The 5 word Secret

What is the 5 word Secret? Give yourself what you need.

You don’t need the world to understand you. You may want the world to understand you, but you don’t need them to.

“Understanding from others is like dessert: enjoyable when you get it, but unnecessary for survival.”  -LA Holmberg

Desiring understanding from the outside world is similar to money in the sense that it becomes most available to you when you need it the least. Financially speaking, if you have a substantial amount of money and assets, you have what you need to secure additional money and assets. Whether this seems unfair to you is irrelevant. This is yet another instance where I am going to ask that you deconstruct your conditioned thinking. Right, wrong, fair, unfair, yada yada yada- there is unfairness in the world. If you haven’t yet reconciled yourself to this it is what it is fact, I urge you to work on it, because as a person who struggled tremendously with a need for fairness, my path became much easier to navigate when I adapted to what clearly was instead of bemoaning what I felt should have been. Maybe you feel it should be, but it isn’t. Capisce? The upside of resigning yourself and adapting to what is is that you can put what is to work for you in every area of your life.

How do you do this? By giving yourself what you need. It’s the 5 word secret that is so basic you probably aren’t even aware that you’re not doing it. But if you require understanding from others, you’re not. The only one that needs to understand you is you. That doesn’t mean you “do unto others, then split” (my fave 1970’s era bumper sticker 🙂 ) but if you are trying your best to live a life of integrity and uprightness and keeping those qualities at the forefront of your behavior by being accountable and accepting responsibility for your life decisions, you do not need to waste energy worrying about how others feel about your actions or whether they understand. Period. At the end of the day, they are not the ones living your life. YOU are.

If you think you don’t possess the fortitude necessary to go boldly forward in your own truth without the acceptance of others, let me assure you that you do.  It just requires a new way of perceiving yourself and lots of practice. For the former people-pleasers out there (hand raised) it may help to do some visualizing in the beginning. Yes, that means pretending– stick with me here. See yourself as split into 2 people. Get that inner badass that is within each of us out of yourself and “see” them beside you at all times. Really feel them there. Let the other half of yourself give yourself everything that up until this point you believed you needed to obtain from outside sources. Sound a little too woo woo for you? That’s okay. Use whatever method you come up with that achieves the bottom line of you getting what you need from yourself. It may feel foreign and fake at first (click here for more on FakeItTilYouFeelItMode) but as you grow in it and become adept in giving yourself what you need rather than relying on others to fulfill wants and desires that many times they are not even aware of, you will feel the empowerment of understanding that you truly are in control of your destiny. And that’s the kind of understanding that will serve you.

*You may find that giving yourself what you need is not as easy or automatic as it sounds. Like all soul stamina training, it requires workouts to build the muscle of “learned” behavior, which we’ll be covering in future posts. *