What are the limits of your sense of self and how do you go beyond them?

What are the limits of our senses of self?

This is the question that arises today and ask, as I sometimes do, what wants to be written? 

I caught myself wrestling with one - a limit of my sense of self - this week. I was asked a question by someone that I'd been afraid of being asked. I found my reaction slipping, being hijacked, in a way it hasn't for a while. A way that used to happen a lot more before I broke my Twitter compulsion and before I grew more into a space of trust. 

The question was sensitively asked, other than perhaps the odd sentence, but all it took was that one sentence to almost, almost make me spike up and push back. 

I have been thinking often over the last few years about how we change our minds. About the value of that. With the voices of Brené Brown and Adam Grant and others ringing in my ears, I tried to breathe. But still the message rattled through my thinking for 24 hours or more.

The limit of my sense of self was there, asking: are you really someone who changes their mind? Who is, even, open to changing it? 

And it turned out in this moment that I was, just. With all the work I had done to open my awareness, to accept that I - like everyone - am sometimes wrong. That, in fact, most of the things I used to think I now believe are wrong.

But the pain of shifting, of changing, of expanding the limits of my sense of self was there for me to see. It was there in the moment, waiting for me.

These, of course, are the moments of Resistance. The limits of our senses of self are all the things we know are good for us but we don't set out to actually do. 

The diets, the exercise, the meditation. The learning, the growing, the loving. The trusting, the opening, the closing. The saying yes or the saying no. 

All those things we know are good for us, but won't be nice. Won't taste good. But will be good. 

Those are the things just beyond the limits of our sense of self. And our current self won't want to step over that limit, because if we do, it will cease to exist, transcended and included in our new sense of self but also undoubtedly gone, changed beyond measure. 

But the complexity of the challenges facing you in your life are asking this of you: step beyond the limits. 

As one of my clients said, learning is like compound interest. It is the best investment you can make because wherever you go you will take yourself with you. And so, wouldn't you want the biggest, most flexible, skilful, noble sense of self you can have? 

But that requires sacrifice. It requires doing the right thing, not the pleasant thing.

It requires knowing who you want to become, knowing the mentors you are following, and, when given the choice, responding as the biggest, most flexible, skilful, noble version of yourself that you can. 

It requires finding the limit of your sense of self, sensing the unknown outside it and stepping over the threshold, over the current final frontier and into the wilderness. 

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This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online. 

The first 12-Minute Method Book - How to Start When You're Stuck - is out now!