The Life Lesson of Self-Acceptance
Self-acceptance is such a hard thing, might even be the most difficult things for a lot of us. I struggle with it, my coachees struggle with it and many people I know struggle with it.
A lot of us have been told from a young age that “we are not good enough” and to be good enough we need to do this and achieve that. This has led to us perceiving life experiences as either proving that we are good enough or not and from that a belief has been formed and reinforced over and over again. The belief is that firstly the state of myself at this present moment is not good enough. Secondly, there is some version of myself in the future that is good enough and thirdly, all I have to do is to keep putting pressure upon myself to work to get to that future ideal state.
We tend to think if we accept ourselves fully then we will be lazy, we will be complacent, we won’t be able to achieve the things we want in our lives, we will lose that drive and we will become “nobody”. We have this fear of letting ourselves be, letting that guard down and letting ourselves play, rest and recover. So, many of us have bought into the idea that self-acceptance is on the opposite end of success, of achievement and if you want to continue striving, you better not let self-acceptance get in the way.
However, I argue and know that as a coach that self-acceptance is the birth place of becoming the best versions of ourselves and making truly meaningful progress in our lives.
When we self-accept, our pressure that we put upon ourselves drops. When we self-accept, our brain is no longer obsessed with some future state that we need to get to and is able to see where we are at and know exactly what is our next step. When we self-accept, we allow ourselves to play and rest so that we can regenerate, recalibrate and have energy and the clarity to execute on the truly important things. When we self-accept, we learn to love ourselves better, not based ours and others’ worth on productivity and have the patience and compassion for ourselves and others around us.
If the above is all true then why do we find it so hard to self-accept? This is because we need to let go of our old selves, our old ways of “doing life” and embrace the new way of “being”. Yes, it is true that our old ways of “doing life” have led to results and some brilliant ones too so our brain naturally doubts whether this new way of “being” is going to be better. Well, I will say to that that we better start collecting evidence for the other side.
As with any major change we want to make in our lives, we need to go all in. We need to take that leap of faith despite our fears. Otherwise the trajectory we are currently on is what we can predict and won’t be an exponential leap. Otherwise we won’t find out if this new way of “being” is going to bring a more wonderful life and a truer more aligned version of ourselves. Otherwise we won’t ever experience that we can progress naturally with the flow of life and continue to have days filled with constant pushing and a persistent feeling of “not good enough”.
What would you consciously choose? There is much more to be gained when we try a new way of operating and if don’t like this new way of “being”, by all means, you can always revert back to your old way of “doing life” 😊 If you are interested to understand more about the feeling of “not good enough”, here is a YouTube video that I made.