The New Version of Chivalry

I have to share a story to start this blog. I am part of a women’s mentoring group for my bank. I was introduced last week to the newest group of women. A male executive at the bank, who will probably be our next CEO, kicked off the meeting by telling the women a story as to why he started this program.

He explained that he graduated from Dartmouth College and started a new job at the same time a woman counterpart started. He shared an office with her. He was very impressed with her, and he quickly realized that she was very smart and excelling at the job. She was doing much better than he was at the job. Fast forward a few years later, and they end up getting married and having kids. Since then, his career has had a sharp upward trajectory, and he has been very successful.

As a couple, they decided that she would stop working and stay home for a few years for the kids, with the intent of her returning to work. He has seen firsthand how difficult that has been for her and the repercussions of that decision. She hasn’t been able to have the same opportunities to have the same success in her career as he has had. Entering the workforce again has been very challenging for her. He got visibly choked up and said that it isn’t fair that society creates a situation for women where they have to decide between a career or children, and he was very upset that his wife hasn’t been able to thrive the way he has, knowing she had all the skills to do so. He has three daughters, and he said wants to be part of the change in society by supporting women in their careers.

Seeing him get so emotional about this impacted every woman in the room, and many had tears in their eyes. I told my friend this story ( Melissa:), and the first words out of her mouth was, “That is so hot”….and I agreed wholeheartedly.

With society evolving, our idea of what chivalry is may be evolving too. Women are more independent now and can adequately take care of themselves. We have all the tools to live a secure and fulfilling life. We don’t need the knight in shining armor to rescue or take care of us. There aren’t any hidden dangers lurking around the corner and we can open our own car doors:) Kindness and politeness should be a norm in a civilized society, not something extraordinary.

The danger that faces women now is a society that tries to keep us in a box and doesn’t let us grow to our fullest potential. The society that makes us feel like we are less than and/or that our needs or desires should be second to our male partners. The new chivalry is a man who is our biggest cheerleader (as we have been to him) and wants us to grow and be as big as we can in our world. A man who wants to help remove any obstacles to our success and encourages our growth. A man who isn’t threatened by that and doesn’t think our only aspiration in life is to take care of him and/or the children. We aspire to be in a relationship where we care for each other and cheer each other on to be our best selves and reach our highest potential in life. We BOTH make the necessary sacrifices to support each other as equal partners. We work as a team together~against the world, not competing with each other. Now that is HOT!

Open Heart

When we are born, we are only equipped with our emotions to navigate the world. We can only make decisions and choices based on how we feel. We are still working on developing a logical brain, which only comes into full force in our mid to late 20s. We don’t understand ulterior motives, manipulation, and negative behaviors. As a child, we operate from a place of pure emotion but deal with others who benefit from total capacity, using their hearts and minds.

This puts children at a disadvantage when dealing with people with access to their minds and emotions. As children, we end up being subjected to people not operating from an emotionally and mentally balanced place, and these imbalances become a challenge and burden for us. We navigate these imbalances by what feels good and doesn’t; we are constantly tap-dancing around these emotions. We are not equipped to understand and process our emotions yet (which requires your mind), so we learn imbalanced ways of behaving, enabling us to adapt or even survive our environment emotionally. These behavior patterns become part of who we are, serving a purpose for us in specific environments. These behavior patterns are a survival mechanism to mitigate feeling bad in our imbalanced environment. When we become adults and have more autonomy to choose our environments, we need to look back at the patterns of behavior and see if we can figure out who we are versus who we learned to become to adapt to an imbalanced environment. This can take a lot of time and inner reflection because you could have taken on a persona for years, maybe most of your life, that doesn’t reflect who you are. You may not know the difference between the “learned you” and the authentic you.

For example, if you were raised in a household with a parent/parents who were overly critical without some praise to balance it out, this created an extreme environment for you. This environment creates some extreme “learned” behaviors from you in response to feeling better in this environment. Some of these behaviors may have been to strive for perfection to avoid criticism or become timid to avoid interaction to mitigate any negative feedback. Your parent’s imbalanced behaviors created a learned imbalanced response from you to balance the situation. Now you go through life thinking you are a perfectionist or timid. We claim these as our personality traits and accept this is who we are, not realizing we learned to be this way to adapt to our environment to feel as good as we can in it.

