" Most of all: to be true to yourself." ~ William Shakespeare
Although I looked pretty good as a child and what you could call "normal", I was a ball of self-doubt and uncertainty from an early age.
Rethinking, questioning my actions and generally thinking about what people took for me as naturally as breathing. Life felt like a big balancing act between what I thought and who I was – and it was pretty exhausting.
You can imagine my relief when, when I was eighteen, I looked for a textbook in the library and discovered the genre of self-help (and a new world in it).
I can still remember sinking into a library chair and immersing myself in a story that was different from anything I've ever read. This book was about a woman and her short-lived love story, which on its surface is the oldest idea in the literal book, except that this story was different.
This woman had fallen in love, had to sunbathe in search of her ideal partner and then found that he had cheated on her all the time.
While I expected her to rave, sob, and generally devalue the whole relationship as a farce, she described a completely different process that felt revolutionary to me at the time. She wrote about how after anger and sobs and the feeling of betrayal she found that she still had an incredible time in love.
While he had never been real with her, the love she felt was real – which meant that it had arisen in her (and not by him) all the time. She was grateful, empowered, and absolutely blew me away with her interpretation of the situation.
You mean … we can decide how we interpret the events of our life? As someone who always thought things were clearly good or bad, I was intrigued by the idea of another truth.
And although my life in the following years was anything but smooth, I carried this seed of an idea as well as an unshakable love for self-work with me. During each stage of my wildly fluctuating life journey, I brought with me various types of self-development tools – tools that I believed would lead me to freedom.
The special thing about tools such as self-confidence, reflection and communication with other seekers is that they can lead us to freedom. Taking responsibility for our lives, taking the freedom to make decisions about our stories, and doing the serious work to improve our wellbeing, regardless of what happened to us, is the stuff of literal miracles.
It changed my life, I saw how it changed others, and I do not want to live in a world in which it is not about self-reflection, reinterpretation and the divinely sprinkled, perspective-changing magic of people Draw misery into a fantastic life.
But tools for self-improvement can also be misused.
Similar to how we humans are complex combinations of darkness and light, the way we use self-help tools for ourselves (and others) can be a similar mixed bag.
This topic is one that we all "self-employment lovers" and practitioners have to reckon with at some point: What is the boundary between taking responsibility for our perceptions and a valid answer when important boundaries are violated?
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How can we refrain from "circumventing real problems in ourselves and others" or glossing over?
I recently had a great example of this limit in my own life that blinded me but also reminded me of the importance of asking these questions.
It started a few months ago when I decided to improve my entrepreneurial game and use the skills of a highly respected and successful business trainer.
Her price was high, but also my commitment to unlearning many of the stories that got me stuck – so I bought six months of coaching (twenty-four sessions of one hour each) for a large preparatory run.
I was amazed at how serious I was with my own work after spending this amount of money. Yes, coaching was expensive, but this high price helped me to be laser-focused in our sessions and in my life.
During our months of working, I have also built the deep bond of trust and support that is required to work with a healer or coach: we really need to believe that our insecurities, doubts and vulnerabilities are kept in a safe place . I felt this security – and the magical container for growth that it created.
The impetus for our joint work was the same seed of an idea that I had read about in the library for the first time when I was eighteen: It is not so much the events in our lives that make us up, but the stories that we tell She. It is our thoughts (and the feelings and actions that generate them) that either our dream castles or our inner prisons can build.
Thoughts create our lives, but it was also my thoughts that this coach finally used against me.
Three months after we worked together, she emailed me one morning before our meeting.
"Our sessions will be changed from one hour to forty-five minutes with immediate effect."
There would be no cost adjustment, additional meetings, or explanation of why she made this change. I did the math and found that a 25 percent cut from each session would eliminate nearly five sessions from our original and fully paid session.
I was down to earth.
Your email continued: "Perhaps you have some thoughts on this. Thoughts like, "But that wasn't our original agreement" or "It's not the same value". I encourage you to coach yourself and investigate where these thoughts come from. "
I felt my anger increase and realized that I had some thoughts.
It is not trustworthy.
She takes advantage of me.
Financial advisors are all scheming and greedy.
The thoughts that emerged from this interaction were not new: they were the descendants of stories that I had told myself all my life.
People cannot be trusted.
They will take advantage of you.
Financially successful people are scheming and greedy.
Recognizing and solving these limiting stories was the greatest catalyst for my own growth and a big reason that my work with this trainer was successful. I had realized that they were not "truth" but only thoughts.
Then how should I understand what felt like a clear violation of the ethical boundaries formulated in my old "thought" stories? How should I solve this problem with someone who knew my stories and could use them against me?
"Melissa, we know it's only your thoughts on this situation because other of my customers have received a positive response," she told me when I interviewed them that night. "Our change in session length is neutral."
