Internal Honesty and Success
Are you honest with yourself when you see someone else who is perceived to be having more success than you in life?
Whether it’s relationships, money or health, how do you feel about other peoples success around you?
Do you give them nice words and phrases like congratulations, hey great work and a pat on the back?
Are you surface level about it or is it a genuine satisfaction for their results?
Or do you hold others too high in your mind and never say a word? Do you begin to inject their values into your own, then attempt to live your life through their values? This is what causes internal moral conflicts.
Or do you look down on them? Maybe you get pissed and wonder why they got all the breaks, they are the lucky ones or you make up excuses as to why they had more advantages and resources than you did.
I can honestly say I’ve done all the above.
I never stopped to think deeper though. I may have asked “how did they do that?” But it never occurred to me to ask something like, “how does that person occur to themselves?”
Questioning Your Current Perspective(s)
Your answers to the earlier questions may be a good indication of understanding how you occur to yourself. Like the answers or not, they can be a key to unlocking more success in your life.
When you see someone and you perceive they are successful in a particular endeavor or in life overall, would it be beneficial for you to ask yourself:
- How did they learn to accomplish that result?
- How long has it taken them to get that result?
- What where the steps they took to learn it?
- What did they study?
- How do they go about studying it?
- Where did they find the resources?
- Is my perception of their success even rational?
- Is there another side to their story other than what I see? (more than likely)
- How about asking, “How does this person occur to themselves?“
Chances are if we only hold one perspective of other peoples success, we probably only have one of our own.
When you ask bad questions you come up with bad answers that minimize your self concept. Maybe we’re just acting out irrational thoughts instead of asking ourselves better questions?
“Who we are is in the moment. Who we become is through a process.”
The challenge is we often times haven’t witnessed other peoples process, only who they have become up to this point. Then we make judgments about them and compare ourselves based only on our frame of reference, otherwise known as our single perspective.
Kinda sounds irrational once you consider it, doesn’t it?
With that understanding maybe it makes more sense to hold that person in your heart rather than higher or lower in your perception.
When you hold that person higher or lower in your perception you’re either living your life through their values or projecting yours onto them. Either way you’re not living consciously in the present. Holding them in your heart leads to a balanced perspective and frees up our energy to live in the now.
I found it hard for me at one time to hold anyone in my heart when I couldn’t even hold myself there.
This is something I had to discover and learn.
This is what I feel I had to experience in order to acknowledge and appreciate self esteem which indeed impacted my perspective on experiencing success.
“The kind of experiences I feel I’ve had, you can’t buy or get in a classroom. You just have to live it and become conscious of living it. I feel that’s why so few people learn to really live their lives, because they’re afraid of what it may take (or what they may have to lose) in order to live it.”
So what does it mean to learn something?
- Is it because you cracked open a book, read it and have some new knowledge?
- Is it because you took a test and you passed it?
- Is it because you received a degree or diploma?
Or is learning a set of steps and actions that you followed through with to get a particular result?
Maybe learning is having a mentor, a coach or a teacher?
Could it be a combination of all the above?
I would say yes and no. Depending on your vocation or desired result, there may not be a classroom 101 for a particular outcome you want.
I’m going to ask you to challenge what you believe it means to learn so you can better follow your intuition and life path that feels right to you.
We all want a certain amount of success in our lives in areas like relationships, money and health. We have more than likely created a certain level of success in those areas so far by what we’ve learned up till this point.
If you feel there is room for improvement in your behavior, then read on.
Since success is an ambiguous and abstract term that holds many different definitions for each of us, I’m going to explore our inner game perspective of success.
When we can experience success in our inner world, it would suffice we would experience fulfilling success in our outside world.
Self Discovery
Who are you?
You are the sum today of everything you’ve ever thought, said and chose to do.
I say chose to do because this is where self discovery begins to court responsibility. The two give birth to living consciously which which we’ll explore in a minute.
This is a place where as an adult you begin to own the idea that you can create positive change. This is where taking responsibility for what may have been reality and what wasn’t, frees you.
You can begin to own love, harmony and abundance as your birthright.
