Introspection

Introspection is the self-observation and reporting of conscious inner thoughts, desires and sensations. It is a conscious mental and usually purposive process relying on thinking, reasoning, and examining one's own thoughts, feelings, and, in more spiritual cases, one's soul. It can also be called contemplation of one's self, and is contrasted with extrospection, the observation of things external to one's self. Introspection may be used synonymously with self-reflection and used in a similar way.

That definition came from a Wikipedia entry on the term "introspection". I got to thinking about it while listening to a new podcast experiment from Mur Lafferty in her I Should Be Writing podcast. She has recently started playing with a format of releasing a daily five to ten minute podcast in addition to the "regular" ISBW episodes (usually half an hour to an hour or so). She gets up and uses a small recorder to blurb some thoughts and then converts them and posts it as-is; no real editing to the flow of consciousness verbiage. I hope by the time you read this she's still doing it (as I've said, I often do these entries ahead of time, and she's doing this as kind of an experiment.)

One of the things she did (and drew attention to) in a very early episode of "ISBW Lite" was her tendency to use filler phrases like "Umm" and "Uhh..." during pregnant pauses. She said she normally edits those out of the podcast recordings so listeners aren't aware of how often she really does that, but since these are unedited to accommodate the tight turnaround time of the daily thoughts into the feed she's kind of exposing herself to the listeners of her bad habit.

Being one of the Aspergian mental wiring that is something that really grates on my nerves when I hear presenters do that sort of thing. It's a mental tick that causes me to recoil; if I hear it too much I usually zip right through the podcast or leave the presentation. Mur is nowhere near as bad as many I've heard (a LOT of the ones I hear from the IT Conversations network podcast, often recordings from presenters at technical conferences, I end up just deleting because they're so riddled with fillers that I tend to hear those more than be able to focus on the topic at hand).

I love Mur's podcast on writing. She's one of my inspirations for getting off my ass to even TRY to write; for all my stumbles in life I've really had a fortunate set of circumstances in that I married an English major willing to help with my editing requests as well as stumbling onto The Writing Show with Paula B, Mur Lafferty's podcasts on the craft of writing as well as her podcast novels, and from them stumbling into Scott Sigler and his podcast novel successes to inspire me to plant my ass in front of the keyboard and, even if it fails, just try to write a story that may be successful. I haven't given up my daydreams of trying to create a microISV business...I'm just prioritizing the story writing first.

So as I listened to that episode of ISBW Lite I had a conversation with myself about what I'd say to her to try to overcome that tendency to use fillers in her speech. Being hardwired to wince at hearing a stream of "um" from other people makes me more conscious of eliminating it from my own speech patterns; how did I do it?

Well, Mur, you just need to be screwed up in the head.

I'm betting that's not an option. The next best thing is to become more self aware of your speech. I realized that I knew when it was coming. I just had to concentrate on the sentence, and I gradually become aware of that upcoming "skip", a point where my knowledge was blanked out and words suddenly disappeared from the queue emptying from my brain to my mouth.

I had to become aware of what I was thinking before blurting it out.

Mur likes to inspire people to overcome their fear of writing by giving "permission to suck". It's okay to not be good. I guess that it's more important to be a better editor than a writer. If you're more worried about the story sucking and you forever put off the attempt to write because of this fear, because you want it to be perfect, you'll never end up doing it.

Well, you need permission to have dead air.

Dead air isn't a good thing to have a lot of but it's going to happen. In my quest to get rid of my own verbal filler I've discovered that it makes me a bit lighter on my feet in terms of pulling phrases out of my arse to fill a situation where I'm at a loss for words.

If it's okay to suck, then it's okay to be at a loss for words.

When that mental stutter is the next thing in the queue, just relax, and work instead on the proper word to fill in. Mentally slap yourself when you think that next word should be "Um" or "Uh." The listener knows if you're in mid-sentence that there's more to what you're saying.

What it really takes is the ability to tap into mindfulness exercises, being aware of what's going on in your own head. Introspection.

That's when it started to take a new direction for me.

See, I realized that I have a lot of issues with my current situation because of my inability to control the situation. I've dug myself into debts. I've got a job that I have certain issues with, taking the bad with the good and the bad (there are just some days where that merits the double bad). I recently bought some clothes, a pair of pants and a shirt, and my wife suggested I try them on in the fitting rooms. I sat down to see how the pants felt when sitting, seeing as much of my job involves being at a keyboard, and I was planted right in front of a mirror where I saw my freakish folds of blubber-stretched skin and for several minutes I just staired at myself and wrestled with the feeling that I just wanted to cry. I can't wish problems away no matter how hard I try and I focus on those things, driving me into the brink of a depression.

But I'm trying something here to change some things. I can't control where I am now. I can't fix poor decisions in the past. But I can try writing that novel I've "been meaning to write". I can work on the concept for the software program that may pave the way to a new career after I get this novel out of my head and can use the time I'm using to write to instead code the program framework. Maybe these things will fail miserably, but between now and that time of failure I can at least focus a little less on my problems and a little more on achieving something better.

I needed to explore my own mind a bit more and change perspective, using the same introspection that I was "telling" Mur in my imaginary conversation.

None of that is easy and this isn't an overnight change. Anyone with an overnight life-changing revelation is probably deluding themselves to a large degree and thus setting themselves up for failure. What I am trying to do is take a step in the right direction. I need to become more mindful of certain things and try changing perspective in small degrees.

I suppose I kind of owe Mur a little thanks for that bit of insight. She never intended to help that way, but sometimes the great things come about by accident. Either that or I discovered I need to listen to the voices in my head more often, but I distrusted them after they told me that licking nine volt batteries was a good way to tell if they were old or not.