Get full access to Andrew F. Robinson at andrewfrobinson.substack.com/subscribe

Get full access to Andrew F. Robinson at andrewfrobinson.substack.com/subscribe

Get full access to Andrew F. Robinson at andrewfrobinson.substack.com/subscribe

Get full access to Andrew F. Robinson at andrewfrobinson.substack.com/subscribe

In the last Audio Note I asked you to forget everything we’ve covered so far. When I say forget, I don’t truly mean I don’t want you to remember the Activation Triangle, Reactivity Scale, 6-3-1, and other tools we covered. What I mean is that the aspects of ourselves that we most need to work with reveal themselves it’s through collisions that we experience in real life. Selfship comes to those who recognize and are able to process what they need to work with when it emerges.

The person that lacks Selfship doesn’t possess this level of intentionality. Instead, this person lives what we could call the "Accidental Life”. They still collide with their world and the people in it, but they don’t recognize what the collisions access in them, or even if they recognize they may not know what to do with it. This stands in contrast the person with Selfship who experiences “The Intentional Life”—one in which they have the awareness, tools, and desire to recognize and process the elements of themselves that arise as they collide with life.

So the charge to you for this Audio Note is to get out and live your life. If you’re familiar with the tools I’ve introduced so far, you’ll know how to apply them as needed.

This looks a little different depending on your unique personality. Those of us that tend to process internally can lose ourselves in our inner world or reflection. If that’s you, you need to get out in the world—the world outside of you. Ideally this involves going into nature and doing something that leaves its mark on your body—something that leaves you sore or even injured. I recently rolled my ankle, smashed my big toe, and gashed my knee all in one fail swoop when I fell during a trail run with my daughter in Arizona. I haven’t felt that alive in a while. I was in a lot of pain, but I wouldn’t trade it for the world. Leave the comfort of your own inner world and you’re guaranteed to run into someone or something that frustrates, hurts, disappoints, or annoys you.

Then there are those of you that need to stop. Instead of needing to find collisions with the world outside yourself, you need to time and space to make internal collisions possible. Silence and stillness has a way of accessing things we need to process, which explains why we might not like them. How often do you sit still long enough for things to begin to surface within you. You’ve kept these things at arm’s length long enough. When you stop, you give yourself the time and space to access parts of you that you’ve silenced. It’s getting you to slow down that’s the hard part.

Most of us need both. At times we need to get out more, and at times we just need to stop. Both create the kinds of collisions that precipitate key insights.

So here we are venturing through life ready to collide with whatever happens. We have a box of tools we’ve learned along the journey toward Selfship, and then it happens. We run into a situation that precipitates a reaction of some sort within us. Maybe it was an interaction with someone at work or at home, or a trying relationship with a family member that you’re struggling to navigate. Or maybe you had to take on a new responsibility in your work that spawned a reaction.

The particulars don’t matter. What matters is, first, that something shifted within you and, second, you noticed the shift. It’s a lot like the first sensations you experience when you’re coming down with a cold or the flu. You sense that something isn’t quite right. You don’t feel yourself. You were feeling fine earlier in the day and now you notice a tickle in your throat or aches in your joints or nausea.

These reactions may come fast and furious and with little warning. Others reactions may take time to build and last for a while. You may experience a “mood” that lasts hours, days, or even weeks. In both cases, you have the sense that something isn’t quite right. You don’t quite feel yourself. That’s all we’re looking for.

Look for these reactions in your life. Maybe you’re in the midst of one of these reactions as you’re listening to this right now. If not, just give it time. Life will see to it that you have material you can work with in the not-so-distant future.

I’ve been in a funk this week. It’s not overwhelming, but I’ve noticed myself lacking motivation and feeling down. It’s clearly a mild depression. Using my previous example, it’s like I’m dealing with the flu, only it’s not a physical illness. Depression is an illness of the mind and spirit. I think of depression as a form of repression. Something happened that accessed and released something that wants to get out, but I’m hindering its expression.