Points of self discovery for me have been:
- My Values
- Self Esteem and my Self Concept
- Living Consciously
- Discovering Emotional Intelligence
None of these would have been beneficial though had I not been willing to take responsibility of my current and past realities.
Let’ me give you an example.
I’ve discovered that as a child things happened around me and to me. I may not have had a choice about these events, however they did happen. This was the beginning of my living consciously. I began to take responsibility and acknowledged these events were my reality at that time. I realize yours may be very different.
For me, I discovered I grew up in an environment where I saw a lot of denial. I saw financial problems not being faced. I saw relationships that didn’t work. I saw explosions of anger and violence when these things were finally confronted and so I learned not to rock the boat. I implicitly learned to shy away from any kind of confrontation, especially around money.
Later this had a huge impact on me as an adult around my finances and relationships. I unconsciously denied any responsibility of money. Sure I could create it, but I didn’t want to have to take care of it. I ended up nearly $20,000 in debt and nothing to really show for it. Over the years I also found myself in, lets just say, extremely short relationships over and over … and over.
Self Esteem
Ultimately one of the greatest challenges I ended up facing was a low self esteem because I began to see this pattern in my life but I didn’t know why I kept doing it or know what to do about it.
Have you ever know there is something not quite right, but didn’t know what to do about it?
If I have low self esteem it means at deep levels I really doubt my abilities to cope with the challenges of life or to cope with many of them. Plus I would make it mean I’m not really deserving of happiness. I feel this could be what many people experience.
What came naturally for me when coping with the challenges of life was to just ignore most of it or create situations where someone else had to to deal with it. Pretty shitty either way.
However it wasn’t possible to use any of this as an excuse any longer as I become more conscious of my life not working out the way I wanted.
One of the great challenges of growing up is being the only person now who can give you what you didn’t get as a child. Looking for it outside of yourself won’t work. Looking for someone to fill you up won’t work either. It’s all temporary other than what you can give yourself.
“I hold a deep affection for you, not because you’re the light of my life but because you helped me discover my life lights up when I find my own.“-self love
I wrote that quote while thinking of my prior life coach Jana Fleming. She first helped me to discover this door where I no longer felt I needed to looked back and use any of my history as an excuse but as a key to reintegrate with what I was resisting so much in life.
What was I resisting? Giving my inner child love and affection it didn’t get growing up. I felt it was important to reintegrate my adult self with my child self, to own what I had unconsciously disowned.
I had already went down the path of seeking stuff outside of myself to help me feel whole. I knew I wasn’t living in integrity. I knew this, but did nothing about it.
I was able to experience what I wanted most much faster through drugs and sex at the time. Even if it never lasted and I found myself doing it all over again.
So much of it makes sense to me now.
Values originate from perceptions of what’s missing. If we perceive we’re missing money, sex, or relationships we begin to seek those things. Whatever we perceive as missing, becomes our highest value. The void’s drive the values.
My void and what I was holding most valuable was love and relationships which I chose to fill with sex, and lots of it throughout my life.
Needless. Empty. Sex.
Oh sure, in the moment I fully believed I felt something however it was the inner child desiring the love and affection it hadn’t received. It was my emotions using my body to get what they wanted. Affection, however fleeting it was.
In the long term having so many sexual partners had an affect on maintaining a healthy long term relationship not to mention every time I engaged in them I hurt my self esteem.
But again, this was no longer an excuse, I was becoming too conscious of my life not working.
I got fed up.
What did I begin to do about it?
Grow Up
Growing up means you becoming you’re own parent.
For me i means me feeling love, understanding and compassion for the child that I once was. I wasn’t fully aware of this until later after I worked with Jana and even this didn’t sink in right away. I had discovered I disowned parts of myself and my inner child was using me to fulfill its needs the only way it knew how.
I was acting out in the easiest ways I knew to get attention. In many cases this meant me creating circumstances where I was the victim. it was a secondary payoff using the negative behaviors. It’s just how I showed up at the time.
for you maybe growing up means really remembering with compassion and love how tough it was growing up in an unloving environment or one where expectations and standards were set super high. Even above love & affection.
Figuratively speaking this means taking that child’s hand and be willing to grow up and be that child’s champion.
This was my reintegration where I’ve discovered and redefined a new and very real self love and self respect.
