Practice sticking to your own rules
Practice sticking to your own rules
If you make a rule for yourself, it’s important to exercise discipline to stick to it. I am here to offer insights and encouragement to everyone to stick to our intentions to be able to create the life we want.
We make rules for ourselves when we are feeling clear-headed with our intentions. We tend to break our own rules when we are weary or tired, and we when we are feeling less significant. In these moments, we lack the perspective of the importance of our bigger purpose. We then are most susceptible to slip into a perspective of self-disem- powerment and begin feeling not good enough. Well, at that point there’s not much motivation for doing the hard work of expressing ourselves or being our best. So, let’s take a look at our nature as humans and recognize some similarities between us. Let’s develop some strategies for doing our best and being our best more often. Let’s re- main conscious of our intentions and our desires so we can create the life we want.
Strategies for cultivating discipline
When you feel tempted to break your own rule, think of someone who inspires you. Think of the way in which they help you be better than you could on your own. Think about how you don’t need for them to be perfect - how they are good enough for you just as they are, and then recognize that others see you that way too!
Consider how they would support you for supporting yourself and maintaining your own rules. Consider that they might respect you for respecting yourself and being re- spectful of others. Understand that following through on your intentions is how we live
life fully; it’s how we cultivate our authentic expression and how we find joy in our lives. This can be part of our process of sharing our gifts with the world while deepen- ing our sense of our value to ourselves and others.
This is part of supporting ourselves and loving ourselves. Knowing that what you have to offer to the world is very valuable, and it must be protected and supported. The dis- cipline of the warrior can help us regain consciousness around the importance of what we seek to share in our lives through our purpose, expressing our gifts, being our best and most authentic selves.
It matters, and it’s going to lead to your fulfillment and contentment. It matters be- cause it will inspire you to create love and freedom in the world in someway. It matters because this is how we find our purpose and help the world be a better place by eas- ing suffering and enhancing the lives of others. We start by showing up fully for your friends and family and allowing your love and enthusiasm to extend out into your community.
Your intentions are important, and your rules around your behavior are designed to support you to carry out your will. At times, we will feel as though it doesn’t matter to anyone: those are the times when it matters most! Those are the moments where we are tired and weary, and looking for an escape from the rigors of challenge and the stresses of life. Those are the times when we need a dose of praise and rest and nour- ishment. We must learn to give this to ourselves and get all of our needs met without dishonoring our intentions. This is the discipline of the warrior, and we can celebrate it lovingly. Let’s not beat ourselves up when we struggle to be our best. Just keep trying, and let’s recognize our tendencies and choose to do what’s important to us.
A word of caution around discipline:
We all need to blow off steam and not be so serious all the time. So,
- Let’s practice laughing at ourselves
- Let’s recognize our tendencies to want to break our own rules.
- Let’s practice being free of guilt and shame.
- Let’s practice expressing our truths of the joy inside.
Let’s have fun in life. Let’s have fun building optimism that we can persevere simply through being our best. Let’s have fun being perfectly imperfect; recognizing the struggles that we all go through while seeing ourselves in others, so as to understand the struggles that others are dealing with. Have fun and get excited about our ability to cultivate the life that we really want once we deepen our consciousness around these concepts. Let’s have fun stepping out of the ego and dancing - being our silly and playful natural self. Let’s remember to do that!
Our ability to honor our full selves translates to our integrity. The demonstration of our integrity grows the capacity for others to recognize us as safe and trustable and potentially interesting.
In this way, we develop our connection to our body. We grow our capacity to pay attention to what’s going on with others around us. We are in touch with ourselves and our surroundings and we cultivate the ability to carry ourselves with a powerful confidence and peacefulness. We grow our sense of connection to others and ourselves: we develop a deepening presence which others are often drawn to.
It all starts with telling the truth. Cultivating our honesty with ourselves and others and honoring it. We step out of the need for approval of others through expressing the truth to them. By being our best and most true self, and recognizing that others appreciate us just as we are, we step out of our fear that we might not be good enough. So we practice catching ourselves seeking to bend the truth to impress others or to gain their approval. Then we do the work to determine where that need is coming from. Again, for most of us, that need usually comes from feeling not good enough just as we are and therefore feeling a need to compensate by being funny or appearing smart. It’s often actually an unconscious attempt to manipulate what others think of us. Let’s not do that - it’s dishonest and it ruins the opportunity for creating the deeper connection we actually crave.
Let’s get out of our head. Let’s think about it from the perspective of the other person: we all have a natural sales resistance and we put up a wall when someone tries to ingratiate us or to act interested in an attempt to sell us something. We will naturally want to get away from a person who is trying to deceive us. Our body senses that we cannot trust them if they do not believe in themselves or honor their truth. When we try to get the approval of someone, it demonstrates the opposite of honesty: it indicates that we are hiding something and that we are probably dishonest with ourselves as well.
