Dropping The Roles You Play

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLIwNF_JTJg

Word count:2633

hey this is Leo for actualised org and in this episode I'm going to talk about the roles you play and how to drop them have you noticed yet that people tend to live their life acting out roles acting out roles that are obvious to everyone around them but are opaque to themselves and of course when I talk about people I'm talking about you you're doing this you're playing a role without knowing or being conscious of the fact that you're playing this role and that this role is actually a contrivance so what I want to help you to do is to see that in yourself and possibly to start to move towards dropping it just outright dropping it so that you can live more authentically so what do I mean by roles well I'm going to give you a long list of many examples of roles so you'll have a very clear idea but in the abstract what I mean by a role is sort of like this costume that you put on this character that you are that you somehow picked up probably in your childhood or your teenage years or early adulthood and now you're wearing this costume and you've confused this costume for your authentic personality in the same way that you have goth kids remember the goth kids in high school maybe you were one of them hopefully not but you probably know that stare is that right so we got the goth kids now these got kids they do their goth thing they put on their goth makeup and they wear their goth clothes and they think that they're cool and whatever they're different but if they're unique but when you look at it it just seems so contrived it seems so silly and pointless it seems like a bunch of apes at the zoo who have been rummaging through some you know circus costumes and have put them on and now they're walking around in a tuxedo is like an ape walking around a tuxedo thinking that it's now this hotshot ape when really it's as absurd as an ape can get that's what it is so I want to help you to see that in yourself imagine if you will an alien looking down on the Earth from outer space and he looks at the entire narrative of your life and he can clearly spot the role that you are playing what would that be for you can you start to suspect what your own contrivances might be and how silly they are and yet how seriously you take them some of these roles could be personal some of these rules could be cultural some of these roles could be related to career or to business or to family life and so forth there's a lot of different subcultures and sub subcultures that we find throughout Society and a lot of that you're going to see in all these different stereotypes that I'm going to throw at you here I've taken a while to brainstorm a big big list of roles a lot of stereotypes a lot of research went into this some of these are fun so it's going to be a fun episode because mostly I'm just going to be listing all these roles now what I want you to do is I want you to sit there and to listen to these and even though there's going to be a lot of them and you might have various judgments that come up and you can probably spot these roles in a bunch of your friends and family members and co-workers and so forth people you've known what I really want you to do is to listen for that one or two or three roles that really sticks for you that you feel that you've been embodied for a good chunk of your life and what you should be looking for is just sort of like aha moment was like oh yeah that's it that's the role line playing you got me that's exactly what I've been doing but I wasn't conscious that I was doing it I hadn't put a label on it yet I hadn't realized that there is this role I thought that that's just how life is I thought that that's what it means to be a human being but no it's just a role so listen close as I go down this list this is one the perfectionist the rebel or the iconoclast or the nonconformist mr. macho or the alpha male this one's very common or mr. cool or mr. Shaw offer mr. James Bond the bad boy or the badass the winner the loser the moocher or the Hagler or the penny pincher the player the nice guy or the nice girl or the doormat the victim or the Wounded Bird or the mistreated one the abused one the whiner the know-it-all or the smartass or the whippersnapper the professional with a respectable businessman the responsible one the dependable one the mysterious one the cynic the skeptic the socialite the attention or the show-off the drill sergeant or the rule keeper or the enforcer of the law the Crusader the martyr the shy guy or the Wallflower the nerd or the eek the Care Bear or the bleeding-heart the vixen or the the version the tormented artist or the starving artist the achiever the guru the free spirit the team player the addict the vegan the Bohemian the environmentalist the rationalist the scientist the philosopher the libertarian the anarchist the intellectual of the mastermind the knight in shining armour the grumpy old man the desperate housewife the soccer mom the Alpha businesswoman the loan Wolffe the prima donna or the drama queen or the diva the up or the black sheep in the family or the prodigal son the golden boy the trihard the gentleman or the lady the good Christian or the born-again Christian the sinner the celebrity the hero the villain the oppressed minority the misunderstood genius the conspiracy theorist the exemplary mother or father or the opposite of that which is the terrible mother or father the critic or the snob the outcast the Guardian and defender of truth the savior of humanity or the chosen one the Joker the underdog the slick salesman or the wheeler and dealer the creative genius the schemer the hippie the trickster the hipster of the avant-garde the artsy fartsy artist the frat boy the gym rat the jock the hotshot the airhead the alcoholic the clown the New Ager or the flower child the idealist the rags to riches story the metrosexual the flamboyant gay the confused and tormented homosexual the preacher tending to his flock the healer or the shaman the jolly fat guy the patriot the American the Arab the Jew the Hindu so that's the list of some of the roles did any standout for you if they did good jot that down keep it in your mind it's a gut feeling you have of like oh I've been caught it's like I spent the last 10 or 20 years playing this role and now it's like wow I've been caught that's what I've been doing that's exactly what I did I've been playing the role of the perfectionist in my relationships in business in my art in my family I was the perfectionist the whole time or it's like no I've been playing the role of the wounded bird in my relationships I was the wounded bird I keeping the wounded bird with my you know everything I do is my career it's like I'm always the victim someone's always hurting