UCWG 030: How Do Heroes Test Their Resolve On The Mantle Of Reality?

There comes a narrative turning point in the life of the person who makes their development their highest priority. When you find your internal motivation, your actions become immune to circumstance. But you can only reach this point through painful self-discovery.

Veronica Kirin is an entrepreneurial success coach for women, an anthropologist, and the creator of an upcoming book featuring the life lessons of the “greatest generation” who grew up before our present technological abundance. Veronica and Gregory embark on a journey of understanding why we act the way we do, and how we use the tools of our world to get what we want.

The new Wonder Woman movie tells the story of an idealistic hero whose motivations are faulty because she has no real world experience to test them against. By the end of the movie, after suffering great misery and having her motivations tested through trials, she realizes she now acts for a different reason. She isn’t acting to save other people for their sake or because they deserve it. She is acting because she has confidence in her beliefs that her standards for action are better, and she will uphold those standards no matter what changes around her. Nothing can destroy her now. She is internally invincible. She is a hero.

Emergency situations test us because they suddenly remove the external conditions we have grown dependent on for maintaining the illusion of our comfortable motivations. When we are uncomfortable, only our internal conditions remain. Your internal motivation must be rock solid to operate under any possible circumstances.

Self-doubt and humility keep you human. People have to know their weaknesses just as much as they know their strengths.

Boredom is the opposite of fear and curiosity. It is the indifference to the stimuli in your environment. Fear is the rejection, and curiosity is the desire for more.

Your weaknesses only matter if they stand in the way of your goals. They create struggle on the journey toward what you care about. Abilities only matter when you decide they do. When you are lacking a natural faculty, you can compensate with analysis and adaptation.

We all rely on mental strategies and physical tools to accomplish what we want and make up for our weaknesses. You must adapt to the toolset that makes you category of actions comfortable. We are spoiled by our physical tools because we grow with it, so we take it for granted. Are you always using the best possible tool in any situation.

People would rather never try something new than risk the discomfort of being bad at it for a time, and that shame is there greatest weakness of all. Shame can only exist when we compare ourselves to a standard someone else has given us. This is why children have so much less shame and so much more enthusiasm for trying new things. They have no other standards. Curiosity is gradually replaced by habit and routine as we age.

You need passion to break out of the normality of your routines. Passion can look like many things besides curiosity and enthusiasm. Passion can be deeply negative, a righteous kind of anger. When conditions are comfortable, rely on your curiosity and enthusiasm to drive your actions. When conditions are uncomfortable, when things have started to go wrong, rely on anger and other negative emotions to drive you forward.

The purpose of acting on a negative emotion is to reconcile the emotion as quickly as possible. You want to change the conditions which urgently created these bad feelings. The goal of positive emotions is to prolong them as long as possible by continually feeding them with new experiences.

Every work of art, regardless of the medium, exists to foster a new emotion in the viewer. It is to make people think or feel differently than they did before.

If you lack the emotional capacity to use your entire toolkit of emotions, you will also be unable to perceive of the world in a specific way when certain emotions are necessary to be accurate. Practice your ability to act in emergency settings to develop your emotions and hone your tools.

Things mentioned:

Veronica Kirin: https://veronicakirin.com/

Untold Stories book by Veronica Kirin: http://untoldstories.life   

@storiesofelders