Compassion allows me to separate myself from these tendencies and reframe my motivation as understanding myself—being curious—rather than fixing myself. Compassion allows me to remember that I and everyone else are doing the best we can with what we have, and that there is no binary right and wrong.
I don’t want to lose my ability to find patterns. I do want to stop my brain from concluding that if I can’t find a pattern, I must be a failure or wrong.
This month's deep-dive essay into curiosity: linking it to how we solve problems. Now published on Medium: https://medium.com/@bankoferin/curiosity-in-problem-solving-916d38c833b4
The shadow makes it hard to do anything, let alone be curious about why it’s hard to do anything. It knows that the minute I start questioning its existence, it will lose power and fade away. It pushes me so deeply into the swirl of everything, that it’s hard to separate myself from the shadow.
The more I talked about my blog, and the more questions I answered about it, I became curious: what is this blog all about? This curiosity put me, almost accidentally, in a place of vulnerability.
If I ask this inner critic, “What are you trying to say,” and really listen, I hear its fear, its desire to protect me from failure and rejection, and I can say to the voice, “Thank you for trying to protect me, but I’ve got this.” What is the “inner critic” part of the brain, if not a string of judgmental words?
Being curious about a problem opens space around it. It allows us to detach from it.
