Welcome to the Potential Leader Lab. And I'm your host, Perry Maughmer. Um, this one's going to be interesting. Today, we're going to talk about how we're condemned to be free. So I'm going to try to keep it short, because in this particular area, I've got more questions than answers. And I don't believe we're trying to answer anything in this particular. Discussion. If, if if I might, I just want to throw out a couple concepts and want you to think about them because I think about them. So if I'm thinking about them, maybe you can think about them. Um, and what we're going to talk about, we'll produce varying levels, varying levels of discomfort and response from everybody. And that's fine too. It's just something that, that I, I can relate to, I gravitate towards. And it's, these are concepts that inform the way I look at the world, more or less. So they're there from existentialism and they're all from the same person, Jean-Paul Sartre. He was a French existentialist. And he actually came up with the term that we're condemned to be free. And the reason he says that is because from his standpoint, we didn't create ourselves and were put here without consent. But we must we must choose and act freely from every situation we're in and everything we do as a result of being free because we have a choice. And and as I look around to people and as I work with people, I think sometimes we lose that mindset.
00:01:35
Right. We didn't choose to be placed here, but we have ultimate choice to define who we are in that freedom of human being manifests itself as the limitless choice of human action. No matter what the situation is, we can always choose to act and in the action we define. Are being. We act our way into being. And so to me, that's really powerful. We're not free beings. We're actually freedom itself. And there is no authentic self other than the one we create. And I wholeheartedly believe that we're not fixed in any way, shape or form. We're not destined to be something. We have free will to create who we are. And I think that's a pretty powerful state of mind. And I don't. I don't enjoy. I don't see when I see people give up that power. When they feel like they're being acted upon, when they have more of a there's a there's a concept called locus of control. And when somebody has an external locus of control, they don't believe they have the power to change things. They believe they're being acted upon by an outside force, external locus of control. So the control is external to them things and people are acting upon them which they're powerless to stop. Versus if I have an internal locus of control, I believe regardless of the situation, I have the power of choice. I have the power to do something about it.
00:03:15
And one of my one of my favorite sayings from existentialism is we always have a choice, even when it's not the choice we like. And that's true. The choices that we're faced with may not be ones we like, but we always have a choice. We can always we can always move ourselves forward. And one of my other favorite quotes is in similar vein is Joan Baez, where she said she's credited with saying action is the antidote to despair. Take action. We can always take action. We can always. We can always choose. And we're not we don't we can take we can take comfort in the fact we're not hard wired to be any certain way. It's merely how we've developed up to this point. And how we behave right now is what takes the least amount of energy. Now, he also said Sartre also said existence precedes Essence, and that's reflective of what I just said. That personality is not built over a previously designed model or a precise purpose because it's a human being who chooses to engage. In such a way. And so existence precedes Essence. We were brought into existence. Then we figure out who we are and we figure out who we are by our decisions. By our choices. Remember, condemned to be free. We have a choice. And I know it's just the verbiage, but the condemned to be free part is we didn't choose to be here.
00:04:46
So that's how we get condemned to be free. And being free can be a little bit dizzying. They talk about nausea, right? And funny enough, I'm sure everybody's experienced this. But when you stand at the precipice of something like you're standing at the top of a building, you're standing at the top of a cliff and you look over and you feel that queasiness in your stomach. Existentialist would say it's not because you're afraid you're going to fall. It's because you know you have the choice to jump. That's the queasiness you face. It's because, you know, deep down inside you can choose. You're not afraid to fall. The queasiness is about the opportunity to jump. And that existence precedes Essence is powerful because if we've created ideas and practices that aren't serving us, we can then do the flip of that and change that. We can create ideas and practices that are beneficial to us and everybody else. We have the power to do that. We have the we have the choice. Now we have to be careful. And what I've been inferring about making choices, there's also something called bad faith. In bad faith is when we give up that power and claim that we don't have a choice. That's what. Existentialists call bad faith. When we say, Well, I had no other choice. That's bad faith. We always have a choice, even when it's not the one we want.
00:06:22
And these are all it's actually like a it's almost like a form of self deception that allows us to overcome our anxiety and our responsibility for making the choice. You know, we just didn't have a choice. And again, we're trying to we're trying to do away with discomfort, right? So when we're especially when we're faced with something that's challenging, when we're faced with something that doesn't feel good, that's when we typically will exercise bad faith. And that little bit of self deception, saying we didn't have a choice, but we always have a choice. And then the final concept that I want to talk about today in this little brief discussion is just absurdity. That's a big thing with existentialism and absurdity from our lives comes from the fact that there's no meaning to be found in the world beyond the meaning we give it. And we do create meaning out of things. Things happen and we assign meaning and value to them. And that's what creates our world. There can be the argument that most of our anxiety, most of our frustration, most of those feelings in our life come from the fact that. The world doesn't do what we want it to do. We had an expectation that wasn't met. And so we have anxiety. We have frustration. We have anger. And those are all things that that we projected onto it. Because by and large, if we default back to stoicism for a minute.
