In this episode, Bill explores new ways to become aware of your biases and to create a better understanding of where those biases stem. Enjoy!
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Origination Point Podcast
In this episode, I’m going to start talking about the steps that I have taken to be able to bust and deconstruct my own biases. I’m going to share those with you as a strategy and as a way to go through each chapter of my book, Finding the Origination Point: Understanding Our Biases to Create a More Peaceful World. Before I get into this, I want to tell you why I started to do this work. The main reason is that when I was a young adolescent, my life was completely out of control. The behaviors, the actions, and the ways that I saw life would’ve never led me to where I’m sitting now. A lot of people see me now and go, “That’s pretty interesting. I can’t believe that’s true.” It’s true within myself as everyone else. We have what we would call a shadow or a dark side and the light.
Finding the Origination Point: Understanding Our Biases to Create a More Peaceful World
When I was young, I was fully engulfed in my shadow beliefs or my dark side. It was connected to all of these stories about who I was and how I didn’t want to truly acknowledge the impacts of my behavior. When I do this work, one of the questions I ask people is, “How would you define the characteristics or attributes of a biased person?” Most of the characteristics and attributes are things like being close-minded, discriminatory, bigoted, hurtful, demeaning, and unwilling to change. If you met and interacted with me when I was an adolescent between 13 and 20, you would’ve thought that I was all of those things because that is truly how I behaved. I was demeaning. I denigrated people. I didn’t care about myself and others.
I justified it by being a triggered victim where I said, “Poor me.” My parents got divorced. My dad beat me up. My sister died when I was young. Substance abuse was a part of my life. I almost got kicked out of high school. I had a revolving door into the juvenile hall until 17 and a half when a policeman stuck his finger in my face and said, “I’ll see you when you’re 18.” I had to start to self-reflect on what was going on in my life, what was I doing, and how do I get off this train. It was not a healthy thing. Throughout my life, I had created a collection of stories in my head that drove my behavior. A common thread in these stories was the ego-driven idea that I was a good and important person. If there was a problem, it was the other person’s problem.
I say that from the perspective of an ego-driven idea because when I was younger, my perspective on life was that it was all about me. When I was in a place of the world being all about me, I didn’t care about others. I didn’t care about the impact of my behavior and my words. I didn’t care about other people if I’m going to be honest. It showed up in my relationships. People didn’t like and trust me. I didn’t have a lot of friends. I was so unskilled that I made up story after story to explain away the problems. I was always the victim of my own stories because by remaining the victim, I could then blame other people for why I was the way I was. It meant that I didn’t have to look deeply at myself because as a victim, it wasn’t about me. It was about other people.
I convinced myself that I was right and everyone else was wrong. When I interacted with people when I was younger and it didn’t go very well, my full question was, “What is it about you that is creating a problem?” In other words, “What’s wrong with you? It had nothing to do with me?” Connected to all of that was a high level of negativity that I had in my life, growing up being verbally demeaned, physically beaten, excluded, and feeling not wanted by my own parents. On the other hand, I saw all of these lovely television shows. Growing up, that showed all of these beautiful families like Leave It to Beaver and Ozzie Nelson. For some of you, this is dating me and some of you may not even know what I’m talking about.
You can Google all of them. Essentially though, they were sitcoms of these lovely families where everyone got along with each other. The dad went to work and the mom stayed home. She always dressed fashionably. When the dad came home, dinner was on the table, and everyone talked about how their day was and the things that they went through. There was never any talk about somebody dying, being an alcoholic, or getting beat up. In my head, I made up this story like, “That’s what my family is like.” I thought I could tolerate all the negativity of my home life by pretending that my life was out of the children in the television shows and that we had a happy family. At the same time, my reality was completely the opposite.
I found that myself and others were all adept at creating stories and justifications for the many things that occur in our lives, especially when we feel that things in our lives are out of control. As I started thinking about myself, I knew that I had to figure out what reality was because the life that I was living was not the life of that television family where everyone was portrayed as loving, communicative, and supportive. As my siblings and my parents checked out of our own family, we were basically torn apart by all of these things that were happening. I continued to not want to look at it. The reason why I didn’t want to look at myself was that I knew how hurtful I was and how ugly my behavior was and I didn’t want to own it.
Origination Point: We’re all adept at creating stories and justifications for the many things that occur in our lives, especially when we feel that things are out of control.
I knew I was hurtful and demeaning to others because I was lashing out in an attempt to reduce my own pain. As I lived in that place and also had it be all about me from that ego-driven perspective, I didn’t even think that I had any work to do because I thought the world was a bad place. As I’ve engaged more and more in looking at myself, I had to shift over and start to look at, “How do I care about myself? How do I be compassionate? What is compassion?” When I was about twelve years old as my dad was hitting me one day with a board, I remember in my head saying, “I’m never going to let him see me cry again.” What I didn’t realize is when I shut down that emotion, I also shut down all of the feeling emotions. What I mean by that is that I shut down the idea of showing my dad how hurt I was.
