To the person who wants to change a behavior that prevents them from being fearlessly authentic to themselves:
You are strong and beautiful and I believe in you. I know it might seem strange that a stranger is writing this to you, but it doesn't make it any less sincere.
It's going to take some time and thought, but I know you can make that change. Your desire to change for the sake of being more authentic is beautiful and inspiring. Thank you for being who you are, I appreciate you and admire your efforts to do something so noble.
Many of us deal with pains in our lives. I know I certainly do. We've got burdens within us that we want to change in order to become a better person, but something is preventing us from changing that behavior. Many of us hold deep pains within us that we are afraid of addressing because they make us feel hopeless and powerless. As a result, we bury them deep within us and ignore their presence so that we may never have to encounter them again.
Eventually, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not, these pains haunt us and they affect our lives in many ways. Take a moment to process how your behavior that you want to change is preventing you from being where you want to be. Maybe you want to stop doing an action that has been hurting you from within. Take a moment to think about that burden in your life that you feel you can't change and how it is keeping you from being who you want to be. Maybe you're in a painful situation that you do not have been the power to change. Maybe you went through a heavy situation in your past and you feel stuck because you can't press rewind and delete what happened. Perhaps there is a person in your life who you want to help but who leaves you feeling helpless because they don't seem to listen to your advice. Regardless of what that burden is, we all have something in our lives that prevents us from being who want to be and doing what we feel is best.
The real question lies in how we respond to those hurdles. Are we going to give up? Are we going to let these burning pains that can't be disposed of, control us? Or, are we going to find a way to lift this burden in someway?
I personally feel the desire to accomplish the latter. But, how?
Keep on reading for 3 ways to start taking control of your life again and lift the burdens that have been holding you back from being who you want to be.
1. Stop running away from your burden. Instead, acknowledge and seek to understand it.
I'm sure many of us have heard it before: running away from our problems will not make them go away. Pretending they don't exist or ignoring them might temporarily give you relief, but in the long run, they will come back to find you again, knocking on your door until you have no choice but to address it.
Instead, we need to understand the pain for what it is and come to accept it. We need to look at our pain as a close friend, and question them to understand the roots of where they come from and why they hurt, rather than simply ignoring them.
Write down a list of questions to try and understand how that burden you are facing is preventing you from achieving your goals. Take this time to understand what the burden is and why it is there.
Once we come to understand the roots of our problems, we will be better equipped to fix them (or our perceptions of them).
2. Have some compassion and empathy.
In the previous step, we took the time to consider our pains through questioning to learn more about them. This questioning doesn't get us very far unless we apply compassion and empathy to truly understand our burdens from a place that will lead us to acceptance.
Think your burdens as a good friend. Just because we understand what that friend was saying, doesn't mean we agree nor connect to it. Often, we prevent ourselves from allowing ourselves to connect to those people because of our own fear of change and vulnerability. For this reason, it is essential that we understand our friend as it we were them. We need to be able to connect with our friend on emotional level and understand the feelings that took place within them during that time. By doing so, we illustrate empathy which encourages feelings of compassion that stirs our desire to want to love and accept them.
Take sometime to consider the internal feelings of the subject involved in your burden. Is it something about yourself? Try looking upon yourself as a separate person and allow yourself to have compassion for that part of yourself. Practice some good self love here. Is your burden about someone else? Try to connect and understand the pain they are feeling or the situation they have been going through. Let these emotions that accompany you move you to want to help.
Like wise, let this empathy and compassion help us to want to overcome our pain and burdens from a place of love and understanding so that we may be able to see the beauty of our burdens come closer to accepting them.
3. Change your perception.
We are not be able to change everything in the world. While we have the power to manipulate things and influence others, we are not the deciding factor of their change.
We can't go back in time to reverse an incident. We can't fast forward through painful moments in our lives. We can't press delete and expect the burden to go away as if it never existed.
I know, bummer right? I wish I could just press a delete button and get rid of certain events that happened. I can't though.
What can I do then?
At this point, we've come to understand the roots of our pains and burdens. We've lent empathy and compassion so that we may have the desire and motivation to accept it. Now, we need the key that allows us to completely accept it: changing our perception. We might not be able to change the burden, but we can change how we perceive that burden and the role that burden now plays in our life.
Take the time to rethink how you can change your perception of a burden. Now, use it as a fuel for accomplishing your goals.
When we learn to change our perceptions, we can change a burden that holds us back into a tool that propels us toward being who we want to be.
