Systems of Self

You are a system of systems. Biological, nervous, emotional, cognitive, behavioral, all running at once and shaping what you experience, how you act, and what your life produces.

This episode introduces a different way of understanding the self. Not as a single identity trying to get it together, but as infrastructure. A set of interdependent systems that determine how you feel, how you think, how you behave, and what your life becomes over time.

This is a reframing. One that asks you to move beyond mindset and begin to understand, coordinate, and lead what is already running.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:01

I'm Ashley and this is Dear Sovereign Self, my audio journal on the way I walk through life, practicing sovereignty, living from truth, not wound, and choosing alignment over self-abandonment. Here's today's entry.

SPEAKER_01 0:17

If you've been listening to the show for a while, you know that I have been sick at least a handful of times this winter, and I am just gonna go ahead and throw her under the bus. I have a toddler, and it's absolutely her germs. Okay, I never get sick, knock on wood, but she is one and a half and she's starting preschool soon, so this is actually just the beginning of it. Uh so consider this your pre-warning about the quality of my voice over these next few years, I guess. But it did force me to notice something. Because my voice is my instrument now. This show depends on it. And every time I get sick, it doesn't just affect how I feel, it literally affects whether I can record, which affects whether the episode goes out, which affects the consistency of the entire project. And that made something very clear to me. This isn't just about being sick, this is about systems. Because the show doesn't run on my voice, it runs on the system that produces my voice and the system that produces all the parts of the show to make sure that it gets to you, dear listener. The system of how I manage my time, the system of how I manage my energy, the system of how I manage my capacity, all of those systems are sitting on top of something deeper. The systems that make me, my body, my nervous system, my attention, my behavior, all of it. And if one of those systems is off, the whole thing starts to wobble at best. Start to get honest about something. I've been thinking about myself, like I'm one thing, one person trying to be consistent, trying to show up, trying to get it all together. But that's not actually what I am. I am a system. I'm actually a system of systems, and so are you. And this is important because this is not a mindset shift. Your mind is not the primary lever here. We spend a lot of time, in my opinion, trying to think differently, reframe things, shift perspective. I'm not saying that doesn't matter, but we are way too overindexed on the mind and not nearly anchored enough in the body. You're trying to solve systemic problems with thoughts, and it doesn't work. Because your life is not built in how you think. So your mindset shifts are not you starting from zero. You are starting from a fully operational system that is already doing things on your behalf. And those systems are not separate, they're interdependent. When your immune system is taxed, your energy drops, right? When your energy drops, your behavior changes. When your behavior changes, your output changes, which is exactly what I experienced. I didn't just feel sick, my ability to execute collapsed. Because a foundational system, a few actually, were compromised. And that's the part people skip. You don't override your biology, you build on top of it. So if your foundation is unstable, everything above it will reflect that. So now let's zoom up one level because it's not just your body that's running, your nervous system is constantly deciding whether you feel safe. Your emotional system is signaling what matters, your cognitive system is interpreting everything that's happening, and all of that is happening before you consciously decide anything. So when you say things like, I just need to think differently, what you're missing is this. You don't think in isolation, you think from within a system state. And I know that sounds fancy, but stick with me. If your system feels threatened, your thoughts will reflect that. If your system feels safe, your thoughts will reflect that. We talked about this in the nervous system entry. You are experiencing life through your systems. Your thoughts feel like the source, but they're actually the output. Okay. And it is common for us to focus on behavior, right? Discipline, consistency, habits, trying to fix what they do, but behavior is downstream. It is the result of everything happening above it. So when you say, I need to be more disciplined, what you're actually saying is I need a different system producing my behavior because you don't have a discipline problem. You have a system that makes discipline feel unsustainable. So no amount of motivation, no amount of mindset work is going to override a system that is misaligned. You might get short bursts, but you won't get sustainability because sustainability is systemic. So this is the moment where you wake up, right? Because the systems that were running while you were asleep, all of your biological cognitive systems that were running, they don't stop running when you open your eyes. They just start then producing behavior. You wake up, your systems are already running, you move through your day, you respond to things, you avoid things, you follow certain impulses, you ignore others, you interact with people. Their systems meet your systems, you take in new inputs, new stress, new stimulation, and then the day is over. And now you get to see what those systems, your systems, produced. Did you make time for that thing you said mattered? Did you follow through on what you planned? Did you rest? Did you eat? Did you take care of your body? Did you move forward? Or did you just move around for 24 hours? And now let's zoom out further. It's not just the end of this day. It's the end of the week. It's the end of the month. Hell, it's the end of the decade. What did those days produce? Because none of that is random. It is the accumulated output of systems that were running the entire time. So when you look at your life, you're not looking at a series of isolated choices. You're looking at the result of what has been consistently running underneath them. What is running in your systems that keeps you from having the time or energy to live the life that you want? So now the question becomes: if all of these systems are running and have been running, if they're producing your experience, your behavior, your life, then what is your role in all of this? This is where sovereignty comes in, not as control, not as forcing yourself into alignment, quote unquote, but as stewardship, as the one responsible for the systems that are already running, as the one who learns how to lead them. Because your life is not the result of one system, it's the interaction of many. So your role is to observe your systems, to understand them, to regulate them, to align them, to decide which ones get to lead and when. Because you can build systems, external ones, you can design around your life. Like I could decide that I always have one episode recorded ahead of time, just in case anything happens and I can't record. That's a system. It would protect consistency. But then I would have to ask myself, well, what is that for? Right? What what problem is that solving? Consistency, yes, but this is a journal. And part of the integrity of it is that it reflects what's happening in real time. So if I'm going to hold that standard, then I also have to build a different system. Right? The episode in the can in case I need to swap it in, that's an external system. But the internal system that I would have to build is an emotional contract with myself that says there will be weeks when the most aligned thing to do is to not record. And I have to be okay with that. So now it's not just about output, it's about alignment between systems. Because the emotional place that it puts me in to even think about not getting an episode out makes me want to cancel on literally everything else I have to do in life to make sure that the episode gets out.

SPEAKER_00 10:03

Which is okay. In individual moments, but is it upheld by a system? Right?

SPEAKER_01 10:14

And you start pulling on that thread and you look at your schedule, your childcare, your co-parenting, how your time is actually structured. Because none of these systems exist in isolation. They all touch each other, they all affect each other. So when you change one, you are, whether you realize it or not, changing many. And sovereignty is not becoming a better version of yourself, although that is a byproduct of doing the other work involved. But it's about becoming the one who governs the systems that make you. And whatever you want to be, whatever you want to do, that is entirely dependent on the systems that you have in place to be able to pull that off, right? At this level of podcasting, I'm everything. I'm recording, I'm editing, I'm writing the description, I'm writing the scripts before I even hit record, right? You want to be an influencer, a content creator. Great. Until you get to the point where you have brand representation, you are every single part of it. You're filming it, you're uploading it, you're putting pushing it to TikTok, you're doing all of the things. And that is only upheld by systems. The better your systems, the greater your capacity. And we're gonna do a whole different entry on capacity. But the secret, not to give the whole episode away, but the key to expanding capacity. Because I get this a lot. Like, how do you do your daughter's hair every day and also work a full-time job? And also, also, also, also that to me at this point feel like regular, but I realize it's because I have systems in place to pull these things off. I do my daughter's hair every day because I part it at night. I parted and grease it at night. Makes my morning easier. And that's just an example. At any given time, I'm probably operating on to be generous, a hundred different systems. It may be the first or second time that something happens, I'm kind of taken aback, like, okay, how do I deal with this? But like, you know, to bring it full circle, the beginning of the episode, it's only taken me two episodes of having to record sick to be like, hold on, hold on, hold on. What what what system? What system is holding this together? Because I'm having an emotional response to even the potential that there won't be an episode that comes out. I am having a physical response to the work that it requires to get the episode out. I've got a lot of things that are clashing, and I need to figure out what my system is going to be going forward. Right. And also taking some vitamin C. That's part of the system, too. But so, not to preach to you, but I just wanted to bring to ground this in a silly but very real example of how you are a system of systems, and it is your job to steward those, to be the governor of those systems. So I'll leave you with this. Where are you trying to change your behavior without changing what's producing it? And where are you trying to think your way out of something your systems are still running? Let me know.

SPEAKER_02 13:52

We'll close the page here for now. Until next time.