The Rider’s Mind Podcast Episode 129: Know Thyself to Hack Yourself

In this episode we explore the importance of learning more about yourself, how you’re wired and how you can use that to essentially hack your system, to recognize your strengths and weaknesses, so that you can use all of these different aspects of yourself to turn them into superpowers.

Transcript:

00:01:49
In this episode I want to talk about getting to know yourself and why that’s important and how it can be quite empowering. I think it’s important to learn how you tick so that you can recognize your strengths and weaknesses and use it to your advantage. When you know how you’re wired, when you know how you tick, you can essentially hack your own system. You can figure out why you are the way you are and once you recognize that, once you learn that, it gives you an opportunity to essentially override the system. Now I believe, we’re wired, we have a blueprint from when, when we were born, that we are the way we are. And if you have children, you will know, and you will have recognized, that no matter what you do to try and change your kids or mold them in a certain way, they have certain traits and tendencies that just are the way they are. And you’re no different no matter what your parents trying to do, no matter how the school tried to program you or tell you that you should do things a certain way. There are certain parts of you that just are the way you are now. We can certainly be programmed and we can certainly be influenced, but our core at our core, we are all very different. There’s different things that we’ve been influenced, different things we’ve been taught, we’ve been taught to find safety through our community and through falling into the norms of our society and our communities. We’ve experienced traumas that have changed us, but at our core, at our essence, there is a blue print of who we are now.

00:03:23
There are tons of personality tests out there we will link a website that has like 23 different personality tests you can take, but some examples of these might be like the Enneagram, the myers-briggs test, 16 personalities tests. You could be and A type or B type. There’s different color tests you can take, maybe you’re green type, there is the DISC type that you can take, there are different archetypes that you can fall under. You can have different attachment types. You could take the highly sensitive person tests, then you could have your zodiac sign say something about you. Recently I’ve been interested in human design and learning about that you could be an introvert or extrovert, there’s just all of these different types of people and different there’s different aspects that are brought forward in, brought forward in these different types. I haven’t taken all of these tests that I’ve I have listed, but some of the ones that I have taken have made me think wow, like I’m not weird for having that. I’m not unique for having that because there’s other people that fall into that category as well, but in other ways I am unique because there’s a whole other group of people in personality types that are not like me and it kind of normalizes our differences and that that’s how we’re supposed to be.

Find all kinds of different personality tests here:  https://www.workstyle.io/best-personality-test

00:04:55
Meanwhile, as we grew up, as we went to school, we were taught that our safety came from fitting into a mold. We were good little soldiers that all lined up and if we behave, things went better for us. If we behaved in a certain way that our authority figures thought that thought we should be, things went better for us, society and our parents. They have an idea of how “should” be and how we should behave, and they work to try and mould us into what they thought would be best for us, and I think as a parent that’s kind of natural. We’re doing it out of the what we think is best for the kids right. We think that if they behave this way well, it goes better for us if they behave this way, if they follow this path, that it will be best for them. We’re trying to help our kids fit in and in the sense that they be “normal” and this probably happened to you, because being different and being eccentric is harder and we want our children to have an easy life. And that’s probably what your parents wanted for you too. But there are so many outside influences coming in on this blueprint that we’re wired with, including culture, society or community, tribe or at our family or and the household level. So many outside things are trying to change who we are, how we act and it can be quite confusing because when we’re finding safety in being somebody that’s different than who we are at an authentic level, it can challenge. That’s our safety and our nervous system.

00:06:49
I have found a lot of compassion for others when I’ve started to realise and recognize how different we all are, and we’re were different for a very positive reason, because we all have different roles to play in this life. But we all have a blueprint and then it’s influenced by this conditioning and then our dramas. As I’ve mentioned, once you start to learn these types and become more familiar with the different types, you’ll start seeing different types and others and be able to honour and recognize and just see like right: she’s she’s a-type or she’s a-type eight on the enneagram. Maybe I’m thinking of the Myers Briggs, but I don’t know the types that well, but I find them interesting and you of course take them all the grain of salt. But it has been liberating in the sense for me learning the different types to celebrate my uniqueness, but to also not feel like I’m alone. At the same time. It’s made me realize that I’m unique to this world on purpose and it’s also helped me feel a little less weird because I’ve always felt very different. But now I can see that there’s a reason for that, because I have a role to play in this life and I’m different by design. That’s on purpose.

