The aphorisms of TWD: The second one

Today’s aphorism has to do with Word (Consistency):

• What you do is who you are.

Let’s look at this first from the perspective of someone other than yourself. I know that defining yourself by what someone else thinks is foolish, I’m just doing so to illustrate some points.

Oops. My bad.

Here’s a common scenario. Imagine I’m a nice, decent human being (it’s not that far off, honest). I’m preoccupied one day as I’m driving home and I change lanes without checking my blind spot as well as I could. The driver I have cut off in the other lane has to brake quickly to avoid a collision. I’m mortified at my blunder. The other driver is angry. This is the only encounter they’ve ever had with me but now they know who I am and how I drive. As far as they’re concerned I am a menace behind the wheel and probably a real jerk, too.

People judge you by your behavior, by what you say and do. It is all they have to form their opinion of you. They can’t read your thoughts. So to someone else what you do is who you are.

Can’t they see what their problem is?

Have you ever noticed how easy it is to solve someone else’s problems? This propensity to judge others by their behavior is why it seems so easy. All you see is the behavior. When you look at your own life it’s a little more complicated. After all, you know what you are trying to accomplish with your behavior. You know what you intend to achieve by doing what you’re doing.

Generally, you will judge yourself by your intentions and judge others by their actions. This makes perfect sense because you have no idea what they are trying to do you only see what they are actually doing. For yourself, though, what you are trying to do is apparent. “I’m a good driver. I just made a mistake. “

A fresh perspective.

Which brings us to the aphorism and your perspective on yourself. To increase your integrity and discover who you really are look exclusively at what you do.

It was put to me sarcastically, “If you are what you do and you don’t, you aren’t.” To which I reply, “Exactly.”

The sarcasm was meant to imply that if you identify who you are with what you do that’s a mistake. What then are you basing your identity on? Your thoughts? Your possessions? Your achievements?

Possible criteria of identity.

If you base who you are on just your thoughts and they are different, perhaps better, than your behavior you have a disconnect happening. You hold a double standard. You are rationalizing what you are trying to do even if that’s not what you are doing. “I don’t want to identify myself with what I do because what I do is not consistent with what I intend to do. Since I mean well that’s what counts. What I actually do is irrelevant.”

If you base who you are on your possessions you have fallen into a trap. Now your possessions own you. You will need to protect, maintain, and upgrade the symbols of who you are. And if someone makes off with them or destroys them have they destroyed you?

If you base who you are on your achievements and you don’t achieve very much, what then? Only one wins the race. Are all the rest losers?

Maybe you base who you are on your looks or the physique you’ve built. If so age will become a factor and who you are will begin to deteriorate.

The touchstone.

These are only some of the possibilities. I always bring everything back to the only thing I have control over: my thoughts, my words, and my deeds. If I base my identity on what I have absolute control over my chances of finding satisfaction and peace of mind are greatly increased.

This aphorism is not to be used to beat yourself up. Use it to be objective with yourself. Understand that what you do is who you are, to others and yourself. On some level you are being consistent with your Self-Identity. You may say you want to stop eating donuts but there you go again putting another pack in your grocery cart. Look at your behavior. It doesn’t lie, or rationalize, or exaggerate. All it does is show you what you need to work on. When you have changed who you are you will see it in your behavior. And when you change your behavior you are changing who you are.

We have looked at the process of Act As If as it’s used naturally. There is a way to use it consciously to effect change that ties in powerfully with your Self-Identity. We’ll explore this fully in a future post. I’ll briefly say here that when you “act as if” that is how you actually are in that moment. When you incorporate this into your Self-Identity you are purposefully changing who you are.

As for me and my driving, I obviously wasn’t as good a driver as I thought. Since that incident I have done my best to be more aware when changing lanes. I haven’t done anything like that again so it seems I have changed.