It’s Not About Them, It’s About You

One of the most important parts of our lives is social interaction. Is the way we act and, most of the time, react to other people. And, from my personal experience, is the part which can create most of our bitterness and sadness, which can carve the deepest guilts and seeds the most ferocious fears in our life. And why is that? Because most of the time it’s about them. The others. Peoples who hurts us, who makes us suffer, who break our hearts and our wings.

Well, guess what? It’s not about them, it’s about you.

In this post I’ll share my personal experiences about social interactions. I’ll also try to synthesize some simple ways in which you can try to avoid all the negative manifestations that relationships can create.

The lesson

The first, the most important, and, to be honest, the only lesson I’ve learned from social interaction is: it’s not about them, it’s about you. It took me a lot of time to learn this and also some paynful experiences. I’ve been through a lot of denial and defensive attitudes, I’ve cast tons of guilt to other persons in my life and tried to escape all the abusive situations in which i’ve been put. But in the end, I learned that this is the only healthy way to deal with others. Understanding that you are the person responsible for everything is happenng to you it’s the cornerstone of a fulfilling social life.

Because you actually have the power to attract, maintain and seed all the positive interactions you need. But the reverse of this meddal is that you also have the power to attract all the negative, consuming or humiliating relationships into your life. Although is hard to accept that, this is the truth. You may think that you’re not responsible for the stinky job you have, for the broken marriage or for the complete emptiness of your life, but it’s true.

The only person who can live your life is yourself. Nobody else, just you. Blaming others for your current situation puts you in a surrendering situation. It actually takes your life out of your hands and put it in their hands. Making them responsible for your life actually empowers them. It’s like going to a person you don’t like and saying:

Please, make me miserable! I’m so bored and irresponsible that I need somebody to blame for that! Would you be my blaming mate? I’ll even call you my husband, my wife, my girlfriend, my parent or my kid? How about that? We can have a deal on that one? Coz I really, really need a blaming mate and I think you’d be perfect for that: you want to control everything, you’re insecure, dominating, my god, you got them all? So, can we get married now?

Although you smiled reading this, you did exactly that at least once in your life. We all did it. We put the blame for our broken marriage on our parents shoulders, on our so-called friends, on the dentist with whom she ran, on the stripper whit whom he quit, on her, on him, on the other guy, on everybody. On everybody except us. Why? Because it’s simpler. It’s easier and relieves the pain for the moment. We feel better, get over it for now, and try to have a life. Until next time, when we do exactly the same mistake, and blame exactly the same person.

You may ask now: but what’s the mistake? My situation was so special, I had a bad childhood, I grew up in a poor family, I had an abusive parent, I had a difficult time in school… In fact, although they seem different, all the situations comes to only one: the choice. You have the power to make a choice. And, despite your expectations, this is the easiest choice you can make: you can chose to react to the person, or you can chose to act. You can chose to stay happy when somebody is hurting you, or you can chose to be sad. You can chose to feel humiliation or you can choose to manifest power. You can control everything. You have the power to create whatever response you want in your interactions. Of course, you won’t be able to do this instantly. Or if you are able, I bet you stoped reading this post from the first paragraph, because you’re already past this, and you learned the most important, valuable, and, to be honest, the only lesson about relationships: it’s not about them, it’s about you.

But if you are still reading, that means you can use some advice. Let’s see how we can stop the process of reaction and start acting, moving the power flow towards us and harmonizing our social life.

(more…)

Understanding Astrology

Like any other discipline outside the normal, established scientific approach, astrology is often mistaken as a form of delusion or just a funny topic in a new agey conversation with your new neighbors. There is a lot of confusion regarding this topic, and, when it’s not pushed into the entertainment area as a daily horoscope in a magazine, it is discarded as a trustworthy and sound discipline. My personal experience with astrology is quite the opposite. For me, astrology proved over time to be one reliable model of reality. It also helped me identify and solve some of my inner problems I had during years. Using astrology was a tremendous leap in knowing and understanding people around me, it gave me a better understanding of events, situations and relations.

