Today, we continue our Dadly Daily Declaration series with readings from The Passion Paradox by authors Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness. So far, Stulberg and Madness have discussed the pitfalls of passion and the sole focus of pursing your passion. Today’s reading focuses on self-awareness.
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Here are a few gems from today’s reading:
- There are risks inherent to having your identity tied up in a single activity—mainly, what happens when doing that activity is no longer an option?
- Far better than striving for balance is striving for self-awareness, or the ability to see yourself clearly by assessing, monitoring, and proactively managing your core values, emotions, passions, behaviors, and impact on others. Put differently, self-awareness is about creating the time and space to know yourself, constantly checking in with yourself (since your “self” changes over time), and then living your life accordingly.
- Someone with keen self-awareness is able to separate the acute euphoria of being fully immersed in a pursuit from the long-term consequences of doing so. Self-awareness doesn’t come easily. Paradoxically, one of the best ways to accomplish it is to mentally step outside your “self.” Psychologists call this self-distancing, and examples (that you’ll soon learn about) include pretending you’re giving advice to a friend, journaling in the third person (and then examining the emotions that arise when you read what you wrote), meditating and reflecting on your own mortality.
- It helps you realize when your identity may be getting too interwoven with a specific activity, and that in some instances—writing a book, the first few months with a newborn baby, or trying to make an Olympic team, for example—your lack of balance may be excessive, but it can be OK because it’s time-bound. For some people, when you zoom in on any given day, week, month, or maybe even year, they don’t appear at all balanced. But when you zoom out and look across the totality of their lives, they are actually quite balanced and whole. This is the kind of balance to strive for.
- When it comes to living with passion, it’s not about balance. It’s about marrying strong harmonious passion with an equally strong self-awareness. Doing so trumps balance any day.
- Maybe the good life is not about trying to achieve some sort of illusory balance. Instead, maybe it’s about pursuing your passions fully and harmoniously, but with enough self-awareness to regularly evaluate what you’re not pursuing as a result—and make changes if necessary.
Those gems lead us to today’s Dadly Daily Declaration:
Practicing self-awareness allows you to more honestly evaluate and reevaluate the trade-offs inherent to living an unbalanced, passionate life. It ensures that you are taking the time to rest and recover so that you don’t burn out, and it also ensures that you are making conscious decisions about how you spend your time and energy, and thus decreases the chances that you’ll have regrets about what you did—and didn’t—do.
