Your actions follow your self-beliefs
Something I say semi-regularly to friends and family is “people can only treat you the way you let them.” Inspired by quotations from Seth Godin and James Clear, this post is the other side of the coin. It’s about the way you treat yourself.
This year, I’ve had tests for a whole range of things. One by one I’ve discovered there’s nothing wrong with the structure of my heart, with my lungs, thyroid, adrenal glands—and I’m not anaemic. As the year has gone on, I’ve gotten slightly better, and then a lot better.
I’m still not fully right, as I can’t run or do some of the more intense physical things I used to do. But I’ve got a new self-image, one that’s perhaps more appropriate to the age I am. Not that I should expect less of myself, but that I should expect different things.
Your actions follow your self-beliefs.
If you identity as a failure, incapable of achievement, unfit, unlovable, destined to play a bit-part role in your own story, then by heck no matter how much willpower you put in to push that boulder up the hill, it will return to its place.
But there’s a way through: every action you take is a vote for who you wish to become. Every day you wake up, look your old identity in the eye and say “thanks for your service, but you’re not needed around here anymore,” step forward and lean in, is a day your new identity is built.
It takes time. You have to actually want it. You have to choose to adopt a new mindset. Rome wasn’t built in a day. But it comes, a little like how Hazel Grace Lancaster describes falling in love in The Fault In Our Stars: “slowly, and then all at once.”
The path is there, should you choose.
Source: @fredrivett
Image: chloe combs