The more she convinced me to question my judgment of the situation, the more I felt an increase in clarity and the appearance of a limit. Thoughts, stories and evidence neutrality went out the window. That was my line in the sand. I ended our coaching relationship that night.
Since then I have expanded my interpretation of the situation and keep coming back to something that we all who are looking for self-help should think about: Regardless of the wonderful tools and treatment models we can use for our healing, Es is only one tool that we can always rely on to differentiate, guide and help to distinguish our own “right” from “wrong”: the development of our own inner guidelines.
It is based on our intuition – the deeper knowledge among our stories.
Ultimately, it is the most powerful tool in life to maintain a strong trust in yourself.
We can read all books, take all courses, hire the best healers, trainers and mentors – but the core tenets of all these modalities should ultimately strengthen the trust that we build in ourselves.
If we never decided where our limits were (for example, viewing an abusive relationship as a "neutral fact" about which we have "negative" thoughts), we would never achieve the healing and transformation that most of we are looking primarily.
We need distinction as individuals. We have to believe some thoughts.
Ultimately, the best coaches, teachers, and mentors should make us a person who doesn't have to rely on them to form an opinion. You should show us what we are really capable of in ourselves.
But how do we trust each other not only in the self-help world, but in life in general?
How do we differentiate our own voice from that of people we love and even from the trusted professionals we pay for the guide?
Although maintaining confidence in ourselves is a lifelong process, there are tools we can use to feel in contact with our inner leader today. I approached them with my trainer that day and offer them to you in the hope that they will bring you closer to your own reliable inner guide.
1. Look in the rear view mirror.
Most of us had to make big and difficult decisions before. Perhaps it was ending a relationship, quitting a job, or even deciding how to take care of someone at the end of your life. While we may have been discussing these decisions with other people, we made them ourselves at the end of the day.
Somehow we looked through the noise of other people's opinions and found a deeper knowledge within us. Thinking about these moments in our past is one way to highlight the inner guidance that we all already have. Although it sometimes feels like we are open to opinion work when we are open to "thought work", the rearview mirror of life shows a foundation of consistent and strong intuition.
2. Return to your body.
Each of us received an original and invaluable gift on the day of our birth: an animal body. This body can feel tense in some people and relaxed in others. It can tell us not to get on a sketchy elevator or eat more of this nutritious and healing food.
being "embodied" does not have to be esoteric: it can include the simple act of walking, doing something physical or paying attention to how and where we feel things in our bodies. Although our cognitive skills can make things seem quite complex, our bodies are much wiser than we attribute them to.
3. Practice meditation.
When we spend time observing our thoughts, we have the opportunity to practice not identifying with them. Becoming aware of inner critics, opinions and the different stories we tell each other about our lives is the key to detaching them. To trust ourselves, we need to find out which inner voice we want to listen to. This becomes possible when we create the space (through meditation) to hear it.
4. Speak things out.
I know that talking to other people can be the opposite of ourselves, but talking to someone can also show us what we already think.
Have you ever brought anyone a problem, just to be relieved when they say what you already thought? I don't mean the ego connection that can result from shared misery – it's more like realizing what you really want to feel when you hear it from someone else. Speaking (or writing) is also a way to organize our thoughts, gain perspectives and return to a situation with a new lens.
5. Realize that being human is not a neutral event.
The situation with my trainer is a perfect example of a situation that can be interpreted differently depending on who is doing the analysis. I have no doubt that some of your customers have been really positive about this change – and were they wrong? Not necessarily.
I simply have the certainty that the change was wrong for me. I took the liberty of choosing that limit and then standing behind it – and by giving ourselves permission to make decisions (which others can and will question), we strengthen a muscle that ultimately makes us what we are: people with choices, discernment and individual identities.
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Ultimately, I do not suggest that someone give up self-help, as I would not stop using spoons if someone attacked me with one. (Spoons were the vehicle for so many delicious things – they are not to blame for being armed!) The gifts of inner work far outweigh the disadvantages; We only have to stay true to ourselves if we go through the country of self-knowledge, responsibility and thought work.
As Toni Morrison said: "The function of freedom is to free someone else." I am convinced that those of us who are aware of these teachings should use them and use them forever. The best naturopaths empower people to heal themselves (and trust them).
I also believe that some of the best breakthroughs in my life result from working with incredibly human, imperfect, and fallible teachers and their teaching. Recognizing where their helpfulness ends and our own limits begin could be the greatest gift that the journey to self-development must give us.
About Melissa Pennel
Melissa Pennel is a Northern California life coach, writer, speaker, and podcaster. If she doesn't make faces to her baby or plays lasers with her cats, you can write her on her blog or talk about life with meaning in her podcast "Follow Your Fire: Life, Work and Purpose" (available on her website). iTunes, Spotify or Soundcloud.)
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