This wasn’t from any ill intent from our parents or the people around us. They were suffering from their own imbalances and had adopted their imbalanced behavior patterns as children/adults to survive their environment. This cycle continues until we become conscious and understand what is happening. We have to see something before we can fix it. You usually recognize this moment of consciousness when you observe yourself with others. There is a moment when you can observe the dynamic with another instead of just feeling it. This is where you use both your mind and emotions to experience the dynamic. This is the beginning of working with your mind and emotions in balance……where you aren’t just feeling the emotional triggers without thought but can recognize them now and see how behavior patterns impact the interaction. This is a moment of freedom because now you have become aware. You can now start to unravel these imbalanced behaviors and learn how to interact more consciously with the world. You are on the path of engaging with the world from a place of authenticity (your true self) versus from a place of patterned behaviors and who you learned to be based on your conditioning. Your emotions become more authentic, and you aren’t operating from triggers. You realize that you are not your behaviors, and your responses become more natural and more authentically aligned with who you are. You start living life versus mitigating it.

When we get to this place of consciousness, our relationships can improve exponentially. We get in touch with our true feelings and engage our authentic selves, and people respond differently to this. You will respond differently to them too. You will become adept at feeling when others are not engaging from their authentic selves, and those relationships won’t feel as good to you. You may lose interest in people you have had relationships with for years because dealing with someone’s unconscious triggers and unproductive behavior patterns becomes exhausting. When we are unconscious of our behavior patterns, we end up making our internal imbalances someone else’s challenge or burden. When we start taking responsibility for our imbalances, not to make it the problem of others, it gets more noticeable when others don’t do the same. The more balanced we become, we become almost allergic to imbalanced people and relationships with them. We start to get more discerning about our relationships because we crave authenticity, and we get very clear on what relationships feel good to us. Your relationships become more intentional, and we don’t fall into relationships anymore……we consciously choose them.

Emotional Maturity

I googled what emotional maturity is and this is what I came up with.

Emotional maturity means having the self-control to manage your emotions and work to understand them. As an emotionally mature individual, you don’t view emotions as a weakness. Instead, you value them and don’t try to hide them.

This is a lot to absorb and it makes me think about myself and a lot of things that I have learned and what I have been trying to teach my children. I think a lot of people confuse being emotional for being emotionally immature. Dramatic is a word that comes to mind~when a person vomits their unprocessed and misunderstood emotions onto another person. Another word comes to mind and that is needy~when someone relies on someone emotionally, to the point of burdening another person, for their emotional security or well-being. Children do these things because emotional maturity has to be taught or at the very least observed in their environment as a normal way of behaving. It is either taught or “caught”. We have to learn how to take care of our emotions just like we learn how to physically take care of ourselves. When we learn how to do this for ourselves, we can take care of others emotionally too. I don’t know many of us that grew up in an environment where we learned this so we have to make a conscious effort to learn to do this ourselves as adults.

One of these extremes is when we can’t control our emotions and we behave in ways that aren’t productive and don’t really serve our best interest or well-being. Outbursts of anger are when we have feelings we haven’t really processed yet but we direct these emotions into the world and usually toward another person. There is nothing productive about this and rarely does a real problem get resolved this way so this behavior isn’t serving you because it isn’t helping to improve anything. Another angle of this extreme is instead of outwardly being angry we internalize the anger and use tactics to punish people. Giving a person the silent treatment or pouting are ways we can do this. Usually, people that don’t feel empowered enough to get outright angry will use these tactics instead. The end result is the same, we are not examining our feelings and processing them to present them more productively. Our emotions are always important but getting to the core emotions to understand them instead of defaulting to these more “dramatic” alternatives is what we need to work towards. Most of us use these default tactics because we don’t understand how or why we feel the way we do and we resort to “emotional shortcuts” to try to get what we want. Without doing the work to understand ourselves emotionally, so we can honor our emotions and calmly communicate them to others, we will never be emotionally free and we will feel caught in this hamster wheel of unprocessed feelings and behavior patterns.

