Look back on your life and the chances are that the things you are good at and enjoy, and the things that you have succeeded at, are one and the same
So why should this come as any surprise?
Perhaps that we have been taught to value things other than our innate abilities…or others may have not (yet) recognised our skills and abilities and so we are not sure of them either?
It may be that we measure our successes by the standards of others?
If so, we are employing a falsely-premised referencing mechanism.
The thing is, no-one else can know all of the relevant details of our existence and subjective experiences to be in a position to provide a full in-depth and accurate analysis. Some may be able to pitch quite startlingly apt suggestions at us, but really only we have access to the myriad of folders of our memories of thoughts, feelings, images and ideas which make us the unique creatures that we are.
That information only becomes known to others if we choose to reveal it though words, pictures, sounds or actions; and/or if we are both highly unaware of, and demonstrative with, our non- verbal communications.
The thing is, we create our own memories, by taking all the information available and constructing it in a way that we like, that makes ‘sense’ to us, that suits us!
In doing so we write our own story.
If we accept that we tend to define others in our lives by the nature of their actions (friends who we eat and drink with; employers/employees/colleagues with whom we discuss work/career issues; peoples of other cultures whose practices of which we have no experience or understanding); and in the process infer that they perform in a certain way because they think or feel a certain way, for example 'she refuses to answer my calls because she's selfish, all wrapped up in herself'; rather than 'she's not returned my calls because she is busy, having many tasks to attend to'; it is useful to consider that in comparison, we tend to define ourselves, and our own existence in terms of external events, such as the demands of our ‘job’; family commitments; our geographical location; current bank balance and such like….
Then, for our story to be more accurately representative of the form of ourselves, it needs also to be written in terms of our own beliefs, thoughts and feelings.
After all, these are the agent provocateurs which actually form who we really are, (in terms of ego) and thus how we behave accordingly.
On a human level, we can choose the words we use; the images we wish to convey to others ; and the emotions we wish both to feel ourselves and to invoke in others.
And as we tend to store somewhat rose tinted memories and have limited ability to predict how we will feel in the 'future'; then an honest appraisal of what we are thinking and how we are feeling right now is a good place to start.
And so, with this power, why create a story of anything other than shining success?
