If you like most people then you live with the desire to grow, expand and have a happy and fulfilling life. Here’s the 5 mistakes that block your happiness.
What stays in your way of creating the life of our dreams is often our yown programming and a number of reasoning errors you learned in time.
Error no. 1: You think life is easy
This is wrong. Human existence is not always easy, we like to delude ourself it is, because this is what we’ve been told.
Life on Earth is actually demanding and challenging on many levels and our complex needs and desires do not help us adjust with ease all the time.
One of the problems is that we have not been encouraged to talk about our difficulties when we were little and we continue to live in that default, pretending we cope with life and ignoring our real inner feelings.
Shame, guilt, inadequacy and fear mix together within us and keep us away from connecting with our experiences. On top of that, our busy schedules give us sometimes a false sense of happiness or excitement, which is very often just intensity numbing our inner pain.
Error no. 2: You want to reach perfection
Perfection does not exist. It is only a social construct, a delusion of our mind. We are all imperfect and we struggle to admit it.
This makes it hard to connect with our weakness and vulnerability because we think the outside world expects us to be perfect, strong and resilient.
In this circumstances we have no option than to follow the crowds and do our best to hold it together, but there are times when our self-deception, the distractions or self-medication become less effective in numbing the hurts we trap inside, and this is when we need support.
Error no. 3: You think we should be strong at all times
Most of us will acknowledge that human life is dynamic and is changing rapidly, sometimes in the space of a few seconds.
To expect someone to be strong at all times is insane. It is no different to asking someone to be awake at all times and never go to sleep. That would be unnatural, it will be against our human nature, we will simply not survive.
Being vulnerable is natural, but showing vulnerability comes unnaturally. It is perceived as a sign of weakness and we tend to avoid it at all cost.
But there comes a time when we cannot cope with the pain we ignored for a long time. The pressure comes out gradually in layers and outbursts that are hard to control. The sooner you start working properly on yourself, the quicker the results and the shorter the suffering.
Error no. 4: You value other people’s stories more than ours
There is a global trend that encourages people to train the human mind to think positively, increase resilience, focus, perform and never give up. What a seductive idea. Most people embrace it as a natural progression through life and describe it as a personal journey of self-development and, in most cases, it is exactly that.
What this process does not tackle is the vast human experience that lays underneath these expectations and the distress they bring in people’s lives.
Whether we acknowledge or not, we love movies, television and social media and we invest a lot of time in listening to other peoples’ stories, but we find difficult to listen to our own internal story.
Immersion in your self-discovery process can be frightening, although you are probably aware that whatever you are trying to avoid is already there within you.
It is your social conditioning that prevents us from embracing your inner world and it can make you waste important time in your life if you don’t give yourself the chance to own who you really are.
Error no. 5: You focus on the outer world
In times of hardship, although it is more helpful to connect with our feelings, to listen to their message and learn from their depth, we tend to focus on the busyness of the outer world.
The problem is that the outside world does not really have answers for you and acts more as a distraction.
To preserve your wellbeing, you need to look inwards, let go of fears and shame, consume the suffering, forgive and heal, and create space for future joy and happiness in your soul.
A good start would be to stop listening to the critical voices of others which you allowed to inhabit your mind for so many years, and consciously learn to hear more of your genuine inner voice.
This will naturally bring light in your mind, warmth in your soul and health in your body. All you need to do is to make that jump and shift your perception. And know yourselves. Because you can correct these 5 mental errors that prevent you from growing.