Ep 86 How To Embrace Self-Awareness and Becoming Your Own Hero

What if there was more to mentorship than just finding that one perfect person to guide us? In this throwback episode with Gregory Diel, we reveal the untapped power of self-awareness and understanding our own identities beyond what society dictates. Together, we tackle the notion that one ideal mentor for every aspect of our lives is a myth and discuss how to seek influence and inspiration from various sources to truly grow.

As we embark on this journey of self-discovery, Gregory and I also delve into the realms of self-awareness and heroism. We discuss building confidence by showcasing our abilities rather than merely assuming we can do something, the dangers of arrogance and elevation, and the pitfalls of self-sabotage. By challenging cultural conditioning, we can gain a fresh perspective on the world and embrace self-acceptance. Listen in and learn how to become your own hero by standing up for yourself and living a life that brings you the utmost happiness. Join us for this insightful and transformative conversation with Gregory Diel.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Finding Your Own Mentorship
• 7:58 Self-Awareness and Heroism

Transcript

Gregory : 0:00

because life has so many dimensions, It's extremely unlikely you're going to meet one person who is the ideal mentor for every aspect of your life. So it's up to you to figure out what you need to figure out where you're going to get the influence, either from a person or an experience. But the point is not to just sit around and waiting for that magical mentor to show up before you initiate your journey. You're the one writing the story.

Mikita: 0:25

Hey there, i'm Makita, a small town girl with dreams who started a podcast with an old headset and a laptop at my kitchen table and made my dreams come true. On my podcast, time for Tea with Makita, we chat about living life unapologetically, on your terms, from career advice, entrepreneurship, relationships and everything in between. This is your one stop shop for real conversations and inspiration. If you're looking for connection, then you've found it here. Join me every Tuesday as we dive into those sometimes hard to have conversations. So grab your cup of tea or coffee and get comfy, because this is Time for Tea with Makita, and the tea is definitely hot.

Mikita: 1:11

Welcome back to Time for Tea with Makita. First of all, thank you so much for sharing your time, your space and your amazing energy with me In this Bicise episode. I am taking you back to one of my favorite podcast episodes with the one and only Gregory Diel, and we're talking about what it means to have a mentor, someone that we can look up to, and also about understanding who we are, despite what society tells us who we are. So let's dive into this conversation. It was just very it was nice to have that moment to realize that I am a lot more self-aware of where I'm at, what I like, the type of person I wanna be, the type of impact I wanna make into the world, knowing who that person is. I think this book kinda touched on that. I do know who I am, more than I thought I did.

Gregory : 2:08

Yeah, and for me at least, a big part of my struggle has been stepping away from who the world told me I was, which I think a lot of us is the first step we have to go through, because it's not like we're just blank slates until we figure out who we are. We have a lot of inherited ideas. We've lived a life. We grew up as children and became adults with rules that we learned to follow and ideas and associations about what we were supposed to be doing and supposed to care about. And sometimes those ideas are all right, sometimes they're good and be nice to each other. That's an idea we inherit from the world. That's a fine one. I keep that one with me.

Gregory : 2:48

But at the very least, even if they are good ideas, you have to be willing to question where they came from and why they are good ideas, because maybe some of the things that we accept as just automatic or innocuous could actually be severely limiting us in a lot of ways.

Gregory : 3:04

If for no other reason, they could be preventing us from realizing what we actually do care about. And I think you only actually figure that out by having a lot of potentially difficult experiences, but at the very least a variety of experiences where you can see, okay, i was deeply passionate about this thing and I was totally intolerant and I poured everything about this, you know, and after a while, after enough years of that, you start to realize there is a pattern to the kind of person I am and the way I respond to reality and the things that have a strong negative or a strong positive reaction in me, right, and so from that I can start to put together a map of the kind of person I really am and build my life around these principles I've realized about myself. But first I have to get away from what the world told me I should be like.

Mikita: 3:53

This book was very intentional, like everything in it, like it was set with intention behind it, and I think we all kind of look for mentors. As you try to like as you grow into like who you are, there's a you have a spot in there about like being a mentor or mentorship and looking for someone to kind of like guide you, because now you have all those good thoughts and you have this huge growth where you're like I'm gonna go here, but I need some guidance And sometimes you know you can. You can find a mentor that's like really embracing of hey, let me, yeah, i'm gonna show you what I know, or help you make this process easier, or a mentor that's kind of like Yeah, i really think you maybe should stay in this lane Have.

Mikita: 4:44

I mean, what has it been like for you? Have you had a mentor or someone that kind of died of you or maybe still does?

Gregory : 4:53

I've definitely had some good people in my life, some of whom are still in my life, some of them died, and but it's always been really difficult to find that one person. And I think that's that's one of the flaws of our mythology is that we expect what we need to come from just one perfect source. And I even say that in the book that it's kind of a mistake on our part to expect real life to happen the way mythology does, whether it's Star Wars or some other ancient story of heroism, because a story is a manufactured and concentrated version of reality where everything happens the ideal way that it can for the purpose of encapsulating the message. And so I didn't have an Obi-Wan Kenobi in the sense that there wasn't one person who came and said Gregory, this is the kind of hero you are, this is the kind of journey you're on, these are the kinds of struggles you're going to have, these are the kinds of choices you're going to have to make. Now, go and kill Darth Vader and blow up the Death Star, and then you're done Right And the story. That's usually what happens, because it helps the storytelling for Harry Potter to realize oh, he has to. You know, stop Voldemort from coming back and Avengers parents or whatever Right, that makes a really good story. You know what's supposed to happen, you know what the stakes are, you know what the outcome is supposed to be. Real life doesn't really work that way, but you can get those kinds of influence and bits and pieces from different experiences, from different people who might maybe recognize a certain faculty, a certain strength or a certain kind of struggle in you that they are uniquely well suited to address.

