“Who am I” is the wrong question, and it’s wrong in a way that keeps you busy for years.
It assumes there’s a single answer sitting somewhere waiting to be uncovered, and that once you’ve found it things will make sense.
The more useful question, and the one eight lectures of Peterson’s course keep returning to, is narrower and less flattering.
What have you refused to look at?
Peterson’s Personality and Its Transformations runs through Freud, Jung, Rogers and Piaget. What follows is what survives when you strip the theory back to things you can actually do this week.
Force the goal down until it becomes physical
“Be a better person” is not a goal. It’s a mood with a to-do list attached.
Personality works as a hierarchy.
Abstract aim sits at the top, concrete micro-action at the bottom, and the levels connect.
Good person leads to good parent, which leads to cutting vegetables and laying out plates at six o’clock which leads to a decent meal on the table, .
Every level is a translation of the one above it.
The test is simple and most goals fail it.
Name the physical action you’d take tomorrow.
If you can’t, you don’t have a plan, you have an intention, and intentions don’t survive contact with a Tuesday.
So take whatever you’re vaguely trying to improve and force it down one level before you do anything else. Then down another. Keep going until you hit something you could do with your hands.
Stop lying by omission
Freud’s most useful idea survives without any of the jargon, and Peterson’s version is blunter than Freud’s: most of what looks like repression isn’t burial at all. It’s refusing to investigate something you already half know.
You noticed.
You decided not to look.
Then you kept not looking, and after a while the not-looking became so habitual that it stopped feeling like a decision.
The practical version is a counting rule. Find the thing you’ve noticed three times and set aside three times.
Once is noise.
Twice is coincidence.
Three times is a pattern, and at three, “I hadn’t really thought about it” stops being an honest thing to say.
Recently my girlfriend asked me for help with our business website, which she runs, and I said I would have a look. It was important to her that I deal with it quickly so she could move on to the next thing.
I kept coming up with excuses as to why I hadn’t looked at it yet.
I half knew that I should be able to do what needed to be done in less than a day, but I kept postponing it. I would say to myself I’ll investigate it tomorrow and then I would keep doing my thing. The pattern was repeating daily for a week.
Finally, she confronted me about it. She was hurt that I wasn’t taking it seriously enough and she was right. She pinned me down and I had the website fixed in a few hours. I still don’t know what that was about.
Not doing the job was procrastination, but I never sat down to investigate why I was coming up with all the excuses for more than a week.
It’s best to investigate it on your own schedule, rather than waiting for it to hunt you down. Trust me, I know :)
Claim the traits instead of disowning them
You have a specific, nameable set of characteristics you’ve decided aren’t really you.
The anger that only shows up when you’re tired.
The competitiveness you’d describe as something else if asked.
The capacity for coldness you’re fairly sure is situational.
Jung’s argument, and it’s the spine of the whole course, is that unexamined traits don’t go quiet. They go feral.
Something you’ve never admitted to owning still runs your reactions, it just does it without supervision.
The move is to stop asking whether a trait is good or bad and start asking whether it’s yours.
Write down three things about yourself you’d be embarrassed to say out loud.
Don’t fix them.
Don’t build a plan around them.
Just admit authorship, which is most of the actual work and the part nearly everyone skips on their way to the self-improvement.
(I wrote a review of this course, including the shamanic material the lectures are built on, here.)
Choose your descents deliberately
Facing something difficult by choice produces a measurably different psychological response than having it forced on you. Same stressor, different response, and the only variable is whether you picked it.
If you face difficulties by choice, you are in exploration, energetic mode. If it’s forced on you, you act like prey, overwhelmed and paralysed.
Which means difficulty you select is a fundamentally different substance from difficulty that arrives.
And since something difficult is going to arrive sooner or later, the training matters.
Make a list of everything you’ve been avoiding that isn’t actually dangerous, only uncomfortable.
Rank it smallest to largest.
Do the smallest one today.
Not because it matters, it almost certainly doesn’t, but because this is a capacity that builds only through repetition, and repetition has to start at a weight you can lift.
