The Hardest Hurdle

After many many years of research and thinking I have come to a conclusion that possibly that hardest hurdle for most people is to truly be themselves. What do you think?

Are you really yourself or do you try and play roles in the various aspects of your life. When you think about it we can all see that we do play roles -we play the role of being someones employee, someones employer, someones husband or wife, someones son or daughter, someones friend or colleague. With each of the characters or broad personalities that we adopt to fulfil the expectations in each of these roles we also draw on a range of differing emotions which will dictate our level of involvement.

You could say that in many respects we are like a Chameleon. For some this way of being can be dramatically different in each role but for others the differences may still be very subtle but essentially we are all changing our roles depending on the circumstances and environment.

What happens therefore when we are alone? Do you like being alone and are you comfortable or do you need the company of others to give you a sense of identification?

Many people suffer from emotional loneliness and so they turn to their workplace and their role to provide that meaning in their life. In fact they need to be recognised for the job that they hold. This for them serves as a constant reminder as to who they are. For many people this is very important and it is recognised that in the longer term this may cause psychological difficulties. Why? Because what we do is not who we are and until we find who we are then we will always feel ultimately a lack of self understanding and fulfilment.

So what does it mean to be truly yourself and how do you get there?

One of the first issues to contend is the ability to find self acceptance. Self acceptance is one of the main criteria in finding oneself. When you consider your own self talk or the internal dialogue in which we all indulge you need to watch the words you are saying about yourself. Considering the fact that you are the only listener and it is coming from within you these words can have a very powerful impact because they effect the way you think and feel and essentially you may believe that in spite of what others tell you the fact is that you know yourself better. 

Self acceptance is the first step.

One of the major obstacles in finding self acceptance is the view that we have of ourselves which of often tainted by our past thoughts, actions and failures. We all fail-we all do things the wrong way, we all say the wrong thing at the wrong time and we all do things that we don't really mean. We all hurt others who are often the ones that mean the most to us. Essentially we are not perfect and yet our own internal dialogue delights in the constant reminder that it is because of these things we either do not deserve what we have or in some way we are a fraud.

The first step then to self acceptance is to forgive oneself and to recognise that we are all the same-everyone is the same and no one is really different. We all carry emotional baggage and our internal assassin will not let us forget it. We need therefore to constantly forgive ourselves and every time we find ourselves indulging in this kind of negative self talk we need to stop -breathe in and then clearly in our mind forgive ourselves. Maybe we will need to do this thousands of times but in the end we are becoming the master of our mind and refusing to allow such self talk to influence the way we are.

Rather than constantly tell ourselves that we are a fraud or a failure we need to pay attention to forgiving ourselves because we are human and as such we are all the same. The big secret is that we are all the same and that we all have doubts and uncertainties and now that we know this information we can get on with our lives and become our own Leader by taking the first step towards self acceptance.

With Self Acceptance being the first step then we can move on to the aspect of Forgiveness. Who better to forgive ourselves than us. If we are the one that is constantly self talking in a negative destructive way then we need to change this habit and then this can be achieved by constant forgiveness. By forgiving ourselves we are then creating the environment for greater Self Acceptance.

Having practised Self Acceptance through forgiveness and our deeper understanding as to how to control our self talk we can then begin to see the impact that this has had in the past on our emotions and our lives. We can now turn this around so that instead of our way of being and thinking having a detrimental effect on us we can now use the same methodology to improve our lives and to therefore begin to see a bit more clearly the way to be truly our self.

When we can accept ourselves for what we truly are in this fashion then we are well on the way to overcoming this first great hurdle to better self awareness.