But I often found it difficult to share my astrological opinions with other people. The vast majority rejects astrology and, despite the credit they are showing to it when in difficult situations, most of the time they are not taking it very seriously. Well, that’s everybody’s choice and I’m not going to twist anybody’s arm in this regard. Everybody is free to believe or to not believe whatever one’s want. But for those of you who are curious about the nature and the advantages of astrology I will describe my experiences with it in this post. I will try to find a simple way to show how astrology can be understood and then I will outline a few areas in which an astrological analysis can bring benefits.

(more…)

Do It For Yourself – who’s benefiting from your actions?

Remember that we started this series with a fundamental sentence: you are the most important person in your life. You, and only you, are responsible for your actions, for their outcome, and for the level of energy that fuels you as a result. You’re responsible for your wealth or poverty, for your relations, for your mistakes or successes. Or in a simpler way: you’re the only one responsible for your life.

In the first post we formalized the way you interact with the world, which is based on a 4 steps path:

1. intention
2. energy
3. action
4. outcome

And each of your action will respond to 3 simple questions:

1. how you do it?
2. why you do it?
3. who’s going to be the beneficiary?

The answer to these questions have a direct impact on the energy you can use at every moment in your life. Each answer can influence dramatically your overall energy as human being, or, to be simpler again, it will shape your entire life.

If you just come here I recommend that you should first read the other posts in the series, although they wouldn’t be mandatory for this post. And in this post will talk about the third question, the final one:

“Who’s going to be the beneficiary of your action?”

The third answer is the most easy to understand: who is going to actually enjoy what you’re doing? Who’s at the end of the line? Who you try to reach? Who’s the target? If the second answer was about the “because”, the third is about the “for”: you do things because somebody drives you to, but those actions are for somebody also.

Most people tend to think they have a clear understanding of their targets. They think they obviously know the actual goal for their actions. And at the beginning of your life this is entirely true: a kid is always crystal clear about what he wants. You’ll never have doubts about that one.

But as you grow up, as you adapt to different communities, habits or beliefs, you tend to blend your action goals in a much larger picture. You start to do things for the benefit of others, just because you’ve been thought that. Is wonderful to do things for others, but as a result of a direct, non-biased experience. Do things for others because you feel good about it, not because they told you it’s good to do it. You start to do things because it’s an established habit, or because “it was always like this”. You start to do things sometimes not really knowing why you do those things.

And here comes what I call the fake-targets, or the fake-beneficiary: those persons, or concepts, or things for which you do things in your life, without even knowing that. Take a moment and think about all your actions and try to answer to this simple question: “who was the real beneficiary of that?”

It might happen that all you’ve done in your career was not entirely for you. All those extra hours of work were beneficiary not for you, because they failed to give you that promotion, but for the company. You even got a worse health after that…

In relationships, you do a lot “for the sake of the relation”. You compromise, you pretend not to see things, you accept situations or words that you shouldn’t accept, but you do this “in order to stick to the relation”. Guess what? Those relations never work.

Dig deeper into your life and try to find out all of the actions that you thought you’ve done for you, but actually they had another beneficiary: starting from school, from your job, from your friends or so-called friends, from your family. You’ll discover – with a little bit of bitterness, in the beginning, I have to warn you about it – that most of the time you’ve been acting for other peoples. You’ve been feeding with your actions other beneficiaries…

Those are all fake-targets, as I already told you, they pretend to be something but they aren’t. Most of the time they pretend to be you, your desire for success, for a relationship, for a family or for prestige. But at their core they are nothing but cultural habits that you embraced without judgment. And that you’re actually feeding by giving them all your energy in your current stream of actions. Making them stronger and even more appealing as they grow.

