If you don’t realise this about yourself, the growth journey could just be very frustrating.
How complex are you?
You know, in the scheme of things…
Like, a clock is complex. There’s probably a couple of hundred moving parts, some electronic circuitry, a battery that stores power and that slowly releases it at just the right rate.
Clocks are fairly complex.
But they ain’t got nothing on you babe.
What else? Computers are fairly complex, but still, humans can build computers. They can’t build other humans yet (except in the old-fashioned way).
And then even consider other organisms. Plants, insects, beavers, pelicans, bonobo monkeys… even bee hives and ant colonies.
All doing some pretty complex crazy stuff, but then hey, you’re doing all that stuff too AND you’re reading a bunch of scribbles on your phone, translating it into a voice in your head, and using the sound that voice makes to discern meaning.
Titty-sprinkles.
You are really about as complex as it gets.
Now if that’s the case, how hard is it to ‘fix’ you?
Now I don’t like the word ‘fix’ because it implies ‘broken’. And if you’re not hitting your life goals, if you haven’t build a powerful abundance mindset that’s making your life a ticker-tape parade of dreams and yummy things, there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s nothing ‘broken’ about that.
It’s the journey we all have to take. In some ways, I wonder if life is set up just so we can take that journey, as a way of learning how weird and complex we are, and how wonderful and strange the universe is.
So there’s no ‘broken’.
But I’ll use broken as a metaphor because we don’t tend to care about the performance of our stuff unless it is actually broken.
“My watch is great, but I still wonder if it is really actualising its full potential. It seems happy, but is it ‘really’ happy?”
No, we only engage with our watch’s performance if it just not doing what it is supposed to do – if it’s broken.
Ok, so let’s imagine our watch – a relatively complex thing – is broken. How do we fix it? Well, we try and pull it apart, isolate the problem, and sort it out.
What you would find though, when you did that, is that many pieces of the watch are interconnected. You can’t get to the gears unless you remove the battery. You can’t remove the gears until you de-tension the springs. You can’t de-tension the springs until you get the little lady-bird off the bike.
(Yes, that is totally how watches work.)
The defining feature of complexity is inter-connection.
If its parts aren’t inter-connected, then it’s just not a complex thing.
Ok, now let’s talk about you again. As I said, you are one of the most complex creations that has ever existed. (No I mean it. You’re special).
If that’s the case, how many of your parts are inter-connected?
Like, all of them?
Your hormones respond to stimuli, travel around your blood stream, give signals to your organs who then turn stuff into other stuff. And there are literally like thousands of lady-birds working the pulleys of your muscles.
And now how complex is your psyche?
Like, totally?
You drive is connected to your self-belief. Your self-belief is connected to your self-worth. Your self-worth is connected to the imprinting you received from your parents as a baby. Your imprinting is connected to your knee bone, and praise the name of the lord.
Now if that’s true, if your psyche is massively inter-connected, how tricky is it to ‘fix’ yourself. (Again, not the right word, but you see where I’m going.)
You can’t work on any one thing in isolation. You can’t just go, I think I need to work on my drive. You drive is connected to a hundred other things, embedded in the complex web of your psyche, and will manifest in different ways depending on what’s going on in your life.
It’s not a gear you can just pull out and polish.
The reason I’m saying this is people can often get frustrated with themselves.
“I’ve been working on my abundance mentality for 18 months now, and I’m just not getting anywhere.”
But sometimes it is hard to know. To get to you abundance mentality, you probably had to cut through a dozen different beliefs about yourself and how the world works.
Each of these will need to be brought into alignment, until finally the target of your work itself can be brought into alignment.
It’s just the nature of working on complex things.
So my advice is this: keep pushing, keep going. Once you know what you what you want to do – the areas of your life where you would like to grow and mature – just hold it in your mind and keep going.
And remember it’s probably not going to be a linear journey. You’ll have to fiddle with a dozen different gears before you get the one you want.
But stay focused. Just hold it in your mind, and do the work that presents itself to you – even if you don’t get what the connection is. Just keep working.
There is a deeper intelligence at play – the intelligence of complexity.
You’ll create the change you want eventually. It will happen. Just keep going.
Because no one said being complex was easy.