S01E18 Orientation: Seeing the forces shaping change

In this episode, Laura dives in deeper to the first Pillar of creating generational wealth for our humanity. The ability to recognize where we are coming from is necessary to avoid failure when attempting meaningful change. The host introduces "orientation" as learning to see clearly before taking action.

Three questions help reveal what's influencing you: What is being rewarded in your environment? What feels risky to say or show? What part of you has learned to adapt? These questions expose the external pressures, social costs, and survival strategies that guide your behavior without you realizing it.

Transcript

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Hi everyone. Welcome back to a life and color. Last week we talked about generational wealth, not financial sense, but in the human sense. The skills, the capacities, and the ways of being that get passed down, whether we intend to pass them down or not. We laid out three pillars. We talked about the first part being recognizing where you're starting from. orienting yourself within your own life and understanding where you want to go without changing anything. finding that understanding, doing an assessment if you will. Pillar two, which was putting in place the habits and activities that set you up for success and really establish your humanity within yourself. And then pillar three, which is passing that down, not just to future generations, but to your friends, to your family, to your community, anybody around you to keep this moving This week I wanna slow us down and I wanna focus on the first pillar of that work. Before we try to change anything, before we talk about freedom or boundaries or courage or choice, we need to be able to see clearly because you cannot protect what you cannot see. You can't change what you don't recognize, and you certainly can't pass it on. We see this all the time, right? People wanna change their lives. They want more freedom, more confidence, more clarity, more alignment with who they actually are. Sound familiar does to me. usually they start with action. New habits, new boundaries, new goals, new frameworks. We do this every New Year's, right? We set all of these new goals for ourselves. We read a book, we make a plan, we commit to doing things differently. And then. It doesn't stick, or it works for a little while, but then it collapses on itself. Or maybe we're doing everything right, but it just doesn't feel good like we thought it would, and then we think I must not be disciplined enough something inside of me must be broken. I'm doing it wrong. But here's what I've come to believe most change efforts fail. It's because they're trying to change without first seeing what's shaping them, and they're trying to move differently while still inside a system, that they don't even realize that they're responding to. So today is about orientation. We're not talking about action or fixing anything or any kind of self-improvement, just learning how to look at your life with clearer eyes. Here's what I mean when I say orientation. It's the skill of understanding the environment that you're in before you decide how to respond to it. I think most of us were taught to look inward first and think, what's wrong with me? Why am I struggling? Why can't I just do better? Orientation asks a different question. What am I responding to? Because as human beings, we're adaptive, We're gonna adapt to whatever comes our way. We learn very quickly what works, what's rewarded, what's risky, and what keeps us safe, most importantly. And if you don't name those forces, you end up blaming yourself for. What are really reactions that actually make a lot of sense. So I wanna offer you three simple orientation questions that you can carry with you this week, and I'll walk you through a concrete example for each one. You don't need to answer them perfectly, you don't need to do anything with them yet, and you don't need to share your answers with anybody if you don't want to. I'm just asking you to notice, start to look around and notice where you're starting from. Each of these questions looks at a different layer of your life, the external pressures, the social costs, and your internal response. Okay, orientation. Question number one is what is being rewarded here? This is a really important question because we all respond to rewards whether we know it or not. We learn through reinforcement. We repeat what works. We move toward what gets approval or safety or stability or belonging. We don't need anyone to explain the rules to us. We just infer them Most environments won't tell you what they value. When you go to work or you're with your family, nobody's explicitly saying the rules. They show you who gets promoted, who gets listened to, who is praised, who is tolerated. This question helps you see what behaviors are encouraged and what kinds of people succeed. What trade-offs are being made invisible. here's why this can be uncomfortable. It's because once you see what's being rewarded, you may realize that you've been shaping yourself around incentives that you wouldn't actually choose. You may not even want them. This is just a human reaction and orientation around this question. Replaces blaming yourself with getting really clear on what's going on here. Let me give you a really clear example. Imagine someone working on a team. Where the people who are most praised are the ones who respond instantly to emails and jump into meetings at a moment's notice and are always available. No one ever says you need to sacrifice your personal life to succeed here. But the people who get promoted are the people who are always reachable. The people who set boundaries are described as not quite as committed. So over time this person starts answering emails at night. They rearrange family plans and they feel anxious when they're not immediately responsive. I have been there many times. They might tell themselves I just need better time management, but true orientation will reveal something else. What's being rewarded here is not depth or discernment or sustainability. It's constant availability. So that person who's observing this and trying to emulate it isn't failing in any way. They're responding intelligently to the incentive structure around them, and orientation helps you stop asking what's wrong with me and start asking what works here and at what cost Question two is what feels risky, even if no one says it out loud. This question matters because risk doesn't have to be explicit to be real. We are exquisitely sensitive to social and emotional danger. We notice tone shifts and body language silence. We notice what happens after somebody speaks. Honestly, you know when everybody gets a little uncomfortable or the tone of the room, the feeling in the room changes over time. We learn what's safe to say, what's safer kept to ourselves, and what costs us belonging and credibility and stability. This question helps you see where fear is guiding your behavior instead of preference, where is silence or compliance, actually a