Accepting yourself isn’t the opposite of growth. They are some of the steps to progress.
- Find the Weakness
The first step is to figure out what your weakness is or what you might be doing wrong. This part is hard because our ego spends years convincing our conscious selves that there isn’t anything wrong. It creates a blind spot in understanding ourselves and our behavior to protect us. You have to do some intense self reflection and be open to input from people that you trust to find the areas in yourself that you can improve on. If you’re constantly asking yourself the same question or observing the same results of your efforts, you need a new perspective and to break free of your personal biases. But it doesn’t matter as much how you find the areas of improvement, as long as you do and you can confirm that they are in fact weaknesses.
2. Accept Yourself
The next step, once you’ve find those weaknesses or mistakes, is to accept yourself and love yourself in spite of your shortcomings. Remember you’re a work in progress. And this newly found mistake developed in response to your strengths.
For example, if you constantly chase new situations and stimulus, it’s probably because you didn’t have a stable life growing up. You didn’t have stability so you convinced yourself that you didn’t need it and became too adaptable in adulthood.
If your feelings have been dismissed your entire life, you become overly logical and deny the value of your own feelings. If you’re on the extreme side, you might even deny that you have feelings.
These weaknesses subconsciously develop in response to our coping mechanisms. And it takes a lot of effort to recognize our blind spots because our ego is working overtime to lie to us.
But even though the overly logical person will deny their emotions and the person running from thing to thing, person to person denies the desire for stability, it is actually what they want. Once you recognize your own weaknesses, and then you accept yourself as being a logical person that wants to be able to express their emotions, you will realize that the suppression of secret desires actually hinders your strengths. Once this is realized, your strength will be set free.
Your blind spot is like an exhausted tired 3 year old nagging you in the back of your mind. But if you push that three year old away, their cries only get louder. Once you pick up that three year old, and soothe it accepting that there is a part of you that is still very childish and needs a bit of coddling, that part of you stops crying for attention and you’re able to focus on the immense strength inside of you.
3. Growth
Once you accept yourself for the recognized weakness, the growth starts to happen naturally. You start to recognize where weakness is holding you back and you just tear it down or coddle it in the way that it wants, and literally over night, you can start to become the person you want to be.
If you can’t recognize your weakness and accept yourself not only in spite of it but because of it, you will not be able to grow. It will feel like you’re climbing up a mountain while God is throwing rocks at you for you to dodge.
For example, if you’ve recognized that your denial of the need for stability is a weakness and you’ve accepted yourself because you realize that the lack of stability made you a creative free spirited person, you will start to see where the unconscious desire for stability is controlling you. You might let toxic people stay in your life because despite their toxicity, they provide a consistent connection. Or you might rush relationships to a point of stability without having put in the work. If you accept that you have unconscious desires, you can now make them conscious and control them instead of fighting them.
If you are reading this and you feel like there is blind spot in your personality that’s holding you back, private message me. I’m developing something that will help people in the future recognize their deepest weaknesses. And I would love to have an open honest conversation with anyone willing.
Closed System 