“Self esteem is a function, not of what we are born with, but how we use our consciousness, the choices we make concerning awareness, our honesty in relation to our reality and the level of our personal integrity.”-Nathaniel Braden The Psychology of Self Esteem
Become clearly conscious of your values and be honest about what you feel is missing and then you begin to find the inspiration in life rather than requiring motivation to live life.
High self esteem is that deep rooted experience that says I’m really able and competent to cope with the challenges of life. That I’m worthy of happiness which includes feeling worthy of success.
So how do you begin to learn to cope with the challenges of life and feel you are deserving of happiness and successes?
Step 1. Face Facts:
“Living consciously implies respect for the facts of reality. The facts of our inner as well as outer world. Living consciously is living responsibly toward reality. This doesn’t mean we have to like what we see in all cases, but it does mean we recognize what is is, and what isn’t, isn’t.”-Nathaniel Braden The Psychology of Self Esteem
Our wishes, fears or denials do not alter facts nor do they create your desired future.
Step 2. Live Consciously
Until I decided to live consciously nothing in my world changed much. What I mean is nothing at the level of behavior changed. I never did anything with the new found knowledge I began to encounter. I stored it away and felt content with that.
I’ve quoted Wyatt Woodsmall many times around the fact that learning can be gauged by behavior change. No behavior change? No true learning has occurred then. You’ve only acquired more knowledge.
So how do we begin to change our behavior?
Living Consciously
Living consciously can be such an ambiguous term or an extreme generality.
If you’re a fan of The Secret and the Law of Attraction you’ll hear people using it a lot without any real way to define it. It sounds too woo woo.
However living consciously is something that can be broken down into concrete thoughts and actions where you create positive long lasting change. It means examining your behaviors and making sure they match up to a strategy and a plan of action towards your purposes in life.
It means you being the grown up, taking responsibility and moving forward consciously with your choices.
When you:
- Know your purposes (By identifying your values)
- Create strategies and plans of action to achieve those purposes (clear actionable steps)
- Confirm every night that your actions and behaviors during the day are in alignment with your strategies and plan of actions to reach your purposes.
You raise your level of self esteem when review and acknowledge your actions are in alignment with your purposes. This is when you’re living consciously and purposely in your choices. You feel good about your choices and your progress. Your choices compound upon each other and your life sets sail on a course of success.
Rinse and repeat.
You want your self concept to be one of specifics and not irrational generalities. You accomplish this when you’re living consciously.
Consciously Take Action (And Then Some)
so here is the …(and then some) part…
People who are moving consistently towards their outcomes are doing so because they occur a certain way to themselves. They have gained a certain perspective. Remember, many of those individuals have went through a process that you haven’t been privy to.
David Logan of Tribal Leadership outlined in his other book, The Three Laws of Leadership, a process where you gain perspective and put it into action.
You can ask yourself some new questions:
- In what way do I occur to myself right now?
- Do I like how I occur to myself?
- What outcomes am I truly trying to accomplish? (Acknowledging your highest values will tell you)
- How do I need to occur to myself to accomplish those outcomes?
- What are my current assets I have right now that can assist me in accomplishing those outcomes? (Current relationships, skills or knowledge)
- Where can I find the assets I need for my outcome if I don’t have them?
- What do I need to do right now to get started?
So back to people we may have looked up to or down upon in regards to their successes.
Remember, your answers to the questions in the beginning of the post may have been a good indication of understanding how you occur to yourself. Be real with yourself and face what ha,s so far up to this point, been your reality.
Begin to hold others in your heart. When you do you make space with “what is” in your life. When you do this, you free up your mental and emotional energies in order to connect with your highest values and organically discover your desired purposes and outcomes in life. There can be no moral dilemma because you’re acting out of your highest values.
What assets do you have that will support you getting those outcomes? What current relationships, skills or knowledge do you already have that can help you obtain those outcomes?
If you don’t have the assets which ones do you need and where can you find them?
The resources you need are all around you. They just don’t always fall in your lap though. However you do improve your probabilities when you’ve gained better perspective of who you are, where you’re going and are consciously moving towards your desired outcomes.
The time has never been better than now to do it.
Take Your Next Steps
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