I have a few options. I can submerge myself in prolonged reflection trying to figure out “why” I’m feeling this way. This could yield some clarity, but it may also take me deeper into the Activation Triangle where I risk slipping into a dorsal state. Second, I can “fake it till I make it,” which amounts to me playacting that I’m someone that I’m not. Remember what I said about the term “Hypocrite” in Greek? It just means actor. Choosing to act, or “fake it till I make it” contributes to dis-integration of the self, as opposed to integration, which is what we’re aiming for with Selfship.

Third, I can listen. My reaction lets me know that I accessed and dislodged something within me. That something has a voice. The question is whether I tend to it long enough to listen and use the tools and practices we’ve talked about to remain grounded. Think of this as a form of curation. I’m not trying to figure out why, not yet at least. I’m just noticing what’s coming to the surface and collecting it. I typically use a journal for this curation process.

Have you ever been on a team where you didn’t feel like you had a voice? Maybe your family was even that way. What was that like for you to not have a voice? Not so pleasant, was it?

Now can you imagine if you’d had a voice? Imagine what it would be like to freely provide your perspectives, insights, and emotions and have someone actually listen. Each reaction has a voice. It wants to speak. It’s coming to you with insight. The question is whether you’re able to listen.

We’re definitely inching our way into the Deep End, so I want to pause to review the takeaways from this Audio Note and set up the next one.

This Audio Note challenges you to:

Create opportunities for collisions. By colliding with the world outside and the people in it, and by slowing down enough to create collisions within the world inside us, we precipitate reactions and conflicts that provide insight into ourselves.

Exercise your ability to recognize when they happen and use the tools to process these collisions.

Give voice to those parts of us that emerge through these collisions. In short, we need to be their freedom fighters. Free them. Give them the mic. Listen.

Now we’re ready to go a little deeper into my Complex Identity Framework. In the mean time, don’t waste a good conflict—with others, with the world, with God, and even with yourself.

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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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I trust this process helps you discover newfound clarity about your Narrative. You’ve now not only captured the events of your life, but in so doing you’ve also gained, or in some cases regained, a sense of the significance of these events and your response to them.

We have one more aspect of your Narrative to consider before we put all the pieces together: your Rule Book. Your Rule Book includes the dos and don’t—the “Thou shalls” and “Thou shall nots”—that guide you through life. In one sense you know these rules intimately, but in most ways you’re unaware of them because they operate at a less-than-conscious level. I’d like to change that. I’ve designed this portion of the Selfship journey to increase your awareness of these rules. Only then can you decide which rules you want to follow and which you want to break.

Where do these rules come from? Our Rules arise from the beliefs we form as a result of our Narrative—beliefs about ourselves, others, God, and the world around us. Some of these beliefs are accurate and helpful. We want to keep and obey these rules because they reflect the truth. Other rules stem from false and misleading beliefs. Shame, as we talked about previously, stems from a belief that something is wrong with you. This belief will inform the rules you adopt for life: “since there’s something wrong with me I should”…fill in the blank. Maybe you work harder, longer hours and drive everyone around me to do the same. Or maybe you shrink back and avoid risk and let others take the lead. Whatever it is, it all begins with a belief and this belief informs a rule.

Remember the CEO I spoke about in the last Audio Note? He realized that his lack of a consistent caregiver during his younger years led him to believe he needed to be independent and self-sufficient in order to survive. This belief informed a rule that he’s obeyed his entire life: “Take care of yourself and don’t trust anyone else.” This rule served him well when he was young. He may not have survived without it. But the very thing that helped him survive childhood began to erode his relationships and influence in adulthood.

You began crafting your Rule Book early in life. Some research indicates that you adopt your most formative rules by the time you’re seven years old. Certainly the Rules evolve to some degree depending on your Narrative, but it’s our formative years that seem to have the biggest impact on the rules we carry into adulthood.

Consider the research about attachment theory in infants and young children. In his book, Mindsight, Daniel Siegel references a study in which researchers observed two kinds of responses in babies: how they responded when their mom left the room and their responses when the mother returned to the room. They were struck by varying responses, especially the responses of the babies when their mother returned to the room. Babies with healthy attachment were distressed when their mother left and accepted their mother’s comfort when she returned. These behaviors were absent in babies that lacked healthy attachment. Some were indifferent to their mother’s absence, while others panicked. And upon the mother’s return, some refused their mother’s comfort, while others continued to feel distressed even in their mother’s arms.

