Do I Love Me for Who I Am or How I Am?
Fearing the energy of my potential
The invisible, untouchable energy of fear leads to paralysis more often than fleeing or fighting. We are no longer cave people hunting against saber-toothed tigers, yet the fears we conjure in our minds are often larger than life. My favorite acronyms for FEAR are Face Everything And Rise or F**k Everything And Run. It becomes a battle of wits within our minds.
Pain lies underneath most if not all of our actions or inactions. Both are choices we make whether we choose to acknowledge that or not. Truly getting to the heart of the matter paves the bravest path we can take. I don’t know about you, but most of my fears were fueled by pain, primarily of the emotional kind. Uncertainty put me in the mindset of figuring it all out and grasping for answers because not knowing the outcome and being blindsided was the scariest and most vulnerable place for me to be. Always waiting for the proverbial waiting for the next shoe to drop, I constantly sought answers to control my next move and to keep one step ahead of the pain — the misconception of facing everything and rising above it. But looking back, I had no control. That was only my perception.
I have spent the last month or so, since the MWC challenge, thinking about how to improve my writing. The popular notion that simply writing every day makes me a writer no longer works for me. You see, I have journaled and used the technique of morning pages for decades, but while those streams of consciousness made me aware and showed me glimpses of who I am, they didn’t always transfer into stories. I needed to organize my streams of consciousness into coherent essays that delivered my messages to my audience. Marcus helped me see that about my writing, but being who I am, I stepped away from his help because I wanted to do it myself. That stepping away from his support enlightened me to the answer to Diana C.’s recent Creative Corner Prompt #10: Do You Love Me for Who I Am or How I am.
As you see in the title, I changed one word in the prompt, “you” to “I,” because it starts with owning my story and my part. It takes much more than self-awareness to have the confidence to ride the wave of fear. With that awareness underlying my ownership, you will discover as you read through my piece, I elevated the prompt to address the energy of potential that comes from switching to a growth mindset rather than the fixed mindset instilled in me by my upbringing.
I have also had two other prompts by Diana, in her Editing-Behind the Scenes, ruminating around in my mind. They grabbed hold of my heart so profoundly that I cried a bit just thinking about them. The emotional pain of falling short of my potential and blaming myself as if it was because I wasn’t good enough. The Untouchable — something always out of reach like a dream, a goal, or a destination looped in with Potential Energy — revisiting an experience where you had a lot of potential for success but ended up failing.
All three prompts have come together to inspire and produce this essay.
On the Edge of Success
Throughout my life, I have experienced the feelings of my goals, plans, and projects sitting just on the edge of success. I could feel it. I could taste it. Yet, I fell short of my expectations and failed. Did I set myself up for failure? Did I set myself up for success? Did I simply fall in love with the potential?
The law of attraction states the energy you put out is what you receive back. What if the energy is that of an underlying fear that you can’t see or feel? It creeps around lurking in the corners of your unconscious, feeding on your self-esteem. You refuel yourself with positivity and tactics shared by others of their roads to success. I tried these, would start living up to my potential, or so I thought, yet I would still feel blocked and fear that I would still fall short of the finish line.
Being a problem solver at heart, I search for what I miss — a piece of the puzzle floating out in the ethers of space waiting for me to grab it. Somedays, I feel I give so much of myself to obtain a goal that I will die trying and never taste the realm of peace and success. I will fall short of leaving a legacy of who I always felt I was at my core. I will never reach the land of Oz or find the magic in my own backyard. I will be stuck in the promise of what the Yellow Brick Road could lead me to. This train of thought brought me to the reminder of spirituality within a growth mindset.
Becoming aware of the actual problem is what is bringing me the answers I need. While I professed loudly, “I just want someone to love me for who I am, not just what I do for them.” It was an underlying mantra throughout my life. It was not until I asked myself, “Ah, but do you love yourself for who you are, or do you rely on being loved for how you are and what you give?”
That question became the answer to the paradox of my life.
No, I didn’t. Relying on being one step ahead of the unknown placed me smack dab in the midst of loving how I am, not who I am. I let the emotional pain stop my heart from loving myself for who I am inside. I blamed my body, past experiences, and others and tried to fix it with my mind — the core component of a fixed mindset.
