Are We Perfect?
It is common to look at little babies and coo things like ‘aren’t they just perfect?’ And they are. The questions is do we change, why do we often consider that we are not perfect as adults?
We have always made a point of telling Son and Daughter the we love them, that they are beautiful and so on. I can remember not so long ago He said to Daughter ‘You are beautiful’ and she turned round and casually said ‘Yes I know’. She has taken on what has been said and, not being familiar with the concept of modesty, quite happily agrees.
It was during the school holidays that she announced to me at one meal that she wouldn’t have another sandwich as she needed to cut down on her food because she was fat. She is not fat so I was immediately curious as to where she had got this idea. After a few questions it appeared that a few girls at school had said she was fat. This suddenly came back to me on Saturday when I was at a workshop and a guy asked the speaker (Dale Beaumont) how to deal with all the people who try and knock you down or tell you what you should be doing. Dale’s answer was that your inner voices must be stronger than the outer voices.
I thought of Daughter and how she had taken on a belief, at least for a few days, of what she had been told. She is not the only one, I am sure most of us can find at least one belief we have about ourselves that has come from something someone has said. Nothing wrong with that if it is a positive one. The problem is when our inner voices are weak and we have self doubts, then someone says something or something happens and we take on a negative belief.
As I have mentioned before once you take on a belief the mind is very good at filtering all the information it is exposed to and finding stuff to support that belief and then bringing it to your attention. Like the age old example of the cars. If you are going to buy a certain model of car you will suddenly find yourself noticing how many of those cars there are around. Similarly if you have decided that you are no good at maths then every time you get some maths wrong you will remember it. The times you get it right will not be remembered with such clarity.
It comes back in part to being confident in yourself, not worrying about what others think. Living your life according to your values and goals, not someone elses. I admit this is often easier said than done. School is a great start to worrying about what others think, as we can see with 5 year old Daughters experience of starting to take on views of others.
There was another thing that Dale Beaumont said in relation to this that I thought was good and might get you thinking. How much time did you spend yesterday thinking about your best friend? Assuming that there was no major incident or unusual event then for many of us it was probably not much time, we were probably busy thinking about what we were doing and worrying about daily dramas. So how much time do you think people who aren’t your friend spend thinking about you each day? Probably not much!
We can spend our lives worrying about what others will be thinking or think about us. You could be changing what you do in your life because of what you think people are thinking, for just a few seconds of someone’s thoughts. Is that worth changing for or worrying about?