Some thoughts on gossip
Gossiping about others is usually an unconscious attempt to build connection with someone. It’s part of human nature to seek connection as throughout our evolution our survival depended on it. We can build healthy connections without pointing out the flaws of others. Our motivations to gossip are a usually a reflection of our internal sense of inadequacy or fear of scarcity or unlovability. Sadly, when we gossip we actu- ally destroy trust. We undermine the potential to build authentic and loving connec- tions with others. Let’s catch ourselves when we feel the need to impress others. Let’s remind ourselves that we are good enough just as we are. Let’s remain open to learn- ing new things and creating new experiences to grow and enjoy our lives together.
To build our self-esteem, we must become conscious of our adequacy and recognize the love that we have already received. We all have the opportunity to deepen our in- tegrity by being honest with ourselves and everyone. We all have childhood wounds and trauma which causes us to hide parts of ourselves. Most of us are all ruled by a se- ries of self-limiting beliefs, which we keep hidden. These are stories that we told our- selves back when our brain was not yet fully developed. Those stories govern our be- havior and limit us throughout our lives unless we become conscious of them, bring them out into the light of day and test them and revise them as needed. We do this by being honest. We do this with faith that we will be okay and that others have the ca- pacity to understand us. We do this with the help of others (our book club group or our other support systems) and we bust through our self-limiting beliefs and revise our adequacy and step into inspiration and gratitude for love.
A rule I set for myself which I have difficulty maintaining
I read an article once about a filmmaker who wrote all of his best work in the morning. He described that he was able to be wildly creative only if he removed all distractions. This is a powerful and wonderful thing. Along these lines is another concept we can utilize to access more of our creativity: We can go to bed asking ourselves a question, and throughout the night our mind will figure out ways in which we can solve some of our biggest problems. In the morning, away from distraction, those ideas will come together. The idea is that if you pay attention, you can compose music or develop new strategies for solving problems. This can be a powerful technique for developing clarity around our truths.
For me, I love to get up early and drink coffee and write for a few hours to start my day. It’s during this time that I can piece together thought fragments and express myself most fully. I find clarity around my intentions and I do some of my most creative writing in this peaceful time with no distractions.
My writing is important to me, so the rule that I set for myself was to stay focused and not be distracted by the news or any type of social media until 9 AM. I extended that rule to then not look at the news and social media again until noon, and then 3 and 6 PM. In this way, I only check social media a few a day, and I’m working towards checking it even less often.
The question I ask myself is: what am I looking for when I check social media? It’s a great question to ask ourselves. Sometimes we’re just looking for a break or something exciting outside ourselves to break the monotony of the day. Sometimes I might be feeling lonely, so I look to make sure that people still love me. Fear of not being loved is perhaps the most common fear that we carry and many of us are often ruled by it. Most of us have a self limiting belief inside that we are somehow not good enough or are unlovable or that love is scarce and there’s not enough for everyone. These internalized mistruths often cause us to be less assertive and less inclined to speak up for what we need or what we want. We end up being less likely to go after what we want in life, fearful that someone else better will do it and do it better. It’s not true!
Let’s let Love be the answer
We all have gifts and talents to share with the world! We all have the capacity to love and be loved and to express ourselves! Many do this with their family and they do it a bit more with their community or through their work. But at the same time, most of us are still holding back, and we haven’t fully come alive to express ourselves. This has led to many of the problems of the world. Most of us do not know how to love ourselves fully, and therefore we cannot love others fully.
So, let’s help each other love ourselves. Let’s help each other grow beyond our internalized self-limiting beliefs so that we can work together to help the world be a better place. It starts with honoring yourself and channeling the inspiration of those around us into motivation to be our best. It starts with developing a bit of discipline and sticking to your own rules. It starts with being honest with ourselves and everyone around us, revealing ourselves to safe people and recognizing that we are all perfectly imperfect human beings and there is nothing to hide. We amplify our wellness by practicing gratitude for the love that we have received throughout our lives. This is how we can all cultivate our integrity.
Let’s live our lives as an expression of gratitude for the love that we have received whether from God or whatever you believe makes life possible. I believe that it is all the same thing - Love. Let’s be grateful for love in all of it’s forms - from life giving energy and light to inspiration and courage and honesty - we can all let a bit more love and light and truth into our lives and express our authenticity. Visit my website where you can download my books where I outline the steps I took to begin connecting with others and helping each other love ourselves most fully.
