There’s a story that all of you should read that eloquently expresses the power of taking a stand for something, telling the truth to yourself, and focusing on who you are instead of just what you’re doing.
This blogger tells two stories: the first is a nice little piece about New Years resolutions and why they almost never work. Her point, and it is an excellent one, is that simply trying to change one’s behavior without altering any conception of who one actually is tends to be futile in the long run. This is because who we are pulls for a certain kind of behaviour, or doing, and what we try to alter what we do while being the same person we’ve always been it’s like swimming upstream.
Take this example: you know you’re a fat lazy slob who’s 20 kilos overweight. You don’t like this about yourself so you make a resolution to eat less and exercise more. You go to the gym – it’s hard, you don’t want to, but you force yourself, and you force yourself to eat less as well. At some point, you give into temptation and oversleep and don’t make it to the gym or eat that piece of chocolate cake because just one won’t hurt, and then you’re done for. Now you know yourself to be a fat lazy slob who’s 20 kilos overweight and is too weak-willed to do anything about it.
What went wrong? You tried to alter your behaviour without altering your being. You still were for yourself a fat, lazy person who hated exercise, and that made if excruciating to take actions. Willpower only gets you so far.
This is where the power of taking a stand comes in – declaring oneself to not just do something different, but be somebody different. Get inspired by the kind of person that you could be. Actions then tend to alter by themselves, more naturally.
The second part of the blog post talks about fooling yourself. Sometimes we don’t take a stand because we lie to ourselves. She talks about going to a Tony Robbins event, and realizing she was lying to herself about being a smoker, and that telling the truth gave her the freedom to take a stand and quit. Take a look; it both embodies a lot of why I got out of Landmark Education and is quite well written. Plus I love Tony Robbins and the story about him is excellent!