This study illustrates that we adopt our “rules for life” at an early age, even a preverbal age. The babies that received consolation form their mother demonstrate a belief that their mother is safe and good. They can infer that there are safe and good people in the world. This informs the rules they develop and obey, rules like “Trust people until they demonstrate their not trustworthy.”

The other group of babies held a completely different belief: my mother isn’t safe, and by inference, people aren’t to be trusted. This belief gives rise to a completely different rule: don’t trust people. Both groups will carry these rules with them through life. The former group will go into professional situations and trust people until they prove themselves untrustworthy. The latter will struggle to trust people no matter how much they demonstrate trustworthiness.

You carry with you your own personalized Rule Book with you wherever you go. It’s with you right now. You’ll identify and clarify these rules not by going back to your childhood so much as paying attention to how these rules reveal themselves in the present.

For example, I was recently meeting with a CEO from a large healthcare company. He described himself as having “creative constipation”—his words, not mine—especially when it came to proposing big ideas for the company. His Narrative includes formative events in which his parents criticized his school work and grades if they weren’t perfect. Though he teemed with ideas for his company, he’d adopted a belief: If I share my thoughts, especially my big ideas, people will shoot it down. Play it safe and share only small ideas; and only if they’re perfect.

Bear in mind that some of these rules don’t arise from specific aspects of your Narrative. They’re just part of being an imperfect and broken person. We are all in many respects poorly-equipped for this adventure we call life. No matter how many blessing or challenges dot our Narrative, we will invariably form rules that arise from inaccurate beliefs about ourselves, God, and the world we live in.

Let’s get to work on identifying the rules in your Rule Book by looking at some tendencies that inhibit you and your growth. Rather than take an inventory of all of your tendencies, select that one that holds you back the most. Do you tend to dominate people, or default to passivity? Do you drink too much, or check out in other ways? Do you believe others accept you how you are, or that you need to perform, appear a certain way, or own certain things in order for others to like you? Are you a name dropper? All of these tendencies, along with all of your responses to the varying situations you confront each day reveal beliefs you’ve adopted to navigate life.

Once you’ve identified your beliefs, consider what rules you’ve wrapped around those beliefs. Let’s take that last tendency I mentioned: name dropping. I was recently in a conversation with a leader that started dropping names of some famous people he’d been with over the weekend. Even though I had no idea who they were, he was clearly trying to impress me. Why? I suspect he believes that dropping the names of significant people makes other people see him as significant. If I’m right, there’s a belief at work: I’m not significant. This gives rise to a rule: Thou shalt use strategies that make me appear significant.

Herein we see that the very rules we follow to govern ourselves have a self-fulfilling quality. The person that name dropped in order to appear more significant, succeeds only in revealing his deep sense of insignificance. And the person that believes they shouldn’t trust people will invariably find reasons to confirm this belief and reinforce this rule, failing to see all the while that their belief prevents others from trusting them. That’s the cycle: beliefs create rules that confirm that validity of the beliefs.

Fortunately life offers up “disconfirming experiences” that challenge you to reevaluate your rules and consider beliefs about whether you are in fact, smart, gifted, lovable, acceptable, and all the other things you’ve struggled to believe throughout your life. As you begin to consider your Rule Book, be sure to also note these experiences that challenge your beliefs and invite you to reconsider and even break the rules you’ve faithfully obeyed up until now.

Your Nature and your Narrative influences how you show up every day in every situation. Now we can move to the final third of the Selfship process. I’ll introduce you to a framework that ties together everything we’ve covered so far. I use it everyday and use it with all of my clients. But like I said in the very first Audio Note, I’ve never presented it in entirety as I will in the coming Audio Notes. I can’t wait!

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We’re delving into your Narrative. By now you know that your Narrative informs at least 50% of the way you show up every day in every situation, and that the other half is your Nature. Both require work, but most people find each brings it’s own challenges.

