UIOK: Honing my self analysis skills with Will Fleming

I got the chance to have a chatwith one of the guys who help inspire me to get into podcasting. I started listening to Will Fleming last year when he hosted the “My Kiwi Life” podcast. He pondered life with a bunch of interesting Kiwis. More recently I’ve got into his new podcast “Willosophy” where he willosiphises about life.

All up I reckon I’ve spent close to 40 hours listening to Will have conversations without ever having met him, or had a chat with him myself. It’s a strange dynamic talking with someone that you think you know, but you don’t. Thankfully Will had listened to a few of my podcast episodes so hopefully he was having similar slightly odd feelings. More thankfully Will in real life was exactly like he is on the podcast so it was easy to get into some great conversation quickly with no need for too much preamble.

Will is a content creator who has done some pretty deep self-analysis over the past few years. He told me in our chat that “very rarely do we stop and analyse who we are”, which he was guilty of as well. It took him a while to realise that he had tricked himself into playing the game of getting up, going to work and thinking that was all that mattered. Once he’d had that realisation, the self-analysis deepened. He tells me that he had had enough of living life on autopilot, that as he started to look deeper at himself and his life he found his eyes opening wider. He started looking at what he enjoyed doing, what got him into the flow state, and now he spends his time and energy trying to do those things and trying to get paid for them.

“I was only able to adapt my thinking base off the experiences I was going through. But those experiences I went through were only through me searching for those areas I could offer more value.”

Our thought patterns are intricately intertwined with our experiences and our actions. They all feed in to one another. This quote from Will really resonated with me as I’m having a similar journey. Will’s thought processes shaped his actions which then influenced the experiences that he had, these experiences then fed back into his thought processes, either reinforcing them, or allowing him to alter them in line with the experience.

This is something that is inherent in our nature as humans (at least in my thought processes, actions, and experience). Our thoughts influence our actions, which lead us to experiences, which then alter our thinking. It’s a cycle that we aren’t going to change, and it’s a cycle that we don’t want to change. It allows us to evolve as people and as societies. The problem occurs when we get stuck in a cycle for too long without change, we stick with what we are doing because it seems like what we’ve always done, and what we’ve been told we should always do. Our thought patterns have been reinforced to keep us taking the same actions, which lead to the same experien