00:08:12
So how does this apply to the riders’s mind? What benefit is there to knowing your type or knowing thyself? I really feel like once you know what your strength and what your weaknesses are within your hardwiring, you can stop looking at certain traits as bad, like there’s probably parts of yourself that you’re not really thrilled about or impressed with or have caused you hardship in your life. Maybe it’s your type, maybe just it’s your wiring that you’re not very motivated. It’s not you. You’re not bad for not being motivated, but also recognizing that you’re not going to change how you’re wired. You can then hack the system and find out. This is natural for me to not be motivated in this way, but I recognize that I’m really motivated by accountability or challenges. That’s me, so that you can work with that and really hack your system.

00:09:05
Every year I’m learning a little bit more about myself and then I find it easier to tap into an hack my system when I know that it’s not something that’s wrong with me that’s causing this hike up. It’s just how I’m wired. Say, for example, if doubt comes up for me, which I’m hardwired for doubt, I can see it for what it is. Oh, look here’s my old friend Doubt showing up, he’s just here to check-in on things, and so then I can override it. If I didn’t know that doubt was something that I run everything through, like it’s like a filter of doubt that I’ll run everything through. I would think that I’m getting a hunch or a sign that this situation wasn’t good for me or this choice. I’m doubting it’s it’s it isn’t a bad choice. I can just see it as recognizing like that that’s a natural filter. I run things through, that I can play the devil’s advocate and have this doubt and then know that just because I’m doubting it doesn’t mean that it is a bad choice for me. I just run everything through doubt first.

00:10:07
Also, if you know how your nervous system responds to things, we could probably do and likely will do a whole other broadcast on this. Now that I’m mentioning it, for example, for me, how I rule if I get to a bare race and if there’s a lot of time here, I have to wait. What comes up for me is I just want to go home and I’ll think if I was just a little bit closer, I would just go home right now. I don’t even really want a Bale race, but since I drove all this way, I might as well run and I recognize that this is a pattern for me. Maybe it’s do, but it’s also my nervous system getting activated, getting died too far into my sympathetic nervous system, and this is a pattern for me. And now I can see that and I can just go back to the trailer and I can run through some exercises to regulate my nervous system, because I’m recognizing this coming up for me. It’s just an indicator, it’s an indicator in pushing on the edges of my window of tolerance within my nervous system and because I know this about myself, I can do something about it, because I’ve been aware enough to recognize this and instead of beating myself up for having this come up again and just being angry, I recognize what it’s saying about me and I can do something about it.

00:11:16
In the recent episode I did on travelling partners, I talked about how different people plan differently and how you like to do something isn’t right or wrong, and so neither is the other person who likes to do it a little bit differently from you. We have natural differences and they can really be respected and honored when you start to see. That’s how you know. Somebody of that type would act and behave like they can’t even help themselves, just like you can’t help how you respond to certain things or how certain things rub you the wrong way. It’s it’s just your wiring and it’s okay, so to throw an additional rent into things.

00:11:56
Here are a few things to consider. There are some other aspects of this. There’s who you believe you are, who you’ve been told you are and who you’ve and how you’ve bought into that and believe that, like if you were always told that you were shy and you believe you were shy, you might not actually be shy. You maybe just went through a shy phase and took that on as your identity and you identified as that. So that’s interesting, that you might, you know, go through some of these personality tests, you might do your human design chart, you might do whatever and you might find that some of these things that you’ve believed yourself to be are not actually who you are in your blueprint and your core. You might recognize them as stories and who you’ve just identified as, and you will change throughout your life. So you could do the Myers Briggs when you are 16 and then when you’re 45 and you might get a totally different number, your values change, your identity will change too. I used to be more extraverted than I am now, but I’m also not very practiced in being out in public like I was at that time back in the day, when I used to do a lot of more public speaking and public events through a totally different job that I had. I was more practiced in that and it was more comfortable in that. So who you are and how your being right now may change, but I really believe at our core there’s some hardwiring in place that doesn’t change and we maybe spend our whole lives peeling back all of the stories that are layering, layered on to our wiring and then eventually come back to who we really were. Before someone told us who we should be or how we bought into these stories of who someone else said we were or how they tried to mould us.

