Words With Myself

Don‘t look down

There can come a point in our journey where we feel like we don't want to lose what we have in order to pursue what we want. This can be money, security, status or any number of things, we get to a point in our life where we become comfortable and wonder if the pursuit of our dreams is worth the risk of losing the life we have created.

See what you think

Everyone has opinion and bias, it is an integral function in our brains ability to process information and make judgements and decisions on how to respond appropriately to information. A problem arises however, when we receive new pieces of information that directly contradict previously held beliefs and opinions. We keep ourselves in a state of cognitive dissonance in order to protect our idea of self, our ego is attached to what we believe and wants to preserve itself and it's identity. This can make changing incredibly difficult. We begin to sabotage ourselves and prevent ourselves from changing in order to hold on to the belief that what we thought or did was right all along.

Let the leaves fall

As we are in the height of Autumn, I have taken time to reflect on what I am holding onto. I am in a transitional period in my life and I am becoming increasingly aware of the things I am holding onto that no longer serve my best interests. Like the leaves fall from a tree, free yourself from past burdens and allow yourself to move on.

The ostrich might not bury it‘s head in the sand, but we do.

It is human nature to avoid pain, integrated into our survival are mechanisms that protect us from dealing with pain. Unfortunately, these mechanisms can work against us as well as for us. When we bury trauma and avoid the pain of addressing it, no matter how deep we bury it, it will always find a way to come back up and manifest itself back into your life. Anger, Sadness, Depression, Numbness can all be symptoms of something that you are avoiding and you may have avoided it for so long, you don't quite remember what it even was that was hurting you. Dealing with trauma may cause short term pain, but it will result in long term peace.

You know what to do

If you did everything you knew you were supposed to do, every day, how would your life be different years from now? How much closer would you be to the person you want to be, the things you want to have and the things you want to do? What are the things you are avoiding? This is the kind of questions I have been thinking about lately and I have realised just how much time I have spent recently off my path, it is time to get back on it.

School of thought

Lately, I have been focused on things that I need to unlearn rather than things I need to learn. In school, I picked up a lot of negative thoughts and patterns that I still repeat to this day, I learned to hide myself, to reduce my achievements and make myself small. Well, I will no longer tolerate this for myself, I release these wrong teachings and assimilate the new, I am going to burn brighter than ever and will stop at nothing to live up to my full potential. 

When it rains it pours

Sometimes it can feel like the world is against you, like the whole universe is conspiring to make you miserable. Well, I know how this feels all to well but I also recognise that it is a complete fallacy. Despite how it may feel, the problems that you are facing are just challenges you need to complete in order to level up. To get to a place where the kinds of issue you are facing don't even effect you. To motivate you to work harder, smarter and better so that you are in a position to glide over these things as trivial. We must seek adversity, charge forward at each problem and tackle them head on. This is how we grow.

Dependence on Self-Dependence

For some people, myself included, we are well versed at doing things ourselves but we are terrible at asking for things. This kind of person will typically give all they can in the service of other people even to the detriment of themselves, they always go the extra mile to help or accommodate the needs of others but never allow others to help them with their needs and wants. This is the self-dependence trap, being so independent that we lose our ability to ever be dependent on anyone or anything but ourselves.

Confidence is key

In my experience, very few people identify themselves as completely confident. If you ask someone if they are confident or not, their first response is usually what they are most insecure about instead. We have a tendency to view people as either confident or not, but the truth is, confidence is complicated. Almost everyone (if not everyone) has insecurities and things they are not confident about, whether it is their ability, looks, voice or anything else. If you self identify as not confident, instead, try to break that down into different areas and understand in which places you are least to most confident. A lack of confidence can lead to a lack of execution and missed out opportunities, missing out on that job opportunity, talking to the person of your dreams or just losing the chance to help someone in need.

Onions have layers, healing has layers.

Sometimes it can feel like we have hit a block, that no matter what we do we can't feel better. Sometimes this is because we focus on the areas we want to change as opposed to the areas that we have to. The more integrated you are with your trauma and the negative things in your life, the harder it is to clear them from it. We justify, protect and ignore the things that hurt us because we have grown used to the pain that they cause, we can become "comfortable" and we know that change is hard and painful. However, if we don't deal with the root cause of our issues, it will only become more ingrained and harder to remove.