Picky Self-development Consumer

Self-development Consumption Constraint

In all things self-development, what you consume and who you consume it from matters immensely because what you’re consuming is finding a place to reside in your mind and body.

That makes it quite necessary to notice your felt experience as you take in all of the latest from the gurus, coaches and mentors, including me, so that you can still benefit from learning from others while being self-guided.

It’s choosing to have constraint and discernment ahead of time.

The decisions I like to make quite deliberately are how much I want to consume, why I want to consume and whose voice I am paying attention to ⤵️

How much are you consuming?

How much are you consuming lately? If you were to look at the last 2 weeks or so. How many podcasts, workshops, books and social media posts have you consumed? Does the number surprise you? 

I am not saying consuming is bad, not at all. Just take inventory, and decide is that what you want to spend that amount of time doing? If yes, carry on, if no, explore the changes you’d like to make going forward.

What is your intention when you are consuming?

What’s your intention for listening to someone’s podcast for instance? 

Is it to get more ideas, is it to have something to respond to, is it because you don’t trust yourself to come up with your own answers, is it to better understand something or a concept, is it because you’re lost and hoping to find your way? 

Whatever it is, it’s important to be transparent with yourself about your reasons. These reasons color the experience, always. Without knowing them, you are allowing, maybe not on purpose, but you are allowing someone else to decide the direction they will steer you towards without your explicit consent.

Who are you listening to?

Who are you paying attention to? Next time you listen to the work of someone in this space consider pausing partway like while you are in the experience and ask yourself: What is my felt experience of being in this person’s energy? How do I feel about myself as I listen to them? What do I notice in my body feeling right now?

To make this easier, I’ve compiled what to avoid and what to look for when picking mentors:

❌ RED FLAGS ❌

•  They tend to minimize experiences of others or over simplify
•  They tend to absolve themselves of responsibility and turn it around on the other
•  They often use sweeping statements as facts
•  You feel worse about yourself after listening to this person

💖 GREEN FLAGS 💖

•  The nuance in their body of work recognizes the complexities of the human experience
•  They are mindful to use their tools ethically and responsibly - no weird power dynamics or gaslighting
•  They invite you to look within for your own answers
•  You feel empowered and closer to SELF after listening to this person

For more deets, listen to this SELF Guided podcast episode here.

Transcript

Hello everyone and welcome to the third episode of the first season of SELF guided. Today, I am expanding on last week’s podcast where I spoke about a SELF guided approach to self-development by inviting you to consider how you can support yourself even more by using the skill of deliberate constraint.

In all things self-development, what you consume and who you consume it from matters immensely because what you’re consuming is finding a place to reside in your mind and body. That makes it quite necessary to notice your felt experience as you take in all of the latest from the gurus, coaches and mentors, including me, so that you can still benefit from learning from others while being self-guided. It’s choosing to have constraint and discernment ahead of time.

Let’s first look at the idea of consumption. Consuming is anything that you ingest in some way. So whenever you’re watching a workshop, listening to a podcast, reading a book or blog, attending a master mind. You are consuming.

What you are taking in will be taken in both consciously and unconsciously. The conscious stuff I’m not too worried about. I’m aware I’m taking it in, I see that it’s there if I ever want to look at it or discard it. The unconscious stuff, that’s what I want to place boundaries around, safety precautions if you will. I do that because the unconscious is hidden, and yet, yet it has a way of affecting me and I don’t even know it’s there. For that reason, I like to make conscious decisions regarding my consumption even (or especially) when it has to do with self-development because on the surface it’s for my own good but maybe it’s not. So the decisions I like to make quite deliberately are how much I want to consume, why I want to consume and whose voice I am paying attention to.

How much

Let’s start at the beginning. How much are you consuming lately? If you were to look at the last 2 weeks or so. How many podcasts have you listened to? How many workshops have you attended? How many books have you read (or listened to)? How many social media posts have you ready? Does the number surprise you? So much of it is done when we’re not really thinking about it, especially the social media input. I am not saying consuming is bad, not at all. Just take inventory, and decide is that what you want to spend that amount of time doing? If yes, carry on, if no, explore the changes you’d like to make going forward.

I like to start this inventory by seeing how much I’m consuming consciously because it seems to be easier to track for me. So I’m currently taking a continuing education course, it’s 4 hours per week and so I’d take that down. I’m also on a personal journey that’s super fun where I use a structure as a loose guide for personal contemplation, each section has a few recordings so that’s probably about an hour to 2 hours per week. I keep doing this exercise until I’ve exhausted my awareness of how much I’m consuming for self-development. 

For the less obvious inputs, I get a little more creative at figuring it out. For example, when I’m on instagram, I can pretty much count most of that time as unconscious ingestion of self-development input because for me (doesn’t mean it’s the case for you) but for me the accounts I follow on instagram are about 90% fellow coaches or people I admire who I like learning from. Once I’m on instagram, if I don’t pay attention, it becomes more like zoning out so that’s why I put it in this category. On another platform, I probably wouldn’t count it because I know I’m following mostly comedians let’s say. This is just an example and again, use this exercise how you believe would be most useful for you.

Once you have that tally, ask yourself self-reflective questions and answer them from the mind but also what are you noticing as felt sensations when you take in that tally? Don’t forget that the information your body is sharing with you is just as important as what your mind reasons. Leaving all judgements at the door, some good questions to ask yourself would be: 

What’s coming up for me when I see how much I’m taking in?

All things being equal, is this how I would like to continue spending my time?

What am I being called to adjust at this time?

Intention

After you’ve become aware of your current consumption, the next step is to consider your intention, what is driving you to consume self-development materials.

