Tag: selfworth

  • Authentic gratitude

    Authentic gratitude

    This is for the ‘attitude of gratitude’ crowd.

    It’s for the ones who believe that gratitude is an act.

    A gesture.

    A token word of appreciation.

    A polite mannerism.

    A show of acknowledgement.

    A gift prompted by an event.

    It’s not.

    Authentic gratitude is what you do and how you show up for those whom you claim to appreciate on those special occasions.

    Gratitude is about valuing what is important to those whom you claim to value.

    It is about what you do with the privilege and favour enabled by those who serve and/or support you.

    Gratitude is a state of being.

    It is a way of life.

    It is a way of living without deliberately trying.

    It is a consequence of the belief in the virtue and the goodness of what benefit you are capable of being to those around you, not because they deserve it but because you’re capable of it.

    Authenticity is rare.

    That’s why most use gestures and expressions of gratitude as a commodity with which to transact for significance.

    Appreciation is not gratitude.

    Gratitude is reflected in what you do with, or about what you claim to appreciate.

    You cannot be truly grateful for others if you take yourself for granted.

  • Do you really love yourself?

    Do you really love yourself?

    What does ingratitude towards yourself look like?

    I think it looks like this…

    You focus on your aesthetic to feel better about your internal conversation.

    You live loud with everything you do and possess because you’re concerned about how others perceive you.

    You beat yourself up in private, but present yourself as confident and bold in public.

    You over compensate to make space for people who treat you as an option, but go out of your way to exclude people who have high expectations of you.

    You comfort yourself by preempting how others may judge you by telling yourself that they don’t know what you’ve been through.

    You withhold your contribution of support or assistance if you don’t think others deserve it.

    Your internal conversation is harsh resulting in health issues that you then use to seek pity from those around you for your self-imposed struggle.

    You try to save others from your opinion of their lives believing that you’re doing it because you’re a good person, while not realising that you’re projecting your struggle onto them so that you can feel valued.

    You take your time and your comforts for granted, always procrastinating on your own goals but over investing in assisting others to achieve their goals.

    You see self-sacrifice without healthy boundaries as a virtuous way of life, and lose sight of the impact of such behaviour on your health and wellbeing, and on those who care about you.

    If you find yourself growing angry or agitated at this list, chances are, you are feeling judged or attacked.

    That’s a clear sign of how much the opinions of others about you holds more weight than your opinion of yourself.

    A healthy self-worth is not a narrative. It’s not an internal dialogue. Nor is it a set of tools or methods.

    A healthy self-worth is a state of being, and is only recognised in hindsight.

    It is only through reflecting on how we handled situations that we are able to consciously determine if that is true to who we are or not.

    If not, we focus on understanding what drove us towards such behaviour so that we become aware of the reasons for our behaviour rather than simply judging ourselves for behaving in that way.

    Awareness is the critical step towards self improvement.

    And self improvement is impossible if every piece of criticism or negative feedback makes you defensive.

  • Break the stigma

    Break the stigma

    I think it was Dr Wayne Dyer who said that if you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.

    This is true both positively and negatively.

    Do you know someone who has a problem for every solution? Who sees doom and gloom at the happiest of moments? Who is preempting a negative outcome despite things going in their favour?

    Do you think they have a mental illness, or have they just been hurt so many times before, that they are afraid to hope for a positive outcome? Are they simply protecting themselves from being let down again?

    This is how we experience life when we finally give up hope about the future, or we give up hope about being appreciated.

    That absence of hope is what causes us to feel depressed. Depression is a legitimate experience of human emotions after we’ve taken one too many hard knocks from life about something important to us.

    The same is true for every other emotional experience.

    Emotions are not deficiencies. They’re the essence of what makes us human.

    If we ever hope to win this battle against a consistently declining quality of life, we need to stop referring to emotions as mental health, and we need to stop defining the duress that we experience in life as a mental illness.

    We need to reconnect with the human behind the pain, instead of dehumanising them by denying the legitimacy of their emotional experience.

    Break the stigma. Stop the labelling. Embrace the humanness.

