Episode 39 Know your enemy kno... of the perilous in ones' life
Sat, Nov 18, 2023 11:42AM • 25:46
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
call, knowledge, self control, enemy, sense, reactivity, stressful, stress, respond, behaviors, patterns, information, chances, intrapersonal, necessarily, talk, battle, foreknowledge, self regulation, body
Welcome back, folks to Episode 39 of the Running Man self regulation skills and self improvement project podcast with me, your host, Dr. Armando Dominguez, PhD in health psychology, Licensed Professional Counselor and an adjunct professor at a local community college. Now what we're going to be discussing today is self control, and also self knowledge. Now, how does this relate to self regulatory skills and the development of those? Well, it's very closely tied to those things in particular. And what we're going to start with is a small passage that comes from Sun Tzu's art of war that has lots of carryover because in a life or human life, or regular civilian life, it doesn't have to be that of a soldier of a warrior in combat, who would run into conflict. And when we have conflict, that is a battle, a very personal battle of sorts, sometimes it can be a very intrapersonal battle going on inside of me versus interpersonal, between a diet or group of people outside of myself. And this is something that can give us some insight, some grist for our mill, so to speak, that we can grind and work and actually make it to something useful. And it's not hard to fathom, but it makes a great deal of sense. And it's something that I having trained in martial art for years, have had to learn to use and apply whenever under duress. And also in regular interpersonal situations, and even whatever it is me on my meditation, cushion interpersonally. Working with those things that may seem at odds are what we would call a conflict. And being able to work those things out before things get out of hand to where it's no longer a matter of self control, but rather one of trying to rein in whatever behaviors we may be having if we get out of control or impulsive for that matter. So let me start with this quick reading of this passage. And once again, this is from Sun Tzu's Art of War actually, the the translation that I'm looking at it from Samuel B. Griffin, it's one of the classics, but very simplistic, and we'll discuss this after the fact. So it reads this way. It is in these five matters, that the way to victory is known. Therefore, I say, know the enemy and know yourself. In 100 battles, you will never be in peril. When you're ignorant of the enemy, but know yourself, your chances of winning or losing are equal. If ignorant both of your enemy and of yourself, you're certain in every battle to be in peril. That speaks very loudly of the fact that knowing oneself isn't just merely knowing your name, and what your preferences are, even though those are small elements within that in our existence, and what we would call our ego and self image in which we use our self image and or sense of self to interact with others and how we like to identify or maybe be recognized by people that we socialize with. But this speaks to the underlying deeper sense of what it is, that is me. That is my fundamental sense of response, or for that matter reaction, if it's stressful enough, that would fundamentally be recognized as part of my personality, my character, and whatever my proclivities and behaviors that could be considered, like patterns, so to speak. And many people tend to lean on the fact that patterns don't lie. And I would say that's not particularly true. And I will tell you that if somebody is intent on acting a certain way, it doesn't mean that they're authentic or sincere. It may be camouflage. And that's something that's untrue talks about, as does Miyamoto Musashi in his Book of Five Rings about seeing through the veneer of social interaction. So what does this have to do with self control and self regulation? And I'll tell you, it has a lot to do with it. Because often, whenever we're dealing with a stressful environment, or maybe a stressful interaction, maybe disagreement or maybe something that digresses into an argument or something that could become a physical fight. We have two things that are happening in the very first thing is that we have words And then there is probably a physical distance. If you have a cell phone or a phone or are calling across the way and there's space, wherever you're beyond to arm's reach plus six inches, then chances are you are physically safe, regardless of how noisy it is. But we have to recognize that there is a communication going on verbiage in most cases beyond the body language. And the body language is kind of neutralized when we're discussing phone communications. Not necessarily on Skype, or, or even on camera of some sort. But rather, it's something that seems almost distant or surreal, almost close to reality, but not quite. So therefore, it doesn't carry as much weight as far as our feeling threatened. If somebody's yelling at you, that I'm going to do something to you threateningly on the internet or on the phone versus someone actually do it in person. But the language is what's going on. It's the verbiage. It's the speak. It's our word communications, you've heard the term, that the war of words is what is being considered the big thing right now in our politics, recently, and also what is considered the precursor before diplomacy fails. And then we move in with physical attributes that may be not necessarily in the war sense, armies, but rather our hands or feet, start doing things, whether they'd be constructive, destructive or otherwise. But usually, it's the words that we