How to Get Real with Yourself

Emotionally we humans sometimes put up blocks and barriers in order to avoid the reality of our lives. Whether we are in a bad marriage, having troubles in interpersonal relationships, or we are feeling frustrated with our lack of advancement in our career, we lie to ourselves about it. We make up reasons why we don’t get along with people and usually we blame them and take no blame on ourselves. We become victims.

We fall into a survival condition rather than nurture a thriving condition. A survival condition is sometimes necessary depending on the circumstances, but eventually as we get stronger we move into a thriving condition and it is then that we can find it within ourselves to accept our own responsibility for the choices in our lives that led to where ever we are today — for bad or good.

The way to get real with yourself is to first want to change. If you do not want any change, keep doing whatever it is you’ve been doing that is making you miserable and unhappy. If you really want to improve things, then you have to do the work, often painfully difficult work to looking inside yourself, sometimes back to your childhood, to figure out which pivotal choices brought you to today.

Start by making a list. Write down in one sentence, starting from birth, one thing each seven years of your life that you see as a pivotal choice in your life that you made. Make no judgments about these choices right now, just write them down.

Now go deeper into this taking the first thing on your list. Take a day, a week or a month, however long you need to study each pivotal decision from all angles. The only thing you are not allowed to do is concern yourself with things that could not be different. If it was someone else’s choice, it’s not your issue. Only choices that you could have made differently should be examined.

Naturally you cannot go back in time and really change what happened, and now you must accept this fact, but by accepting what you could have done differently, or by coming to terms with the idea that you made the choice (good or bad) at the time, no matter how painful, you can now move on having learned about yourself and being responsible for your life. Now, have the power to let your leader within guide you toward better life choices.