Welcome back to your weekly subconscious upgrade
A Personal Ethos
Have you ever experienced the freedom of a mind that replays why you can laugh freely today, instead of searching for reasons you can’t?
Every morning you wake up with an ease in your chest, energised by what today could be. From this place you’re allowed to be wrong, to lose, to fail. None of it questions whether you’re worthy.
To me, that’s true confidence.
To be eager to live even when life is uncertain.
Now let yourself get in touch with the feelings of self-trust — because you’ve felt it before. You know what I’m talking about.
It’s true because your brain compares your off days against these moments.
What would happen if you experienced this daily?
What type of person would you become?
With this in mind, this week I want you to deeply think about a single idea: your personal ethos.
The original meaning.
The word ethos is Greek. ἦθος.
Most people use it to mean the values or character of a person or culture.
Look further back and the original Greek is far more interesting. Ethos meant “accustomed place.”
In other words, the habitat or ground an animal returned to instinctively.
Only later did the Greeks apply the same word to people, and only then to mean the inner ground a person habitually lives from.
Your ethos, in the original sense, is the familiar place inside yourself that you actually live from.
The Greeks understood something else. Heraclitus put it bluntly: ēthos anthrōpōi daimōn — “a man’s ethos is his destiny.” Character was was fate. The ground you habitually returned to became the life you lived.
Aristotle took it further. Ethos, for him, was character built through habit; moral nature shaped by what you repeatedly do, repeatedly choose, repeatedly think.
Which hints at my adapted philosphy of Cogito Ergo Sum.
Can you begin to see the connections now?
So when we talk about ethos this week, we refer to this and not a gimmicky mood board or affirmations:
The values which motivate you. The beliefs that inspire your character. The way you approach difficulty, intimacy, work, rest. The passions you return to whether life rewards them or not. The connections between your craft, your art, your relationships, your sense of meaning — the threads that, when you look at them honestly, weave together to make you, you.
This week’s practice: discover your own ethos.
Set aside thirty minutes. A notebook open in front of you.
Step one — drift back.
Allow yourself to drift back in time when life felt rawest. Can you remember a time when nothing else existed except that current moment? Maybe a moment of presence. Maybe a moment of joy. Maybe an accomplishment that meant something to you. Maybe a feeling of passion, or flow, or wildness, or quiet, or love.
Just picture this for a moment.