have. The second part that is on and off is the body language in many cases. And that plays very closely to the emotional intensity, but the one was the word the two is what we would call our sense of self control, our sense of self regulation, and our sense of self modulation, how do I manage my stress, or what I'm perceiving as stressful or dangerous? is causing me stress? How am I reacting to it, if it is a reaction that I'm no longer mindful of getting closer to second nature reactivity or even reflex, when we have something like disgust, or impulse that says, Get away from here, because I'm not going to stick around long enough to make sense of it. But those are the two big things. One is the words that we that we exchange, or that we hear. And second is going to be the reactivity. What's my body doing? How am I responding to this? If it's a mindful thing? How am I reacting to it? If it's so fast, that I don't have time to be mindful of? So in the exchange, am I knowing myself? And can I control myself? Well, those are good questions. And the self control the self regulation is what we're focusing on. If you know yourself, and how you respond to, let's say, a stressful environment, you know, not to be in those and maybe do your best to avoid them. If you ever had a brush with discomfort, or injury or illness, that sort of thing that resulted from proximity or being close to something. And therefore you got sick, hurt, or otherwise. And often, when we talk with people that have had traumatic events, they tend to be very averse to certain things, certain sounds. And we have these things that we will call in quotes triggers, which I'm not going to use that term much today. That may bring back that robbery that recall that brings upon us the elevated sense of arousal, reactivity, maybe irritability, maybe even anger, for that matter, for some anxiety, and stress and even thoughts of not wanting to be here wanting to die. So it can get pretty heavy really fast. So knowledge of oneself do I know how to respond to certain things, many of us know that. And that's only a half of what we would call having situational and environmental knowledge. Sons who's writing said, no one wants self and no one wants enemy environments, not always enemy. But if we understand that, it can become a very uncomfortable thing to recoup become dangerous or even violent, suddenly, this doesn't necessarily have to be a human, it could be an animal, if you're out camping, you could be other people. If you're out in the park and a mob start gathering and they start getting kind of antsy and angry. That could be something that we would call the degrading situation where your assumption of safety is not met and knowledge of self. One is let's say, I have limitations that I can't run very fast. I'm seeing that happening. Would I keep walking forward towards that?
I would hope not. I would think not. And I would certainly encourage you strategically. Don't do that. And I'll walk the other direction while you still have at least time to make distance from wherever the fractures may be occurring with a pen potential practice. And the second part of that Self knowledge is knowing can I get away Can I do something in the sense of can I hide? Can I run in if I were caught I cannot protect myself. Those are very important questions, that has to do a lot with self regulation and self control. Because whenever we feel the most unsafe, whenever our environment becomes very unsafe or potentially So, and our thoughts of predictably thinking that I can or more prediction or more correctly, of whether or not I can accommodate the change in my environment cannot protect myself against it, can I get away from it has much to do with? Do we have anxiety? Do we have fear stress? Do I have anger? Or do I have freeze? Whenever I'm in such an environment, self knowledge has a lot to do with how I'm going to respond, especially if I have an experience prior to that was negative, painful or frightening. Now, the second half is knowing one's enemy. No one's one enemy, if we were to change that term to environment, guilt, once again, it's not always an enemy situation, or one that's against you. But sometimes it can become dangerous. If we have a group of people, and they become dangerous, and you're in that environment, you might get accepted into the group and you might get walked by as a non target, we could very easily become a target, not meaning to and by virtue of proximity and convenience, groupthink being what it is, could put you in a very seriously vulnerable and compromised situation. So knowing the enemy, can this be played out in an individual intrapersonal sense, me? What is my worst enemy inside? Sometimes it's my self critic, that makes me feel bad that I have anxiety, or I have worry, or I have discomfort, or I have a bad self image as a result. So yes, knowing myself in the way I think my patterns, yes, that can be considered being your own worst enemy, if you will, to use the common colloquial, but also interpersonally between people knowing the people that you interact with, if you're at work, and you have regular interactions with folks, you tend to pay attention to certain things we assume certain people act with certain within certain patterns or ways of doing and to become more predictable, and our natural tendency is human is to save energy, be efficient, to become more effective. And long term, the enduring part is saving that energy for whenever we get needed most. Whenever high stakes things occurs, I'll have a reserve so to speak. So I can run the risk of survival and improving my chance of living and thriving in the next moment versus just in the immediate right now. Where there are no