Weakness is a Choice: Owning Your Reactions and Building Self-Trust

Hello and welcome to another episode of Words With Myself.

Weakness is only weakness because you permit it. You choose to be weak. You choose to allow yourself to be lazy. You choose to allow yourself to mistreat yourself. It's all choice. We always have choice. If you only allowed yourself to be courageous, brave and truthful, then cowardice, dishonesty and disharmony couldn't exist. We have to take ownership and accountability.

Because when we choose to complain instead of be grateful, when you choose to wallow instead of pursue, you allow yourself to be something that is out of alignment with who you believe yourself to be. And that gives your brain two choices. Cognitive dissonance or depression. You end up delusional or miserable and typically both. You must own your choices, stand by the decisions you make and the actions that you take. They are yours, no one else's.

You don't always have to be positive or motivated or grateful, but you do always have a choice. You can honour how you feel, but you must own what you do with how you are feeling. We all like to believe that we are forced into our reactions. That something happened, a vent happened, someone did something to us, or maybe we just feel like things aren't going our way. It leads us to believe that because something has happened, we have no choice but to react in a certain way.

For instance, if someone was being horrible to us, we might believe that we're forced to be angry. If you have ever tried to calm down or have a rational discussion with an angry person, they typically come out with the responses that they are being made to be angry because someone has done something to them or because something has happened because x happened i am reacting in this way. And there's almost no choice in that.

They're describing it in a way that because this event happened, the only way I could possibly react would be to get angry and react and take action on that feeling. You'll also hear people say things like, you made me angry. I'm angry because you did this. It's all projecting to the external. I am feeling this way because I am forced to by your actions. If you didn't do what you did, or if you didn't say what you said, or if life didn't go the way it did, I wouldn't be angry.

But we all know that life doesn't work in this way. And being centred and being at peace is not the removal of all problems or all things that could invoke an emotional reaction. People that tend to claim that they are more healed than they are, you will see this a lot in them. Because what they will do is they will remove the exposure to what was causing them those previous feelings. So it may be being triggered off by their family or their friends.

And they remove themselves from this. So they no longer have the feeling because the stimulus isn't provided. However, that wound still exists. Just because it's not being triggered, that doesn't mean you have healed the wound.

And to heal the wound it must be willing to endure those triggers it must persist through those states if you are trying to work on being more peaceful and not being as reactive not being as angry or explosive you can't just remove things that make you angry and. Because that isn't truly healing the wound, that's just treating the symptom. Anger, all these feelings, shame, anger, guilt, grief, they are all symptoms of something deeper, something larger.

A lot of people might say that they've found their confidence because all they do is expose themselves to people that tell them what they want to hear, tell them things that make them feel good.

But that isn't true confidence confidence is being able to be confident no matter what is in the external environment that's real self-assurance if you walk onto a stage and you have to do a performance being confident is knowing that you are going to give it your best and there's nothing more or less that you can do you just have to try your best deliver the best performance possible and it doesn't matter how the crowd reacts because the crowd's reaction is outside of your control.

There are many reasons why a crowd might not like a performance and if your confidence is rooted in their approval you can never truly say that you are confident because it's something less like confidence and something more like assurance.

You are expecting the crowd to react in a certain way and that is what is making you positive that's what's making you feel confident is that you think or you are almost certain that the crowd is going to appreciate and enjoy and clap along and give you your applause and do all the things that you need to do to feel good about the performance but if you take that away if the crowd is booing if the crowd is saying it's terrible, if the crowd is saying that your performance was terrible,

if you all of a sudden think that the performance was terrible because that's how the crowd has reacted, then you've lost it. You've lost that confidence because it isn't something that is rooted in you. It's something that is rooted in outcome. And anything that is rooted in outcome is A, uncertain because it's something that's happening in the future we can predict and we can think, we can theorise we can hope. But we can't be certain of an outcome.

And B, your confidence should be in the fact that you know it's a good performance. Otherwise, you wouldn't be doing it. If you didn't think the script was good and you didn't think the writing was good and you didn't think that you were going to put on a good show, you probably wouldn't want to be getting up there and doing the performance. If you're confident in what you are doing, you should be confident because you know it's right.

So it shouldn't matter about other people's opinions or the outcome or the reaction all that matters is your intention and it takes an incredibly long time it's incredibly difficult to get to this point in time to realize the intrinsic value the intrinsic worth of what you are doing and the things that you do and of course we all want to have a positive outcome from what we do. We want to be appreciated. We want people to like what we do and see what we do as valuable.

But that shouldn't be where the confidence is rooted from. And the same for all healing. It's in your work. It's in your self-assurance that you know that the triggers or the symptoms are not you. If you are angry and something triggers you off that is because you have allowed it to do so.