Before we get into the next tool, I want to point out a couple things that you may have already noticed:

First, we’ve gone from the shallow end of the pool toward the deep end. During the early Audio Notes your feet touched the bottom of the pool. Not anymore. This portion of the Selfship journey requires that you’re able to swim, which is why I’ll remind you of the importance of the Activation Triangle and Reactivity Scale. Think of them as the edge of the pool that you can reach in case the swimming gets tough. Use the edge to make your way back to shallower depths where you can touch. Or get out of the pool altogether.

Second, you may also notice that most people don’t do this work. Most of us live willingly and accidentally unaware of our Nature and Narrative. We have some sense that they’re there, but tend to avoid them, which is what produces all of the compensatory behaviors that affect us and the people around us. Instead of gaining an honest assessment of ourselves, we hold ourselves together with psychological duct. For a lot of people, it’s only when things begin to unravel that they begin to consider their Narrative and Nature. They ignore the disturbances on the river which grow over time into rapids.

Think of this Selfship journey as the antidote to that tendency we all have to put off the hard work. As you go through this process, you’re proactively identifying defining elements of your Nature and Narrative. Soon I’ll introduce a framework you can use every day to work with yourself and the insights you’ve gained during this journey. More on that later.

Now that you’ve completed your Life Map you have a snapshot of your entire story from birth up until today. It’s a powerful tool that often brings enormous clarity to leaders.

I recently took a CEO through this exercise. He was reflecting on his story he realized in a new way how few care givers he had growing up, how he was on his own, and how he learned to do everything on his own. He made immediate connections between his story and some of the tendencies within his leadership. For example, he spoke about his tendency to do everything on his own and how he struggles to effectively delegate and collaborate with others. Going away from his Leader Intensive, he identified this as the growth area he most wants to target. We spoke last week and he talked about the how he’s already seeing improvements, and that his team is recognizing his changes as well.

The point of the exercise is to highlight the data of your story. Like the disturbances on the surface of a river, we’re gradually beginning to consider how you’ve responded to the data of your story. Like this CEO, you may also recognize that certain behaviors have their inception not in your Nature but in your Narrative. They’re reactions to your story. That’s what this portion of the journey toward Selfship is all about. The specifics of your story are important, but we’re most interested in your responses to these events, relationships, and all of the things that comprise your Narrative.

In this Audio Note I’ll walk you through how to punctuate your story into chapters. We’re going to break your story into bite-sized chunks. In the last Audio Note I said that I was going to help you create your Rule Book, but decided to include this Note first because it’s an important lead-in to the Rule Book.

(Like I said, this is the first time I’ve ever presented the Selfship journey in its entirety. I appreciate your patience with me as a sort out the best way to sequence the content.)

When I say we’re going to “punctuate” your story, I mean that we’re going to identify the natural breaks in your story. Events like moving from one place to another, moving one school or grade to another, marriage, a divorce or loss in your family, a graduation, and other events like this add natural divisions between sections of your story. These may or may not be the events that received the highest or lowest scores on your Life Map. For example, my dad leaving our family scores lower than when I left for university a year later, but it marked a break in my narrative.

Let’s het started.

Take a look at your completed version of your Life Map. Reflect on the events that you see and ask yourself how much impact they made on what came after the event. In other words, to what degree did this event mark the end of one chapter and the beginning of another chapter?

You’ve already scored the event on a scale of plus ten to minus ten with respect to whether it was a positive or negative event. Now I want you to score it on significance when you consider the degree to which it punctuated your story. Next to each event put a number that represents how much this event punctuated your life. A score or 3 or less indicates a period in a sentence. A score of 3-5 indicates a paragraph break. 6-8 marks the end of a section within a chapter, and 9 or 10 means you ended chapter and began another. Again, you’re scoring the significance of the event by how much it punctuated your story, which is different from scoring based on triumph or tragedy.

Draw a vertical line to indicate those breaks across your Life Map. Now that you’ve identified your chapters, you will print and complete one Chapter Map for every chapter in your story. That way you have one for each chapter of your life.