The other extreme is just shutting down your emotions and not talking about them at all. Maybe we don’t want to feel emotionally out of control so we don’t use any of the tactics above to get what we want but we don’t share our feelings at all. When we don’t share what we feel or how we want to feel, then we are creating an isolating environment. This was my go-to move. I didn’t trust enough that someone cared how I felt or that I could communicate it without feeling weak, needy, or dramatic so I didn’t communicate my feelings at all. I behaved as if I was by myself in managing my own emotions but that isn’t conducive to being in a relationship. I think caregivers (usually moms) feel this way because it seems that they are only supposed to care about the needs and feelings of everyone around them and not give any consideration to their own emotions. When you don’t share or have trust in those around you, then you aren’t doing your part to create a good relationship. We have to trust that those who love us care how we feel and they would want our needs met too. A relationship has to have a foundation of trust and sharing and when we can share our feelings, we allow our partner to meet us emotionally and we can reciprocate that with them.

So these two emotional extremes are how most people operate. Very few have learned how to balance this. If we want better, more fulfilling relationships, we have to get to this place of emotional balance, feeling our emotions and examining them so we can communicate them. I guarantee you, you will feel better in your life once you master this but it takes some work and it will push you out of your comfort zone. Authentically communicating your emotions can feel very vulnerable, especially in a society where power dynamics are the gold standard in relating. It can be difficult to trust that your vulnerability won’t be used against you or you can feel disempowered or weak by authentically expressing your feelings. I guess the lesson wouldn’t be to not express yourself in this way but to only surround yourself with people who value this part of you as you do them.

Believe me, adjusting to this way of relating is uncomfortable but that doesn’t mean it is wrong or dangerous because you feel fear. It is uncomfortable because it can be scary. You feel exposed, when you authentically express yourself, but with practice, you get better at it and you start trusting yourself. Kind of like public speaking scares most of us but the more we do it the more comfortable we can get with it.

As you get better at it, you gain confidence, especially when you start seeing more rewarding results in better relationships in your life. It doesn’t mean that people around you will get better at it but you will start to clearly see what and whose emotions you are responsible for in a relationship. You will value your emotions enough to understand them and be able to communicate how you want to feel and you will understand when you need to value someone else’s emotions because they are clear and communicate them effectively. It is difficult to value dramatic (unprocessed) emotions or emotions of a person when they aren’t expressed…..(we aren’t mind readers).

Many times though, we aren’t taking responsibility for our own emotions and we make it the problem of those around us or we are burdening ourselves by taking responsibility for someone else’s emotions when it is unwarranted. Neither of those ways creates authentically connected, fulfilling relationships because we are utilizing emotional shortcuts to try to resolve obstacles. Emotional courage is one of the most difficult things to demonstrate but the payback is priceless.

I will leave you with one of my favorite quotes by Maya Angelou that reinforces why this emotional “work” is so important. It makes the biggest difference in your life and those around you.

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Maya Angelou

Being the Bigger Person

There are so many tried and true ways of thinking and acting that society has taught us that is not productive and or outright wrong for the situation. This relational wisdom that has been passed on to us has kept us from cultivating better relationships and I am going to address one of them today.

“Being the bigger person”. We generally use this when we initiate engagement with a person that we believe offended us or owes us an apology for some of their past actions or words and they aren’t initiating engagement.

Being the bigger person is an erroneous description of what is really happening within the dynamic. It is almost like we are using reverse psychology on ourselves regarding the situation by telling ourselves that somehow we are behaving “ better” than the other person which allows us to compromise our boundaries and integrity without feeling badly about it. In truth, we are demonstrating a lack of self-worth and inappropriate boundaries and trying to make it sound like a positive thing to do.

A few dynamics are happening in this situation that are not healthy or productive in cultivating good relationships. First is that justice is needed in situations to maintain balance. If justice means an apology needs to be given, then that is what should happen. Trying to circumvent that by being the “bigger person” just erodes your value in the relationship and it keeps the other person from learning valuable lessons in how a healthy relationship functions. Second, people learn by feeling the weight of their actions. When we overfunction in a relationship and don’t allow a person to take responsibility for their words and actions, we are inhibiting their personal growth. In life, we have to feel how our choices/words/actions impact others, good or bad and that is how we grow emotionally and personally. You take that opportunity for growth away from the person even though you might be making it more comfortable for them and maybe even more comfortable for you. Comfort isn’t growth.

