Help Moving Through Stage Green

[emenasche]

I estimate myself to be roughly around stage green. I have a sense of my life purpose and am working towards that, but also I can easily be triggered into black and white thinking, fantasies about the perfect morning routine and other stage orange personal development holdups. Currently I’m struggling with the idea that nothing I do really matters. I’ve spent years exploring different ways of living and different life philosophies but in the end all of them are eventually unsatisfying and as Leo states I don’t know what criteria to judge them by. I hear his point on efficacy/practicality being a stage yellow way of valuing different approaches but I’m not bought into that yet. I can feel my mind clinging to the idea that there is a one right way (heavily trauma informed). Curious to hear perspectives on this, I imagine many in the community are or have been at a similar place in their journey.

[Basman]

If I was you, I'd start by making clear and concisely what exactly your hang-ups are and format your text. Reading of what you've written, it sounds like you struggle with:

• Perfectionism around habits.
• A sense of meaninglessness.
• Simplistic, black and white thinking tendencies.

It's hard for me to read clearly what exactly you are trying to communicate when you aren't very clear and concise about what exactly you need.

But trying anyway (and based on the title), I wonder if you simply lack experience. In my own experience, the sense of going in circles comes from when I try too hard to create results without clearly defining goal as well as actionable steps. Just blindly following a sense of "self-improvement". It's easy to get lost in the sauce.

For me, developing my critical thinking skills has been an important part in making me feel less ridicolous as a person. That involves weighing the efficacy of things, truth, biases and the relativity that comes with the complexity of life. It requires an openness to learning and an awareness of ones own tendencies to want to jump to a conclusion. 

It allows me to better process how I think and more accuratelly assess the information I'm inundated with. I hold a habit of questioning the information and ideas I'm presented with instead of simply believing or not believing. For example with Leo, I take most of his content with a grain of salt and I don't (or atleast try) to not complicity just accept all that he says. This approach makes me an active participant of my world view. This in turn allows me to act in a way that is more integritous to me. I help myself by thinking for myself.