It’s true: you cannot live in a society without adapting to it. And adaptation is nothing but a compromising process: you give something from you, part of your freedom, most of the time, in exchange from something from the society, wealth and respect, most of the time. Those actions are taking your energy and putting it back into the society. It’s nothing wrong with that, as long as you are doing in consciously. As long as you know every second who’s the real beneficiary.

You have to always observe what you do. You have to always know who’s the real beneficiary, in order to identify all of your fake-targets, induced either by the social conditioning, either by early thinking patterns or whatever context you want, but not you. You always have to chose your personal path, and most of this blog is about that.

It’s about learning how to do things for myself, because I am the most important person in my life. It’s about how to overcome my obstacles, being them simple but devastating habits like procrastination, or deeper things like my twisted roots. It’s a constant witness of my efforts in doing better and better. And is also a witness of my mistakes in the process. We’ve been born with a dark side too.

I admit, this requires more than average skills and ambitions. This is not a thing that you may do on a moderate level, because you cannot perform with your greatest potential without investing all your energy. It takes time and patience to learn how to do your actions, to find out why you do what you do, and to identify without mistake the real beneficiary of your life.

But the reward is huge. Is a life of unparalleled richness and fulfillment. A life of freedom and achievement. Of love and understanding. I’m not enjoying this life right now, I’m only glimpsing at what it can be. But I’m already on my path to it.

Are you on the path for the life that you deserve? If not, you can start right now. Just watch the way you act and put all your attention to it for a while. Soon you’ll be finding your own way to do things for yourself. As I told you, this is not an easy task and requires a lot of discipline and energy. There will be times when you’ll fell out of the wagon. But even if you’ll have your breakdowns along the way, you can always start over.

As long as you’re the most important person in your life.
[tags]personal development, personal growth, beliefs, motivation, success, productivity[/tags]

Do It For Yourself – who’s driving your actions

My first post in the series “Do It For Yourself” was about the “how” in your actions. If you come here directly, and didn’t have the chance to look at the whole series here’s a little recap, to help you better understand the concepts. First, and foremost, you are the most important person in your life. This is the fundamental concept in these series, and starting from this point we designed a simple action workflow. This workflow is really just a 4 steps path that you follow on every conscious act that you perform:

1.    intention
2.    energy
3.    action
4.    outcome

And for every action I saw 3 fundamental questions that you must answer every time you do something:

1.    how you do it
2.    why you do it
3.    who’s going to be the beneficiary

In this post I will talk about the “why”, and that “why” is usually the response to:

“You are doing that action to please you or to please somebody else?”

Every action you perform (or, to be a little more understandable, every thing that you do) has a cause, you do it for a reason.  That reason can be inside you, or outside you.  By “inside” and “outside” I understand two very simple areas: your conscious being is the “inside”, and what you can observe from this conscious being, without acting on it, is the “outside”. In a more simple definition, the “inside” is you, with all your integrated beliefs, and the “outside” is the others: people, social beliefs, concepts that you can observe but do not necessarily embrace or accept.

Every time the reason for an action is inside you, chances for the energy level to grow after the outcome of the action are greater. Because most of the time you preserve the energy in yourself. If the reason is outside you, chances that the energy level to go down after the outcome are greater. Because most of the time you are directing your energy outside you.

Let’s put it like this: if you do something because you really want to do it, the result will always be part of yourself. But if you do an action driven by an outside factor, your outcome – and, subsequently, your energy flow – will follow that factor, being it a person, a social belief or a concept that you don’t agree.

If this sounds to fuzzy right now, let’s have an example. We will talk about your required actions when you chose – and follow – a career. The choice of a career is always based on your beliefs about it. You know in your mind what a career is and, based on that knowledge, you chose the most appropriate one for you. Suppose you think a career should be something fulfilling, something that will not limit your freedom and something that you’ll be happy doing it. And, apparently, you chose your career based on this set of beliefs.

