Who is the REAL you? Do you really know yourself or the people closest to you? In the book 'The Fifth Agreement', an imaginary story about a man in a movie theater who watches a movie about himself and all his family in which he plays the lead role. He then goes into another theater and finds his mother watching a movie with the same characters in which she plays the leading role. He finds that his mother appears to be different than the person in his movie and, although he recognizes his physical self in her movie, he does not recognize his character. The same happens when he enters a third, fourth, fifth, etc. theater and watches the movies of his siblings, friends, etc. He learns that everyone has their own perception of themselves and of other people and everyone creates their own story about themselves and others.
The book says that we create our own story based upon how we want other people to perceive us. We are acting out different roles according to the situations we find ourselves in and the expectations that others have of us. The more we do this, the more we lose sight of who we really are and become fearful of revealing our true self because we do not believe that we can live up to the illusion we have created.
Who do you think you are?
We project who we think we should be to the outside world and yet internally we criticize ourselves for perceived faults and failings. We are our own greatest critic and we build the barrier that keeps us from being successful, happy and fulfilled. We have been conditioned over time to believe in a story about ourselves, which is the product of the way we think other people perceive us. We develop subconscious beliefs such as:
- I am too fat
- I am unattractive
- I am not good enough
- No one likes me
- I am dumb
- I will never amount to anything
How can you be happy when you are constantly being criticized by someone you cannot shake off –your own inner voice? If it were a friend or a partner who continually said these things to you, you would most likely have ditched them by now. Don’t you think it is time you ditched that inner voice and started to appreciate the magnificence of the REAL you?
We are programmed by negative reinforcement all our lives; consequently, we become conditioned to respond through fear. Most of what we do in life is because we fear the consequences of NOT doing something. To be truly free and empowered, we may want to switch off the fear reaction, shut out the critical and negative noise, and operate from a position of conscious awareness that moves us towards a positive outcome, with positive energy. This is how we become successful–by getting out of our own way and allowing our magnificent self to operate at full power.
Visit us again on Thursday when we blog about how we make this change.
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