You chose to allow yourself to react in a certain way because you thought it was justified and any time that you open yourself up to a conversation or a debate with yourself it's going to end in you defaulting to what you really want to do and what you want to do is react in the way that you want to react because it feels good and it feels justified.

But if that's out of alignment with who you are and what you believe and what you want from yourself, then the fact that it feels good isn't good enough a reason to do it. Because it's not you. If you allow yourself to be weak, if you allow yourself to concede on your beliefs and your values, you are only betraying yourself.

And sooner or later you will start losing your values because they have been corroded by your lack of a belief and lack of enforcement this happens very quickly with lies someone will say that they're honest but then get caught in a situation where they feel like their back's on a wall and they will keep lying and each time that they lie they will feel less and less guilty about it because it will just be part of the routine it will just be the new normal they will say well

i accept it like this is a situation i'm lying about and i'll try not to lie about other things but this thing i'm lying about it and it just becomes accepted. Even though you might at your very, very core believe that honesty and integrity is a core value of yours. Once you have permitted yourself to betray that value or betray that belief, you will then find it easier to do it again. And when you think about patterns over time, over history, over your entire lifespan.

You'll probably notice sometimes when you believe something really, really strongly, but then over time you kind of got whittled down and you started conceding it you started seeing the other side and then going well actually you know it's not as bad as I thought it was I thought that if I failed on this belief or if I failed on this value that would make me a terrible person and I wouldn't be able to live with myself but I am able to live with

myself and I'm still myself and I still believe that's the right thing but maybe I won't take it so seriously and sooner or later your values are just something that you say it's not something that you live by but if you are honest with yourself about what your values are what you value what you think the right thing to do is what you believe you should stand by and embody you will probably see that not just over your lifespan but even every day there is something that you probably concede there

is something that you believe that you should be doing or you should be standing up for yourself more or you should be taking more accountability or going to the gym or eating healthy or you know standing up to your family whatever it is you believe that that is something that is important for you to do and yet you don't do it and the reason why is because you allow yourself to fail.

There is some decision there. You go, I think this is the right thing to do, but it's sort of okay if I don't do it. It's okay if I push it to tomorrow. You make an excuse or an exception and sooner or later, it never gets done. And it just exists as a belief, but there is no action or intention behind it. You must put serious weight on your values and your beliefs.

What you truly believe you should be doing and how you should be acting and how you should be showing up in the world that should be so important to you that all the fear of doing it or the action like anticipating the action and being nervous about it should be eroded because the thought of not doing it the thought of not turning up for yourself or showing up in the world the way you know that you should be.

That should be so terrifying to you that it is unbearable to think about the consequences of doing that versus just doing it in the first place. But we don't have a punishment. No one's going to punish you for not keeping your word or not staying true to yourself. Or maybe someone will, but it won't matter unless that's you. You must enforce your own values.

You must enforce your own beliefs. And if you think something or you want to do something, your word to yourself should be the most important. And even to the degree where I would say don't say it unless you're definitely going to do it. Don't even let the words leave your lips unless you are committed. Because if you say it and you don't do it, that will have eroded that trust that you have with yourself and that trust is so important,

How are you going to trust yourself? How are you going to be someone confident if you know daily you don't do what you know you should do? You don't do what you think that you should do. So where's the trust gonna be? Why are you gonna trust yourself to do what is right when every day you concede on that? Or there is something that you do that you know you shouldn't do just because you think that you can get away with it, but you can't.

You know you you know your actions you know what you believe you know what you do somewhere there is a consequence and it might just be so small that you don't see it but over time these little things really add up in a big way to the point where you go i don't even recognize myself like i thought i was this kind of person but i spent the last five years 10 years 15 years being something completely different,

not living up to all this stuff, not doing what I believe or standing up for what I believe. Nobody gets away with it. Nobody.

We all have to bear the weight and responsibility of our actions and what we do.

And even if nobody knows, you can't get away with it there is nothing nobody gets away with anything and the sooner you take responsibility and accountability and accept that you are not doing what you know you should be doing and you are probably doing stuff that you know you shouldn't be and you take accountability for that and go why am I not doing this or why am I doing this you are free to start building up that trust again because you can have that conversation

with yourself and go you know what is the cause here why am I not doing this? I know that I should be doing this and I want to do this so why not? Why am I not doing this? In fact I'm not going to allow myself to not do this. When I feel tired, when I feel lazy, when I feel weak, I'm not going to allow it.

I'm going to say no you must do this because that's what we agreed and have that relationship with yourself where you have accountability, you have a partner, you have someone that you can trust in yourself. That will hold you to that standard. That will hold you to the actions that you want to take because you are the only person who's going to be able to do that for yourself effectively. Thank you for listening.