But instead of doing this, you focus on other things, like making as much money as you can in as little time as you can get, having much more properties that you can actually use, and hunting a social status based on your car, clothes and so-called friends. Doing this requires a lot of energy. You put as much energy as you can afford into this set of beliefs, and, before you know it, you really start having all those things. And to act upon a second set of beliefs, different from your initial one.

But, strangely enough, you don’t feel happy about it. You have more and more money, more and more stuff, and more and more respect from those who share the second set of beliefs, those based on money and social acceptance. Your time is more and more limited because you have to manage all this, your freedom is surrounded by more and more properties that starts to act like walls, and your fulfillment feelings are starting to fade away.

You do believe that your career should be nice but you do the opposite. Why? Because your actions are driven by the other set of beliefs, the set based on money and external proof of well-being. The “why” in your actions is outside you. Without even noticing, you succumbed to a social pattern and replaced your internal driver of your career with an external one.

Where is all the energy that you put in this flow of actions going? Well, outside of you, sustaining the second set of beliefs. Every time you initiate an action related to your career, you give away your energy, because the real reason is not congruent with your real self. And yes, you will soon start to be tired, bored and sad. Your drain yourself out of energy.

The real drivers of your actions are as important as your beliefs about the reality. Even if you have and follow a positive set of beliefs about reality, you can – and most people do – follow other action triggers that your internal ones. This is why the “why” of an action is a fundamental question. By following only your internal reasons you are constantly add to your energy field. Your outcome will always be part of you.

But let’s be honest about one thing: you can’t really and always act only and only by your internal reasons. Sometimes you are on “auto-pilot”, sometimes you are consciously and deliberately choosing an external reason, or sometime you are just compromising. But most of the time you are confused, and you really delegate your power to an outside event, letting it trigger your actions.

How can you know that you are acting upon an internal reason and and not upon an external one? Well, to be short, you will have to learn this all of your life. It’s a process in itself, because you are continuously changing your internal reasons and the external are also in a constant process of change.

The rule of thumb here is: follow your emotions. Follow them with trust because your emotional feed-back system is one of the most precise and precious tools that you’ve been blessed with. If you are doing something out of joy, with enthusiasm and passion, chances are that you are driven by an internal reason. If you are doing something with sadness, fear and pressure, your actions are most probably triggered by an outside reason. Whatever fuel your optimism, must come from within your real self, and whatever feed your pessimism most come from an external source.

One other thing you may do is checking against your beliefs. If an action is performed in congruency with your general beliefs, must be coming from the inside. If you are driven to do something that is not in sync with your beliefs, chances are that you are forced by an outside driver.

The edge between inside and outside triggers is a very delicate thing. Because is very easy to be dragged in what I call “in and out traps”: things that you do for others, but you think you are doing for yourself. In other words, you are deluding yourself. And a vast majority of people can earn a master degree in deluding themselves.

All of the actions you are doing over and over for helping your friends, co-workers or other mates, but you don’t feel any positive emotions in doing them are “in and out traps”. You do them “because of them”, and not for you. There are outside reasons for doing it, and your inner self doesn’t really feel any positive emotions out of it. These types of traps can be identified when you are being excessively polite, extremely socially fit or just shy. Most of the times all of these situations are triggering an outside driver for your actions. You can do them, of course, if you want, but your energy flow will be drained.

At the opposite, there are “in and out traps” that you may consider outside drivers, but they aren’t. Suppose you are doing something nice for your family, like taking them to a walk, or giving them a present. This might look like an external driver, because the family might look like and outside trigger, but it really isn’t. Why? Because you are doing this with happiness and love, most of the time. Your emotional system is telling you: do it, I love it. So, even if this is looking like “outside reason” it really is an internal one: you’re doing it for yourself.

Basically, the “why” question is about your ability to circumvent all the “in and out traps” that you may encounter along the way, and follow only your heart.

In the next post of the series I will be talking about the last question an action should respond to, and that is:

“Who is the real beneficiary of that action?”.

[tags]personal development, personal growth, beliefs, success, productivity, motivation[/tags]