As the directions indicate, you’re going to identify the narrative components that comprise each chapter of your life. Of course you are the main character in the story, but each chapter is like a story unto itself. It includes narrative elements like setting, plot, tension, crises, triumphs, and resolutions. Each chapter will also include a cast of characters. You’ll identify your supporting cast. These are the people that walked alongside you through this chapter, and maybe several chapters. You’ll have unsupportive cast members that should have supported you, but didn’t, or even worked against you. You may also have villains within some chapters—people that haunted you and seemed bent on your destruction.

Take the time you need to complete one of these for each chapter. Each complete Chapter Map represents a portion of your story. Together they capture your entire life so far.

This exercise provides a deeper understanding of your story. Like I said in the last Audio Note, you knew all of these things at some level. You knew the data. Now you’re gaining a deeper appreciation for the significance of the data. As we move forward, this will illuminate how you may have responded to the data.

Remember that I challenged you to own your Nature—the unique tendencies, passions, and gifts God gave you? I talked about how there are times you may want to be someone else, wish you had certain aspects that others possess and you don’t. In other words, there may be times you want to disown your Nature. The same is true of your Narrative. You may wish you could change your story, erase certain elements, or take things back from the past. You may wish that you could have had someone else’s story.

Nature and Narrative envy are a normal part of life, but true Selfship requires that we do the work that’s necessary to own your own story. It’s yours and no one else’s. You may not like all of its aspects, but it’s yours. It’s shaped the person you are today. Your attempts to disown your story produce the very reactions and tendencies that hurt the people around you and undermine your leadership, your goals and your aspirations.

Imagine reading a book, or watching a show, or a movie that lacked tension. You wouldn’t watch it. It makes you root for the hero as he or she navigates challenges in the story. Without them you’d stop watching. Why? Because, opposing forces make stories not only interesting and meaningful, they make them good, even if they include the bad.

Your story is no different. Whether you’ve lived a relatively charmed life or experienced tremendous hardship, it’s your story. It’s not your spouse’s or friend’s story, or your co-worker’s, or your employee’s, or that person you envy because according to Instagram, they have an amazing story. It’s yours and it’s a good story—all of it, from your birth this very moment. In that sense, every element is not merely necessary, it’s good in the sense that it’s part of your unique narrative. The one that shaped the person you are today.

As you grow to increasingly own your story, the Selfship process invites you pay attention to those disturbances on the surface of the river—those times where your Narrative reveals itself in your perceptions of the world and your reactions to life’s situations. That level of awareness and commitment to understanding the truth about your Narrative opens a whole new world of intentionality.

In the next Audio Note we’ll look at your Rule Book. For sure this time. Whether you know it or not, you have a Rule Book. You follow it every day, mostly without knowing it. This exercise will clarify those rules, encourage you to keep some of them, and to start breaking others. It’s all with the same goal: that you own your Narrative.

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In this Audio Note I’m going to introduce you to a tool that we use to help people view their narrative with a fresh perspective. Part of the challenge in this process is that you know your narrative too well. After all, you lived every minute of it. In that respect, any suggestion that you view it with a fresh perspective may sound like a waste of time.

But that’s not how it works.

Every disturbance on the surface of a river reflects an object below. The disturbances vary depending on the object. One may be a small ripple and another a class 5 rapid. Removing the object or changing its structure in any way will necessarily alter the disturbance. And if there aren’t any objects below the surface, there aren’t any disturbances on the surface of the river.

Your narrative, like objects below the surface of the water, create disturbances in your life that show up in the form of certain reactions, behaviors, and tendencies. I look at many of my own and see how they’re a function of things I’ve experienced in my narrative. So the analogy of the river has merit in that respect. That’s why if we want to better understand ourselves so that we can live with greater levels of intention, we need to understand the nature of the river bed below the surface.

But the analogy of the river eventually breaks down when I apply it to your Narrative because your events don’t guarantee a specific response. Unlike the objects below the surface of a river that always and forever creates a particular kind of disturbance, people responses to the events in their life can be as unique as the people themselves. For example, ten people that go through a traumatic event will all be effected as a result of the event, but they’ll each carry with them a different response throughout their life.

Think of the events in your Narrative as data. You know the data from your narrative. None of it comes as a surprise. It’s your response to the data—to the events—that may be less known or entirely unknown to you.