I heard one time that high-vibrational people can admit they’re wrong and apologize. I think what this is really saying is that these are people who don’t let their egos get in the way of their personal growth. They don’t look at being wrong or apologizing as a character flaw or weakness but as an opportunity to understand and improve. The “better” person is a person who can reflect on past actions and words; feel and understand their impact, apologize when it is warranted, and learn and grow from it.

I think we should start applying this phrase more appropriately. Instead, let’s define the bigger person as someone who takes action to create harmonious relationships where both people feel empowered and valued. Where there is fairness and justice in the relationship. Let’s stop lying to ourselves and telling ourselves that a lack of self-worth and lack of good boundaries is some kind of moral high ground.

This is just another example of ways society has erroneously taught us to engage in unhealthy relationship dynamics. We all go through life not even questioning this and believing this is the right way or a good behavior when in fact it is sabotaging your ability to create healthy balanced relationships by not requiring emotionally responsible behaviors with those you are in relationships with.

The Balance Point

It appears that part of the human condition is that we think the
solution to solving a problem is the extreme opposite position of the
problem. Usually, we are challenged because of an imbalance, the
solution is never to continue the imbalance by taking the opposite
extreme, it is to find the middle, balance point. Balance creates
stability and humans crave stability. We are always striving towards
balance, we just don’t always recognize how to get there. I have
noticed this dynamic in society and in people’s personal lives and
relationships, including my own. A lot of our life-changing
solutions are born in childhood and we don’t even realize it.
Throughout our childhood, we make commitments or contracts with
ourselves, consciously or unconsciously, on how to solve for these
imbalanced experiences in our lives going forward, not understanding
that people and relationship dynamics are very complex and require
complex solutions.

For instance, we may have come from a divorced family and we commit to
ourselves that we will never get divorced or our mother may have spent
her whole life seemingly unhappy and overwhelmed with her family, so we commit to never having children. Another situation is when our parents never made time for us so we commit to being involved in every aspect of our children’s lives (helicopter parent).

The feelings triggered by these imbalanced/unhappy dynamics in childhood
are valid and important because they are the alert system that tells
us something doesn’t feel right and these feelings need to be honored
and explored. The challenge occurs when we come up with the final
solutions to these imbalances as children because children don’t have
the emotional or mental capacity yet to solve these complex and
nuanced dynamics. To add to that, these decisions were probably made
at an emotionally charged time which results in drastic solutions that
fall way short of a completely fulfilling solution. To be fair, I
don’t think we can expect more from our childhood self, but the most
interesting thing I have observed is that it doesn’t keep adults from
still following these spoken or unspoken contracts they made to
themselves as children without reassessing if there is a better way to
view the situation and solve it.

For example, if your mother experienced an unfulfilled,
self-sacrificing sort of life, maybe the answer is to have 2 kids
instead of 5, marry a man who happily takes on equal responsibility
of child-raising and thoughtfully creates a more balanced life where
you don’t put everyone’s needs ahead of your own. There is no way a
child could come up with these nuanced solutions but as an adult, they
sound pretty reasonable. Missing the experience of parenthood may not
have been your only or best option. If you vowed to never get
divorced because of your experience as a child, you may be keeping
yourself in a completely unfulfilled or at worse, toxic
relationship. Your kids may never get the opportunity to experience
or observe a truly loving, healthy relationship that will have its
own repercussions when they become adults (they may vow to never get
married and the imbalance continues).

If we all reflect, I guarantee that all of us have made some decisions
as children that could be rethought and reworked and if we are honest,
we may not be living the most fulfilled life because of it. If we can
identify the imbalances in our lives, it is the start to finding more
happiness. Unravel it and identify it. Now as an adult with our
wisdom and more evolved mental and emotional capacity, we can find a
more nuanced solution that creates balance and a more fulfilling life.

