The Cost of Being Who You Are

Who are you, really?

Are you the person others can count on?  Are you always there when someone needs to talk, a ride to the airport, or someone to help them move?

What about you?  Can you count on others the way they can count on you or do you sometimes find yourself not asking for help because "you don't want to bother anyone or impose?" 

If you've ever complained when you really needed someone and they weren't there for you, did they, all of a sudden, come running to your aid or do you find it happening over and over?

What about family?  What about all those times when you've shared a new thought, idea or dream, only to have the people closest to you tell you why, "it'll never work?"  When that happens, you can feel like they aren't being there for you when you really wanted or needed their support (but you've learned let it go because, after all, "family is family").

If you find yourself constantly putting the needs of others before your own, the cost of being who you are can be quite high!  The simple truth is, when your needs are being met, you feel happy, content, safe, secure and empowered.

It can be such a foreign concept for us to actually believe why putting our needs and wants first, is the most empowering choice we can make for ourselves.  But here's the caveat to that, when someone else puts his or her needs before your own, how do you react?  Do you feel slighted, angry, judgmental, vindictive or hurt?  So how do you have your needs met while allowing others to have their needs met as well?

Check your thoughts, did you act with love or with malicious intent?  Are you open to feedback?  If your intentions come from love but others see it differently, are you open to learning how others view your delivery or actions, or are you defensive?  When someone gives you loving, constructive criticism, how do you handle it? 

Learn not to take anything personally:  how someone treats you is their karma; how you react is yours.  When someone says or does something that invokes your negative self-talk, instead of beating yourself up over whatever is going on in your mind, ask yourself "WHY" it bothered you. 

99% of the thoughts you're thinking today are the same thoughts you had yesterday and will be the same thoughts you have tomorrow unless you change your mindset.  Stanford studies have concluded that 90% of all self-talk is negative; that means 90% of what you're saying to yourself, inside your own mind, is self-critical.

Every single person that comes into our lives is here to gift us with something to learn about ourselves; that includes the people we like and the people we don't like.

But what happens when someone you like says or does something to piss you off? How do you deal with it.
When someone says or does something that makes you angry or defensive, keep in mind that the only way it can bother you is if there is truth to what they're showing you.  You may not like hearing it and you may not be ready to take a look at it but it can't bother you if there is no element of truth to what they're saying.
You may not be ready to hear it, you may not want to admit it, but Life Is All About Choices! You can choose to learn something about yourself and try to find a way to blame it on someone else or you can choose to take 100% responsibility for what you're learning and make some changes.

Allow every person in your life to have their perception of you while maintaining your own empowered perception of yourself.  What others think of you is merely a reflection of how they view the world and everything in it.  Friends and family can be the most disappointing to us because we naturally want someone who is important to us to approve or support what we're doing.  But if that person is vibrating on a different energy frequency than you, they can't possibly understand or support what you're sharing.  Just like you can't turn on the sports channel to watch a cooking show, you can't expect someone who is on a lower energetic frequency than you to be tuned into the energy of your thoughts and words.

If you truly want your dreams to be bigger than your fears, take 100% responsibility for your choices!  If you tend to blame rather than take responsibility, the cost to yourself and others can be very high.  You'll either take the risk of alienating someone special to you or you'll walk away feeling like you've been taken advantage of, once again.

Life is all about choices.  We can see others as being non-supportive, rude, hurtful or malicious or we can simply shrug it off and stay empowered by assuming they're showing signs of having a perceptual handicap.

Your job is to know your value, who you are and what you're here to bring to the world.  Once you know that,  you'll have built such a solid foundation on which to build your life that no person, place or condition can pull it down.   Now that's a cost worth investing in!

Ciao for now,
Nancy Mueller ~ Life Sensei

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