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.