Self-Reliance Is A Trap

My parents kicked me out of the house when I was in the 8th or 9th grade. Like, "Nobody is going to be there for you. This is how this works." And so I became extremely self-reliant. I remember just getting so angry because nobody would show up for me. And one day I'm sitting there complaining about how people don't show up for me, and my friend was like, "Yeah, you make that impossible." I was like, "What?" All right, everybody, welcome back to The Art of Accomplishment, where we explore living the life you want with enjoyment and ease. Hey, Brett.

Hey, Joe. How you doing? Yeah, how am I doing? I've been, I've been going through a thing lately which has been really fascinating for me, and it has to do with self-reliance, which is what I want to talk about today. Now, I have this friend who who we've been friends for years, and over that time he's been building a business. And when I first met him, I felt far newer in the, the Bay Area VC-funded tech scene, and he seemed like a veteran.

Yeah.

And so I started out kind of seeing him as this person who knows what's going on, and many ways he does. But also I've been more recently starting to realize how The way that I've been seeing him in that light has actually been preventing me from showing up in ways that I could actually support him. And more recently, you know, the, the funding environment's been challenging in many sectors, and, you know, he's been having a hard time raising money for his company. And recently they hit something that is both a crisis as well as a blooming opportunity. And it's sort of a high risk. You never know which way it's going to go, but there's suddenly there's a lot of valences for support. And I found myself stepping in and realizing that there's actually connections that I have. There's ideas that I have. There's, there's resources that I could bring. And I realized that this is something that I hadn't been doing before with this person for some reason.

Mm-hmm.

I had been seeing this person as they've got it.

Yeah.

And it had never occurred to me to be like, hey, why don't I introduce you to these people?

Yeah.

And somehow that all dropped away very recently, and I've been finding myself joyfully engaged in what's going on in that whole situation, which is actually really— it's very exciting. Yeah. Both in terms of possibility, but also in the joy of engagement and like being in it. Yeah.

I have a curiosity because I've seen this phenomenon before, but mostly from the other side, because I mostly work with extremely self-reliant people. All the CEOs I work with, there's usually a big streak of self-reliance. And so the question I have is, as this crisis slash opportunity showed up, how is he asking for help more? How is he showing up in a way that makes room for you to step in and be there for him?

I mean, there's so many parallel things going on. One, there's ways that he asked for help from me that I don't think he had before. Yeah. Two, there's ways that I saw his excitement and the way that he was, like, responding to the ever-changing situation that like I wanted to get drawn in. I was like, I wanna be part of this excitement. And then I found myself asking, how can I help? In ways that I hadn't been doing in the past, despite being really excited about what they've been doing in the world for a long time. Something in the energetics of our experience together switched.

Yeah, so what I see is that, and I experienced it firsthand in my life earlier, which was I was extremely self-reliant, right? So, you know, my background— dad was emotionally abusive and alcoholic. And so I learned at a very young age nobody was going to be there for you, right? My parents kicked me out of the house when I was in the 8th or 9th grade. Like, nobody is going to be there for you. This is how this works. And so I became extremely self-reliant. And it— I remember just getting so angry. I mean, even early marriage, I was so angry because nobody would show up for me.. And, you know, one day I'm sitting there complaining about how people don't show up for me. And my friend was like, yeah, you make that impossible. I was like, what? Why? I make that impossible? And, you know, when you have that strong thing of self-reliance where because people didn't show up for you, there's a way that that hurt. That self-reliance hurt that, oh, I have to do this for myself. And so you don't want to open up a door where somebody can let you down again.

Yeah.

And so you start acting like you got it all together. I got this. I got it. Yeah, I know, I know. I've got it. I know I got it. It's okay. Yeah.

No, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And then if someone does help you because you're scared of having them let you down, you double-check their work. Do they really have it? Are you really going to be there? Did you really? It's like asking a teenager to do something 6 times. They're just like, fuck off, and they don't do it right. Like, it's— but you do that with all your friends or people who work for you. And that's what I noticed, is that I had to look forward to being abandoned, to be let down, so that I could overcome self-reliance. At the same time, self-reliance was like amazing in some ways. And so there was goods and bads with it, but there was definitely some drawbacks that I didn't want to live with anymore.

But I want to break this down a little bit further. Like, how would you define self-reliance? What exactly does that pattern look like?

Yes, the pattern is typically you were abandoned or somebody let you down horribly when you were a kid. So some way that you were supposed to be attuned to, you didn't get attuned to. And the only way to take care of yourself was to take care of yourself. It wasn't to depend on somebody else to take care of you. It wasn't to convince somebody else to take care of you. So if you had a circumstance where there was just no way you were going to get the financial support you needed or the emotional support you needed from the environment, then you started saying, oh, I have to be there. I have to be able to do this for myself. And so there's a feeling that arises in you that's partially disappointment, but also helplessness. And you just are not going to allow yourself to feel that. And so, no, I'm not going to feel that. I will be determined as hell. I will focus. I will do whatever. I will push and pull and scream and scratch to get it so that I don't ever have to feel that level of helplessness again. And you see this sometimes with people who grow up and they just, no matter what happens, they are going to not be destitute again. Or you can see it with people who are emotionally let down and they are just never going to be hurt again. That's— they're going to create that reality. And so that's where self-reliance— it's just that will that comes online to not feel that way. And it makes you incredibly resourceful.

Yeah. So there's, there's a couple of pieces to break down there. One is that you needed support in some way and you didn't get it. You were let down. It seems like there's also a way where you're not allowed to feel the disappointment. You're not allowed to feel that heartbreak.

Yeah.

Or you're not allowed to need. You're not allowed to ask. Any of those could be entry points to developing that.

Implicit or explicit.

Yeah.

Usually it's an implicit thing where So either I have to totally admit that the people who are here to take care of me, that are adults, that are my caregivers, are completely incapable. I don't want to have to feel that.

Yeah.

Or sometimes you get punished. No, you can't be disappointed in me. Or they're not even there to feel that way. So you have to just take care of you and your sister or whatever it is. So there's that as well. There's you know, rejection of that emotion or shame when you've had that emotion. But typically it's, it's implicit. It's, it's really overwhelming for a 5-year-old to think that they're not being taken care of by the adults in the room.

Yeah, that surface is one of the tells of self-reliance that I've started to see, which is somebody is going through life, some setback happens, and they just go immediately on to the next thing. They're like, oh, that happened, we're moving on to this now, this is the new thing. And there's a way that that actually looks really emotionally intelligent from one perspective.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But if you take the full journey, it's like, I wanted something, I got disappointed, I let myself feel the heartbreak of it and be seen in that, and then I can move on to what's next.

But then I can move on to what's next and not repeat it.

Right. You cannot repeat the pattern because it's in that middle space where you're allowing yourself to feel what you have to feel and not having your expectations met and also be seen in it. That's where the opportunity for support.

Yes.

Comes in.

That's right. And support and healing.

Yeah. Yeah.

So the self-reliance is oftentimes the self-reliant character. It's hard to heal because you're not having the mourning process, which means you're not feeling the emotion that you that you couldn't feel the first time around or the second time around or the third time around. So you can't get out of the golden algorithm. You can't get to a place where you feel the heartbreak, feel the grief of the situation, of the pattern that's repeating so that you can welcome that emotional experience in the future.

And they're least likely to ask for support in healing that thing.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's right.

What are some of the benefits of the self-reliant pattern?

Yeah, like I said, resourceful, willful, drive. There's just a deep— it's not quite discipline, but it's, uh, I will overcome resilience.

Grit.

Grit. Yeah, there's a lot of that that comes with self-reliance. And every single really successful CEO I know has a pretty heavy self-reliance streak that they have to overcome in part to have a great team. Because if they're too self-reliant, they're micromanagers. They don't, they can't attract great talent. They can't delegate well.

