The story in your head makes you what you are
There are five indispensable resources for living the fullest possible life, that is, if you believe and listen to anthropologist Bob Deutsch, author of the book 5 Essentials Using Your Inborn Resources To Create A Fulfilling Life. The five, as Deutsch declared, will help you identify and harness the five fundamental competencies that everyone possesses to live a life anchored to your deepest core.
It is not about morphing into a fresh and romanticized brand “you,” but by recognizing what’s already in you, and making your story work for you. Singer and songwriter Bob Dylan proclaimed, “I was born very far away from where I was supposed to be born. I’m always on my way home.” This book is about being on that road to the destination that is “you.”
The five essentials include curiosity, openness, sensuality, paradox and self-story. “Desire to learn, willingness to change, and experiencing life with all available senses will enrich the experience of life and make it easier to explore what you really want. Paradox in life does not present an impossibility, but rather creates more possibilities,” Deutsch stated.
Curiosity goes beyond the given, the habitual, the routine and “business as usual.” If you’re curious you simply get more out of life since you make the effort to “look under the hood” and discover how the world works. Your curiosity allows you to make remarkable discoveries about any pursuit, passion or even passing interest if you’re curious about it. It’s equally remarkable, though, that most people engage in the world with a minimum of curiosity. Choosing not to be curious is a bit like choosing not to pick up a thousand-peso bill that you find on the sidewalk — except in this case, the sidewalk is littered with thousand-peso bills. Countless opportunities await you if you are curious, topmost of which is the opportunity to discover something you never anticipated, and to have this discovery become a vital part of the life you lead.
Openness explores beyond the surface of things and brings surprises. One of the greatest ways to live a richer life is to go into any endeavor unburdened by the need to know the ending at the beginning. You may regularly confer with people in companies who claim they are interested in learning more about consumer behavior. However, many of these people try to tilt the nature of the engagement to confirm a preset vision of the market. It sometimes takes the full use of your negotiating skills to get them to approach the project with openness. That’s where all the magic is, though. When you set your goals with an air of openness, you have a result in mind, but you are willing to embrace a different and better result. This phenomenon is called “directed serendipity.” You allow the possibility of the extraordinary happening because you steer clear of preconceived notions of the result. When you bring into play your curiosity, the rewards can be huge.
Sensuality is “feeling your own experience of your own experience.” You use your five senses — not numb out and flat-line. Feeling more means that you will unavoidably feel more unpleasantness. As expected, there’s a strong motivation to avoid this. After all, while most of us feel less fulfilled than we’d like, few of us are in constant state of unhappiness. Why, then, take the chance of experiencing unhappiness when can glide across the top of your life instead, even if you’re gliding miserably? The answer is that when you dive deep into your life rather than skimming the surface, you let yourself interrelate with the world at the richest possible level.
Paradox imaginatively integrates contradictions to create new things. Far too often you section your experiences and your roles. Something extraordinary happens, though, when you start playing with ambiguities and contradictions. You start to see possibilities you never imagined before. It’s within those possibilities that you discover your most gratifying, significant and authentic ventures. And you will discover that the word “and” is one of the most liberating words in the English language.
These four essentials work in the service of a fifth resource labeled as the “queen of all essentials”: self-story. It is the thing that allows you to fully believe in yourself and that other people have nothing on you.
Self-story is making a narrative that emotionally reflects your true nature. It is not an account of your life or an autobiography. It is created out of the intersection between memory and imagination, mind and heart, and fact and emotion, in terms of how you perceive the patterns in your life. Self-story is the one thing you need, more than money, background or IQ, to live a fulfilling, exciting, personally motivating and happy existence. It is the recurrent pattern of your being, the force driving your authentic self — all of it. It’s beauty and its warts, brightness and its darkness.
Self-story isn’t your ideal or hoped-for self, but the underlying design of “you” as an idea that stands above the pressure of the moment. It is, very simply put, what you are about — creative, not athletic; a singer, not a dancer; or a planner, not an implementer. It is the “you” that exists beyond the day-to-day. You alone are the author of your self-story, and you alone have the power to change its course. And if you’re truly conscious of it, then you can employ it to live the truest and most satisfying version of the life you should be leading. Aspects of your self-story are not all sunny or glamorous. Your task is to at least manage your darker side. Or better yet, to shape a negative tendency into one that can be deployed in a productive way.
Today, there are a growing number of people aggravated and downhearted because they feel their business and personal lives are separated from their true nature. In truth, they are just going through the motions of what life is and can really be, not minding that life can be more stimulating, refreshing and rewarding at a deeper level.
Real life is a crisscross street complete with twists and turns, ups and downs. But when it’s in the quest of uncovering and articulating the real “you,” life is grand and worth living. Here are some key takeaways from the tome that can allow you to master the creation of your self-story.
• Always be on your way home. One of the keys to living a life of fulfillment is to have a clear sense of your destination without ever reaching your destination. This might sound contradictory but mastering this process is revelatory.
• Own your narrative. There’s a difference between being aware of your self-story and taking true ownership of it. When you do the latter, your self-story works for you at all times.
• Stop and focus. Taking a moment to gather yourself might seem like a luxury given the pace at which we all seem to be living. However, once you come to understand this process, you’ll realize that it is luxury you absolutely must afford yourself.
• Riff on the world. We admire the virtuoso in the world because of their ability to create something distinctive within the structure of their disciplines. For example, a great jazz soloist riffs on a musical chart to bring something fresh and exciting to a piece. All of us are capable of similar virtuosity within our chosen disciplines.
• Vitalize. One of the most endearing aspects of living the truest version of your life is that doing so has the potential to bring increased vitality to the lives of others. When you consciously attempt to vitalize, what you often find is that you feel a greater sense of vitality yourself.
In your search for your self-story, there are no have-nots. You, and all other people, by virtue of being human beings — with experiences, curiosity, openness, and paradox — can write self-stories that will secure you and set you free to develop. The key is gaining a vivid awareness of your developing, self-story, because if you have that — if you truly know what you are about — a world of possibility materializes for you. Novelist Patrick Rufus pronounced, “It’s like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.”
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