What’s your intention for listening to someone’s podcast for instance? Is it to get in your ideas, is it to have something to respond to, is it because you don’t trust yourself to come up with your own answers, is it to better understand something or a concept, is it because you’re lost and hoping to find your way? Whatever it is, it’s important to be transparent with yourself about your reasons. These reasons color the experience, always. Without knowing them, you are allowing, maybe not on purpose, but you are allowing someone else to decide the direction they will steer you towards without your explicit consent. 

Take my podcast for example. While I hope you are listening for reasons that are right for you, I always have an intention behind my work. That intention is to help you tap into self-empowerment and be self-guided. That means that my shares will sow seeds of my intention no matter how careful I am about adding self-reflection questions for you along the way. I insert these interjections to make sure you are checking in with yourself as you consume my work.

If you’re not clear with your intention, it’s much easier for the other person to choose for you. So decide, be the one in the driver’s seat of why you’re taking in the input, whatever its form, in self-development. The intention is completely up to you and it has  no morality, one reason isn’t better, more moral, than another. It is right if it’s yours and you are in integrity with you. 

What’s interesting about setting your intention or intentions is that in itself, it serves as a filter. You’ll have purposefully given your brain a direction. Yes, sometimes, other things sneak in but much less than when you don’t give instructions to your brain. I’m certainly not saying you have to have full defense gear on in order to prevent every single input, what I am saying, is that this right here serves as a very good safeguard while keeping you open to receive what you do want to receive. In my experience, whenever I’ve done this, I’ve noticed that while I consume the thing, my brain will offer a lot more questions about the material I’m hearing or reading, I’ll more naturally take pauses and check-in with myself about my experience of the material.

Remember, when it comes to intention, you can choose from anything in the world! This can be an actual goal, like the smart goals your gym teacher had you make in gym class or it can be an energy with which you approach it such as a statement or mantra like “I am open to diving further into such and such a topic and with that new information, I will choose what is correct for me based on my felt experience”.

Who

Once you’ve decided how much and why you want to consume, then consider who you want to have in your ear. Clearly I am thinking podcast, but feel into this query however you like to consume. I don’t want to overwhelm you with all of the questions that you could ask yourself and all the things that you could consider but I will take a second right now to give you some of my biggest considerations so that you can see if they resonate with you as well.

I desire to listen to people who share the same values as I do. They may have a different approach but if the values are similar then I am safeguarding myself a little while being open to the new information with curiosity. The minute I realized how important it was for me that values be aligned, I was faced with something I wasn’t expecting and that’s that I had outgrown or was no longer interested in the teachings of certain schools of thought or certain people I had once looked up to.

What is coming up for you when I say that? Some of what came up for me was a worry  that I might have to say goodbye to teachers or mentors because they showed me their values and they don’t match mine anymore. Well, you don’t have to stop, you can keep listening to them. Actually, you can keep listening to them while knowing that you may have to exercise more caution when listening to them or more introspection to see what was ingested that maybe you didn’t want to because they may be different from your values and create an internal conflict. I will offer a few questions for you right now that I considered. Why am I afraid of letting letting them go? What do I gain from continuing to listen to them? What am I giving up when I listen to them? Again, I’m reflecting on this primarily through my lens and the main ways I consume self-development is through podcasts and books, hence my references, but make this applicable to your abilities and preferences.

This is another decision where your choice is valid, no matter what it is because there isn’t one option that’s more elevated than another. Sometimes, I choose to listen to someone that I disagree with to help stretch my own perspective. Sometimes, I choose to watch someone because they’re the only ones talking about a topic. Sometimes, I choose to read the work of someone who deeply resonates with where I am on my journey now. All valid. All intentional. 

Who are you paying attention to? Next time you listen to the work of someone in this space consider pausing partway like while you are in the experience and ask yourself: What is my felt experience of being in this person’s energy? How do I feel about myself as I listen to them? What do I notice in my body feeling right now?

I expect this to hit differently for everyone. For some, it can be confusing now because you might think so much is at risk and that now you have to know what is your one right way. I think you already know who you want to continue to listen to and who you don’t. The moment that you feel off, that’s a really great clue. When you feel off listening to someone, that’s your body signaling you. What do you think your bodies trying to tell you here? 

Red/Green Flags

What I want for you is to be able to recognize red flags in a mentor.

Here are some of the red flags that I am currently looking at when I really consider who I want to be listening to 

• They minimize experiences of others or over simplify meaning, there’s no nuance in their work.
• When you question aspects of their work, they don’t answer or explore other ways but rather absolve themselves without taking responsibility and likely turn it around on you.
• If I’m honest I feel worse about myself after listening to this person.

So what do I actually seek, what are the green flags that I’m looking for?

• They invite me to look for my own answers even when their way seems logical.
• The nuance in their body of work recognizes the complexities of the human experience.
• I feel empowered and closer to SELF.

This may seem like more work for you, and if you’ve consumed unintentionally for most of your life, it might be daunting to try a new way. The beauty in this approach is that it’s easier to decide ahead of time than it is to deal with unconscious accumulation later on. 

What I’m basically saying is we can all benefit from not staying in the disillusion that we’re always being discerning because so much happens without our knowing or our approval. This approach helps you to be more aligned with YOUR own values. From how much you consume, to why you consumer and who you consume self-development goodies. This is one way you can still enjoy being in the self-development world and be SELF guided. 

So I leave you with one last self-reflective question: How can you support yourself in taking your next small step in being a little more SELF guided here? What’s supported me has been this approach of tapping in with body as I consider how much I want to consume, setting my intention before I begin and being deliberate on who I let in and as always, my body has a lot of wisdom that I can rely on to assist me in making those decisions.

I do hope this was helpful to you wherever you are on your journey.

Until next time, love to each and everyone.