Yeah. So let's go further into that. The costs. What, what are some of the failure modes when the self-reliant pattern isn't overcome and is driving the, driving the show? Whether it's in a company or in a life.

Yeah, it's a lot of failures in it. One is it's really hard to experience getting help. Even if you're getting it, you don't get to experience that you're getting help. You make it transactional or you push it away. That's one thing. The other thing is that there's a whole set of solutions that you don't see because you couldn't even imagine that other people would want to participate. So it's all, all the solution sets revolve around you and your capacity. And no matter how smart you are, there are certain things you are going to be incapable of. And so, so there's just, you can't have as wide of a, of a reach. You can't make as big of a company. You can't have as large of an impact if you don't get over some of that self-reliance. So that's another one. There's a deep feeling of aloneness that comes with self-reliance. You can be surrounded by people, but you feel like you're all alone in it.

Yeah.

And so that's quite painful as well. Those are some of them.

Yeah. As I've been working through my own self-reliance, I've also noticed that there's been a shift in the way that I perceive people. So if I am self-reliant or I'm running the self-reliant pattern, thinking I need to be self-reliant, I'm more likely to believe other people either should be or are self-reliant. So there's a distance that that creates.

Yeah.

And I'm less likely to perceive them as having open valences for me to support them.

Yeah, there's a couple of other things that happen in, in that similar vein. If you go the other way, the more extremely self-reliant you get, the easier it is to justify heinous acts. On other humans. So think about it this way. If you relied on your natural environment for all your food, you probably wouldn't—

Hypothetically.

Hypothetically.

Hypothetically, if you needed something like a biosphere to produce food that you eat.

Exactly. But it was a direct thing. You knew that if these trees got poisoned, you would not eat. You probably wouldn't poison those trees. You would make sure you would do what you had to do to protect those trees. The more removed you get from that, the more you don't think that you're reliant on nature, or you can't feel that you're reliant on nature, the easier it is to pollute. It's the same thing with humans. The more transactional your world gets, the easier it is to just say, well, the algorithm says that these people shouldn't get healthcare, or whatever it is, to have heinous acts on people if you don't feel the interdependence that all humans have on each other. Now, we all rely on this biosphere, but right, transaction can make it so that you don't see it.

Yeah.

And we all rely on each other. I like, we couldn't even have electricity without thousands of people, right? But it's, it all can be hidden through transaction. And the further that gets away, the easier it is to do things that hurt people all the way to, you know, autocracies.

Yeah. I mean, something that that description surfaces is that self-reliance is an illusion all the way down.

It's an illusion all the way down. And the more you believe in that illusion, the more likely it is that you're going to be hurting a lot of people.

Yeah.

I'm not saying that all self-reliant people hurt other folks, and some of them have great intentions. But the other seems to be very true. I've never met somebody who's hurt a lot of folks who doesn't feel like it's all on them. That they have to do it.

Right, it's like a shrinking sense of self, like a smaller sense of self. If what you see as what you're relying on is all arrows point back to self, then you're not seeing the broader ecosystem in which you are a part of a system of greater—

Right, someone was gonna take it, so it might as well have been me. Somebody was gonna do it, so it might as well have been me. It starts becoming that kind of mentality.

Yeah.

Instead of, oh, I rely on all these people. I can't hurt them.

Yeah.

And you see this economically happening. It's no secret economically that a strong middle class makes everybody wealthier. But the more self-reliant you get, the easier it is to say, I'm getting wealthy on the backs of shrinking the middle class.

Yeah.

And then everybody gets poor, including there becomes less and less people in this society that are wealthy.

