to change your perspective. Adopt a regular refocusing habit. If you do, you’ll take another step toward Becoming Yourself.

13 Implicit Biases That Torpedo Your Personal Growth

March 20, 2021 / / 0 Comments

I hate realizing I’m wrong.

It’s embarrassing. It’s humbling. It makes me feel like I’ve failed somehow. And it’s completely necessary if I want to grow.

I was reminded of that fact recently when I read a post highlighting author and speaker Brian McLaren’s work on implicit biases (you can read the full post here). Implicit biases are subconscious beliefs we hold about life, ourselves, and other people that impact our worldview.

The insidious nature of implicit biases are that they wield tremendous power over our lives, yet we don’t even know they exist. It’s like looking through tinted sunglasses that distort the color of everything we see, but we don’t know we’re wearing them. We’re convinced we’re seeing things as they really are.

As I read this post, it did more than convict me of my own implicit biases (Comfort Bias – ouch). It helped me understand how reasonable, intelligent people can be so divided on so many issues—political, cultural, social, religious, you name it. We’re looking at the same facts but seeing very different things, in large part because of our implicit biases.

Check out the list of common biases that Brian McLaren outlines below. Can you look at yourself honestly enough to see yours? He writes:

“People can’t see what they can’t see. Their biases get in the way, surrounding them like a high wall, trapping them in ignorance, deception, and illusion. No amount of reasoning and argument will get through to them, unless we first learn how to break down the walls of bias. . . .

Confirmation Bias: We judge new ideas based on the ease with which they fit in with and confirm the only standard we have: old ideas, old information, and trusted authorities. As a result, our framing story, belief system, or paradigm excludes whatever doesn’t fit.

Complexity Bias: Our brains prefer a simple falsehood to a complex truth.

Community Bias: It’s almost impossible to see what our community doesn’t, can’t, or won’t see.

Complementarity Bias: If you are hostile to my ideas, I’ll be hostile to yours. If you are curious and respectful toward my ideas, I’ll respond in kind.

Competency Bias: We don’t know how much (or little) we know because we don’t know how much (or little) others know. In other words, incompetent people assume that most other people are about as incompetent as they are. As a result, they underestimate their [own] incompetence, and consider themselves at least of average competence.

Consciousness Bias: Some things simply can’t be seen from where I am right now. But if I keep growing, maturing, and developing, someday I will be able to see what is now inaccessible to me.

Comfort or Complacency Bias: I prefer not to have my comfort disturbed.

Conservative/Liberal Bias: I lean toward nurturing fairness and kindness, or towards strictly enforcing purity, loyalty, liberty, and authority, as an expression of my political identity.

Confidence Bias: I am attracted to confidence, even if it is false. I often prefer the bold lie to the hesitant truth.

Catastrophe or Normalcy Bias: I remember dramatic catastrophes but don’t notice gradual decline (or improvement).

Contact Bias: When I don’t have intense and sustained personal contact with “the other,” my prejudices and false assumptions go unchallenged.

Cash Bias: It’s hard for me to see something when my way of making a living requires me not to see it.

Conspiracy Bias: Under stress or shame, our brains are attracted to stories that relieve us, exonerate us, or portray us as innocent victims of malicious conspirators.”*

So how about you? What biases have tripped you up in the past? Which might be affecting you now? Take an honest look in the mirror. Acknowledge what you see. Forgive yourself. Read / listen to (podcasts or news outlets) / talk with people who have a different perspective. Commit to having your beliefs, words, and actions match your renewed awareness. If you do, you’ll help heal our social divide, and you’ll take another step toward Becoming Yourself.

* From Brian McLaren, Why Don’t They Get It? Overcoming Bias in Others (and Yourself) (Self-published: 2019), e-book, as shared by Richard Rohr in his daily meditation March 1, 2021 for the Center for Action and Contemplation at cac.org.

3 Metaphors for Healthy Spirituality (Part 5): The Tricycle

March 13, 2021 / / 0 Comments

As a kid, I had a Big Wheel.

With the aptly named big wheel in front and two smaller wheels in back, I was the king of the driveway. Little did I know that almost fifty years later, my tricycle toy would become a powerful metaphor for healthy spirituality.