  • Reclaiming Peace: A Rabbit Hole of Reflection

    Reclaiming Peace: A Rabbit Hole of Reflection

    Reclaiming yourself in a vacuum of support is probably the most challenging part of mindfulness. I say mindfulness because it demands a focus on what is, rather than what should be, or could be, or must be. That, I have found, to be the most deflating distraction of all.

    The thoughts and the lamentations of everything that you have a right to, everything you deserve, and everything that is fair but is absent from your life or your relationships with those you value most denies you the composure or the absence of distraction needed to be mindful. Thus, the struggle for mindfulness is exacerbated by the struggle to quell the distractions. It therefore demands that it not be a struggle but instead, a quieting of the mind. But what quiets the mind?

    The regrets of the past that fuel the angst of the future occupies the mind in the present. Mindfulness is therefore the result of reconciling the past so that it does not prompt fears of the future leaving your mind blissfully unoccupied in the present except with which you choose to busy yourself.

    The test of self-worth is revealed in how you treat yourself when you are being neglected by those around you. Self-deprecation becomes an unhealthy expression of need in the hopes that someone will want to save you from yourself. If that someone is unfamiliar with your journey to that point, approach with caution.

    I’ve found that naivety has exacted the heaviest tolls on my life. Moments of blind trust, maybe optimistic trust, resulted in tears of regret and struggle because of the residual mess left behind after trusting the wrong people. Sometimes, that residual lasts a lifetime, although it doesn’t have to. We choose what we value, including the value that we place on what has been and is no longer true. Understanding why we willingly surrender peace for what is no more further peels away the layers that reveal the source of our self-loathing, or our discontent.

    To prevent a dulling of the spirit in the face of such upheaval, we must sharpen our resolve for what we claim is important in life. Clichés about life being short reveals the hypocrite in us when we use that short life to lament the past, or to exhaust ourselves in trying to demonstrate to others how badly it still affects us. Too many place life on hold while waiting for their struggle to be revered. They are the ingrates. The ones who chant about appreciating the beauty of life while being defined by its bitterness or its losses.

    Poetry is most often written by the broken hearted. The rest of the time it is written by the euphoric victim who never expected goodness after their last torment. I have not seen poetry written by one who is content, because the contented ones have no need for such expression. It is only the forlorn or the euphoric that have such desires to be heard, or seen. This I have found to ring true of my experiences too.

    Mindless meandering leads to pointless prose, akin to romantic poetry that calls out to the life we court, but rarely reflects the life we have. The journey through life is not life itself. Perhaps life is what is created by that journey while we presume to be pursuing life in our struggles during that journey. It’s a conundrum that the meek think to be obviously uncomplicated, but the troubled see it confounded beyond comprehension.

    The philosopher in me has been dulled by the elusive balance of reaching into the hearts of those dear, while accepting that such reach is not mine to have. In that, I believe, is born the struggle that we value long after it no longer holds promise because the values that we live by dictate that such struggles cannot be abandoned. My ramblings isolate me further in the space in which is thrive. It seems that a journey like this holds only the promise of fascination but not companionship, nor an understanding gaze from one who believes themselves to be too simple for such contemplations. If only they saw themselves through my eyes, perhaps they would see beyond the horizon of their despair.

  • Find your peace

    Find your peace

    Gratitude lays the foundation of the home.
    Respect builds its walls.
    Love and compassion provides the roof that protects you from the storm.
    And passion gives you the windows to allow your soul to breathe.
    As for faith…faith is the door that opens the path to all of it.

    Virtues have limited effect or value if practiced in isolation.

    It sometimes has a detrimental effect when one is practiced in excess compared to the others. Balance, as always, is what leads to harmony.

    Harmony is the throne on which peace resides.

    Find your balance.

    Find your peace.

    Your peace.

    Not what works for someone else.

    What works for you. For those who have rights over you.

    That’s the harmony you need to find.

    A balance between their rights, your responsibilities, your dreams, and your practicalities.

    Don’t wish away the not-so-good parts of your life. That will only create stress over things that are out of your control.

    Instead, find a way to incorporate it into the life that you have, so that you can consciously and deliberately mitigate the impact that it has on all the good that you have in your life.