guarantees. So yes, interpersonally, being able to know what people do. Now, this often ties very closely to what we call the grapevine and organizations and even by verbiage we can gain information that may or may not be true, but our most reliable information is perceptual perceptual, my own perceptions. I can't always trust what people say, because the definitions, and the interpretations may not be exactly my own, and may take things incorrectly, I may not have enough information. And if someone is speaking flippantly, there may be some details left out. So therefore I have inaccurate, or largely inaccurate information that's not perfectly reliable. And that is not a good survival skill. Now, the next passage was, if you know your enemy and yourself in 100, battles, you will not be in parallel in parallel. So knowing both is really good. That tells you whenever you can have that yin and yang balance, so to speak, wherever you can push whenever being pulled, wherever you get pulled, you can push or for that matter just flow more effectively, or better yet, not be there, not engage if you have foreknowledge and potential predictability, which is our natural human capacity to be able to predict into the future based on past patterns. Now, the second statement was, if you have knowledge of yourself, but no knowledge of your enemy, in 100 battles, the chances are equal that one or the other can overcome. Now, once again, if we take this and make this environmental, or maybe even change the word enemy to situational, and we're trying to apply influence or trying to develop success in sales, or to improve capacity in a skill, but you don't know what you're doing or who you're dealing with, but you know what you want to do, your chances of success go up if you know more about what you're going into what we would call our environment or our goal, not necessarily the enemy, but even the enemy. The more you know, the better off you are, the more prepared your that also means your potential prediction goes up. It doesn't make it perfectly accurate, but it also gives us a better chance of certain assumptions being correct and being more helpful. Rakhine. So, that is a very important thing, knowledge of self, at the very least knowledge of self. And the enemy or the opponent or what it is that we're challenged by, is best. But what if I don't know what the challenge is, but I know me, I know that I'm tenacious, I know that I gather information, I know that I like to succeed, I know that I don't quit easily. Those are important things, when in face of a challenge, or an enemy. And the third statement in 100, battles, if you lack knowledge of self, if you lack knowledge of your enemy. In 100 battles, you're in great peril. That means you're at risk if you just go in haphazardly, with no foreknowledge of what's going on, and what you're going to do or what you're up against, and no understanding or knowledge of how you're going to respond to things. If you've never been in a stressful situation, or been in a situation that requires you to think under duress and make good decisions under pressure, and do so successfully. Your chance for failure is much higher. Not this does not necessarily mean penultimate failure. This did come from a book on strategy on war. But it wasn't just about killing. It was about the psychology, the intrapersonal within me, applied in the interpersonal, between people the sociological sense, on the individual, and also on the larger macro scale numbers of people, and even countries, cities and wars, being fought not necessarily by the drawing of the sword, but rather by the playing of influence, reading people, learning how they think and what their patterns are, what their behaviors and values are. So here's a rhetorical question. So is self knowledge, something that involves knowing what your values are? What's important to you? I would say so, is self knowledge, something that involves self control based on for knowledge, not getting freaked out, because you know, what's coming down the pipes early, and you can avoid it? Yeah, yes. So by gathering information, this is another way of using Sun Tzu's terms, what used to call spies, and espionage. Does that mean you go around spying and creeping around corners and being a creeper? Not really. But it does mean gathering information. And by your perceptions, what you take in being able to trust that information and developing a catalogue that you can determine not only is useful, but as regular. And it gives you an idea as to how to make decisions. When you see those ear markers of things repeating pattern behaviors, we as humans, were creatures of habit in a large sense, but our pattern behaviors aren't perfect. However, they are largely predictable and reliable. And under typical serpents circumstances will come up. This isn't even getting into the biological, reflexive level of behavior, but rather those things that have to do with the things that we choose, that have to do with our veneer of social interaction, that have to do with how we're accepted into the social scheme, or into our groups or whether or not we're rejected. It has to do with how we apply influence and how influence is played on us by the things that we read and hear. And what we believe and believe has a lot to do with how well we interact with things, and also people and what we believe them to be like or who we believe them to be if we bought into the ruse of their self image. And we've kind of jokingly talked about the ego and realizing that, well, it's just a figment of our imagination, it doesn't exist. But yet there are people that will defend it, tooth and nail as if their ego or their sensor, the idea of self is more real than this body, this vehicle that we're driving it with them. So the subjective is more real than the objective? That's a good question, isn't it? I would say that it is not our objective, we can count and touch our subjective whenever I have thoughts of myself. They're not the equivalent of what my body is, in the sense that we have a vehicle a body reflex, heart, lungs, this sort of thing. But yet,
