Hello Reader!​

"The key to self-mastery is self-forgetting." - Abdu'l-Bahá

In Big Trust by Shade Zahrai and Faycal Sekkouah, the founder of the Baha'i Faith is quoted. When we focus on ourselves, we worry about what others think and if we're not good enough. When we focus on what we are doing and bringing to the world, we forget about ourselves, therefore enabling us to be our best selves.

Think about it: when great athletes are in the zone, they aren't thinking about how they look or how others perceive them. They are thinking about what they need to accomplish. In this way, when we're building or creating or even just doing what we are good at, we are being our best selves. Forgetting the 'who or what' of who we categorized ourselves as frees us up to discover the 'why and how' of what we can do.

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Feel

Why We Feel Better When We Forget

I guess I've always been lucky to completely forget what I look like when I'm done looking in the mirror. My mind is usually off to far-off places or what I'm going to have for breakfast. I always wonder if I would even recognize a time-travelling version of myself immediately or at all. I'm always somewhat shocked to see what I look like in pictures, good or bad!

So when I decided to film myself writing for my upcoming YouTube channel shorts, I was aghast to see how old and chubby my hands looked. But mostly old 😱I was so upset staring at the age spots on my hands and forearm (damn you, Colorado sun!) that I was ready to throw in the towel. Forget the reels. Forget the YouTube channel - how bad would my face look?!? And forget the Feel Change Build Community altogether.

Wait what? Was I seriously not going to share the message I've been researching and perfecting for the last 6 years because I didn't like how my hands looked on camera? Was someone really not going to learn about processing their emotions or protective patterns because I didn't like having a visual reminder of all the years of lived and hard lessons I'd learned?

Absolutely not! So I refocused my vision onto my message and editing the video. Yeah, it's still not perfect, but it's telling people what they need to know. And as soon as I focused on the mission outside of myself, it felt good to keep going.

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Change

Why Self-forgetting Isn't Self-abandonment

Here's where it gets interesting, because "forget yourself" sounds like terrible advice for a personal development community. Aren't we supposed to be doing the opposite? Getting to know ourselves, understanding our patterns, sitting with our feelings?

Yes. But there's a difference between the self-awareness work we do here and the self-consciousness that keeps us small. Self-awareness is looking at your hands, recognizing the spiral starting, and asking what's actually happening. Self-consciousness is spending forty-five minutes staring at your hands and quietly dismantling a six-year project. One is useful information. The other is the Over-Achiever and the Perfectionist and every protective pattern we've ever discussed all showing up at once for a committee meeting nobody scheduled.

The self we need to forget isn't the one doing the inner work. It's the one standing in the corner critiquing the inner work while it's happening.

Athletes call it paralysis by analysis. You know the feeling. You're doing something you're actually good at and then you become aware that you're doing it and suddenly you can't do it anymore. The golf swing that fell apart the moment someone watched. The presentation that went sideways when you started thinking about how you were coming across. The writing that dried up when you started wondering if anyone would be offended.

The research on flow states, which is what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spent his career studying, shows that peak performance and deep satisfaction both happen when challenge and skill meet in a way that demands our full attention. Not some of our attention. All of it. There's no bandwidth left for self-monitoring because the task is using everything we have.

That's not escaping the self. That's the self operating at full capacity. Which turns out to look a lot like forgetting it's there.

The protective pattern work in FCB is actually preparation for this. When we understand our patterns we stop being ambushed by them. When we're not constantly managing an unexpected emotional emergency, there's space to actually show up for the work. Processing our feelings doesn't make us more self-focused. It frees us up to focus on something beyond ourselves.

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Build

How to Get out of Your Own Way

The practical question is how to actually do this when the self-conscious spiral has already started, because knowing you should forget yourself and being able to do it in the moment are two completely different things.

Here's how to shift your focus.

1) Reorient to the recipient.

When I stopped staring at my hands and asked who needed to hear this message, the hands stopped being the point. There is always a specific person on the other end of whatever we're making or teaching or building. A real person with a real problem that our knowledge might help. Get specific about who that person is. Name them if you can. The moment the work becomes about them instead of about us, the self-consciousness has nowhere to stand.

2) Give yourself a job small enough to start.

Self-consciousness thrives in the abstract. It loves the big scary question of whether the whole thing is good enough. It does very poorly with specific, concrete, immediate tasks. Not "is this YouTube channel a good idea" but "does this sentence say what I mean." Not "will people judge me" but "is this next cut better than the last one." Small enough to do. Specific enough to evaluate. The spiral can't get traction when you're actually busy with something real.

3) Use the mission as the mirror instead of your face.

Every time we catch ourselves asking "how do I look" or "what will they think" or "is this good enough," we can swap in a different question: "is this useful." Not perfect. Not impressive. Useful. That question has an answer. It points outward instead of inward. And it turns out that useful, shipped, imperfect work does more for more people than perfect work that never makes it out of the drafts folder.

4) Start before you're ready and keep going even after you notice the fear.

I filmed those hands. I kept editing. The video is not perfect but it will be out in the world and someone who needs to hear what it says will hopefully watch it. That person does not care about my age spots. They care about the message. And what that message means for them.

So do the thing with the hands you have. Write with the voice you have. Build with the knowledge you have right now, in this season of your life, with whatever the sun has done to your face and forearms.

Abdu'l-Bahá was right. The key to self-mastery is self-forgetting. Not because we don't matter but because what we're here to do matters more than our worry about how we look while we're doing it.

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What have you been sitting on because the self-consciousness got loud? Hit reply and tell me. I'll tell you the same thing I told myself: someone needs it. Do it.

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Have a lovely day! - Kate