Self-reflection

Self-reflection is underrated.

Most men would rather do almost anything than sit still and have a proper look at themselves. Phone, telly, pint, work, another episode. Anything but the inside of their own head.

I get it. I avoided it for years.

But without it you’re stuck in a loop. The same mistakes, the same arguments, the same type of woman, the same job you moan about every Sunday night. You can’t fix what you won’t look at.

There are two reasons we don’t do it.

• It’s boring.

• We’re scared of what we’ll find.

The first is an excuse. The second is the real one.

Before I started self-reflecting I didn’t know who I was, let alone what I wanted.

Then a run of bad luck, some of it my own doing, left me on my own with time I hadn’t asked for. No distractions, nobody to talk to. Just me.

I was forced to spend some very uncomfortable time with a very scared, lost and lonely me.

I didn’t like him much at first. He was needy, he sulked, and he blamed everybody else for the state he was in. I’ve written about both of those since, in Neediness and Accountability.

But the more time I spent with him, the more I found out. What I was actually into, rather than what I said I was into. What I enjoyed. What wound me up. Where the insecurities were, and where they’d come from.

Nobody could have told me any of it. I had to sit there and find it.

If you think that sounds dramatic, there’s a study that says otherwise.

In 2014 Timothy Wilson and his team at the University of Virginia put people in a bare room for fifteen minutes with nothing to do but think. The only other thing in there was a button that gave an electric shock. Every one of them had tried it beforehand and said they’d pay money not to feel it again.

Two thirds of the men pressed it anyway. One bloke pressed it 190 times.

A quarter of the women did the same. Men, it turns out, would rather be electrocuted than sit alone with their own heads.

I was one of those men. The only reason I ever sat with my thoughts is that life took the button away.

The best picture I’ve found for what self-reflection actually does is the Johari window.

Most men keep the open pane small. The missus sees one version, the mates see another, and the biggest pane of all is the one marked unknown.

Self-reflection moves things out of hidden and into open, because once you’ve admitted something to yourself it gets a lot easier to say out loud. Honest mates move things out of blind. And a rough patch, the kind I had, drags things out of unknown whether you want it or not.

The bigger the open pane, the less energy you spend managing the gap between who you are and who you’re pretending to be. That’s the whole point of it, and I covered the pretending in Authenticity.

The men with the smallest open pane are usually the most tired.

It isn’t rocket science, but it does take a bit of commitment.

Ten minutes a day. Morning or before bed, whichever you’ll actually do. Somewhere quiet. A notebook, not your phone, because your phone is where the distractions live.

Then two questions. What went well today? What didn’t?

Once that gets easy, the harder one. Why did I react like that?

Write it down. Writing makes it real, and it stops you tidying the story up in your head afterwards. Don’t sugar-coat it. Nobody’s reading it but you, so there’s no point lying.

After a month, read it back. That’s where the patterns show. The same name keeps coming up. The same mood on the same day of the week. The same excuse. The patterns are what matter. A single bad day tells you nothing.

Then pick one thing. Not five. One habit, one week, and a plan for what you’ll do instead of it. Small steps add up. Big plans get abandoned.

And every so often, ask a mate you trust what he actually thinks of you. Then shut up and listen. That’s the blind pane, and you can’t open it on your own.

Dating first, because that’s where the loop was most obvious. I kept going for the same type and getting the same ending. Writing it down showed me the pattern was mine, not theirs.

In relationships, I started checking how I’d behaved rather than how she had. Uncomfortable, and useful.

At work, I finally asked whether the job was anywhere near what I wanted, or just what I’d fallen into. I wrote up where that went in Finding Your Perfect Job.

And with mates and family, I noticed which ones left me feeling better and which ones left me feeling worse. A couple of them I see a lot less now. No drama. I just stopped ringing.

Still getting to know him

I still don’t know everything about the bloke I was stuck with that year.

I don’t think you ever do. The unknown pane never empties. It just gets smaller.

But he’s a lot less scared than he was, and a lot less lonely.

All I did was stop running from him.