For example, I had a leader in a group recently share that he was physically abused by his father when he was a child. By the sounds of it, his dad was a capricious tyrant. He knew the data of his story. What concerned me was that he seemed to introduce it into our conversation as a way to shock others in the group. In other words, his response to the trauma he experienced seemed out of sync with the horror of the trauma he experienced. He knew the data from the event, but as I got to know him better, I grew more convinced that he’s never really processed his response to the trauma.

I don’t mean to diminish the specifics of your narrative. Whether your narrative includes traumatic rapids like this individual, or it includes large stretches of relatively smooth water, it’s helpful to begin with the specifics of your narrative. After I help you identify the significant events from your narrative, I’ll introduce a framework and process in future Audio Notes you can use to deepen your response to those events.

The exercise I’m going to introduce assumes that you have the strength and capacity to remain in a grounded state. You’ll likely experience some activation as you recall some of the events from your life. You may feel again the sadness of a loss or the joy you experienced during a momentous event. That’s good and healthy. But you need to pay attention to yourself and make sure you remain in a grounded state.

Given the nature of this exercised, here’s my disclaimer: if you’ve experienced significant trauma, especially if you’ve not processed it, please skip this and all of the future Audio Notes that relate to your Narrative. It does you know good to revisit traumatic events if you’re unable to process them. Doing so will likely activate and quickly move you into the demobilized zones on the Activation Triangle. I can’t emphasize this enough.

I recently shared a story with someone from when I nearly died from appendicitis as a teenager. I felt myself activate as I revisited the event and the details surrounding the event. But because I’ve done a lot of work around that event and other traumas I’ve experienced, and because using the Activation Triangle is an ongoing practice, I was able to remain grounded.

With that in mind, I want to introduce you to a tool called the Life Map that we use with leaders during a leader intensive. A leader intensive is a two-day experience in which we meet one-on-one with a leader and help them deepen their understanding of the Nature, their past Narrative, and their vision for their future Narrative. It’s an experience that forever transforms the leader, personally and professionally.

Download and print the Life Map, and follow the directions. It’s pretty straightforward. You’re going to put your age along the bottom of the map. Put a 0 on the far left to indicate your birth. Put your current age on the far right. Divide your age in half and put that number in the middle along the bottom of the map.

Next, plot the significant events from your life on a scale from plus ten for the most momentous events in your life and minus ten for the most tragic and/or traumatic. The download includes an example life map for reference.

Set aside some time in which you know you won’t experience any interruptions. Once you have all of the significant events plotted, connect the dots. The resulting image is a visual representation of your life. It will look a bit like a cross section from a river. You’ll be able to see the rapids and smooth areas, the highs and the lows.

The events won’t surprise you, but notice your response to the events while you complete the Life Map. Just remember to pace yourself and pay attention to where you’re at on the Activation Triangle. Set aside the Life Map if you need some time to reground and come back to it later.

In the next Audio Note I’m going to introduce you to your Rule Book. This Book has governed your life, your perspectives, and decisions from a very early age. Some of the rules have helped you, while others bring you misery. Once you know your Rule Book, you’ll have a better understanding of which rules to follow and which ones you need to break.

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I designed the last Audio Note to activate your allergy to your Nature. You’ll notice as we go into your Narrative that you may have an allergy to that as well. That’s all part of this journey. The more you engage with this process, especially in these early stages, the more you’ll activate your allergies. It’s a form of resistance to the growth process that awaits you. The allergy you experience to your Nature and Narrative is just your resistance at work. It’s the sign I look for that lets me know someone is truly engaging in this work.

But I also know that as resistance increases you’re more inclined to “leave the room.” You may find yourself wondering, “Why would I engage in a process this difficult when I can listen to something that makes me feel better about myself?” To which I would respond, “Feeling better is usually a poor metric for growth.” Inspiration behaves like a drug. It gives us a hit that eventually wears off, and we go looking for the next one. And you’ll never struggle to find a pusher. Transformation is the antidote for inspiration. Through it your “form” literally changes. Everyone wants that, but very few are willing to do the work that’s necessary to achieve it.

