“Am I Being Honest With Myself?”
We need to ask ourselves this question — as frequently as possible —or crisis might force us to
It’s not unusual to run on auto-pilot, particularly when life is hectic: the diary is packed, the to-do list is brimming, the days are full.
What is unusual is to take a step back — as frequently as we can — and reassess: to look at what we are doing and ask ourselves: “Am I being true to myself?”
This kind of question is a catch-all for an infinite number of variations:
“Is this who I am?”
“Is this what I want?”.
“Am I heading in the right direction?”
“Did I mean what I just said?”
“Is this person right for me?”
“Is this job/career really what I am about?”
And so on. And, as with all of them, we will, at times dislike the answers we get.
And that’s a key reason why we don’t ask ourselves these types of questions in the first place.
Or, we simply don’t think to.
Wake-Up Calls
The thing is, if we keep dodging them, they will eventually present themselves to us in a way that we cannot escape.
This is what a mid-life crisis is all about.
It’s about having these very questions thrust starkly in front of us at a time when we feel they must be answered.
It’s when we begin to accept a truth about something (or many things) that we have, perhaps, always known deep inside but ignored.
And that dereliction of duty has given us a life that isn’t the one we actually want.
It becomes a crisis because by the time life forces us to confront this, it comes with a sense of urgency inevitably due to the age at which we are made to face it.
Changes, then, have to be made — and fast.
Paying The Price
This is when marriages fail, when careers implode and when nervous breakdowns come knocking.
It is anything but pleasant.
And it is anything but the hedonistic red sports-car-driving caricature of mid-life that is so often painted for us.
What’s worse is that while it will take just minutes to undo a life that has been built over decades, it might very well take years to get to the New Life — and to get there in one piece.
Inevitably, by the time we do get there, a big part of us will have wished that we had listened to that voice inside our heads so many years earlier when it was whispering, “this person isn’t right for you”, or “your career is killing you”.
Being “Congruent”
While this form of radical self-honesty might seem hard, it doesn’t always have to reach such levels of magnitude. We don’t have to wait for a crisis to make changes.
There are subtle ways we can tap into this “knowing” right now, before it reaches such a dramatic point that it is forced to become a wake-up call.
It is called being congruent.
Congruence (and its opposite, incongruence) is a concept that was coined by a psychologist by the name of Carl Rogers, which Jordan Peterson delves into in each of the videos below.
Being congruent basically means aligning body, mind and spirit. It’s when our beliefs, values and desires line up with our actions.
By its nature, it requires being in touch with what we really think, what we really stand for, what we really want.
It means recognizing the little voice in our head and actually listening to it.
The Body’s Messages
And as Peterson explains below, if we can’t hear the voice, our body will also tell us when we are out of step.
In his words, acting incongruently will make us feel “weak”.
This is not weak, as in the machismo sense — it is in the sense that acting “out of alignment” dis-empowers us, destabilises us internally, puts us on the back foot.
We all know, for example, what it feels like when something feels “off”, or not quite right.
We might agree to an arrangement and a big part of us wishes we hadn’t. We might say something and immediately regret it. We might push forward with a plan but it feels empty. There’s no life in it. We aren’t all in.
And that’s what this is really about — being all in.
There is only so long that we can coast along, living a half-life: being in relationships that aren’t right for us, working jobs we hate, being friends with people who don’t have our backs, failing to connect meaningfully with people who do.
It is a form of self-betrayal which eats away at us each time we say or do something that contradicts our true nature — frequently in such subtle ways we fail to notice it at the time, if we are not paying attention.
Until at some point, much later in life, we are made to.
And when that happens, there won’t be a red sports car waiting for us.
It will be something very different, indeed.