00:13:49
And maybe, if you are like in a really uncomfortable place in your life and you’re starting to become more aware that you know you’re not fitting into this life that you’re in, you might look at these personality tests and recognize that. You know sometimes I think you know there’s like a midlife crisis. It’s it’s sometimes perhaps people just recognizing that they’ve been living life and they’ve started to have this awareness that they’re living a life that’s not authentic to who they are, their core. They’ve been living a life that has been making other people happy and they’re done with that. They, you know they come to their mid-life and we’re like, hey, wait a second, they start assessing why they’re not happy and they start to look at all of the different, different ways that they’ve been showing up that we’re to please someone else and they weren’t at the authentic or nature of who they really are. We are all different and we’re supposed to be, and I know that a lot of us end up comparing ourselves to others, comparing to where other people are. But that’s really pointless. But ego likes to do that, likes to do that all the time. But the fact of the matter is is that we’re all unique and we’re all unique and very positive ways.

00:15:01
We like to look at ourselves and beat ourselves up for all of the ways we are that are not great, the ways that we, the things we see about ourselves that is not, that, are not pleasing, or the ways that we wish we were better. But these traits are really what we might consider our shadow side, that we stuff away these traits, but they are also worth loving, and there are also aspects of ourselves that we might not see them as being a positive trait, but they have a positive side to them. So for me an example would be being a highly sensitive person. That was not some for me growing up being very sensitive, but but now I can see the positive aspects of this sensitivity and it’s actually made me really good at my job, coaching people and tuning into my intuition. So now I use the positive things that being a highly sensitive person comes with and I use it to my benefit. So the more you understand yourself and how you rule, the more compassion you can have for yourself, the more compassion you can have for others as well, recognizing that their differences are on purpose. It will help you be more aware of how you, why you might have responded to a certain person in a certain way, and I feel like you can start planning things in such a way that it supports and celebrates you for who you are and how you’re wired instead of making yourself miserable, because you’re in situations that can feel crippling to somebody like you like. If you’re somebody that finds security in having a schedule, having things planned, well, well, do it, don’t fight it because it drives you crazy or drives your partner crazy because you need to plan things. That’s how you’re wired, that that gives you a sense of safety and security. So so roll with that, and it might open space for you to put energy on different things. Instead of fighting how you are, I feel like learning more about yourself, helps you lean, learn to lean into what lights you up, what fills your cup, what expands the greatness already inside you. These are all clues to your authentic view.

00:17:07
The more authentic your being, the more your horse is going to trust you, they’re going to trust the person that is showing up in their most most authentic sense of self. They’re reading the real you, your energy, and you can imagine how unsettling that could be to them when you’re acting differently than what they’re sensing from your energy. So if you’re actually you know, very intuitive, sensitive person, but you’re showing up guarded and you’re not somebody that is safe to them because they’re a little bit confused because what they’re sensing from you is different than how you’re behaving. So you might show appearing as a threat to them because you’re not authentic or the energy within you is not coherent, the energy that you’re expressing. So the more you know yourself, the more empowered you’re actually going to feel and the more empowering you’ll feel to show up as your authentic self rather than showing up what you think society or your family wants you or how they want you to behave naturally.

00:18:13
I think we feel more confident when we’re lining with the true nature of ourselves and we’re comfortable there. It feels most comfortable to be who we are and learn about your authentic nature and your authentic self.

00:18:26
So I want to leave you with some thoughts to pound, ponder. You could write these down and journal on them, or you could write them down and just put that question out there and allow your mind to real and and answer, because your mind will do that. It will answer questions that you pose, so you could ask who am II? Don’t think very many people actually sit and consider that. You could ask:

00:18:53
How am I showing up in ways that are not true to my nature, that are not true to my blueprint?

00:18:58
How am I disowning aspects of myself because I don’t prefer them?

00:19:04
Where am I missing using a strength? Because I’ve told I’ve been told that that characteristic is actually a bad thing. But how could I be using it in a positive sense, where my deciding parts of me are not good and your decisions of, like what you decide, what is good and bad, are based sometimes on your values or what other people have told you or what society or your community has told you and you’ve bought into it, it might not necessarily be even true.

00:19:38
You could ask how my disowning parts of myself because someone else said it was a bad quality? And how can I use the traits that are part of my blueprint to my advantage?

00:19:50
How could I use these traits to light me up to be more authentic?

00:19:55
So those were some questions I wanted to leave you with, but I do feel like learning more about yourself. Learning how you’re wired. How you tick is very empowering. You can use it to hack the system, recognize like okay, no matter how I fight this, no matter how I resist this part of me that’s really driving me bonkers, it’s not going away. So what am I going to about it and how can override the system?

00:20:21
I really look forward to hearing your journey of the self-discovery so feel free to share with me if you hadn’t had any moments because of this episode or afterwards when you’ve asked these questions, or maybe it’s helped you feel a little bit more empowered when you’ve confirmed some of your traits are actually superpowers.

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