Strategic ignorance is not about being closed-minded. It's knowing what you want.
It's realizing how easy a person can be derailed. You even avoid amazing situations that you know is really a distraction. You create boundaries and live your priorities and values and dreams.
It's not that important to know things. Two things are far more important than what you know. What you can learn, and what you know you don't need to know. Maybe I'll write a bit more about the importance of being able to learn another time, but today's post is about knowing what you don't need to know.
Everybody is wrong except you, right? "Sometimes it's better to be kind than to be right. We do not need an intelligent mind that speaks, but a patient heart that listens." - Gautama Buddha Our mind loves being right. A student went to his meditation teacher and said, "My meditation is horrible!
It's possible to be self-aware to some degree and still be unhappy and unfulfilled. And while self-awareness has many benefits, it is, by itself, not the point. This is how you can cultivate and develop healthy self-awareness in your own life.
Self Awareness is our ability to observe and accurately identify our thoughts, feelings and impulses, and determine whether they are grounded in reality or not.
We avoid pain through distraction. We transport our minds to some other time or place or world where it can be safe and insulated from the pain of day-to-day life.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with distraction. We all need some sort of diversion to keep us sane and happy. The key is that we need to be aware of our distractions.
The goal with distraction isn’t to defeat distraction, it’s merely to develop an awareness and control of our distractions.
What people often find is that the more they remove themselves from distraction, the more they are forced to actually deal with a lot of the emotions that they’ve been avoiding for a long time.
It takes time to become comfortable with all of your emotions.
BUT, emotions can also be distractions from other emotions. Part of developing a strong sense of emotional intelligence is being able to discern which emotions that you experience are important to act on and which emotions should be acknowledged and felt and nothing more.