Why is it important to be completely honest with yourself?
How many decisions have you made based on others and not yourself? I’ve definitely made many. And I’ve also regretted them. They have always led to results that were either stressful or not fulfilling for me.
Almost everyone I’ve talked to was afraid of saying no, creating own healthy boundaries, and doing what they really want. Although it seems to be common, it doesn’t seem to be satisfying.
So why do we do that? Why do we ask others for opinions? And then feel inner conflict between on desires and strong opinions about what we should be doing instead. How much time we have wasted by thinking about what others want us to do instead of actually doing what we want.
The root cause is fear. Specifically fear of rejection and losing acceptance and love of the other person.
- There are certain people in our lives who we feel that we need to satisfy by doing what they want. We make them feel important by including them in our life’s plans just to see overwhelmed by their realities and advises.
These people are typically parents, siblings, old friend, spouses, or bosses. We make these people seem special in own eyes. Better than others. This is the problem. We don’t put into perspective few things.
If someone talks our way from our dreams then this person doesn’t have our best interests in his hearts. On contrary, we allow them to project their fears onto us and pollute our mind.
It’s funny that there few ‘’special people’’ who we allow to keep us down while they don’t support our dreams. These are the people that we believe we have to buy their love by doing what they want. Sure enough this leads to the life that we don’t enjoy and that doesn’t reflect who we are.
- “If we aren’t honest with ourselves, we don’t know ourselves, thus we allow others to influence our decisions,” my husband told me this sentence and it’s so true! Think about it for a moment. If you’d be very honest about what you want, about your qualities, and possibilities then you wouldn’t be likely to get influenced.
If someone would tell you that you shouldn’t start your business because it has no chance to succeed then in the state of self-delusion you’d believe it. You’d buy into opinion of this person and let it influence your life.
Yet, if you’d be honest — which means also accepting your strengths and possibilities — you’d realize that it’s totally up to you. Probably you already have skills that you need and the rest you’ll learn. There are people who can genuinely support you and having your business would give you freedom that you value the most.
I know that sometimes it looks so much better to say in front of others and ourselves that we aren’t good at something so we can get encouragement. Or we pretend to know more than we do. But in both cases we’re just lying to ourselves about who we’re. The problem with these lies is that we begin to believe in them. And they become our destiny.
- We can never buy love of others by doing what they want. Sometimes we believe that if we’re ‘’good girls and boys’’ that others will love us. In a way it’s logical to think so because for the period of time we obey them, we receive some form of recognition.
The need of recognition can be addictive so we forget that it’s not genuine respect and definitely not love. We trade truth for illusions so we create so many ideas of who we think we are based on feedback we receive from others. It shouldn’t be surprising that this creates confusion about who we are.
We create uneven friendships and relationships. In work for example you can work overtime because your boss praises you. While it may be true that you’re good, you don’t need to change your behavior (working more) based on what someone else tells you. People are buying us by saying to us what they think we want to hear.
This is dangerous because many times we aren’t aware of it. Maybe the boss knows that you need to be praised to work harder so he does it. If you chase the carrot on the stick you can burnout and perhaps even follow false recognition in a job that doesn’t fulfill you so much.
Again if we’re honest with ourselves these situations don’t happen. We know our value and we know that we don’t need to try to win anyone’s love. If they genuinely love us and support us — great. If they don’t, also, great so there is space for people who are on the same vibe as we. Not on the illusive vibe of false acceptance and recognition to manipulate us doing something what we don’t want.
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Originally published at medium.com