    Live purposefully, not fearfully.

    The rest will take care of itself.

  • Mental health myth – Social contracts

    Mental health myth – Social contracts

    People will have no reason to remind you about what they’ve done for you if they felt appreciated by you.

    This popular meme encourages a selfish view of life and convinces us that we’re victims of manipulation rather than giving us reason to question if/how we may have wronged someone, or taken them for granted.

    If this meme were true, then every parent who sacrifices their own joys and advancement in life for the benefit of their children will have no right to feel betrayed if they’re neglected by their children later in life.

    It’s become fashionable to write people off just because we’re not getting what we need or want from them.

    The fact that we feel entitled regardless of what they’re going through is often ignored.

    But the circle of life is such that what we judge others about today, will meet us as a test under very different circumstances tomorrow.

    When you write people off because of what they complain about regarding feeling hurt or betrayed by your actions towards them, you will remember them when someone you are convinced will always have your back turns around and walks away from you because they want something from life that they can’t get from you.

    When someone says ‘after all I’ve done…’, step back, dismount your high horse, and consider why they may be feeling betrayed or used instead of getting defensive and assuming that they’re toxic.

    How you respond to someone in their moment of duress is a reflection of who you are, and what you need from them.

    That’s why abandoning family ties, cutting off parents, demanding divorce, and breaking social bonds has grown to define our self-care routine.

    When we stop needing others, they become optional while we think it’s our right to live our best life regardless of their contribution towards getting us through our worst times when they could have been living their best life.

    Be careful what advice you take from the Internet.

    You could end up living your best life, alone.



  • Respect is not earned

    Respect is not earned

    The old saying of ‘respect is earned’ robs you of self respect and replaces it with entitlement.

    How we treat others is a reflection of who we are, not who they are.

    Our ability to self regulate our offering of respect to those who may treat us badly is a reflection of how much we need them to treat us well before we feel good about who we are.

    In other words, the less grounded we are in who we are, the more likely it is that others will impact our moods, our temper, and our overall emotional wellbeing.

    Trust, on the other hand, is earned through consistency of effort about what’s important.

    Trust cannot be negotiated or contracted.

    If we have reason to doubt someone showing up for us, we won’t trust that they will.

    That reason is sometimes because of them being unreliable, but is also often because of how someone else in the past may have disappointed us or betrayed our trust when we needed a similar thing from them. Like comfort, support, or just being there for us.

    If we go through life trusting recklessly while withholding respect to those who, in our eyes, don’t deserve it, we will find ourselves reeling from betrayal long after it has passed while disrespecting those who don’t understand our pain.

    Problem is, even we won’t understand our pain, so we’ll never be able to communicate it in ways that will allow those close to us to understand why we’re raging.

    It all starts with self respect and self worth.

    Without that, you will need others to treat you well before you treat yourself well.

    Own your life.

  • No Thanks!

    No Thanks!

    When you get bad service from a restaurant, you won’t go back there if they show no remorse or accountability for how they treated you. That’s boycotting.

    Boycotting products or people who enable harm on others is no different.

    It’s a choice that reflects who we claim to be and what we want to be associated with.

    The lower our self-worth, the less attention we pay to what we stand for and the more we focus on what others think of us.

    That’s when image and tokens of success become more important than values or principles.

    It’s never a decision that affects only you.

    It influences everyone who may look to you as a role model, or a leader, a parent, or an inspiration.

    More than this, it shapes what you contribute towards the peace and dignity that the world offers us, versus being part of the degradation of the human condition.

    Boycotting is about what you are comfortable being associated with as a moral, ethical, religious, spiritual, and humanitarian standpoint.

    It’s not about politics or privilege.

    It’s about self-worth.

    You are part of a village, whether you accept it or not.

    Your actions and your choices affect others in the same way that you may be bitter or unhappy about the choices of others that have negatively affected you.

    If you are unaware of the impact that you have, there is a very high probability that you are harming others without realising it, or intending to do so.

    Who are you?

    What do you stand for?

    Before you answer, look to an innocent being that may depend on you to show up for them, and then consider how your answer will affect them.

    #free #nothanks