From Pride to Vulnerability: The Journey to True Self-Awareness and Healing

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Insights for the Matt's Mindset Podcast drawn from: Insights for the Matt's Mindset Podcast drawn from: ⁠Tim Ferriss⁠, ⁠Sam Harris⁠, ⁠Neil de Grasse Tyson⁠, ⁠Dr. Brene Brown⁠, ⁠Dr. Andrew Huberman⁠, ⁠Dr. Matthew Walker⁠, ⁠Jonathan Haight⁠, Roland Griffiths, PhD, ⁠Niall Ferguson⁠, Chris Palmer, MD, ⁠Dr. Michio Kaku⁠, Noah Feldman, Emile Durkheim, Stanley Milgram, Jean Piaget, B.F. Skinner, Abraham Maslow, Carl Jung ⁠Bill Gurely⁠, ⁠Jason Calacanis⁠, Jim Collins, Aryeh Bourkoff, Balaji Srinivasan, Ed Thorpe, ⁠Chamath Palihapitiya, David Sachs, David Friedberg⁠, ⁠Howard Marks⁠, ⁠Ray Dalio⁠, ⁠Naval Ravikant⁠, Peter Theil Rick Rubin, ⁠Todd McFarlane⁠, ⁠Bill Burr⁠, Terry Crews, ⁠Hugh Jackman⁠, Matthew McConaughey ⁠James Clear⁠, Stephen Pressfield, ⁠Seth Godin⁠, ⁠Susan Cain⁠, ⁠Morgan Housel⁠, ⁠Jocko Willink⁠, Ayn Rand, Ray Bradbury, Aldous Huxley, Friedrich Nietzsche, Marcus Aurelius, ⁠Tamara Levitt⁠, Soren Kierkegaard, Jean Paul Satre, James Joyce, ⁠Malcolm Gladwell⁠

Show Notes:

Introduction

• Greetings to listeners

• Quote from "Ego is the Enemy" by Ryan Holiday

Discussion

• Anecdotal experience of trying to understand what the quote meant

• The concept of Superbia, which is Latin for pride

• The difference between pride and confidence and how suppressing parts of ourselves can lead to a "shadow self", as defined by preeminent psychologist, Carl Jung

• The reccomendation to acknowledge the shadow and checking in on it to create a more peaceful inner life, based on the wonderful Documentary "Stutz",

Transcript:

Hello, beautiful people. This is Matthew Harris, your friend who helps you to stand on the shoulders of giants so you can achieve your dreams.

Today we’re going to start off with a quote from Ryan Holiday. Ryan is an American author, modern Stoic, public-relations strategist, and host of the podcast The Daily Stoic and one of my favorite people. Prior to becoming an author, he served as the former director of marketing and eventually an advisor for American Apparel.

The quote, which is also the title of one of his books is “Ego is the enemy" The obstacle is the way.

Even after reading this book, I often pondered what he meant. Ego is the enemy is easy enough to understand. But the obstacle is the way. What the hell could that mean?

Aren’t we always taught to lean into what we’re good at? To go with the flow? To optimize around what we are already successful at.

I wrote a story once called Superbia. It was actually the pilot for a TV show. Superbia is the Latin word for pride, so it seemed fitting as the plot centered around the conceit that life is just a game and suffering was the point system. And once you suffered enough, and learned all you could on earth, you graduated to Superbia.

Superbia was the next level of the game. And rather than the point system being based on suffering, it was based on a point system of pleasure. And there were seven rooms you could choose from, to spend the next epoch of your existence. Pride, Envy, Gluttony, lust, wrath, greed, and sloth.

The protagonist, Case Compton, picks pride, because it’s undersold. Everyone else seems to be enraptured by the temptations of lust, greed, sloth, and even envy. But it turns out Pride is where you go when you are arrogant enough to think you can create your own universe and do a better job of it than God did. Which is what you are doing when you are prideful.

You are thinking, if they would only put me in charge, things would be better. If I could only control everything, things would be perfect. If things would just go the way I want for once, I would be happy.

And Case quickly finds out that maybe you don’t want control. Maybe it's better to be in harmony with what is. Maybe things are perfect just the way they unfold. Maybe you can be happy with what is, rather than taking out a savings bond for happiness which will mature in five years.

Pride is my sin, or was, I’d like to think. Prideful people are not confident and confident people are not prideful.

True confidence comes from going through challenges and learning lessons. It comes from self-awareness and heartbreak and messiness and vulnerability. It comes from the at-bats and the mistakes.

A confident person is someone who knows they have faults, chooses to love themselves anyway, and moves through life with authenticity.

A prideful person refuses to acknowledge they have faults, suppresses parts of themselves to present this façade of perfection, and scorns the mistakes and imperfections of others as a result.

As the preeminent psychologist Carl Jung would say, they suppress their shadows, which manifests into a shadow self. This shadow self, which lurks in the depths of your subconscious, is understandably angry and indignant that you yourself have rejected and confined it out of sight. Never to be seen, heard, accepted, or loved. Chained in a basement to be lost and forgotten.