Women’s Superpower

I am sure that no one may be surprised that this next blog will be about the Barbie movie. There have been tons of articles and differing opinions written on the movie. Getting everyone’s “take” on the movie has been fun and interesting. How we perceive the movie reflects how we perceive our society and our place in it.

There is no doubt that women’s emotional intelligence and compassion are superpowers that are badly needed in our society and world, especially when patriarchy is the underlying foundation of our society. But like any superpower, when out of balance, it ends up a detriment to us and those around us. What “appears” to be something beneficial (compassion/forgiveness/understanding) is also why behaviors outside integrity persist. We aren’t helping make the world a better place for ourselves and those we love by unconsciously supporting the opposite of the superpower we are demonstrating. This is such a nuanced and complex dynamic that most people can only see it on the surface level.

I was reminded by someone in my life that I consider a spiritual mentor that even Jesus got angry and overthrew the tables of the merchants in the temple because he was upset that they were conducting business in the house of God. He called out these men who were not behaving appropriately and not acting with integrity within a place of worship. When we allow people around us to behave or act outside of the bounds of integrity, and we act nice and tolerate it….it is a step away from a lie. We are then not acting with integrity. We see this even with Jesus’ actions and his anger. Niceness and kindness are not the same, and there is a time when it isn’t appropriate to be “nice” or tolerate.

Shining a light on someone’s bad behavior and defining rules of acceptable engagement, setting boundaries, or expecting change is how we build better relationships and help refine beneficial relating skills. The act of doing this is not unkind or uncompassionate. What can be viewed as unkind or uncompassionate is the way it is done, not the act of doing it. The “how” we do this is where our compassion and kindness superpower can be demonstrated through loving understanding and kindness. Not out of anger, pride, or ego to point out someone’s flaws or mistakes. Avoiding conversations about someone’s destructive behaviors by acting nice to keep everyone in their comfort zone or avoiding conflict is not kind. These conversations can be had with compassion, but they must be had to live a life of truth and integrity between two people and within ourselves.

If you have anyone in your life who doesn’t apologize when they are wrong or try to adjust when you bring to light their destructive actions or doesn’t care how they impact you/others, your superpower isn’t working. Your superpower isn’t having a positive influence on them. It is out of balance and just keeping them in their comfort zone. Compassion, kindness, forgiveness, understanding, and love should give people the space to make mistakes, grow, and learn to be better. If your superpower keeps people the same in your life…..you aren’t using it to its full potential. When used to its full potential, it creates a better place for you and those around you, not one or the other.

After Ken takes over and destroys Barbie land, kicks Barbie out of her house, and subjugates the women, we see him crying at the end of the movie…..only after he is “defeated.” (Is he feeling bad/sorry for what he did to Barbie or feeling sorry for himself because he doesn’t feel fulfilled?) Barbie is very kind to Ken, tries to make him feel better, and encourages him to “find Ken.” What stuck out was that Ken never apologized to Barbie for his horrible actions or even addressed them. Actually, I think Barbie apologized to Ken for having too many girls’ nights. This is where the movie falls short for me. That whole scene was all about Ken and his feelings, and not one mention of how this whole thing impacted Barbie and how she felt. This is where our out-of-balance superpower works against us. Women can be out of balance with their empathy and understanding because we don’t want to “make” others feel bad; instead, we want to”make” them feel good. The result for Barbie is that there is no discussion about how she feels, and everything is solely focused on Ken. There is a lost opportunity to balance the relationship and help Ken understand that both of their feelings and experiences are equally important. Whether it is a friendship or romantic relationship doesn’t matter; our expectations should be the same, that both people’s feelings matter.