00:07:53
The Stoics would tell us that events are neutral, like things happen, but there is no inherent meaning. We assign meaning and that the point we assign meaning is when suffering begins. And so an event happens. We determine what we believe that means to us, and then we assign that meaning to it. And we could choose to assign a different meaning if we want to. That's kind of what if we take stoicism and existentialism? That's what absurdity is. It's the world has no inherent meaning. We have no inherent meaning except what we give to it. And it's again, pretty empowering because if we have the ability to choose. And it changes our world when we give events different meaning. Um, things like you didn't get a raise. A person didn't talk to me at lunch. Somebody cut me off in traffic. You know, take your pick of how many times during the day do you actually consciously assign meaning to something? Most of the time we don't do it consciously. It's done instantaneously. But imagine the difference in this in this scenario. You're driving down the road and somebody cuts you off and cuts across three lanes of traffic to get into a turn lane. I'm guessing your initial reaction wouldn't be positive. Right. It wouldn't be something positive. It would be some level of Why did that person do that? They're an idiot. They almost cause an accident. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, because we assigned meaning to that to that event.
00:09:36
We projected on to them why they did it, why they behaved the way they behaved. Now, if we knew that person had their young child in the car and they were rushing to get them to the hospital, would we think about it in the same way? It would change the meaning and it would change the way we thought about it. That's what we're talking about. The easiest way to change our life. Is to follow a three word creed. When anything happens. With other humans, and that is simply assume best intentions. And so just imagine every day, no matter what anybody did or said to you, you assume best intentions. You assumed that they were trying to do the very best they could do. Regardless of how it came out, regardless of what they did, regardless of what they said, you had to assume that they were they were they meant well. How would that change your day? How would that change everybody else's day that you interact with? Our default is not that typically. Our default is not to assume best intentions. Now, what's funny and ironic about that is we judge other people by their actions, but we judge ourselves by our intentions. We assume it about ourselves. That's the that's the thought we plant in our own head, which is. Oh, well, I meant well, I didn't mean that. I didn't. All of those things.
00:11:12
Right. We say that about ourselves. We give ourselves the grace that we extend to almost no one else. Even those that are close to us. We don't extend the same grace to. But just imagine the difference in the world if everybody thought about that. If everybody if everybody changed it. And the absurdity of it was we gave that meaning to it. We had a choice and we gave that meaning instead of the other meaning. It's so, so powerful. In. Imagine all the negative emotions, all the anxiety, all the frustration, all the anger. You take your pick, all the sadness that we experience based on fallacy, based on the meaning that we give to things. It's I've heard this story and I've done it myself. You know, you're working, you're in business and you're emailing somebody and they're and you're trying to get a deal done and suddenly they go dark. They don't respond to emails. They don't respond to phone calls. And you're building up this story in your mind about why it happened and that you know that so and so and that son of a bitch this and how dare they not, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then it never fails. At least it doesn't for me that like, six weeks later they get they email me like, Oh, I'm so sorry. My mother passed away. And then who's the jackass at that point? Now. I tried. I tried to keep that in mind When I'm doing stuff now and I'm getting a lot better at it because again, this dovetails into something else, which is I just don't care anymore.
00:12:41
And I don't mean that in a negative way. I just mean I don't care. Meaning I don't assign emotion to it anymore because I have no idea. And this goes back to one of my core values, which is humility. If we went through our lives with a real true sense of humility, we would never do that because we would know. We don't know. We have no idea why people behave the way they do, especially people we don't know. And so if I maintain an approach of humility to everything, I'm going to have a much more pleasant life. And the people around me are going to have a much more pleasant life because I'm not going to judge. I'm not going to assume I know why they're doing what they're doing. I'm not going to assign meaning to other people's behaviors. Because I don't know. Neither do you. But we do. And we suffer. And others suffer as a result. And so when you think about this, when you think about. Existence precedes essence and bad faith and absurdity and were condemned to be free. To me, they're all very empowering concepts. It again, back to humility. You don't have to agree with them. If you believe something different, that's awesome. I'm not trying to convince you. I'm just sharing what I think.
00:14:09
And I'm thinking it from the standpoint of just trying to make it a better place. How do I take these concepts and turn the world into a better place for the people I care about? How do I stop judging people? How do I approach life with humility and knowing that I'm not in charge? The world, by the way, and the world doesn't give a shit what I want. I have never been in control. I am not now in control, nor will I ever be in control of anything except me. Hell, I can't. Those of you that are parents of young kids, you know that you can't you can't control a three year old. How the hell can you control anybody else? And the more you try to control it, the worse it gets. But that's that's where our that's where our the foundation of our anxiety comes from is a need for control. We want the world to behave in a way that we want it to behave because we lack humility, in my opinion. And if we get up every day and the first thing we think about is being humble and exercising humility in the way we approach people. The world is a better place. Undeniably a better place. And that's what I leave you with. So be humble. Take care of each other. Take care of yourself. Give everybody some grace and I'll see you next time in the lab.
