there's an idea called monk mode uh which has kind of become a bit of a meme online but I first read about this years ago uh and it involves a extended period of um isolation to work on yourself uh to reflect on your flaws to kind of do the inner work to introspect um it's usually tied in with meditation with improving your diet with improving your physical fitness your mental Fitness all of these different things and uh that I've almost seen it as if doing that and focusing on yourself for a short space of time
that's very very you know just maybe a couple of months really really focusing on you still going about and doing your work and doing the rest of the things but outside of that just really really trying to make yourself as good as possible periodizing that for me was one of the most powerful inflections aside from the lifestyle change and well that's what confession is supposed to be fundamentally I mean when you take St talk of yourself you confess you confess to yourself and you make your sins a reality you assess yourself for your insufficiency and
you Proclaim your insufficiencies and that well then you can start working on them it's like it's painful here's all the things that I'm not here's all the things that I'm not that I would like to be right that's pain full self-examination but the advantage is you get all your problems on the table and the advantage to that is that problem by problem there's likely some hope like for example you said you were unpopular when you were a teenager but that doesn't mean that you had to carry that forward into University right there was a possibility
that so how did you get out of that what did you do the main reason I think was that I didn't really understand understand how to relate to other kids so I found myself obsessing over the way that other kids would wear their shirts or tie their ties or the sort of shoes that they would wear or the right so you were looking at external models or why that's why they had friends and I didn't right and I didn't realize that it was just I wasn't socially Adept I didn't understand how to relate to other
kids very well and I think I just got to the stage especially when I went to University that I'd spent enough time for me to have learned at least some rough HED social skills and now finally was able to sort of cast off some of the uh presuppositions that uh had maybe been following me uh because what were the opening points for you like do you remember the first friendship you made in University oh yeah the guys that I lived with so okay so these were these were roommates yeah yeah yeah okay so yeah that's
a good see that's a thing that's hard to duplicate online right because it's a having a group of Roommates is a formative experience it was crazy for me I didn't know because again only child two parents living in a small house I didn't know that you were supposed to knock on someone's bedroom door before you were to go in I'd never done that I'd spent my did 18 years I'd never had to knock on anybody's bedroom door it's like Mom and Dad are down like who else is there I'm going to knock on the dogs
like the kitchen door to see if the dogs are mind going into the kitchen uh and so many of those things looking back on it now are just so ridiculous not knowing that that was something that you was supposed to do yeah well not knowing those Elementary skills though that can be a huge impediment you know I had people in my clinical practice we spent hours practicing how to introduce them and to shake hands because you want to be expert at that because if you're not good at that at all like if you're really bad
at it you're screwed you can't even tell someone your name and so how are you going to make a friend then you you you announce yourself as incompetent with your first move and then if you do if that happens to you 10 times you're so terrified disincentivizes oh God terribly terribly and so you should become expert at that that's something you can do with your kids is so they can become expert at introducing themselves you know shake hands do it with a bit of a firm grip look at the other person try smiling you know
match your Tempo to the other person