That said, you will feel better as you go through this process, but not because you’re high on inspiration. It’s because you exhibit the evidence of transformation. I can hear the words of a client’s spouse ringing in my ears, “He’s a different person.” That’s what I want for you. But you have to do the work.

One Sunday morning while my wife was making breakfast, I collected a dozen or so coins and neatly stacked them on the front porch of our house just outside the door. I made sure none of my daughters could see what I’d done. Just before breakfast I told them something to get all three of them to go out the front door. I don’t remember exactly what I said. Maybe I told them I’d seen a lost dog or something.

I heard the door open and all three of them went out onto our front porch. It didn’t take long for them to notice the coins.

“Hey!” I heard one of my daughters say, “What are these?”

I stood close enough to listen. A fascinating dialogue ensued as the three of them puzzled over the coins. (I would donate an organ to have a recording of that conversation. You just don’t get those moments back.) They walked out into the yard and looked both ways on our street, trying to figure out where the coins came from.

Perfect! Just in time for breakfast.

They continued to talk about the mystery at breakfast. I acted like I didn’t know what they were talking about and let them continue to run with it. Fortunately my wife is patient with these exercises I impose on our children and willingly plays along.

As we sat around the breakfast table I asked what they were talking about. They told me about finding the coins and some of the best explanations for how they got there: the neighbor kids playing a prank, a friend stopped by and left them as a joke, and so on. I must have cracked at one point because I looked up and all six of their eyes were on me. The gig was up.

I asked them to review their theories for how the coins arrived on our front porch. Then I pointed out that none of their explanations lacked human agency. Everyone of them assume that someone place the coins on the porch. They didn’t just happen to roll up on the porch in a perfect stack overnight. But who was it? When did they do it? How did we not see them? Those were the questions that occupied their minds.

My experiment worked! I used the stack of coins to uncover a belief that they all held about the nature of causality. Can you think of a better way to spend your Sunday morning? We went on to have a conversation about God, the creation of the world, and our role in it.

My girls were around 4, 7, and 10 at the time. What I love about that age is how they lack sophistication. They go through life with such a sense of simplicity. They haven’t yet learned to be sophisticated yet. As we told them from a young age, “We’re your teachers while you’re young, but life will slowly become your teacher as you get older.”

The process of Selfship rewinds the clock. Through it we grow less sophisticated. The original meaning of ‘sophistication’ has to do with “Making a fallacious argument that’s intended to mislead.” As we enter adulthood, we come to believe all kinds of fallacious arguments about ourselves. Young children possess a natural immunity to these fallacious arguments. I suspect that’s why Jesus said things like, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.”

In a similar way, C.S. Lewis writes in The Great Divorce:

“A sum can be put right: but only by going back til you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on.”

To repeat Lewis, “Never by simply going on.” You have to go back until you find the error—the fallacious arguments—and work them afresh. In that respect, my hope for you this week is that you diminish in sophistication—that you’re a simpler person seven days from now than you are today.

Here’s what you’re going to do:

Take out a piece of paper and write down one fallacious thing you’ve been told or that you tell yourself. Just one thing. Do you think you’re attractive? Do you think you’re smart? Do you think you have worth? You did when you were a child, so much so that you didn’t even think there was an alternative. And then you got sophisticated.

You may be tempted to fill a page. I’m challenging you to limit your fallacy to a single lie you, so make it a good one.

Next, see if you can remember a time when you didn’t hear this message. You probably never even considered it. How old were you? Maybe you were very young, or maybe you’ve always heard this message. If so, I want you to think of someone that doesn’t believe that lie about you.

I know you’re probably more accustomed to looking for evidence that confirms this message. So that’s what you do on most weeks, but not this week. This week you’re taking that unsophisticated younger self with you. The one that didn’t believe the fallacious messages. They didn’t even consider it. They were too unsophisticated. Or if you prefer, that that person with you that sees, values, and enjoys you. They never even considered that lie about you.

That’s what we’re talking about here: we have true stories about ourselves and distortions of the truth. This process will help you detangle them—to become less sophisticated in the process. Expect resistance as you “undo the spell.” Expect to feel sore. In fact, you may feel worse at times. That’s a sign that you’re engaging in the process.

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