The Inner Controls Of Your Winning Recipe – How To Lay Them Bare

IN ADDITION TO being introverts we each create a persona or winning recipe as children.  It offsets our not being outgoing enough. And it allows us to hide behind a socially acceptable way to be – bland, frugal, particular, results-oriented, understanding, or any of the thousands of other personas introverts adopt to win in an extroverted world.

Post #2 described how to identify the early childhood incident that probably triggered your winning recipe.

• Perhaps you were able to discover a way of being to alleviate the pain of your introversion.  If so, please go directly to Unpacking the Recipe below.
• Or perhaps you were only able to see something you did. That happened to me when at age four when I ran away from home.  If so, please read on.

The Way of Being That is Your Winning Recipe

YOUR MEMORY JOG may have shown you a mental movie.  You might have seen yourself being catapulted into action to escape from the discomfort of an early trauma. Maybe you hit somebody. Maybe you cried and screamed. Or maybe you wet your pants. Whatever it was, it was probably only the crude beginnings of a winning recipe.

Try using the same technique as in the previous post.  Compile a short inventory of early upsets either by directly recalling them or by meditating.  Then go to the second or third ordeal on your list. Use whichever event occurred when you were old enough to do more than just take blind action. See if you can identify the kind of behavior you devised to get yourself through. That is where your winning recipe is likely to show up in all its glory. 

How I Found My Own Winning Recipe

MINE SHOWED UP one Friday afternoon in 1953 when I was ten.  That day teacher of my Los Angeles public school class announced a scary assignment.  Each of us had to pick a current event and report on it on Monday.  Without notes, standing in front of the room.

For hours afterwards I was terrified. But that evening I calmed down enough to come up with a plan. I looked in the newspaper and found an article about President Eisenhower that interested me. I cut it out, underlined the main points and memorized them. For three nights I went into the garage and rehearsed them out loud.

The approach shifted my focus away from the external world, where I was nervous.  It settled my attention in the internal world, where I was confident. And on Monday the results astounded me. The interest of the class and the beaming smile on the teacher’s face flung my process-driven recipe into existence.

Unpacking the Recipe

EVERY RECIPE HAS three moving parts regardless of whether it calls you to be organized, energetic, clever, or responsible.  Or any of the thousands of other possible ways of compensating for being an introvert.  It gives you a payoff when you translate it into action:

Be ➝ Do ➝ Get Payoff

Here are the inner controls of my own recipe:

Be: Process Driven ➝ Do: Break Things Down Into Steps ➝ Payoff: Get Results without Having to Deal with People

For me the payoff was a huge stroke of luck. It gave me a useful way to handle the noise in the world without having to go to other people for much of anything. Once I defined the steps involved in mastering a given situation I seemed to produce positive results automatically.

Skinny and bespectacled, I became a process fanatic. In high school I created one for every class – to learn the valences of chemical atoms, reconstruct the history of the U.S., and solve quadratic equations. In college the recipe brought even more success, earning me a Phi Beta Kappa honor society key in my junior year. My social life was dismal, and in grad school the process approach drove me into a wall. But while it lasted the recipe was glorious.

Why It Is Vital To Identify The Inner Controls

IT IS CRITICAL for you to expose the moving pieces of your winning recipe so you can gain access to its controls.

• To detach from the recipe you later will need to alter the Payoff so that it no longer is a form of compensation for your being an introvert, but rather is pure enjoyment for something that you do for its own sake.
• But right now the things you are Doing drive the Payoff, so you first have to address those actions.
• And yet you cannot, because how you are Being drives the engine of the recipe. You can only detach from it by targeting Being in such a way that it changes what you are Doing, and thereby alters the nature of the Payoff.

Understanding these mechanics is a precondition for detaching from your winning recipe.

Exposing Your Own Inner Controls

IT IS FAIRLY easy to uncover the inner controls of your winning recipe. All you have to do is look at its three elements and ask what Being, Doing, and the Payoff look like in your situation.

For example, let’s say your winning formula is to be thoughtful. That is the Being piece. In being that way, what are you Doing to compensate for your introversion?

• Perhaps you look at every assignment at work and every request from your partner or family to determine exactly what they want, and then try to provide it.
• Or maybe you put yourself in others’ shoes to see how you can best support them.
• Whatever you do, you do things to be thoughtful. To a certain extent that makes you feel good – my processes usually did that for me. But the fundamental reason you do them is cut down the noise level in your life. Over decades that becomes quite unsatisfying because you are not being thoughtful for itself, but to compensate for being an introvert.

Your Payoff is likely to be similar to mine – to find a way to distance yourself from people so that you can have more quiet in your life.

Thinking through the above should help you to know what your winning recipe is, and understand its internal controls. That now puts you in a good position to begin evaluating the negative effects you are incurring.

In the next posts we will start looking at the many tolls that your recipe is levying on you in terms of dissatisfaction, drama from unintended consequences, and distance in relationships.

I Invite You To Begin Discovering Your Recipe’s Internal Controls Today

• What is your winning recipe? What is the content of the three pieces that drive its engine? If you would like us to consider sharing your story with The Satisfied Introvert community anonymously please email it to us at thesatisfiedintrovert@gmail.com. We will do our best to publish it but unfortunately we cannot do so for every story. Please note that all submissions are the property of this site.
• How can I help you identify the inner controls of your recipe? Please go to the Contact page and enter your name, email and questions. I cannot answer everyone, but will do my best – especially if the answer could benefit others.
• To be notified of new posts to The Satisfied Introvert blog, please go to the Subscribe section at the bottom of this post and enter your name and email. Under no circumstances will we share your information without your express permission. A new post appears every two weeks. Coming up next: “How to Get Your Focus Off Of Your Recipe And Onto Other People.”

Welcome to the certainty that comes from seeing the

 

mechanics of how your winning recipe drives your

 

life, and the comfort of knowing that you now

 

have your hands on its controls

© 2022 The Satisfied Introvert LLC