Confrontation
I confront everything in my life. My weight, my emotions, my opinions, my thoughts, the actions that don’t serve me, and the company I keep (and the company they keep) to ensure I’m surrounded by persons that are more evolved than me in areas I’m not. There are many areas I’m not. Therefore, I’ve always taken it upon myself to confront things head-on with no excuses or apprehension.
This quality of mind has always come to me naturally without much thought, as small optimization is the only way in my eyes. I’ve gained mastery in several disciplines as a result. I’ve also gained a greater respect for deep introspection and a sense of going slow and steady for my nature (which is very hard and fast, as my dad observed in me as a child).
As a child, anything I wasn’t fully functional in was frustrating to me. It remained so until that frustration combined with hours of daily repetition turned into a lack of thought and a more fluid process. I derived satisfaction from that outcome because it brought me to a place where I could pick apart everything from small things I wasn’t doing well in contests to the large and arduous process of learning a new discipline. Through this uniquely intense process of mine, I discovered that most individuals (including fully grown adults) were not naturally critical of themselves.
It is important to not confuse insecurity/self-abuse with self-criticism. While the first yields exclusively harm and resentment — which is the quickest way to waste one’s life — the second can, in certain contexts, provide results outside of harm which is optimized performance. While no one will ever be perfect and see everything they need to see (a fact I’ve learned to accept), performance at an optimal level allows one to see clearly. This allows a mindset and behavior to be focused on the process versus the distraction of others’ fixed opinions. Focusing on process leads to a fully open mindset that resides in a constant confrontation of one’s opinions.
I have naturally been this way my whole life. While this behavior is a centerpiece of my Behavioral RNA™️ (so it all comes naturally), there are downsides. Some of the downsides are taking that self-criticism, frustration, and fast approach and unintentionally projecting it onto those I care about. That’s occurred because it comes so naturally to critique myself that I’ve lost perspective on the fact that it is not natural for most to confront uncomfortable things in general, much less in themselves. That passionate approach to instruction can lead to a lack of confidence in those I’ve instructed, which is antithetical to my reasons for putting 100% dedication, time, and devotion into instructing those I’ve chosen to assist.
These are just a few of the many aspects of being an internally confrontational individual. The upsides have spoken for themselves, both in my musical capacity/capability as well as my dynamic corporate career in business from which I retired at 33. Going into any of that isn’t helpful even to me. What I focus on nowadays isn’t changing who I am but, rather, improving how I choose to frame my self-analysis while asking myself the same relevant question with every self-critique: “is this helping you right now or hurting you?” Through this question, I work tirelessly through my flawed thinking to resolve my assessment and yield a forward-thinking thought process. While I have failed many times in my life in more ways than are worth explaining, I’ve failed hard and very fast. The positive of failing fast is that my natural ability to be hard and fast allowed me to make quick corrective adjustments to align my life’s infrastructure.
As many issues as we all have in this life, there is always one issue at its base. This one issue is different for every individual but in everyone, like our human spine, it branches off into other parts of our body/life. Most of us have so many issues that after a while we start truly believing that there is no solution to it all. But, like my father says, “there is always a solution.” He teaches that it’s about a frame of mind that will, in turn, frame the body and its function. Without the right frame of mind, there will always be problems past what is possible to solve because there is no confrontation of the problem.
Ever since I was a small child who’d get frustrated at the other players on my hockey team that couldn’t come close to keeping up athletically on the ice, my dad would say, “where there is a problem, there is always a solution.” As a child, I had absolutely no concept/clue of what and why my dad kept repeating this. This, of course, led to more frustration and sometimes even feeling like he didn’t understand that there was a problem I was going through. I couldn’t understand why he was always so calm and solution-oriented no matter how large the issue was. As history repeated itself, I was forced to recognize something I thought my father didn’t understand. I confronted this issue in my thought process, and evocative observation ensued. That led me to a helpful conclusion: confrontation is not about good or bad. It’s about how we choose to use it (like anything else in life).
Have you confronted yourself?