As women, that is where we miss the boat, and our superpower sabotages us. If our approach is loving, we shouldn’t try to control or protect someone from their bad/sad feelings by sugarcoating or avoiding things. Sometimes, emotional growth can feel bad because it challenges our ego. There is a big difference between feeling bad for one’s self and feeling bad for others. Discerning between the two and being able to acknowledge our mistakes and FEELING how we impact others is how empathy begins and more fulfilling connections happen. Barbie could have BOTH comforted Ken by telling him how he needs to become his own person, while also pointing out he went about it the wrong way and his actions impacted her negatively and made her feel bad. She had the power to make the conversation about both of their feelings and experiences and Ken could have learned something about empathy and relating. This was a teaching opportunity. She lost the opportunity to shift the dynamic, so it isn’t just about Ken and how he feels. By helping him understand his impact on others and helping him take responsibility for that, she is the catalyst for his emotional growth.

Yes, that may have felt like she would be piling on when he was already sad, but she could have prompted the beginning stages of understanding empathy by putting ego aside and admitting when you are wrong and hurt someone. Every time women dodge the opportunity to do this (because they don’t want to make someone feel bad, dumb, or judged by bringing things to light), they waste their superpower when we all need it most. In the master class of spirituality and love/self-love it isn’t enough just to demonstrate our superpowers of understanding, love, and compassion; we are charged to teach it AND expect it in return. If we want men to change, the world to change and our kids to experience better, we must change. Women will be the ones to create the shift….are we up to the task?

What is Guilt?

I want to explore the emotion of guilt. Have you ever wondered what prompts this emotion and why we feel it?

From childhood, whenever someone tried to make me feel guilty, it would evoke anger in me and I wasn’t sure why or where the anger came from. Looking back at it, I must have instinctively known or felt that they were trying to emotionally manipulate me even though I didn’t have the logical wherewithal to know or understand this. All I knew was that I felt I had done nothing to feel guilty about and that what they were trying to do didn’t feel good to me. I didn’t succumb to the emotion they were trying to impose on me that I wasn’t feeling authentically.

Now that I can analyze this, I realize that people use guilt to control others by trying to bend their will or make them feel a way they aren’t naturally feeling. I couldn’t understand this at the time but could feel it. This is a tactic in emotional manipulation. They use your feelings against you and try to sabotage your decision-making by placing doubt in your mind about your feelings and inner compass to manipulate you into making different choices that suit them.

In life, we all have free will. We get to make our own decisions and experience the results of those decisions. That is how we learn, grow, and live a full life. Sometimes our choices won’t and don’t align with those around us, and sometimes we make poor choices or mistakes. Those are our choices to make and learn from. When our choices don’t align with those around us or impact others, we may resort to using guilt to control a situation. Whether it is because they want a situation that serves them better, or maybe they think they know what would serve them better, in the end, it doesn’t matter; it isn’t up to them to make that determination. When our actions don’t align with someone else’s preference, this creates a feeling of loss of control for them. This loss of control makes people resort to tactics that aren’t always noble or loving

This is where the guilt trip comes in. A person can then decide to use guilt to try to change your mind or make you feel bad about the decisions that you have made. Instead of having a direct exchange about the situation to understand, forgive if necessary, and accept, they instead choose to use guilt by weaponizing your emotions against you. When you guilt a person, you undermine them emotionally, many times to get your desired result out of the dynamic. This isn’t a caring or loving action but a tactic to gain control over someone else’s free will or emotions. Unfortunately, I see this as a normal relating style in families. It is a learned style and utilized because people either have not learned how to express themselves more constructively in relationships especially when they reach an impasse or it is used when others feel that they deserve or have the right to have some control over another. (For instance, when the parent never fully acknowledges that the child has become an adult and they feel they still deserve some control over their lives).

We can approach these impasses with others by appealing to someone’s logic and reasoning to try to help them understand why we are making or made the decisions we have in life……But, it isn’t our responsibility to get them to agree or accept our choices. We have to be OK with dissonance as an outcome. We aren’t responsible for another’s emotions and how they feel about the decisions we make in our own lives.

To add another layer to this, we do more than an adequate job of feeling guilt without someone trying to put that on us. We can feel guilty about a decision that doesn’t align with another or may disappoint another without them saying or doing anything. This is when we sabotage ourselves emotionally. Why would we do that and undermine ourselves emotionally? This isn’t a very loving act towards ourselves. We aren’t allowing ourselves to potentially make mistakes, learn and grow, or assert our own free will in a situation that may cause angst for others. This is part of the human experience. This is where we need to get emotionally balanced so we can accurately discern between the emotions we should be feeling and when. We can’t take on another person’s emotions or their imbalanced view of our responsibility in the relationship.

