Question Everything
The world is an increasingly busy place. It’s hard to even hear your own voice sometimes over the din of people and information vying for your attention.
Keeping your own space and safeguarding your energy is paramount, more so than ever before. Do you have a process for controlling the information that enters your awareness?
Do you understand how to stay in touch with yourself enough that you can truly decipher what’s best for you?
Most fact is opinion and everyone will try to convince you they’re right. Ask anyone and they will have the solution you need to the problem they insist you have and all it takes is money to buy it.
If you’re a little afraid of a negative outcome, you’re giving away your power and it becomes very tempting to spend money trying to get it back.
Your power will come from leaning into yourself and trusting your own judgement.
Learn to question everything
Gather information studiously, but question where it came from. If you take it as right, understand why. The internet is littered with “facts” that will happily mislead you away from yourself and your purpose.
Keep questions like these close at hand:
Is that person right or should I question more?
Is what they said true or is it rooted in false information from their past?
Do I have to do what they’re telling me, or is there an alternative solution?
Open-ended questions make you think and, when asked of others, will bring you more information. Use language consciously.
Discernment Takes Practice
Questioning whether something is true and forming your own opinions takes energy. It takes effort, practice and time.
It’s very easy to accept something blindly and move on, so this becomes a temptation that reinforces itself into habit. The problem is, beliefs often become unnecessary limitations to living an extraordinary and fulfilling life. It’s in your best interest to put forth the effort to add to your awareness only that which you have studied enough to trust.
I understand there will come times when questioning information becomes overwhelming and feels as though it will demand more from you than what you have left to give. Push through those feelings, for when you feel like you’re at your whits end is exactly when you need to be most careful about what you allow to access your mind.
Society will tempt you with an easy life, filled with happiness and shortcuts. Give yourself the gift of difficulty once in a while, just to allow the opportunity for those heavier feelings to remind you that you’re still intensely alive.
Discomfort Reveals Truth
Discomfort and the emotions that come with sitting in it reveal a great deal about a person. How far they’re willing to go for a dream, or for the ones they care about. What their values are and where their moral boundaries lie.
I shared part of my concussion story in last week’s post. It’s in these dark times, when you’re fighting for what’s right, something you believe in or your life, that will build your character. If you stay true to yourself and do the hard things during those times, you will build yourself into a person who is utterly unstoppable.
Not only that, you will learn the most valuable lessons about yourself and who you are. Nobody learns anything from sitting on the sidelines or taking the comfortable road.
This is why resilience building is so important. Learn to become comfortable enough with yourself to be your own best company, even when you’re hurting. Learn to sit in silence with yourself. Allow yourself to hurt to your core and still manage to get up, do what’s right and stand for what you believe in. Once you manage this, then there isn’t anything life can throw at you that you cannot handle.
This is how powerful you are. But it all starts with standing up for yourself and saying no to what doesn’t belong. Simplify your environment and your mind. From there, in the quiet stillness of your mind, you can decide exactly who you’re becoming.
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