Today I’m sharing the third and final metaphor of this series – The Tricycle. The Cosmic Egg gave us a map of reality with My Story, Our Story, and The Story. The Three Boxes showed us how to travel across that map via the Order, Disorder, and Reorder Boxes. The Tricycle metaphor helps us navigate whichever Box we find ourselves in. I extend my appreciation once again to author and teacher Richard Rohr for each of these teaching tools.

Picture a tricycle. The front wheel is Personal Experience. One back wheel is Sacred Stories, and the other, Tradition.

PERSONAL EXPERIENCE

We can define Personal Experience as the summation of our everyday, real-life encounters. Things we see, hear, feel, taste, touch, smell, and do. Interactions with people and our environment. Pleasures we savor. Hardships we endure. Events, actions, and memories we recall with fondness or regret. These are our Personal Experiences.

SACRED STORIES

Sacred Stories are the cherished, revered, perhaps even idolized source materials of spiritual systems. The Quran of Islam. The Talmud of Judaism. The Bible of Christianity. The Vedas of Hinduism. The Tripitaka of Buddhism. The Book of Mormon of The Latter-day Saints. The creation stories of indigenous people groups. These are writings and oral histories from various spiritual perspectives that try to answer some of life’s biggest questions – where did we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going? How should we live?

TRADITION

Let’s define Tradition as the way people attempt to apply Sacred Stories to their lives. Each spiritual system has its own prayers, services, liturgies, rituals, ceremonies, styles of dress, and ways of doing things. Tradition is the history of how past adherents have tried to understand and live out a particular brand of spirituality.

BALANCE YOUR WHEELS

Some spiritual systems emphasize Personal Experience, some Sacred Stories, and others Tradition. The metaphor of The Tricycle teaches that a healthy spirituality embraces them all. Importantly, it places Personal Experience as the front wheel because that is our primary way of understanding the world. Our myriad of experiences are unique to us and incredibly formative, shaping our worldview in profound ways.

As important as Personal Experience is, it’s also crucial to know our place within our Sacred Stories and to learn the lessons they teach. And why we would ignore the hard-won wisdom offered by those who have gone before us through Tradition? Without all three components, our spirituality will be out of balance. We won’t get far on a tricycle that’s missing a wheel.

HOW THE TRICYCLE METAPHOR HELPED ME

When I was in my period of deep spiritual struggle (you can read that story here), The Tricycle metaphor gave me the gift of validating my Personal Experience. I recognize that depending too much on my own experiences, without healthy external reference points, can lead me to believe in false realities. But without Personal Experiences in the lead position, other problems arise.

Here’s an example. The evangelical Christian system I’ve been in most of my life places its Sacred Story, the Bible, as the front wheel. And not just the Bible, but that system’s particular interpretation of the Bible. So whenever I had real-life personal experiences that ran counter to the Biblical interpretation my system taught, it caused me a lot of confusion and stress. That’s what led me into the Disorder Box, as I shared in my last post. When I finally rotated the wheels on my spiritual Tricycle, placing Personal Experience at the front, with strong support from Sacred Stories and Tradition in the back, I found my way to a healthier spirituality.

WHERE THE TRICYCLE HAS LED ME

If you’re wondering where my spiritual Tricycle has led me, I’ll share some of my current thinking based on my own experience. I believe that we all come from God‘s love, exist in God’s love, and will be welcomed back to God‘s love when die. I believe that God is in everyone and everything. This allows me to look at all people as my spiritual family, even those of another faith or who claim no faith at all. I can gaze at creation and see, as Saint Francis did, “Sister Moon” and “Brother Sun.” This is not pantheism, a belief that everything is God, but panentheism, a belief that God is in everything.

RIDING YOUR TRICYCLE

So how about you? Which wheel is at the front of your spiritual Tricycle? Does a rotation need to be made? Are you out of balance? Is there a wheel missing? Prioritize your Personal Experience. Know your Sacred Stories. Honor your Tradition. Remember The Cosmic Egg. Work through The Three Boxes. Balance the wheels of your Tricycle. If you do, you’ll find your way to a healthy spirituality, and you’ll take another step toward Becoming Yourself.

For more on these ideas, I highly recommend Richard Rohr’s daily email mediations and Another Name For Everything podcast.

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