Stage-6: Obedience — Fill a Role
Rationale
While the is about subjugating personal desires to social requirements, the choice of what to obey remains a personal matter. The mode is therefore about getting stress relief from choosing a suitable role and then automatically upholding it even in stressful situations.
Refusal to Hold a Role is a Failure to Cope
Roles are a net benefit even though every recognized role carries socially expected responsibilities. Those responsibilities may seem like a burden, but you depend on others to fulfil their roles just as they depend on you. If you regard a role as a convenience to be taken on and dropped as suits your mood, then others will label you as unreliable and irresponsible. You will find yourself adrift and unsupported. That will make it extremely difficult to cope with life's stresses.
Values & Assumptions
Promoting Survival
Essence: Operate in role
Roles ensure that you can be identified and supported by others acting in their roles. Each social environment will generate its own role opportunities. Any role comes with duties and expectations. If engagement is required in a stressful situation, the role often provides for the required decision or at least narrows and focuses decision-making. In many cases, the role may formally justify avoidance of engagement.
Benefit: Limit demands
Any difficulty or problem invites you to respond and there will be many pushing and pulling you from all directions. The common advice to be willing to say "No" is most easily followed if there is a justification. Defending a role can greatly limit both the demands placed on you and the demands you respond to. Valuing the role of "father", for example, can counter the pressure to compete at work or do community work.
Means: Exert self-discipline
Without self-discipline, roles will become diffuse and inappropriate pressures will be allowed to develop. Regular review of your situation and your response to demands is required.
Handling the Socio-physical Environment
Participation: Protect your reputation
Role performance occurs within a social system. If the role is well handled, your reputation will be protected or even enhanced. Reputation enables influence to be more easily exerted, as well as supporting the trust of others. Generally this makes life much easier.
Interaction: Conform willingly
Roles are socially recognized and largely socially determined. So operating a role involves conforming to its bounds, procedures, and activities. Such conformity removes much of the burden of autonomous judgement and reduces effort entailed by a creative response.
Individualization: Make rules for living
While roles are largely provided by the milieu, it is possible for you to make your own rules in many areas of your life. By making rules that benefit yourself and being consistent in following those rules (i.e. turning them into habits), stresses can be greatly reduced. Rules might govern getting enough sleep, managing eating and drinking, taking time off, and keeping noise to acceptable levels.
Channelling Your Functioning
Endurance: Reflecting
The psychosocial world is dynamic and ever-evolving. So roles and rules that work now may not continue to work in the future. It is therefore essential to reflect on your choice of roles, the social expectations, and how you handle your roles and manage stresses.
Limitations
In Cycle-2, the advised recuperation and escape from stress at work, while advised conforming to social expectations to ensure social support. Both neglect nourishment of your better self and the periodic requirement to rise above the rigidity and pettiness that are the cause of so much stress.
The final Quest, , offers guidance that remedies this lack.
Moving on…
- Continue to Stage 7: Spirituality mode.
Originally posted: 9-Dec-2022. Last updated: 28-Mar-2023.