Gregory : 6:27

I had a guy when I was about 20, i met this 75 year old dude who ended up being a huge influence on entrepreneurship and business to me And he died two years after I met him. But just knowing him, those two years like completely changed my understanding of business and entrepreneurship and the role that would play in my life, just because he happened to be really well suited. He's thought about it the same way I did, but he had 50 more years of experience than me in it And I'm really grateful that I had that mentoring influence, even just for that short time in my life. But I wouldn't expect that person to also necessarily be the person to be like my love life mentor to tell me what kind of wife I should be looking for, or something else like that, because life has so many dimensions, it's extremely unlikely you're going to meet one person who is the ideal mentor for every aspect of your life. And even if you do, it's not like that person is obligated to play that role. Maybe they're busy, they're the things to be doing in their life. So it's up to you to figure out what you need to figure out where you're going to get the influence, either from a person or an experience or a fictional character, if that helps you, if you can take stories from a movie or a book or whatever and apply them because you see how they apply to real life. But the point is not to just sit around and waiting for that magical mentor to show up before you initiate your journey. You're the one. Thank you, writing the story. You are both the protagonist and the writer simultaneously, so you just have to go with what you have.

Gregory : 7:58

I'm someone who's traveled to a lot of different countries. I spent basically my whole 20s traveling to about 50 different countries, and some of the perspective that gives you on the cultural scale is you start to wonder why is it that almost everyone in this country or this part of the world thinks it is impossible to do this thing that everyone in this country or this part of the world just grows up doing by default. Is there a physical difference? No, they're all working with the same basic materials, the same laws of physics. Is it that these people are a lot smarter than these people? No, they're all fairly intelligent people. So what is the difference? It's simply because, in a variety of both explicit and implicit ways, people in this country have been receiving the message don't do this, don't do this, only do this, don't do that.

Mikita: 8:50

No, don't even think about doing that.

Gregory : 8:53

And people in this other country are like, yeah, do this, it's great, it's the greatest thing you'll ever do.

Mikita: 8:57

Why wouldn't you do?

Gregory : 8:58

this, you know, and it's just cultural conditioning and it's it's like, invisible to the people who are under the influence of it, because they don't have a perspective that things could even be different. It's just the way things are, and one of the hardest things in the world to do is to take an adult who's lived their whole life believing things have to be one way and opening their mind to the possibility no, it could be a whole bunch of other different ways. I mean, look at these other people. They do things totally differently. What is the difference between you and them? Nothing, except that they never inherited the same beliefs as you.

Gregory : 9:32

That is the, the essence of heroism Finding out what that thing is for you that is most important and doing whatever is necessary to align your life with it, did you? That's what confidence is. I know I am good at this thing. I know that I have a lot of knowledge about this and I'm perfectly secure in that knowledge. So I will make my future actions based around the assumption that I can do these things competently, whatever they are.

Gregory : 9:57

But then I, in the next two chapters, i went in the other two directions with arrogance and elevation. I defined that as having an artificially inflated sense of what you are capable of, based on nothing, just arbitrarily Like well, i'm me, so I must be the greatest person ever, the smartest, the most charming, the most handsome not based in anything real, not based in actual demonstration. That's the thing I put a lot of emphasis on. If you can demonstrate that something is true, that's how you build your confidence on it, not just because you want it to be true. And then, of course, the opposite cripplement and sabotage is when you lack self-confidence, even when you should have it, even when you can do something, but you don't believe that you can. You've inherited some kind of trauma that prevents you from accepting what is true about you. So those three stood out to me as like the totality of self-conceptions of what you could have, either one that is accurate to what you can actually do, which is the healthy one that you should strive for, one that is artificially inflated, which is very dangerous, and the one that is artificially deflated, which is equally dangerous, but in a different way. And it's funny because sometimes people I think they recognize what the danger in one extreme is Like some people will say, no, you shouldn't be overconfident, that's bad, obviously.

Gregory : 11:17

But they'll say but no, it's good to be humble and not to brag about anything, not to promote yourself and think you're better than other people, right, or they might say the opposite. They might say no, it's good to be confident, it's good to believe in yourself, it's good to think that you're invincible and can take over the world And they'll say that. But you should never limit yourself whatsoever. But you know newsflash. The reality is there are some things you can do and some things you can't do, and maybe those things change over time. You get better at certain things or you lose the ability to do other things. But the goal should always be to have as accurate as possible a conception of who you are and what you can actually do or can't do, because that's how you decide what actions to take, based on what you think will be successful. Yeah, rather than trying to do everything yourself instead of just what you're actually best suited to do.

Mikita: 12:02

It's easy to say, i want you know to be this person or I want to live this particular life, but when you're self-aware and you know who you are, it transcends into everything that you do. It helps you to be more intentional about how you want to show up in the world as well as the impact you want to make. And self-acceptance, i found, is key. And when we talk about being a hero, it's more than just putting on a cape and having some mystical, magical powers. It's about standing up even when everyone else is sitting down. It's about being that version of you that makes you the happiest. So if you want to read Gregory's book The Heroic and Exceptional Minority, please check the show notes. You can find it on Amazon. I would love to hear some of the moments that you felt like impacted you the most during this conversation. Don't forget to leave a review, and you can also email me at timeforteamakita at gmailcom. Until next time. Continue to stay healthy and happy.

Mikita: 13:21

That was definitely some hot tea. Don't forget to join me next week as we spill some more delicious tea. Until next time, namaste.