protective strategy that you're using as you move through the world. why do certain choices feel heavy even when they seem like little small, insignificant choices? This question is challenging because admitting risk can sometimes feel like you're admitting weakness, like, I can't withstand other people's judgment, or I care too much about what other people think. But naming risk doesn't mean that you're trapped within it. It just means that you're now aware of it and you can't navigate danger if you refuse to see it. So here's another everyday scenario to demonstrate what I'm talking about. I. Imagine that you're in a social group, and it could be family, friends, colleagues, but it's a group where most people share similar opinions. No one explicitly says you're not allowed to disagree, but when someone does disagree, the room gets pretty quiet. People don't really react or interact in the same way someone changes the subject and the person who disagreed is subtly labeled as difficult or intense. So they learn without anyone teaching them that it's safer to soften their views, safer, to stay quiet, safer, to translate what they actually think into something more acceptable. And this isn't about trying to be dishonest about how you feel. It's just because that person is perceptive. They're seeing what is being asked of them in this group. But orientation is a way to ask what actually feels risky here, emotionally, relationally, with the people around you. And once you see that, you can stop shaming yourself for staying silent and start understanding the social cost that you're instinctively managing. once they see that they can stop shaming themselves for staying silent about how they feel or what they think, and they can start understanding the social cost that they're instinctively managing without even realizing it. Risk is not always about punishment. Sometimes it's just loss of belonging, and that's only one example, but this is the kind of scenario we're talking about when we say risk, and then orientation. Question three is what part of me has learned to adapt here? This is often the most personal question I know it is for me because most of us were taught to identify with our adaptations. It's part of our identity. I'm just like this. This is my personality. I've always been this way, but your adaptations, the behavior that you have developed over time to adapt to the environment that you live within is not your identity. This question matters because it helps you to distinguish between who you are and how you learned to survive or belong or succeed. So it helps you see why certain patterns feel automatic and why some choices don't feel like choices at all. Why your effort alone hasn't changed. These things, even if you've tried this question, can be super challenging because it brings compassion when we're used to criticism. And sometimes it uncovers grief for parts of yourself that had to go quiet to keep you safe. It also restores agency, though it gives you a choice. Once you see that it is a learned adaptation, you realize that you can also relearn something else if you want to on your own terms. Picture someone who's asked, what do you think? What do you wanna do? Or where do you wanna go? And their mind goes blank. Or they immediately say, I don't care. Whatever you want. They might think I'm just easygoing or I'm bad at making decisions. But if you look deeper, maybe this is someone who learned early on that strong preferences caused conflict or other people's needs mattered more than theirs, or harmony is safer than honesty. So a part of them learned to scan the room and read the situation and respond accordingly. So there's nothing broken about that part. It's just adaptive, They have adapted to the situation that they exist within. when you ask this question, it helps you see, this isn't who I am, this is how I learn to stay safe. that distinction matters so much because you're not your adaptations. You are the one who learned them. You are the person behind the adaptations who can notice them so that you can gently step aside from them. Each of these questions does something different. What is being rewarded shows you the external pressures. What feels risky, shows you the emotional and social costs, and what part of me adapted shows your internal response to those things. Together, these three questions create a full picture of what's going on. Don't use these to judge yourself or try to fix yourself. We're just using these questions to understand why we are where we are and how we behave, so that after that we can move on. This understanding is the beginning of any real change, even if that change comes much later. I wanna be super clear about this because I think there's a risk here. These questions are not about blaming systems, and they're not about blaming yourself in any way. These modern systems exist for a reason, They help coordinate large groups of people. They create order and efficiency and safety. They keep us safe, but every system, every family and workplace and culture and institution. Does shape your behavior whether you realize it or not. if you don't see and notice how you're being shaped, you will assume that that shaping is you. And then when you try to change things still within that same system and you fail or doesn't go as well as you want it to go, you'll blame yourself it's so important that you understand. That it's not because of you. This orientation step gives you your footing back. It lets you say, oh, this makes sense. No wonder this feels hard. No wonder I adapted this way. And from there later you can decide what to protect, what to strengthen, what to resist, but not yet, not in this pillar. So here is a very gentle invitation for this week. This week is not about hard work. We're not trying to fix anything or change anything, we're just noticing. So pick one environment you spend a lot of time in. It could be work, it could be family, it could be friendships or parenting even, or just your own inner world. And ask yourself, what is being rewarded here? What feels risky to show or say? And what part of me has learned to adapt? don't try to answer these questions in terms of why it's happening or what you should change. You don't have to come to any conclusions and you don't need to make any kind of a plan. Just notice seeing clearly is not passive but it's the foundation of everything that comes next. When we move on to trying to take action and put in place activities and habits, this is the foundation that will enable you to do this. Learning how to orient yourself is not just personal work, it's also the first human skill that we protect, the first one we pass on. I'm so excited to be taking this first step with you and I can't wait to hear about the progress that you make. As always, please send me your emails with your progress and your questions and any examples at Laura, L-A-U-R-A at a life and color.co. Thank you so much for joining me today and coming on this journey. I cannot wait to see where we end going through these steps together. I will talk to you next time. Thanks all.