Six-String Guitar
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The Six-Strings Metaphor
- Principles
- Beliefs
- Narrative Continuity
- Uniqueness
- Agency
- Self-Worth
Think of an acoustic guitar and all its parts that make the instrument special and valuable. The six parts of “Who am I” are like strings on that guitar. We’ll also give them a special counterpart piece of the guitar’s anatomy.
| One String | Multi-String | |
|---|---|---|
| Seven Nation Army by White Stripe | vs. | Whole Lotta Love by Led Zeppelin |
| Misirlou by Dick Dale | vs. | Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin |
| Thunderstruck by AC/DC | vs. | Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd |
As you can see, each string plays its part and can sound great alone, but using more than one delivers a richer texture.
Now, we will explore how these six strings help you understand the worlds you operate in every day.
Internal Strings
These are the guitar strings that impress themselves upon the internal world. In the context of the program, these are funneled into your principles, beliefs, and narrative continuity.
Principles
The awareness of the external world is horizontal because perspective is how we navigate the external world (people, environment). The source of your principles sits vertically and is derived from intuition within the environment of love. Importantly, principles are proactive, vertical, and for the internal world (yourself). They aren’t the same as boundaries, which are reactive and meant for the horizontal and external world (other people).
Guitar Metaphor The associated guitar parts for principles are the tuning pegs. You must set the pegs consciously because if you don’t, your tone will be dissonant. Adjust the pegs (principles) as you adapt over time. Don’t let others adjust your principles for your because your strings will go slack or snap.
Beliefs
Beliefs, whether based on spirituality or ability, are a source of energy that dictate action. They’re also a valuable resource that can be stolen. Through fear or praise, the immediate environment (media, family, relationships) compete to “steal” or “mold” your belief in a bid for control over your actions. Appropriately, beliefs can empower or limit a person. Empowering beliefs align directly with your intuition. They blast through fear, clarify your direction, and turn your potential into power. Limiting Beliefs are misaligned, entrapping, and burdensome. They can be given to you through indoctrination, culture, propaganda, or by yourself through learned helplessness.
Your beliefs construct your private world, and they are yours to hold, not to force onto others, and vice versa.
Guitar Metaphor The associated guitar parts for beliefs are the frets. The frets shorten or extend the length of the string, constraining the tone or heightening it.
Narrative Continuity
This is the story that contributes to you who you are as you age. It’s the accumulation of everything that shapes you, and it doesn’t see them as failures or successes. It’s simply the observational, nonjudgmental witness. It’s the record of the events as they happened, not the labels assigned to them. Your life is not a collection of short clips, but a grand cinematic film. Every scene, especially the painful times you felt lost, were absolutely necessary to get you where you are now. While it seems like the dark times are the villain of the story, they’re the point of it. Without conflict, without contrast, the story is incomplete and boring, but with the dramatic flare of emotional periods, we see the true art form of life. The past didn’t break you; it wrote your story.
Guitar Metaphor The associated guitar part for narrative continuity is the guitar’s patina. The scuffs and scratches along the surface of the guitar don’t affect its quality, but act to add personality. It’s the “well-played” wear and tear that makes the guitar have its own story for the curious observer, regardless of its music.
External Strings
These are the strings that express themselves to the external world. In the context of the program, these are funneled into self-worth, agency, and your uniqueness.
Uniqueness
This represents the role you’re meant to play in life: being your true self. It’s not about comparing yourself to others through vanity or humility, but as an observation of variety. Make vertical comparisons, not horizontal ones.
Guitar Metaphor The associated guitar part for uniqueness is the craftsmanship of the guitar itself. The wood grain, knots, shape, and so on create a unique timbre. No two guitars are the same.
Agency
This is about taking actions in the immediate environment and realizing that your actions matter and make a difference in the world. It’s about movement and who commands your actions. A person without agency may be controlled by another, behaving like a pinball that’s knocked around by the immediate environment. A person with agency is in control of themselves, and they operate with calculation and independence. You can have optimal beliefs, principles, and more, but if you never make your own moves, those strings remain still and silent.
Guitar Metaphor The associated guitar tool for agency are the hands. The strumming hand determines the pace of action, and the fret hand determines which actions to perform.
Self-worth
This is about how well you align with your role within the environment of love. Self-worth is inherent in you because it’s a native part of who you are. This worth is not about arrogance or modesty, good or evil, nor materialism or spirituality. It’s not a transactional sense of worth, meaning you cannot accumulate more of it like you can do with money, possessions, or reputation. For example, a mountain isn’t arrogant because it stands above everything else, and a pebble isn’t modest because it rests in the dirt. They both simply exist, playing their role without a particular attitude. Neither should you brag or apologize for your worth. While behavior may need adjustment, you cannot behave your way out of self-worth. You don’t have to prove your worth in the environment of love because you are “worth” itself.
Guitar Metaphor The associated guitar part for self-worth is the resonating soundboard. This amplifies the sound so that everyone can sense the guitar’s purity. The wood doesn’t need to do anything but be itself. The sound is what everyone expects from a guitar, and the value is apparent when the strings are strummed.
Imbalance
If you don’t have depth in the internal, vertical world, you drift without purpose in your immediate environment. You bend to other people’s demands, you conform to other people’s plans, and you compromise your power to fit in. You give away your power because you are trying to be everything to everyone in your immediate environment, and you get burned out and feel like a disconnected victim.
If you have no connections to the aspects of your horizontal, immediate environment, you risk feeling no meaningful connection to reality at all. You become a disembodied idealist where you see the world as it should be, not as it is. You feel a mix of grief, pity, disgust, or superiority, and you cannot be moved by or touch reality.
The reason idealists suffer with the state of the world is because they try to identify with it. They try to match the external world to our internal world, and when it fails, they don’t know what to do. If you are such an idealist, instead, change your mindset from finding an identity to making a contribution to the world. This is at least an attempt to try to get it closer to your internal world of unity. This way, it’s possible for an idealist to reconnect with reality while maintaining their principles.