What I didn’t realize is I also shut down the ability to be empathetic, compassionate, intuitive, or to have any of the emotions that a lot of you have. Through that process, I couldn’t feel empathy and compassion. I didn’t know what that even was. When we shut down our emotions, it has a ripple effect in terms of how we interact and see each other. It took me a long time into my middle twenties to realize that I was living a very ego-driven life. I was living a life that was hurtful toward others and if I continued to do this, I would either be dead in prison or an alcoholic. I started this journey because at 17 and a half, a policeman stuck his finger in my face and he said, “I’ll see you when you’re 18.” I knew that meant that he wanted to see me at eighteen and put me in jail.
Origination Point: When we shut down our emotions, it has a ripple effect on how we interact and see each other.
I knew that was not what I wanted. Starting the journey of self-reflection was the hardest step because the truth was I did not like my thoughts, my behavior, and myself. I had to start by creating a set of practices that I could do for 1 minute, 5 minutes, or 1 hour every day. When I started these practices, I even said something like, “I’m a good person. I have a good heart,” I did not believe it because my behavior was completely the opposite. To some of the earlier work that I’ve shared with you, if people were to judge me based on one behavior, they would’ve said, “He’s a loser. He is untrustworthy. He’s mean. I don’t want anything to do with that.”
The first step in this work is looking at ourselves through an honest lens or a self-assessment and thinking about, “What are the things that are happening in our life? What are the things, behaviors, and words that we’re using and the impact that they’re having?” For my practice, I had to ask myself specific questions and I had to create the space and a process to help me answer those honestly. Things like, “What is real? What do I need to do to live my life as a truly compassionate person? What does it mean to be compassionate?” I knew that as I started, my stories were reactive and they were based on my judgmental victim story.
Changing that narrative was probably one of the hardest things that I had to do because it was so embedded in my psyche about who I was. I was worthless. I would never amount to anything and never be successful. It was hard to change that. You couple that with this idea of blaming and shaming myself to the point that it paralyzed me from doing anything. I saw myself as a bad person. The people in my life, my immediate family, my friend circle, and the people that I met, I did the same thing. As long as I was judging, shaming, and blaming myself, nothing changed. Nothing got any different. I had to figure out what compassion and empathy look like.
The most challenging part is I had to embrace that which I didn’t like about myself. I had to embrace my anger because my anger was very volatile and hurtful. At thirteen years old, I told my dad, “If you ever touched me again, I will kill you.” I probably could have done it because I didn’t have any feelings or emotions like compassion or empathy. Fortunately, that never happened. It still was a very clear indicator of where I was in my life. The first step is looking at what’s called a self-assessment and focusing on our thoughts, behaviors, actions, and being honest. It was probably the hardest thing to do because in being honest, through my own self-assessment, I had to look at all of my behaviors, the ways that they impacted people, and the outcomes that they had.
It’s not through my story and my ego but through a realistic expression of what I did to other people. For example, I had a thought that people made me mad. My behavior was stand-off-ish and not willing to get to know others. My actions were interactions that did not go well and the outcomes were negative relationships. Another thought that I had was judging other people. I could judge people very quickly and righteously. My behavior was that I did not allow people to get close or I thought the worst of them. My actions were that I did not expose or open myself to others. The outcomes were no trust in others or myself to build relationships.
Another one of my thoughts was, “I’m a victim of other people’s actions.” My behavior through that thought was, “I behave as though other people can make me feel happy, sad, or other emotions through their actions.” My action to that was I acted sullen or disconnected until other people show me that they have my best interest at heart. Again, playing the victim. My outcomes were disappointments because my expectations were not met and I continue to distrust people. I’m sharing this with you as a first step to think about your own life and those things in your life that you want to deconstruct or bust out. They start with a narrative or a thought.
Origination Point: Think about your own life and think about those things in your life that you want to deconstruct or bust out.
As you go through this process, think about the narratives that are holding you back. “I won’t be successful. I can’t do this. They won’t like it. I’m not good enough. It’s not right.” Once you write those down, what is the associated behavior? What is the action that you take? What are the outcomes that you’re seeing? Not the outcomes that you want to see or the story that you’ve made up, but what’s real. That’s the first step. Until we can be self-aware and look at ourselves from an honest perspective, it’s hard to know what we even want to change. I didn’t know what I wanted to change until I started to do this self-assessment. As we go through the next few weeks, I’m going to offer you pieces of my book.
Start to process how your biases are impacting the relationships you have with yourself, with each other, and move from a place of being aware of when you're judging yourself and self-blaming and self-shaming. Share on XI’m going to encourage you to engage in dialogue with somebody that you trust and who loves you and cares about you. Start to process how your biases are impacting the relationships that you have with yourself and each other. Also, moving from a place of being aware of when you’re judging yourself, self-blaming, and self-shaming. As we go through this process, I would love to hear from you. Email me, reach out through social media like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and let me know how you’re doing. Send in questions because sometimes we’ll have opportunities to ask questions. Until next time, keep busting those biases. Have a great day and do your self-assessment.