“So you’re always seeking the truth?” she
asked.
“I do my best to be,” I said. “Don’t you?”
Her gaze shifted downward. “No, I
don’t.”
“Well, that’s good to know. I mean, it’s
a good start,” I said. “Just admitting this is a step forward…”
She quickly interrupted me, “I’m not saying I
like lies and liars! At least that’s not how I meant it, anyway.”
I smiled and continued, “I’m smiling because I
know what you mean. But I also want to hear it from you, in your
words. So tell me, how do you mean it?”
“I…I just…I just don’t always admit the truth
about what I think and how I feel, and I don’t always seek the truth when I
probably should.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s easier not to,” she said.
“Because the truth is often scary, and it hurts pretty bad sometimes…and
sometimes it even changes everything.”
“Yeah, it does. But lies and ignorance
usually hold people back and hurt them even worse in the long run,” I said.
She nodded her head slowly in agreement,
“Yeah, I guess that’s true. I’ve been sitting in my comfort zone for a while
now, in my own little bubble of half-truths, mostly miserable.”
Then we sat for a prolonged moment in silence
together, before she took a deep breath and said, “Thank you, I needed to hear
that.”
And I thanked her too, for reminding me that
the truth does not cease to exist when it is ignored – it just tends to fester
and haunt us…
That’s the general gist of a conversation I
had this morning with a
new Getting Back to Happy course student. I’m sharing this with you today (with
permission, of course) in hopes that it might remind you of the truths you’ve
been subconsciously avoiding.
Although it may be tough to stretch our
comfort zones beyond the boundaries of what we’re familiar with – and into the
realities of what we don’t yet feel ready to deal with – doing so is often the
only clear path to mental and emotional freedom.
And we have to admit that, to a
certain extent, we’ve been embracing too many half-truths and falsehoods in our
lives. These half-truths and falsehoods are subtle, but they
constantly get in our way – they stop us from growing, learning,
loving, and living to our greatest potential.
Admitting this can be downright uncomfortable,
scary, and even a bit painful sometimes, but doing so is absolutely necessary.
So in light of this, I want to highlight seven
incredibly beneficial, life-changing truths I have seen hundreds of our course
students and coaching clients struggle to admit and deal with over the past
decade for various fear-based reasons.
1. The vast
majority of our struggles are self-created, and we can choose to overcome them
in an instant.
We all struggle. We all suffer on the
inside. Every day…
We worry.
We procrastinate.
We feel overwhelmed.
We feel angry.
We feel lonely.
We don’t feel good enough.
We wish we were thinner
We wish we had more money.
We wish our jobs were different.
We wish our relationships were different.
We think everything in life should be easier.
We procrastinate.
We feel overwhelmed.
We feel angry.
We feel lonely.
We don’t feel good enough.
We wish we were thinner
We wish we had more money.
We wish our jobs were different.
We wish our relationships were different.
We think everything in life should be easier.
And yet, every one of these struggles is
self-created. They are real, but they are only real because we have
created them in our minds. We have attached ourselves to certain
ideals and fantasies about how life has to be in order to be good enough for
us.
We worry because things might not turn out how
we expect. We procrastinate because we fear discomfort and failure.
We feel overwhelmed because we think we should be further along than we
are. We feel angry because life should not be this way. And so it
goes.
But it’s all in our heads.
And it doesn’t have to be this way. At
least not anymore.
You can think better… you can live better. This is a choice YOU can make.
Take a deep breath, and let all that thinking
and ruminating go. Just bring your attention to the present moment.
Focus on what’s here with you now – the light, the sounds, your body, the
ground under your feet, the objects and people moving and resting around
you. Don’t judge these things against what they should be – just
accept what they actually are. Because once you accept reality, only then
can you gradually improve it.
See life as it is, without all the ideals and
fantasies you’ve been preoccupied with. Let go of all of those stressful
distractions, and just experience this moment.
This moment is good enough as it is.
Focus. Be in it completely.
You can go back to fretting about everything
else in a minute.
2. We fear the
judgments of others, even though their judgments about us are rarely valid or
significant.
“What’s wrong with
wanting other people to like you?”
That’s a question several of our course
students recently asked me in response to one of my
course-related emails. And I’ve been asked similar questions over the
years too. So let’s talk about it…
In a nutshell, tying your self-worth to
everyone else’s opinions gives you a flawed sense of reality that can cause
serious trouble when it comes to your confidence and happiness. Yet, as
human beings, we do it quite often. From wanting others to think
we’re attractive, to checking the number of likes and comments on our social
media posts, most of us care about what others think. In fact, a big
part of this is an innate desire we are born with. It has been proven
time and time again that babies’ emotions are often drawn directly from the
behaviors of those around them.
As we grow up, we learn to separate our
thoughts and emotions from everyone else’s, but many of us continue to seek –
and in many cases beg for – positive social validation from others. In a
recent survey we did with 1,200 of our course students and coaching clients,
67% of them admitted that their self-worth is strongly tied to what other
people think of them. And even though that isn’t a healthy way to measure
your self-worth, it isn’t surprising that so many of us think this way.
We naturally respond to everything we
experience through the lens of our learned expectations – a set of deep-rooted
beliefs about the way the world is and how things should be. And one
of the most prevailing expectations we have involves external validation and
how others ‘should’ respond to us.
Over a century ago, social psychologist
Charles Cooley identified the phenomenon of the “looking-glass self,” which is
when we believe “I am not what I think I am, and I am not what you think I am –
I am what I think that you think I am.” Sadly, this kind of external
validation has insecurity at its core, and relying on it for even a short time
chips away at our sense of self-worth and self-confidence.
The biggest problem is
we tend to forget that people judge us based on a pool of influences in their
own life that have absolutely nothing to do with us. For example, a person might assume
things about you based on a troubled past experience they had with someone else
who looks like you, or someone else who shares your same last name, etc.
Therefore, basing your self-worth on what others think puts you in a perpetual
state of vulnerability – you are literally at the mercy of their unreliable,
bias perspectives. If they see you in the right light, and respond to you
in a positive, affirming manner, then you feel good about yourself. And
if not, you feel like you did something wrong.
Bottom line: When you’re doing
everything for other people, and basing your happiness and self-worth on their
opinions, you’ve lost your moral center. If you catch yourself doing this
– as you inevitably will at some point – remind yourself of the truth:
What most people think of you doesn’t matter at all.
3. In many ways,
our past experiences have conditioned us to believe that we are less capable
than we are.
All too often we let the rejections of our
past dictate every move we make. We literally do not know ourselves to be
any better than what some opinionated person or narrow circumstance once told
us was true. Of course, an old rejection doesn’t mean we aren’t
good enough; it just means some person or circumstance from our past failed to
align with what we had to offer at the time. But somehow we don’t see
it that way – we hit a mental barricade that stops us in our tracks.
This is one of the most common and damaging
thought patterns we as human beings succumb to.
Even though we intellectually know that we’re
gradually growing stronger than we were in the past, our subconscious mind
often forgets that our capabilities have grown.
Let me give you a quick metaphorical example…
Zookeepers typically strap a thin metal chain
to a grown elephant’s leg and then attach the other end to a small wooden peg
that’s hammered into the ground. The 10-foot tall, 10,000-pound elephant
could easily snap the chain, uproot the wooden peg and escape to freedom with
minimal effort. But it doesn’t. In fact the elephant never even
tries. The world’s most powerful land animal, which can uproot a big tree
as easily as you could break a toothpick, remains defeated by a small wooden
peg and a flimsy chain.
Why?
Because when the elephant was a baby, its
trainers used the exact same methods to domesticate it. A thin chain was
strapped around its leg and the other end of the chain was tied to a wooden peg
in the ground. At the time, the chain and peg were strong enough to
restrain the baby elephant. When it tried to break away, the metal chain
would pull it back. Sometimes, tempted by the world it could see in the
distance, the elephant would pull harder. But the chain would not budge,
and soon the baby elephant realized trying to escape was not possible. So
it stopped trying.
And now that the elephant is all grown up, it
sees the chain and the peg and it remembers what it learned as a baby – the
chain and peg are impossible to escape. Of course this is no longer true,
but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that the 200-pound baby is now a
10,000-pound powerhouse. The elephant’s self-limiting thoughts and
beliefs prevail.
If you think about it, we are all like
elephants. We all have incredible power inside us. And certainly,
we have our own chains and pegs – the self-limiting thoughts and beliefs that
hold us back. Sometimes it’s a childhood experience or an old
failure. Sometimes it’s something we were told when we were a little
younger.
The key thing to realize here is
this: We need to learn from the past, but be ready to update what
we learned based on how our circumstances have changed (as they constantly do).
4. Real pain,
heartbreak and failure are outcomes that can help us grow.
Many of the most iconic novels, songs, and
inventions of all time were inspired by gut-wrenching pain, heartbreak, or
failure. Therefore, the silver lining of these great challenges is that
they were the catalyst to the creation of epic masterpieces.
An emerging field of psychology called
Post-Traumatic Growth has suggested that most people are able to use their
hardships and traumas for substantial creative and intellectual development.
Specifically, researchers have found that trauma can help people grow their
long-term contentment, emotional strength, and resourcefulness.
When our view of the
world as a safe place, or as a certain type of place, has been shattered, we
are forced to reboot our perspective on things. We suddenly have the
opportunity to look out to the periphery and see things with a fresh set of
beginner’s eyes again, which is extremely beneficial to our person