And that highlights sort of how this propagates through society as well. For every person who feels self-reliant, to someone else, that person looks selfish or self-absorbed or self-centered or self-whatever. Right. And there's a lack of possible connection and interconnection available to support each other. You hide from yourself the ways that you actually are reliant. So if I have a belief that I should be self-reliant, then the ways that I actually am reliant on, say, all of my employees caring about the vision and showing up for work every day and then putting their heart into what they're doing. Yeah, I get to say that I'm actually just hiring them and that I'm, I'm the one driving the ship and that this is still all like I'm alone in it.

The one thing that I want to make sure of is it's not like self-reliant people are bad guys. You just had this metaphor. Somebody says, look, they're selfish. Right, right. And that is part of what makes self-reliant people self-reliant, right?

Yeah.

People look at that self-reliant person and they make them bad guys.

Yeah.

Instead of seeing that they're scared. You were also just not helping your friend. Totally right. Like, you could have looked at your friend who looks self-reliant and say, oh, I see, I got a friend who needs help, or that I just want to help them, or that they're not being an asshole. They're just scared. You always know who the leader in the room is, like who the CEO is, because they're the ones that's handing out the compliments. Nobody looks to the CEO and says, wow, that was a really good job, Bob. You know, and if they do, it's usually, it's usually with some sycophancy. It's, it's not just, hey, I acknowledge that you've done some really hard work today. And so they're not being seen. And that, yes, they're creating that reality., but also so are the people who are looking at them as self-reliant. So it's a two-way street. It's an interesting two-way street.

Yeah, and so is the way that we put them in society, often put self-reliance on a pedestal. Look how self-reliant this person is.

That's right.

You know, even like a Burning Man principle is radical self-reliance, and yet also it's show up naked with no water and find—

Yeah, exactly.

The Playa provides, like somehow it's both of those things. But you know, we have, that kind of headwind in our culture against asking for help vulnerably.

Against asking for help or seeing that you're getting it all the time.

Yeah.

Be on a garbage strike in New York City for a summer. You'll see how reliant you are on, on everybody. But like you said, it's really easy to not see it.

So we've spoken about the intellectual. I want to go into more of the emotional experience. Of what is it like emotionally to be self-reliant and living that pattern for decades?

How would I know? Shut up.

I'm here supporting you, teeing you up with your story. See it.

Come on. Exactly.

Yeah.

So for me, in the really heavy self-reliant days, there was a feeling of aloneness. Early businesses that I was involved in, it was, why can't people act like owners? Because I wasn't letting them. But, but there's a feeling of aloneness. There's a feeling like you have to do it all yourself. It's often very frustrating. Self-reliant people often get frustrated relatively easy because of that same— it's hard to feel the helplessness as hurt or fear, so it's easier to feel it as anger. Typically, not always, but typically. And self-reliant people often compartmentalize their emotions while they're in the super self-reliant phase because they can't allow themselves to be overwhelmed. They have to get everything done. And so there's sometimes some aggrandization of themselves as well. Look, I've done this all myself and other people haven't. And so there can also be a bit of arrogance that comes All of those are some of the emotions that come with self-reliance.

So what was one of the— of course, this is never just a single moment, but what are some of the pattern interrupts that occurred for you?

Feeling my emotions was one of the most important aspects, was learning how to feel the anger and the sadness. Sadness for me was the hardest at the beginning, as you know, crying, learning how to feel that, feeling hurt, feeling anger all the way.

Baby, a baby in a crib crying is possibly like the Prototype helpless expression. Yeah.

Yeah, the prototype self-reliant, a baby allowed to cry in the crib all alone for hours.

Yeah, until they stop, like the moment they stop is the moment they start becoming self-reliant in this pattern.

