When you’re neck-deep in whatever it is..it can be challenging to see things clearly.
Last year was a rough year for me. At the same time though, every time I would clear a hurdle, the line between the lifestyle I want and my diligent efforts to attain it would get shorter and shorter.
Two things occur to me much more clearly now that I want to share.
1. If you have a general outlook on life that you don’t know everything and you often take a stance of being willing to learn from others, it could be easy for them to mistake the fact that you don’t know something about a thing to mean that you don’t know nothing about nothing. If they lean towards the model of humanness where people pretend that they have everything all figured out all the time, then they will internalize you from that standpoint. They might fail to see your growth because they don’t see doubt, uncertainty and a lack of confidence as a growth phase. They see it more like an attitude that indicates that you will never know because you don’t already act like you know. That made sense, right?
2. The second is this. In my last post I spoke about holding firm in your vision for yourself and never giving up. With a growth mindset like I describe above, that can also make you feel like you’ll never get where you want to be…You keep blaming yourself for every attempt you ‘fail’. There is a healthier way that I’ve discovered to look at the things that didn’t quite go like you hoped, and it’s this. I intentionally set out to do something but of course I have my own ideas about how that will happen. I start off with confidence in the wrong things and don’t realise the ways that I am in my own way. I’ll be shaken by confrontations and critiques that feel very crushing, whether they are done directly or indirectly. Thing is, I’m the one that set these crushing and defeating experiences to happen. They were what I needed in order to help me get to my intended destination or milestone, I just didn’t know it when I started..2021 was a hard but loving slap in the face. It stung in all the right places.
I took responsibility, not just for my responses, but also for the fact that those loving slaps were orchestrated to help me to get to where I want to be, because I continued to be intentional about that, regardless of how hopeless it looked at the time.
This boils down to perspective, yea..on the ways people look at you but more importantly, the way that you look at yourself. The frequency changes that occur by you changing the things you believe about yourself and what you need and deserve in this life have the inherent capacity to change how people view you as well. Ultimately, though, that’s not your business. Refine the image of yourself, for yourself…and the reflections of that around you will continuously and drastically grow and improve.
JanBerry 