If you’ve seen the movie “Us” written and directed by Jordan Peele, think about the tethered clones that lurk beneath the surface, forced to play out what the conscious mind wants to do but unable to act out any of their feelings and desires.

And so this shadow part of ourselves never really goes away. It just lurks and every now and then, makes a appearance. It could be a display of repressed anger or a regression of immaturity. Promoting self sabotaging behabior toward a desire or goal your conscious mind is actively working towards. Or manifesting as physical health issues. The body keeps score.

So what should you do? In the documentary Stutz, Jonah Hill films discussions with his therapist, Phil Stutz. It's honestly a wonderful watch, check it out on Netflix.

But Phil recommends a simple solution. Acknowledge the shadow. The shadow is all the parts of yourself you wish weren’t there. All the desires you wish you didn’t feel. All the feelings you wish would just go away. Any intrusive thoughts you may have. It's everything you wouldn’t want another person to see.

So what do you do? Acknowledge that it's there. Acknowledge that for your whole life, there has been the person you have shown to the world, and the person you have hidden. Just like in Us, there is a person who gets to feel the sunlight on their skin and gets to feel loved and respected, and there is a person who is locked away in the depths of the subconscious, unloved, unseen, despised, and disparaged.

So just acknowledge your shadow. Ask how they are. Ask how they are feeling. The first time you do this, they will probably be pretty angry. You’ll feel some negative emotions. But the more you check in on them, asking them how they are, letting them know that you love them and accept them for who they are, the less ruckus they make. The more you make their inner home a nicer place to dwell in, the less they want to escape and cause issues in your conscious mind.

This is what people mean when they give that esoteric advice to just “love yourself”. It’s not enough to love only the parts of yourself you want the world to see. You have to love every part of yourself. You don’t have to show every part of yourself to the world. In fact, I would advise against it. We’re socialized for a reason.4

But you, yourself have to love every part of yourself, including the parts you wish weren’t there.

And that’s something prideful people can’t do. Pride and shame are really just two sides of the same coin. Pride is often just an overcompensation for the shame one feels.

I really should have just gone to therapy when I was in college, but I was too proud. I thought nothing was wrong with me. That I didn’t need it. But that’s not really what therapy is about. It’s not split between those who need it and those who don’t.

It’s not like you don’t get a physical because you feel healthy. Like if someone said “I’ve never gotten a physical because I feel great,” you’d call them an idiot. Preventive medicine is important and at times crucial.

The author Brene Brown puts it best when she says, "Curiosity is the skill of midlife," and by midlife, I just mean the period that follows adolescence.

After 26, your brain is pretty much developed, and now it’s time to see what you want to keep and what you want to heal.

And I had a lot of healing to do, it turns out.

Because I was a "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" kind of guy. I was an "If you have time to complain, you have time to do something about it" kind of guy.

I was a high achiever who was terrified of intimacy because intimacy meant showing my shadow to someone, or at the very least, risking them seeing it. So I instead opted for short-term relationships that I knew couldn’t go anywhere, or I had no intention of having them go anywhere.

So as a result, I hurt people, and I got hurt. Especially when I ran across someone who I really did like. Because I wasn’t immune to falling in love. I just didn’t have the mental equipment for being in relation to someone, even someone I was in love with.

I was hyper-independent and high-achieving, so when I fell in love with someone, it was a surrender to what I considered superlative values. She, because there have been several, was truly special in my eyes. And I didn’t know how to act or be.

And I think that’s a general problem with our generation anyway, is that we have such a plethora of options, whether it’s from dating apps or Instagram. Our generation of men has probably seen, from porn, more unique naked women than all of our ancestors combined. Probably more naked women than Genghis Khan. But that’s not a problem anyone’s talking about. 10,000 years of evolution rewritten in the course of a keystroke.

And beyond that, the tragic truth is that people are starting to optimize in the courtship phase for a “whoever cares less is the one who has the power” type of situation because most people who are single in this generation have both been in the position of being strung along and been in the position of stringing along, to utilize your options. Because as I’ve said, you have all these options. Or at least, the illusion of all these options.

But a true relationship based on love and respect is also based on surrender. So love and pride and control are really mutually exclusive. You really have to decide what you’re going to base your relationship on.

So whatever issue or negative cycle you’re struggling with in your life, let me give you permission to heal. Shelve your pride and own that you need to heal. It's okay.

It could be therapy. It could be confiding in friends or a loved one. Or it could just be three months that you take for yourself to really identify the baggage that you’re carrying around.

You’ll be surprised what’s still there. And if you’re carrying anything that you don’t need to be, just know that it’s not your fault, and it’s okay to put it down.

Examine how pride may be holding you back in your life.

Or examine what your sin is. And by sin, all I mean is your negative cycle.

Because that’s what sin is, all religiosity aside. Sins are negative patterns of behavior that do not serve us in the long run. They often hurt ourselves or others even if they provide the illusion of pleasure or power.

So examine what yours might be and allow yourself the grace to begin to let it go.

Light and love. Go in peace to love and serve.

Outro Song: Good Example by R3HAB, Andy Grammar