In addition, not loving who I am, stopped me from accepting help. It kept me in the place of how I am, which meant I should be able to figure it out. In reality, this is my place of F**k it and run. Revisiting my past experiences left me melancholy. I remained perpetually stuck in my internal realm of worrying about what others may think of me and wanted to belong and be loved. The energy of potential is familiar to me, more than I like to admit. Being 60 years old carries a lot of “on the edge of potential” experiences.
I now see that to honor and respect my emotional intelligence. I have to develop confidence and competency in all three parts of growing my mindset. To build competency, you have to ask for AND be willing to receive help.
Emotional Intelligence
In my coaching certification studies, I learned we are all born with an innate capacity for emotional intelligence. Maintaining and developing your EQ (emotional quotient) requires communication between two parts of the brain: your limbic system (the emotional center) and your prefrontal cortex (rational thinking center). In my life experiences and studies around how trauma affects the brain, the limbic system controls our fear responses, and when we are in a place of fear and stress, it blocks the communication to our prefrontal cortex.
I believe, from this knowledge, that rewiring our brains starts with addressing fear by changing our mindsets from fixed to growth before we can fully respect our emotional intelligence. The shame and vulnerability that underlies the fears will be triggered, we can never fully move away from that, but when we change to a growth mindset, it will empower us to have the resilience to flow with it.
Locus of Control
Another area of interest in changing your mindset is your personal locus of control. This is the area on which to focus your awareness. Do you believe you can control all your situations? Do you think you have no control and blame outside influences for your circumstances? High internal focus leads to blaming yourself when something goes wrong, while the high external focus tends not to take responsibility for the actions and blame outwardly. To start the path to balancing these things is to realize we need to look at our perceptions of what we can directly control, what we can influence, and what we have no control or influence over. It reminds me of the serenity prayer., which in its deepest spiritual meaning stands for we cannot control or change other people — only our own reactions to and attitudes regarding any situation. Finding balance is the wisdom found in knowing the difference.
Getting Out of My Own Way
The key for me was self-compassion while taking actions toward coaching myself to change my mindset. Living a life of trying to outsmart my heart left me living in my head and my imagination. My son told me recently that I was emotionally unavailable while he and his sister were growing up. At first, inner defense ruminated in my mind, while my emotionally intelligent growth displaying response was to simply listen. His feelings were valid as they were his. In my mind, I was there for both of my children as much as I could be. They were the most important thing in my life. I tried to parent them, opposite of my upbringing. But that was my perception then. My mottos of no secrets, look at the bright side of things, don’t grow up too fast, and follow your heart were vital to me as a parent.
But my defensive posture showed me, plain as the nose on my face, that I wasn’t emotionally available — I had a fixed mindset back then, and being fixed in the fears of showing my emotions, I ran from them. After all, that is how I was, not who I was. It always came from my head and intellect rather than my heart. How do you teach them to follow their hearts if you can’t show them how? Actions do speak louder than words.
Rather than beating myself up now for not being perfect — yes, perfectionism was an issue again due to my overactive inner locus of control, I permitted myself to be compassionate within myself. As parents, especially single mothers, we have been fed that we have to do it all. To be perfect in the way we look, the way we act, bringing home the bacon, but mostly staying strong, balancing choices that leave ourselves last.
The journey of self-compassion and becoming my own best friend is enlightening, to say the least. I’ve used my coaching training tools and life experiences to move to a growth mindset about opening my heart to experience the moments and fullness of my life. Honoring who I am is living the moments of change and respecting the pain as a part of discovery and not something to fear. In my book, it fuels growth and courage rather than allowing it to hold me back from being seen and heard.
Learning to love myself for who I am, all of it, my past, my disappointments, my failures, combined with revisiting my successes, my good traits, and the small successes that brought growth to my life, brought me the wisdom to change how I am.
Your Turn
Writing, more often than not, leaves us to think and feel, but it is the conversations that give the exchange of actions to open our hearts and minds. Within the discussions, we find a sense of belonging — which we need to not feel alone in our work. So, let me ask you, “Do you love yourself for who you are, not how you are?” and what is your untouchable energy that delays your potential? How does fear support your mind rather than your heart? What is your locus of control and your mindset? I challenge you to write about these things and tag me. I am honestly curious to see other’s thoughts on these topics.
