What You Don't Own About Yourself - Will Own You

No single event can awaken within us a stranger whose existence we had never suspected. To live is to be slowly born - —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

It is not uncommon for me to hear from the people that I work with statements such as, "he makes me so angry, she frustrates me so much, if he came home on time I would not be so jealous and insecure, and if my boss was kinder to me I would work a lot harder".

As long as behaviour is justified, it cannot be corrected. The greatest value in gaining freedom from certain behaviours is acknowledging its existence in your life. Situations and circumstances do not "cause" you to be angry, jealous, lazy, rude, impatient or aggressive. They typically reveal who you are in those circumstances.  Failure to acknowledge these traits and their existence in your life will allow them to continue to have influence and control over you. Many people are owned by anger, fear, pride, insecurity, jealousy and inferiority because they refuse to own or acknowledge that these existed in them long before they were triggered and exposed by external circumstances.What triggers you is in you,  and is a wonderful clue to what needs to be owned by you so that you can live responsively instead of re-actively.

The quickest and easiest way to manage what currently manages you is to be courageous and brave enough to recognize that what is triggered in you exists in you already. Become curious about your reactions don't disown them. When I owned that anger existed in my life I stopped being owned by it. I was empowered to manage and redirect its expression in useful ways rather than being governed by it. Placing blame on others and circumstances is typically how anger expressed itself through me. I stopped holding up my visa to  being angry and began to confront its presence in my life. I was no longer clueless. At the end of the day, "It's not what you swallow that pollutes your life, but what you vomit up." 

What you own about yourself you can change. In the words of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry to live this way, "Is to be slowly born". Owning the things about ourselves that we dislike or are ashamed of inadvertently causes us to give birth to our new selves. New patterns replace old ones and living a totally new and different life is possible.

 

The Value of Making Failure Your Friend

In a world where perfection is an ideal that most aspire to, failure is seen as an enemy and as something that opposes success and happiness with a whole bunch of shame attached to it. The culture of the day is that failure is to be avoided at all costs. Somehow over the years failure has come to be seen as a happening or event that limits, depletes and devalues a person's worth.

Milton Erickson wrote that, "Life will bring you pain all by itself. Your responsibility is to create joy". This got me thinking about how failure brings with it a responsibility. The privilege of failing allows for the greatest growth, if we choose to learn and grow. Every negative experience in your life such as financial stress and relationship failure all become the vehicle by which learning can occur. If you see failure as a teacher and embrace the lesson within each experience you will shift to a new place, a different place and bigger place - you will be enlarged and your potential will be unlocked. When failure is seen as an enemy, holding patterns of frustration, anger and fear emerges that shrinks and diminishes the world of those who will not embrace it.

Embracing the things and events in your life that has caused you the deepest pain and the highest stress as noble teachers and fine friends is the first step to "creating joy". I have grown stronger and become wiser from my deepest failures. In those moments of my life I have learned most about myself. I have become more authentic, more at peace and more creative. By embracing failure I have allowed it to process me in a way success never will. In this way failure has come to work for me and while I dislike the discomfort that accompanies its presence in my life I know by embracing it as a friend I am setup to ascend, to shift and be become my true self. So failure becomes a clue of what we must get through in order to become who we were meant to be - our best and original selves :)