Now we’re entering the third and final section of the journey toward Selfship. Everything we’ve covered so far that’s related to Selfship builds towards what we’re about to go into now.

In order to get the most out of these frameworks, imagine them working together as lenses that you layer upon one another, as opposed to train cars that link together in sequence.

The first third equipped you with set of tools for self regulation. These tools help you identify and work with your reactions and tendencies. They give you practical instruments you can use to monitor your activation and reground yourself.

The second third addresses your Nature and Narrative. Your Nature relates to anything that was woven into you before you were born. I gave special attention to your unique personality and temperament. Your Narrative includes everything that makes up your particular story: family of origin, events, relationships, culture, and everything else that relates to the unique contexts in which you grew up.

These two sources—Nature and Narrative—serve as the aquifers of the self. You draw from both as you go throughout your life. They inform your sense of self, your thoughts, mindsets, and ultimately your behavior. Both operate at a less-than-conscious level. The purpose of this section was to help you become more conscious of them so that you’re able to work with their influence and impact on your life, rather than having them work with you.

A deeper understanding of your Nature and Narrative holds immeasurable value for you. Not only does it deepen your understanding of how and why you show up the way you do in life, it gives you insights that enable you to work with yourself.

As we move into this third and final section, I want to clarify your relationship to your Nature and Narrative and issue a bit of a warning. Both of them present rabbit holes that can swallow you whole. You can lose yourself in trying to understand every nuance of your unique personality. In so doing you may come view yourself and others in terms of preset categories and labels. This kind of reductionism leads to a mechanistic and overly simplistic view of humanity: “this person is this particular personality and that person is that personality”, as though a particular label sums up the essence of a particular person’s personality.

You can become equally obsessed with your Narrative and grow overly focussed on your story, believing that doing so will bring healing and resolution. You can come to explain every aspect of yourself in terms of your story. In so doing you may find you lose yourself in your past and struggle to exist in the present.

When we become overly preoccupied with one or the other, a sort of determinism sets in. Obsess over your Nature, and you’ll resign yourself and others to one category or another.“Well that’s just my personality. Deal with it.” Or “That’s just their personality. They can’t help it.” Obsess with your Narrative and you will resign yourself in a different way, and come to believe you lack the freedom to choose otherwise. You’ll find yourself saying to yourself, “This is just my story,” as though you’re destined to live it out.

By now you know that both Nature and Narrative reflect the truth. We can attribute with one hundred percent certainty aspects of ourselves that stem from Nature and Narrative. As we enter the final section of Selfship the question isn’t whether they offer truth, but how we’re meant to access and avail ourselves of the truth.

But how do we strike this tension?

When you look at a map you know that it’s just a representation of a particular piece of geography. Similarly, the description of your personality that you glean from personality tests serves as a map. So does the life map you completed about your Narrative. They serve as representations. They’re incredibly helpful, but don’t confuse them for the real thing. Excessive preoccupation with one or both of them will distance you from life and the people in it. You’ll be lost in reflection, analysis, diagnosis, and speculation. You’ll confuse the map with the geography it’s meant to represent. At some point you need to set the map aside and walk the physical land they’re meant to represent with your own two feet.

When I say you need to walk the territory I mean that there’s a sense in which I want you to forget everything we’ve covered about Nature and Narrative and live your life. I’m suggesting this thought experiment knowing full-well it’s an impossibility. But if you can entertain for just a moment the idea that you knew nothing of these aquifers that inform most everything about you, you will likely find that you’re confronted with this reality:

Your Nature and your Narrative will show up. They can’t not show up. You won’t have to go looking for them. They’ve already shown up today and they show up again before you go to sleep tonight. They’ll be there again tomorrow when you wake up and may even visit you while you sleep in the form of dreams. Life will precipitate the aspects of your Nature and Narrative that you most need to work with in the moment. The question then is whether you recognize when they show up.

The purpose of this Audio Note is to remind you that the people around you need you. You need you. If you’re overly focussed on yourself, you have little to offer others. Use the tools and frameworks you’re learning through this process to to respond when your Nature and Narrative reveal themselves through the course of life. I’ll explain more how to do that as we move on. For now I just want you to focus on this mindset of being in the present with yourself and others, and in a ready state to process what life brings out in you.

In the next Audio Note I’ll present the Complex Identity Framework. This framework helps you work with yourself in a powerful way when life accesses your Nature and Narrative. Rather than getting preoccupied with your Nature and/or your Narrative, it gives you a way of working with yourself and the challenges that arise as you walk through life with both feet on the ground.

It begins with a departure in the way we typically think of ourselves as single selves. We’re accustomed to thinking of ourselves as possessing a single identity, which is accurate in one respect. As the  name implies, the Complex Identity Framework views our identity as a “self among selves”.

This is what we’ve been building to the entire time. This is the core of what it means to possess Selfship. I can't wait to walk you through this framework and how it integrates everything we’ve done so far into a coherent whole that you can put into practice every single day.

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