Is there an appropriate time to feel guilty? I think when we knowingly do something with ill intent towards another. We only have control over our intent. There may be actions in our past that we can look back at and feel guilty about how we handled a situation seeing how it impacted another person, but that is wasted energy and emotion. Sometimes we are not in a state of consciousness to know better or understand the dynamics while we are in a situation but if our intent was not negative towards them, feeling guilt hinders your growth. We grow by making amends and forgiving ourselves and I truly believe that when we KNOW better we DO better. Most people are making decisions for themselves, not against another, but many people don’t see it that way.

Many people make everything about themselves, even other people’s choices for their lives. We can’t own their misperception of the dynamic and surrender our will and emotions to try to please them. We can always consider others’ perspectives of dynamics when making decisions but sometimes we have to accept that others may not like our decisions.

In a balanced interdependent relationship with another, you should be confident in knowing that you have value even when others are upset with you or disagree. You can disagree without guilt. That is a marker for a healthy relationship with yourself and another. This is where we have to work on clear thinking and emotional balance, so we learn to love ourselves enough not to feel guilty when it isn’t warranted. Taking on the responsibility for another’s emotions or making someone responsible for your emotions is a burden and an imbalance that will plague a relationship. If you eliminate unnecessary guilt, you are well on your way in your journey to greater balance, and this is a needed exercise in self-love.

Worthy Enough to Want

I have observed this dynamic over the years through my interaction with others and
within my own life and I had to figure this out so I wanted to share my insights.
We almost always know what we don’t want but very few of us know what we want. I
think it is easier for us to qualify what we don’t want because it is usually prompted
by some outside circumstances that are unpleasant and that have made us
unhappy or dissatisfied. These negative motivators make it easy to identify what
goes into the “I don’t want” bucket. You may have started filling that bucket up in
childhood, and it is probably easy to fill. It is much harder to find someone that can
state very clearly what they want, maybe because in having experienced what you
don’t want, you have a point of context. When you haven’t experienced what you
want before, it may feel like a dream or wish and not reality. Or maybe, you realize all
the changes and actions that may be needed to get what you want and it doesn’t
seem possible or realistic…… so why even open that door of wanting.

I think that there are a few things at play here. First, to state what you want, you have
to feel that you are worthy of it. It would be uncomfortable to state that you want
something if you felt deep down that you are unworthy of that desire. I am not sure
how we get to that place in ourselves but it seems quite common that we start
feeling unworthy of our desires as we get older. (Children don’t have this problem).
Have we been told for too long that our desires are not reasonable/acceptable or
realistic? Are we questioned enough about them that we start doubting ourselves
and not trusting our own desires or our worthiness to have them or at worse feeling
ashamed of our desires? Do they not comfortably fit in with our family, society, or our
current life? I noticed people that are comfortable expressing their dreams and desires, feel more empowered. They must feel that they have some influence or
control over manifesting their desires and they feel worthy. They trust their dreams
and visions of what their life can be even if they haven’t experienced it yet. It
appears that their dreams of what they want are more powerful than their fear of
experiencing what they don’t want.

Another thing that happens is that we think about how our desires may not be in
alignment with what others want or expect so we start to discount what we want in
life or question our desires. We also let other people discount our desires. Society tells
us that we “should” want this or “shouldn’t” want that, so we squash our own internal
“knowing” about what is right for us and what feels good. What if the desires for your
life don’t fit in what society or your family tells you are acceptable for your
happiness? Are they the authority on your happiness? I find, most people abandon
their desires and get further and further away from their authentic selves and end up
more and more discontent.

Finally, we have to do some internal digging around to figure out what we truly want.
Figuring out what we want isn’t prompted by outside forces, this is totally an internal
process and getting to know yourself. This takes personal initiative. Discerning
between our own internal knowing and what we may have learned can be tricky and
it requires some deep reflection. We start to unravel what we think we want which
has been based on years of social conditioning to what we really want.

The Journey Begins

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton

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