What’s preventing you from being the best version of yourself? What will it take for you to truly understand your greatness? Your unlimited potential? What is holding you back?
It took me a long time to come to terms with the fact that I was my own worst enemy. I spent almost all my adult life self-sabotaging and preventing myself from manifesting the life that I was meant to have. I was also preventing the world from knowing my greatness and what I was capable of. The choices that I made in my life were directly related to how I felt about myself and these were negative beliefs that were slowly and methodically embedded into my subconscious mind over a period of time. My insecurities, fears, and self-doubt ruled my life from the time I was 9 years old until age 45. That’s a lot of time! For thirty-five-plus years I got in my own way. Any opportunity that came my way, I would at some point sabotage and not allow myself to go further or not take advantage of it at all. My beliefs blinded me too often to the amazing things that were right in front of me. And I will tell you, looking back, I was given some wonderful opportunities. Now with my current mindset, I was able to see how and why I consistently and purposefully (and sometimes not purposefully) let myself fail or not try. For me, thinking back was like watching a movie where you see the main character going into a room that you know is going to lead to a bad outcome and you begin shouting at the screen for them to not go in. The character obviously can’t hear you and goes in anyway, and then we know what happens after that. Here’s the thing about the past, we can’t go back. We can’t undo things, make a different choice, take a different route, or say something else. All we can do in the present is to learn from past mistakes. When you look back at your life and realize that you made a ridiculous amount of them, it can be overwhelming and a bit depressing, and I can tell you this is true from personal experience. But you also need to understand that this too is self-sabotaging and there’s no point in pondering upon what you did or didn’t do. Acknowledge how you feel, but don’t allow it to continue to stay with you in the present moment.
The hardest part about coming to terms with where you are in your life is coming to terms with the fact that you put yourself there. And that pill was very hard for me to swallow…at first. It’s coming to terms with your truth. Being honest with who you are right now and who you were. The only way for me to have made these enormous changes in my life was, to be honest with myself about who I was and how I got there. I had to take full responsibility for my choices and my life. Once I understood this, I was able to look back at my life and come to understand why I made the choices that I did. While I’ll admit fear played a big role, I was surprised to understand that it wasn’t just a fear of failure, but a fear of success. That was hard to comprehend at first. I wanted to be successful. I wanted to be financially stable. How could I want success yet subconsciously interfere with it? That answer was directly connected to my beliefs. The belief that I wasn’t worth it. The belief that I wasn’t good enough. The belief that I didn’t deserve it. I believed that there was always someone better and even though I might have wanted opportunities and was even presented with them, I would find an excuse not to go further. These beliefs were embedded in my subconscious. They started being set in place from my childhood. As I looked back on my life, I could clearly see the pattern and how early it started showing up.
Childhood is a time of discovery, both of life and of self. There is a forever argument from the field of psychology, and even the field of science, that a person’s behaviors and personality are created by two things; nature and nurture. In other words, we genetically inherit certain traits that set our personality and behaviors (nature), but we can also develop them as well by what we experience in life (nurture). The argument is which is more dominant in creating a personality. There have been numerous studies over the years that have proved that both play a role, so your experiences in your life have helped shape and create your beliefs and personality, but it also means that whatever bad traits you inherited from your parents are ingrained in the DNA of every cell in your body and therefore can not be changed or altered in any way. So, if you inherited some seriously bad habits, you are screwed! I can then argue the point of epigenetics which says that an organism can change due to modifications of gene expression. The genetic code itself does not change, but the expression does, and what that would mean is that inherited qualities, including habits and beliefs, could change. Therefore, we would then lean more towards the idea that how we were raised, what we were taught, and our life experiences have made us who we are today. Although these patterns are set within the subconscious mind, they can be changed and bad habits and limiting beliefs can be altered to become good habits and unlimited beliefs. Self-sabotage can be replaced by self-care, self-worth, self-respect, and self-awareness.
But still, we need to get beyond the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that have limited us for so long. Coming into your truth is the first step. The expression, “the truth will set you free”, I have found, is unbelievably profound…powerful…and true! Once you admit your truth, once you are honest with yourself about who you are, and once you get over the emotions that come up when you come to terms with your true self, it’s incredibly easy to move forward and create the new you. This is self-awareness. In fact, I have found that being that honest with myself has become one of my many personal superpowers. It propels me higher because I know what I’m capable of and that I alone am the only thing standing in my way. In other words, I have the power to do what I want to do and go where I want to go, to live my life as I want to live it. Once you know your truth, you can move on to the next important step, one that can sometimes be harder than the truth…forgiveness. While this step does include forgiving others, the most challenging part is forgiving yourself. Forgiving yourself for the choices you made because of the person you were is sometimes more challenging than you think. Once you learn your truth, the tendency is to get angry at yourself for not realizing this sooner and how different things would have been had you figured it out earlier. Would have, could have should have…those are expressions of the past and they don’t belong in your vocabulary when you are transforming your life into the incredible person you were meant to be. They serve no purpose because they make you focus on scenarios that have already played out for which the course had already been set. The past is to learn from not to live in. When we forgive ourselves for past mistakes, we set ourselves free to move from living in the past to living in the present and focusing on the future with new insight and new information. Everyone makes mistakes! Always remember that everyone makes mistakes. Some just make bigger blunders than others. I certainly did! And as I said, you can’t go back and change the past. You can only change your present to create a different future. Forgiving yourself is hard for many, again, because of certain beliefs that have been just stewing in that subconscious mind. Believe me, I can relate. I’m Italian. We’re very good at the guilt…guilting others and guilting ourselves! It took me a long time to get past that! I still have my moments but they are much fewer and far between.
You are meant to do great things. Take some time to focus inward and know your truth. If it stings, you are not alone. If it makes you feel uncomfortable, know that the only true path to self-transformation is getting out of your comfort zone. This is the only way you will see beyond what’s in front of you and experience life as you have never experienced it before. It is your right to live your life! Knowing your truth and opening yourself up to forgiveness across all levels pushes you into the direction you need to be in…the direction into creating fulfillment, mindfulness, and enlightenment in your life. In other words, manifesting the abundant life you were meant to live. Next discussion…gratitude. 😊
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