me someone's always doing something to me someone's always sabotaging me I'm the wounded bird or like with my health I'm the one did bird I've been having just like health problems over and over and over and that's turned into an identity that I now embody and I that I actually feel as myself and I lived that way the question I have for you is who were you before these roles before you picked up this role and you did pick it up you weren't born with it you picked it up in fact what I'd like you to do right now is just for a few seconds close your eyes think of this role whichever role that you feel you embody the most in your life pick one and now go back to a time in your life before the role was adopted and remember how different life was before the role let some of those memories those early memories come back to you what was it like when you were living without any rolls can you remember can you pinpoint the moment when you started to adopt this role that you play there was a moment where it started to come into existence and it was still new you had to create it you have to put on this costume and at first it probably didn't feel quite right didn't feel authentic but over time you just put it on over and over and over again until you forgot that it was a costume to begin with okay go ahead and open your eyes I'll have a worksheet for you that you can use to go deeper and to really explore this but what I just want to say here is that why do you need this role what function does it serve could you start to let it go what would your life look like if you did let it go who would you become the key theme of personal development work is shedding the artificial layers the taking off the masks taking off the costumes recognizing our own contrivances and calling them out for what they are and sorting that out for more authentic personalities from our authentic motivations are authentic values and if you had a healthy childhood then that's something you can use as an anchor point if your childhood was healthy you still probably adopted roles just later on in life maybe it's in your teenagers in middle school maybe in high school but an elementary school you're probably relatively pure and that's something you can come back to and anchor yourself in that in those memories to remember like oh yeah that's what it was like to be somewhat of an authentic human being and now I got corrupted by all this nonsense by society by my parents and so forth now if you did not have a relatively normal childhood and your childhood was traumatic and abusive and that means you adopted a role very early on and in fact your earliest memories might be so toxic and distorted that already you don't know what it's like to feel that authentic pure clean slate that you started life with right you might not have those memories in which case you're in a more difficult situation now that doesn't mean you can't drop your role you can still drop your role it'll just take more work because you don't have those memories as an anchor point that you can go back to all right you can still drop the mess okay but this is just something that I want you to be aware of the way that you drop a role is first and foremost of just becoming aware of it and just seeing how artificial and contrived it is until it's like you're that goth kid in high school who's putting on all this goth makeup and stuff and then one day you realize like wait a minute why the am I doing this this is so silly and stupid unlike that putting on a tuxedo walking growling he's James Bond thinking that he's the ladies man right when he really is just an eighth in a tuxedo when it becomes that transparent to you you can see the ridiculousness the absurdity of it then it'll naturally just kind of wither away and fall off on its own but to help you do that I do have a worksheet so this is the end of the episode it's going to be short and simple all I really wanted to do is just share this list with you but do the worksheet because the worksheet have some powerful questions and I want you to really think about what these questions are pointing you to do a little bit of journaling and brainstorming about this so that you can get very clear about the in authenticity that you act out every day in your life so make sure you do that worksheet all right that's it I'm signing off please click the like button for me post your comments down below share this UPS with a friend and lastly come check out actualize that runs right here this is my website I have some cool stuff on there I have free resources through the forum there's a new blog that I recently launched which has some more advanced and miscellaneous insights that I don't get to share with you via the videos so check all that out but most importantly just stay tuned stay tuned for more and start doing the work that this theory is pointing you to what I share with you is largely theory I'm a conceptual kind of guy and also because of the format that we're in we're talking that's all I can really do to you is just talk so of course it's going to be all theoretical what I need you to do if you really like the theory and if you're falling because you like some of the advanced concepts I'm sharing with you and they're kind of interesting and fascinating and maybe you're a philosophically - have a person here's what you got to do you got to start doing the work do the work you can't just listen to Theory all the time if you're a fan of the theory and you're a conceptual person like me and you're philosophically minded person like me the cost that you need to pay is to do the work that's the cost of being a philosopher you cannot just be a philosopher sitting on your ass listening to theory all day and reading a bunch of books right that way lies a lot of misery and ultimately self-destruction that way lies what they call crazy fox then jaco's then you're going to turn into a crazy despicable Fox that's what's going to happen you can have all this knowledge all this theory but then you're not going to be able to actually embody it and it's going to slowly destroy you from the inside and you're going to wreak havoc in your life and with everybody else around you so be careful if you really love the theory then honor the theory by putting it into practice and then that will create more space for more advanced theory in the future and in the future all be introducing a lot of really cool but subtle and advanced concepts that you will not be able to follow unless you do the work now so start laying the practical foundation and then from that it's going to be like we're building a pyramid or a ziggurat right or being full building layer upon layer upon layer with this work so if you really like the subtle stuff then get the basics down handle the fundamentals then you can have your dessert you