In the past, when I heard about highly successful people and their ideas, a curious thing often happened. I was constantly studying success because I believed it would help me be happy and, of course, successful. I was often genuinely inspired by the examples and ideas I learned about. However, very often, though I was inspired, my mind would at the same time yell at me things like this: “Look at what he accomplished! You’re such an effing loser! You haven’t done anything like that! What the hell is the matter with you?”*
This of course made me feel lousy. The weirdest part is that for a long time, I had no idea my mind was doing this to me. I just thought that this was how life is. I guess I believed that focusing on improving my life required an equal amount of self-torment.
If you asked me what it was like for me as I was experiencing this, I would probably have said how inspired and fired up I was. And some of the time I was. But often the exact opposite was actually occurring: my own thoughts were stressing me out with self-judgment. Studying success and successful people was a double-edged sword: part inspiration, put giving myself holy hell 🙁
Believe me, this sucked!
I had to stub my vibrational toe on this particular blind spot one or two or three thousand times before I started really looking at what was going on. Eventually, I decided never again to let myself get so out of whack, thinking I was doing myself good while doing the opposite.
I determined to get clear on the difference between being truly inspired, on the one hand, and kidding myself while actually being miserable! Happily, this is happening. These days, I am constantly doing a sort of “gut check” of how things feel. I am so clear that everything I do has to feel right for me–in other words, be in alignment– that I feel completely changed from the guy who drank that poisonous self-torture soup one too many times (!).
Thinking about things that were making me unhappy was not good for me.
What a concept!
Yet I had to stumble through life for awhile before I finally got clear on this.
*I know. My brain is especially nice to me. Not. Although it sometimes still pulls this crap to this day, I’m getting much better at seeing through its tricks.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Stumbling and clarity DO go together after all in this funny, insightful blog post. Not just for the clever first-person narrator but for the reader too who follows along behind.
I am glad! It is always my hope that readers will relate to what I write in my posts.