The Hidden Meaning of Living From Inside Out
FoFty Prinicple #1
The immediate thought that comes to mind is that external factors from the outside world prevent us from living the life we internally desire. Our family, friends, and work have crafted pre-determined personas and expectations of how we should live our lives, which does not necessarily match with what we desire inside. Thus, we are held hostage to these expectations as we begrudgingly comply and continue to live the life expected of us.
This is the generic and default understanding we have from the phrase of living life from outside in, with the converse being to live an aspirational life from inside out.
Except, this is a superficial understanding of a fundamentally deeper concept. A concept that once you properly grasp, can provide the blueprint of how to radically alter your life.
But before we continue, we must properly define what “inside” is. We can start by describing what it is not.
It is not a collection of our desires - those are just selfish wishes stemming from our ego
It is not a purpose that we have fabricated based on a desperate search for meaning in life
Which is why when we say things like, “Who I am is an artist but I couldn’t become one because that’s not what the external world expects of me,” we are operating at a superficial level.
Actually, the “inside” has nothing to do with our wants, desires, and purpose. Instead, it has everything to do with The Self.
And exactly who or what is The Self?
The Self is the entity that lives in the kingdom that we call our mind, which exercises choice and makes decisions based on thoughts and stimulus coming into the mind from the material world. This is the “inside” from which to project to the “outside” - or physical - world.
It is at this point where the challenge manifests because in our attempt to project The Self - all the decisions and resulting actions we have made in our lives - to the outside world, we find it nearly impossible to share everything transparently. Instead, we hide much of our choices, decisions, and actions resulting from them and customize what we reveal depending on the audience.
As a result, we essentially end up creating multiple versions of The Self and end up managing all the permutations of them in real time which leads to stress and anxiety. One mistake is all is needed for the house of cards to disintegrate.
Broadly speaking, we can cluster these versions into the Public Self, the Private Self, and the Secret Self with the last category being the most hidden as it contains information that only you know about and which you have not shared with anybody else on this planet.
In this construct, the method of living from inside out would be to collapse the myriad of versions of The Self into a single representation and project that singular stream of choices, decisions, and actions in its entirety to the material world.
Doing so is what I call true Authenticity.
It is also something that is extremely difficult to achieve. Yet there is a way to develop oneself to succeed in this regard, and that is through the strengthening of one’s will power, which I have previously written about in an earlier post.
Once you have strengthened your will power to the point where The Self is the master of your thoughts and stimulus coming in from the material world, your choices and decisions will be made from a position of ownership and enable you to project them clairvoyantly to the outside world.
And with that comes great power. This is the leadership “secret sauce” that many are aware of but struggle to define.
Through this article, I expose the secret.
Keep in mind that this method of living inside out is not inherently good or bad - it is simply a method, and as such, can be leveraged for either good or bad, no differently than, say, Karate. Just as one who uses it to promote and further positive choices and decisions in life, so too can another use it to promote dark and destructive choices in life.
Equipped with this knowledge, the choice is now up to you.
Choose wisely.
➡️ Watch the accompanying YouTube video for this article here: