Give Yourself Space to Transform

Transcript

Welcome to a beautiful thought.

I wanted to talk to you about giving yourself space to transform.

A few years ago I was in this deep meditation and I got this vision. It was this vision about my ex girlfriend and the way that she had changed over the time from when I first met her to when we finally ended the relationship.

I noticed how much she had changed. She’d become much more mature and composed and independent in many ways. I was thinking to myself in an egotistical way in meditation “I transformed her” and this little voice in my head gently said to me “No, no you gave her space to transform. Now give yourself space to transform.”

I wonder what that would look like. Some people say that people do not like to change their minds.

Actually I’ve had a slightly different experience.

I’ve found that people love to change their minds. People love to grow, see things from new perspectives and gain more tools to help them view things in a more positive light, to help them enjoy their life.

More perspectives, more cognitive divergence I guess you could say or cognitive flexibility, allows you to see things from different angles and enjoy those angles.

But people do like to change on their own terms.

I’ve found trying to argue with people on the internet with Socratic questioning and not humble form that Socrates himself actually did but Socratic questioning in the abused form.

Where you’re like “let me show you the ways you are wrong, let me highlight your errors.”

Or if I present an argument, a case or an essay explaining all the ways people are wrong.

A lot of people won’t buy that. A lot of people won’t even read it because it doesn’t appeal to them.

If you can’t appeal to the audience what good is communication?

However if you embrace people and don’t judge them even if you suspect they are wrong. Maybe you don’t and you just allow your beliefs to exist and don’t try to point fingers.

Let’s face it we’re all flawed.

I’m probably mistaken about many things and you’re probably mistaken about many things. But we’re both probably right about many things.

If you allow a person the space to express themselves and be polite and kind. Then we will both find that we are able to enrich ourselves through that conversation because we have the space to transform.

I will always remember this movie Harvey and the lines delivered by Jimmy Stewart when he says “My Mother said to me you got to be oh so clever in this world or so nice. I was clever for years and I much prefer being nice.”

I love that movie.

If you are nice, not just nice, not just polite but oh so nice then people will feel welcome with you. You will both learn and gain from the interaction.

I wondered for a long time after that meditation said to me “Give yourself space to tranform.” I wondered what that would even look like. It took me years to piece that together to find out if there was even truth in that phrase.

I felt the truth of it but how do you arrive there practically, intellectually?

So I know one thing which definitely gets in the way, a related thing, autoexigent that is self demandingness.

When you get things wrong, you’re extra hard on yourself. You feel guilty, culpable, disappointed in yourself, angry that you made a mistake. So many emotions just for a little mistake. Just for doing what’s perfectly human.

Give yourself space to transform. Allow yourself the space to be human to be imperfect because those of you familiar with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy might know the work of Albert Ellis.

He had these 14 self defeating rules and one of them is “always having the need to not make mistakes”. A similar one is “having a need for every endeavor to be a success.”

Now those things are never going to be a reality. The combination of them we can call them perfectionism or more broadly, auto exigence.

This can be a big strain on our behavior. Self defeating just as Ellis said.

If we let that go, we stop being hard on ourselves and so demanding of ourselves.

What does it look like if you’re not so worried about making a mistake? Go through your past, maybe, I know for myself. Sometimes once a day a memory will pop up in my head and I cringe a little bit.

I remind myself that I love myself, even those parts of myself I try to hide a bit from.

I remind myself I don’t have to be perfect today. It’s ok if I made mistakes in the past big or small. We’re all on a journey, doesn’t matter if you make a few wrong turns every now and then.

Of course we regret those things a bit and wish we hadn’t done those things.

But we have the power moving forward into the future to not do those same things again.

Give yourself space to transform. Nothing transforms like space. I don’t know why that is.

Nobody can change another.

Some situations one can’t even change oneself, not by struggling.

As our great teacher Jesus Christ told us “Look at the lily, it does not toil or spin. It just does exactly what it does, patiently it grows on it’s own pace when the resources are available. It doesn’t struggle, it doesn’t get angry.”

Give yourself space to transform.

Thank you for living, thanks for being patient with yourself and giving yourself love even if you have the doubt that maybe you don’t deserve it.

Thank you for doing that.

Have a great day, I’ll talk to you soon.