Install the listening rule before you need it
Rogers’ technique is one sentence and almost nobody uses it: when in discussion with someone, you don’t get to state your position until you’ve repeated the other person’s position back to them, in your own words, and they’ve confirmed you got it right.
It feels slow but it is considerably faster than the four rounds of talking past each other you were otherwise about to have.
The reason it works is that half of most disagreements aren’t about the topic. They’re about not feeling heard on the topic, and that particular grievance doesn’t resolve through argument, only through being demonstrably understood.
Install the rule before your next difficult conversation rather than during it.
Name the competing goals before you diagnose the anxiety
A low, hard to place anxiety with no obvious trigger usually isn’t a warning about danger.
More often it means you’re running two incompatible plans at once and haven’t consciously chosen between them. Part of you is optimising for security and part for freedom, or part for the business and part for being home at six, and neither has been told it lost.
Write both down, side by side, in plain words.
Naming them explicitly does most of the work of dissolving the anxiety, even before you decide anything. The discomfort was largely the cost of holding two plans without admitting they were two.
This connects to the wider argument that your conscious explanations arrive after the fact rather than causing anything, which I’ve written about here.
Measure the distance to the mask
There’s a straightforward exercise for the persona, the arranged version of yourself you present outward, and it takes about ten minutes.
Write a paragraph describing yourself as you’d present to a room of strangers.
Then write a second, as though nobody would ever read it. Put them side by side.
The distance between those two paragraphs is roughly the size of the mask, and the mask is not the problem. Everyone has one and social life requires it.
The problem is the degree to which you’ve mistaken it for your actual identity, which is measurable by how uncomfortable the second paragraph was to write.
I did the exercise twice and I realised that if Peterson saw the first copy, he would say I wasn’t honest and I would have to agree with him. I did it the second time as honestly as I could bear it, and let’s just say that the size of my mask is bigger than I’m comfortable with. I’m working on reducing it and let’s leave it at that for now.
One filter on all of this
There’s a warning in the later lectures worth carrying out of the course, because it protects everything above.
Stop using calm confidence as your test for whether to trust someone.
Genuine competence is calm because the person has solved this specific problem before. Predatory confidence is calm because the person doesn’t feel the cost of being wrong. From outside, in a short meeting, the two are nearly identical.
The tell isn’t the calm.
It’s what happens when you ask a follow up question requiring real detail.
Competence gets more specific. The other thing gets broader or turns the question back on you.
I asked a contractor I hadn’t dealt with before to come and have a look at a recurring leak in a building that I manage. When I met him on site, he was calm, polite and I liked him.
He quoted, I accepted and he got the job done. He calmly explained what he did and that the problem wouldn’t come back.
Two weeks after that, the affected wall was still wet, so I called and started to ask him specific questions about what he did and why the problem seemed not to be resolved despite his assurance that it was fixed and wouldn’t come back.
I asked if he replaced the washers that he said he would, I asked if he ran a test before he left, and whether he had checked the pressure in the system.
He became vague, wasn’t as detailed as he was at our first meeting, he tried to blame a resident for not using their heating system properly and in the end stopped returning my calls.
I made a mistake. I didn’t ask enough relevant questions at the point of survey, I didn’t ask him how he managed to identify the source of the leak.
My price for it all was the pain of having to do all of it all over again.
Which is hardest right now for you: naming the trait you’ve disowned, or doing the smallest uncomfortable thing you’ve been putting off?
Sources & Disclaimer:
Sources: Personality and Its Transformations by Jordan Peterson (Peterson Academy), an eight-lecture course covering Freud, Jung, Rogers and Piaget. Linked inline above via an affiliate link.
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The ideas are mine. I use AI to argue with them, find the holes and sharpen the prose.
Sources & disclosure
Sources: Personality and Its Transformations by Jordan Peterson (Peterson Academy), an eight-lecture course covering Freud, Jung, Rogers and Piaget. Linked inline above via an affiliate link.
This post contains affiliate links. If you buy through them I may earn a small commission, at no cost to you.