it is so closely tied to our mind in our belief capacity, based on our visual memory of visual recall, and our recollections of things that are very visually oriented on this one is of course congenitally blind, that our memories are enough to get our body to respond in a post traumatic stress reactivity level, or even though euphoric recall or dysphoric. Recall is not at the disorder level, but yet is enough for the body to salivate to have stress reaction, or even to have hormones release and have to do with bonding whenever you remember holding your little baby. Because they're compelling Even though it's not necessarily a tangible I can put in a cup and weigh it. Real thing. It is real enough in the sense that our body believes that response as if at a speed that is way faster to put our word maker is at the level of brain that is the Picture Maker, not the word maker, the level of the wordless mind, we have a very powerful influence there. So how does that have anything to do with self control and self regulation? Much of the things that we respond to, if it starts with verbiage there, there's also that sense of belief that goes with the belief quality that may be stressful, and one that causes us to react versus respond depend on how fast it is, and one that causes us to respond to something as if it's real, even though maybe it's not just like a picture that could be frightening, or just the words that somebody told you will, I'm going to do this wrong gonna hurt you, and you respond to it, and you run as if that's compelling. But also your body responds, realistically, it's not reliving, it is reacting to something that is so similar to something that was painful in the past, that you want to make sure it wants to make sure it being your low level, brain, your your body, one would say that in the produce, that would be our ID, or reactionary survival self is telling you time to go. So these are some important things to keep in mind, self knowledge, how do you respond to things that are stressful, self knowledge along the lines of well, I've had bad experiences. So therefore, it's easier for me to navigate my life. Now, by not being around such things, that strategic, but also psychologically, you know that that would be stressful to you, and you prevent yourself from going in those directions. Those are the seeds of self knowledge. Whenever we have terms like somebody complaining about somebody triggered me, that is somebody telling you that they are not in control, and the lack self control. You are the person that's experiencing the negative as a result of somebody saying something or somebody doing something, whether it be based on the tone, or the behavior or the word spoken, it's up to you as an individual, to recognize that. And also to realize that you have control of this. And if you have enough time, and little distance and little foreknowledge, you can work on getting those measures of self control, under control, and not have to try to blame or find somebody to blame as a result of your emotional discomfort. This does not make it bad victim, you shouldn't be acting that way. Not saying that. It's a matter of developing skill by self knowledge, developing that recognition of those things that stress me developing an understanding that these are not reliving events, but rather, recollections that are causing the body to respond. Because it's so compelling. When we see it this way. It is our body taking care of us and they just no longer a lack of moral ethical strength, or even capacity to take care of oneself. If you already been through it, you've learned something. And there's a lesson within that. And there's also what we call fertilizer for growth, where we have post traumatic growth that occurs. And there's a lot of study going on with that right now. So it was definitely an encouraging message. But Sunsoo talked about this. And it wasn't just because it's more than I've mentioned it but rather, in the circumstances of war, things become very honest, very clear, very simple, and easier to apply. And if those things work in situations that it's life or death, than an irregular civilian life, even one where there's stress, or danger that occurs intermittently versus as the continuous wholesale battle that goes on day in and day out, that it works in civilian settings, as well, because it's still intrapersonal. It's still personal, it's still human, and it's still communication. But above all, is development of strategic control of self. A self regulatory skill that helps you become better frees you up by not becoming so entangled in the social milieu, and allowing you to have more freedom in those things that you like, and that's higher quality of life in a higher quantity, and also better relationships and less stress generally. So that's it for today. I just want to tell you, thank you for sharing some time with me today. And I would like to tell you, please like, share and follow. And if you know somebody that could benefit from this podcast, please share it with them. And if you'd like to send me an email and let me know how things They're going please do. Even if it's feedback somebody like somebody don't like or even if you have a suggestion, send it to Running Man. Get skills project at Gmail. And hopefully we'll talk soon. Take care and walk well