Insights

Knowing your pattern and still running it

You can describe your pattern, but it doesn't change it and you do it anyway.

You can describe the thing you do. Probably really well by now. Where it started, who it started with, what it's protecting you from. And you go and do it anyway.

That's most people who've done any reading on themselves. The describing gets sharper every year and nothing moves.

I did this for the longest time. I used to say I need a woman who's going to command my attention. Not demand it, command it. I said it for years and I thought it was a great piece of self-knowledge, like I'd really worked myself out. Then somebody said to me, well, aren't you just outsourcing your responsibility? Took me over a year to get what he meant. I had this perfect description of what I wanted and what it really was, was a job description for somebody who hadn't turned up yet.

So that's the thing about awareness. You can have loads of it and still be running the exact same play, because the pattern was never a mistake. It's a solution. It's doing a job for you, keeping you away from something you decided a long time ago you couldn't handle. And it works. That's why it's still there. Many of us keep it until we know better.

A lot of my industry runs on the other thing though. Read the books, learn the strategies, analyse it well enough and call it done. I've done it myself, I still catch myself doing it, and it's a nice comfortable bypass because analysing is the part you're already good at.

What shifts it is smaller and a lot less interesting. It's the moment before. The two or three seconds where you feel the pull and there's a choice sitting there you don't normally notice. The body signal, the timing, the interruption. That's a rep, not a realisation. Nobody writes about reps because they're boring.

So that's what all of this is for. Not understanding the pattern, you've got that. What happens in the moment you understand it perfectly and lose anyway.