How do you know it’s time to jump? Because whether it’s in a plane at 13,000 feet, or when you’ve spent 20 years of your life working on something that just isn’t doing it for you, inevitably we all have to make jumps in our lives that sometimes are pretty scary.
Strangely for me, skydiving and leaving behind an entire country to get married were not the scariest things I’ve ever done. The funny thing about skydiving is if it goes wrong, you never have to hear anyone say I told you so.
It took me a long time to realize that most of my fears in my life centered around how other people felt about me, or specifically how other people could make me feel with what they thought of me. When I finally understood that it was my own lack of certainty and acceptance of myself that gave them that power, I realized that I had a lot of work to do about how I felt about me.
Which sounds so much easier than it really is.
Because most of the time our opinion about ourselves is created not in our greatest moments, but in the times where we feel like we’re less than somebody else. This is especially damaging if it happens as a young child, because we will store the memory and the meaning separately. We forget what happened to make us feel that way, and all that is left is the echo in our soul of something that made us feel like we didn’t belong, because if people came to know who we really are they wouldn’t like us.
In my understanding, there are really only three ways to change how you feel about yourself.
The first is to ‘live up’ to the expectations and ideals that you feel like you’re not meeting. In some ways that can be the easier part, because it’s usually a concrete measurement. “If only I could get under 200 pounds”. Or maybe it’s “if I could just pay off all of my bills”. The problem with this measurement is that people often find that the “success” that they’ve achieved feels hollow, and over time the feelings of being inferior will be ‘justified’ by some other thing.
It’s amazing how deep a sense of inferiority can be rooted in your soul.
The second way, a harder way, is to do the work to realize that measuring your self worth through any kind of “metric” is to tie yourself into a paradigm of performance, and instead measure self-worth against how you behave in accordance with your principles, rather than your profits or your presentation.
Although this is still based on performance, the metrics are more “squishy” and it’s easier to find yourself being successful, and therefore changing how you feel about yourself.
The third way is harder still, and although it might be the most effective, it is most definitely the hardest one to achieve.
And that is to realize that the entire concept of having a sense of “self-worth” is something that we should all have because we as a human being have a value separate from everything.
I’ve come to realize recently that so many of the things that I’ve “failed to do” in my life have come down to a significant sense of being “less than” and the terrible fear that if I try something and fail, everybody will have the justification they need to feel about me the way that I feel that they already do. It’s amazing how little you can understand yourself sometimes, even when you’re doing the work to try.
However, that realization is only the very beginning of a new and different pathway that I have to walk.
Because I really do want some things in my life to be different. I’ve always had a strange sense of separation in my soul, believing that I have certain skill sets, certain abilities, and yet I’ve never been able to put them to work for me in the way that I’ve wanted. From what I’m learning, the thing that’s been holding me back is the very thing that I thought I had overcome.
How frustrating it is to pull another layer off the onion, and realize the problem you thought you had left behind is still very much with you.
So once again in life, I find that it’s time to jump, and accept the reality of freefall once again. Only this time if it goes wrong, there may be people who will feel that they are justified in their opinions of me.
But I just have to make sure that I’m not one of them.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings