Few quick notes of looking for your Private Face

Just a quick post to answer some questions I’ve gotten in the last couple of days.

Might be a bit cartoony due to not wanting to cover all the nuanced bases.

Dojo is about having the life that you want to have.

Most of the work is about developing vocabulary, skill sets, and POVs that will get you there.

That means dealing with the vocabulary, skill sets, and POVs that are not getting you there.

As a philosophical orientation, you can’t work with something that you don’t have a relatively good understanding about. Call it a “working understanding” or “understanding enough”.

In Dojo, at the white belt level, there is the what-is of what you call “I”.

In Dojo, the thing that you call “I” is thought of as a character, much like in traditional acting.

In Dojo, the first character, the one that you are taught to self-identify with, is called the, “Primal Character”. 

This Primal Character has two basic parts, the PC part and the un-PC part. 

Or your Public Face and your Private Face. 

The Public Face is what you routinely show to whatever it is that you consider “public”. 

The Private Face is the parts the you ARE CONSCIOUS OF and “know” that you’d better not let the public know about. 

White belt work is getting to know both of these in far greater detail than you probably do now.

There are tons of nuances and subtleties and hidden agendas within both of them. 

Not going to go into those now.

How to go about finding out what your un-PC is made up of?

First of all, “un-PC” is a very individualistic thing for each of us. 

What is un-PC for me may not be un-PC for you.

Second of all, a lot of the un-PC stuff is, more or less, 180 degrees from what you show through your Public Face.

Third, what you think or what your BOS is telling you you’re showing with your PC face, may not be what other people are getting. It’s quite ordinary for you to believe that you are putting one thing out there and many, many, many people are going to tell you something different. 

Which is one of the reasons that there is an exercise called, “What am I selling”. Traditionally, each person gets up in front of the group and people call out what they believe the person is selling. As if the person up there was created by an ad agency to sell some things. It is NOT an exercise about how insightful you can be, if you’re in the audience. You have to be able to point to what it is that gives you the “this is what they are selling”. 

Having this as a baseline can help you explore what might be your un-PC side. 

Take the “what I am selling” and see what the 180 might be.

Often, the un-PC stuff is “hidden” by the PC face. 

Fourth, you might not be so good at hiding at what your un-PC is about. 

Ask your friends. 

Ask them what they think you’re hiding, what you’re not letting see the light of day.

Fifth, what are the things you are passionate about?

Both in things that you believe there should be more of and the things that you believe that there should most def be less of. 

See what the 180 feels like.

Take it out for a walk. 

If you step away from what your PC-face is telling you, how does it actually feel?

Sixth, when you laid these things down, the PC and the un-PC stuff, chances are that you were in the single digits, age-wise. You are currently using grown up stuff to cover up meaning-makings and experiences from your childhood.

Seventh, none of this is true. It’s a philosophical orientation towards one way to be human. Take it out for a spin and see what happens.

What have you got to lose?