Insight: The space between knowing and becoming

Do you believe that awareness is enough? That if you understand ourselves deeply enough, change will naturally follow. But awareness is only the beginning.

In this episode, we explore the space between knowing and becoming. 
Why some insights transform us while others remain only thoughts. 
Why we protect old strategies even when they no longer serve us. 
And what allows us to finally begin living differently.

Because transformation isn't about finding another answer. It's about becoming willing to live from the one we already have.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:08

Welcome to the Nellegner Stadius podcast. Here we will explore fear, patterns, and what is meant to lead yourself through life. Why can two people receive the same insight but only one of them actually changes? Well, both of those people can be aware, but it's not the same as integration. One of them can hear maybe the way your mother treats you is influencing how you relate to people today. They might even agree. But that doesn't mean that their nervous system knows what to do with that information. Because understanding something intellectually and living different are two different processes. And something that determines this also is protective strategies. Because you don't just only protect your own belief of something, you protect your own strategies. Because if you have spent forty years surviving on hypervigilance, pleasing others, controlling situations, or avoiding emotions, those strategies became the way for you to feel safe. So if you are the friend of this person who have lived like this for forty years, if you point out their strategies, you're not just giving them new information. You're also, in a sense, asking them to loosen their grip of something that has protected them for years. And that can make a person feel frightened, even if they wouldn't consciously experience it that way. They can start to become defensive towards you and they can even start to make up things just because it feels safer than putting down the guard. And there's also something depending on the emotional capacity of a human. Because if you offer someone another perspective, they can say that could be true, as I mentioned in the beginning, because they may not even argue with you. They're not saying that you're wrong, they're not shutting you down, they're actually considering it. But then they don't know how to live from that perspective. Because someone can only work with an insight to the extent that they currently have the emotional capacity to stay with. They can hold it in front of them, like a glass of water that looks see through but they can still see it. But they can't stay with it long enough to let it change them. They quickly move to another subject, they joke it away, they explain it or they intellectualize it. That doesn't mean that they are unwilling to actually change themselves. It can simply become very overwhelming in that moment. If they can't even understand their own emotions, how would you expect them to understand that information you give them that for them is like learning a whole new language? It's like giving someone a five hundred dollar bill. You can handle them an opportunity, an insight or a different way of seeing their life. What they do with it, it's theirs. It's not yours to hold. Because you can invite them, but you can't substitute for their own process. Because it's also easy to assume as the person trying to help, that just because they don't change during your conversation, nothing will happen. Some people need hours, some people need weeks, some need a drastic life event to happen before that conversation suddenly makes sense. And the grief in that part is that you may not see that part of them. You may never see them change, or they may even not change at all. So if you gave someone a perspective and they would tell you that could be true, it might genuinely be the first crack in an old way of thinking, or it might simply stay as an interesting idea. You usually can't tell in the moment. So what is it that actually creates the change for one of these two people? It's a tiredness of where you are, because you don't change because you receive a better idea of what you could do. You change because your current way of living stopped being bearable. You can't handle it anymore. And that's a very different mechanism than just learning something. And the thing that requires of you is a lot of strength. It's a lot of courage, but it's also to surrender, to put down the swords that you have held up against you for so many years, and to admit that this is what I am doing, that I've done the same, I had the same patterns, or I'm treating myself really badly and I don't give myself the right conditions. It's not about being fearless because it's no such thing in this world. It's about saying to yourself that I don't know who I'm gonna be on the other side of this, but I can't keep being who I am today. And that requires letting go of certainties, comfort zone, identity and family strategies. I grew up with a father who didn't took care of himself physically or emotionally, and sitting side by side with him for all my life, as a daughter to wanting him to change, seeing glimpses of hope that he would change made me hopeful. But seeing that over time he didn't took the choices that would make him feel better. You wish them to do better for themselves. And the harsh truth with it is that you can't do it for them. You can invite them to try to understand, but it's their life, it's their job to help themselves. If they are not receiving what you are trying to give them, you are giving away your own energy. You may even be able to explain your childhood patterns completely perfect, explain why they behave the way they do, but they can still repeat those patterns every day. And yet again, the knowledge alone doesn't create movement. Because life need to become unsustainable, to stop defending the old identity and become open to uncertainty, not to blame yourself but to recognize that no one can live my life for me, and then start acting differently not once, but repeatedly until a new way of living becomes your reality? And what conditions do you give yourself to make transformation possible? Not only the really bad roadmap that you received from your parents, but the line between that those behaviors, are they actually your truth? Or are you just living someone else's? And what conditions do you give yourself to make that roadmap a little bit easier to read? Do you create a new one? Draw it yourself or do you take the up that old one that's been laying in your pocket for forty years and try to distinguish what it says? You can be so empathic, you can be so loving. You can ask them questions, you can create the safety, but you can't manufacture the moment that another person says I'm done living like this. So not everyone will change because they gain the awareness. And the last thing that takes you from awareness to action is curiosity. Not just curiosity, but willing curiosity. And you might sit with all of these things and feel that you are on the edge and you still say I don't know what to do. I don't know how and you can become tired of looking for answers or trying to observe yourself every day to try to create change. And then with that willingness it comes a point where you have to make a choice not that you will create all the answers for yourself, but whether you're willing to keep on asking yourself questions. Because you can spend your energy avoiding yourself or you can spend your energy understanding yourself. And neither of those parts are effortless, because when you receive that invitation from the outside world, the choice is yours. You either continue to protect the life that you build around the old strategies, or you can become curious enough to discover whether another way of living is possible. But you can't strangle the curiosity too hard and say now I'm gonna find my final answer. It's either this or nothing. It's about saying to yourself while holding the curiosity very lightly in your hand, I'm willing to look at the next question even if I don't yet know the answer.