Yeah. So that was, yeah, that was emotionally a big part of how it felt for me. And then the pattern interrupts, So feeling, feeling emotions was a big part of the change. One was when my friend basically, like I said, told me it's because you're not allowing. And when I got to see that I was in a golden algorithm, that I was pushing people away, that I wasn't making room for people to help, I wasn't vulnerable so people couldn't help me in that moment of vulnerability. And then when I tested it out and was I was so surprised. I need help. And somebody came to help me. I was like, what's going on? Still took me a long time to see it. Welcoming the abandonment was a big one for me. Welcoming that feeling of abandonment, because as I did, I could be vulnerable. And in that vulnerability, help came. I remember this Rumi poem that basically says that all a nursing mother wants is to hear a baby's cry. And it's this idea that that's the way the universe works. If you cry out your weakness, that it's waiting to come and provide for you.

Yeah.

And I tested that theory a little bit, and then I tested a little bit more, and it just kept on, kept on showing up that if I could be vulnerable, it wasn't like every time I was vulnerable, everybody would show up. But when I was vulnerable, people would show up. And oftentimes the amazing thing was one of the recognitions I had is as I was self-reliant, I had a lot of people around me who were used to me being self-reliant, not needing them. And therefore, if there was any transaction, it was me giving them stuff, giving them my time or my attention or my advice or whatever it was. And when that started dropping, other people showed up. And I remember I was, I was raising money for a short film. It was the first time that I ever went and raised money. And all the people who I'd been so generous to, almost none of them helped me raise money. And all the people who were super self-reliant, now that I think about it, I hadn't thought about it this way, they were generous folks, but they never needed me for anything. Those were the folks that were the most likely to give to the thing I was raising money for. It was like, oh, the universe provided for me, so to speak. Like, I got the stuff that I needed when I said I needed help, but it just wasn't from the people that I had those relationships with. It was from the people who were just naturally givers, who were naturally had something to give, many of them being self-reliant themselves. But yeah, so that was an interesting thing to see.

Yeah, it's interesting to think of different, different ways that you can operate from self-reliance. One of them being to give to everybody so that you don't have to receive. Yeah.

Well, think about your friend. Pretty sure he is doing that same thing. He's almost always in the role of the giver of advice. He's almost always in the role of providing for others.

Mentors many people.

Mentors many people. Right. That's one of our self-reliant tricks.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's especially like the, like sort of like the coach archetype as well. It's really easy to get into the coaching profession to be like, oh great, like I can be there for a whole bunch of people and then never have to admit that I need them.

Right. Yeah.

And that's why I get for the intimacy that I really want.

That's right. Yeah. That's one of the big dangers and pitfalls of coaching.

Yeah.

Yeah.

For you, as that pattern fell away, what emerged in its wake?

A lot less.

Less of what?

Me. It's like an ego death in it. There's, you know, these patterns, they never completely extinguish. You know, there's still parts that are more and more finely unwound forms of self-reliance. But generally, there's an ego that has to be maintained.

Right. What are we relying on?

Yeah.

When we think we're self-reliant, what is that self? What is that construction?

Right. There's an ego to that that just starts dropping away and there's an openness and there's a, there's a sweetness. There's more gratitude. Typically there's more faith, not faith like in a religious sense. I guess it's kind of religious, but it's, there's just a faith in how things will work. It doesn't require you to manage reality as much.

Like a trust.

Trust. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. Awesome.

Cool.

Yeah. Thank you, Joe.

You're welcome. Thanks.

Thanks everyone for listening to The Art of Accomplishment. You can find us on YouTube, Twitter/X, and all the platforms at Art of Accompli— Joe is on X as fu_johudson. I am Eric Kistler, A-I-R-K-I-S-T-L-E-R. We've got a bunch of shorts coming out these days on YouTube, so be sure to check out our YouTube channel. If you like this episode, please share it with a friend. Don't be self-reliant about it. Share it. Get it out there. See what happens if you listen to it with somebody. Maybe they even have some reflections for you that you appreciate.

Actually had that happen. A woman told me the other day that she was in a huge fight with her husband, and they decided to listen to a podcast together.

Wow.

And it got them out of their fight, which I thought was great.

That's awesome. Yeah, it felt good. Yeah, see, this is what's possible, everybody. Enjoy.