The beauty in allowing yourself to soar

The title of this post may seem oxymoronic to some.

For aren’t you your own greatest well-wisher? Going by that logic, why would you disrupt your own evolution or growth as a person or professional? And if such disruptions don’t happen, the idea of permitting yourself to soar higher is a moot point, isn’t it?

But a closer look at the human self and the ways in which our minds work shows that sometimes we do get stuck in a rut of our own making, which halts our progress.

But this need only be a temporary halt, provided we understand certain related aspects and apply relevant strategies to help your mind come unstuck from whatever mental processes had you trapped in a stasis.

Read on to come unstuck.

Dream, achieve and soar high...

On forgiving your past self for a brighter tomorrow

‘I did my best but my best wasn’t good enough.’ We sometimes find ourselves thinking this when faced with a failure.

The implication, of course is that the failure was your fault. There may have been other people involved in a project or process(or even relationship) that eventually failed. But still, we may give the lion share of the blame to ourselves for things not working out.

There are two things to bear in mind in such situations.

One is that it’s all too human to locate the ‘source’ for a problem that you face. After all, the fear of the unknown is the greatest fear, and being unable to point at something- or someone- as the root of a problem could be unsettling for the mind conditioned to find security in absolutes.

You are the person who knows yourself the best, and even the slightest blemishes in you may loom large in your mind for that reason. This amplified vision of your blemishes could lead to blaming yourself for things you shouldn’t put the blame on yourself for.

The second aspect is that the very fact you blame yourself and not someone else could be seen a positive sign- of your inclination to take responsibilities for your actions.

Only, in this case you may have applied that quality in the wrong circumstance.

For if you think objectively, you would see that more often than not, at a given moment, you couldn’t have done any better than how you did. Remember that your actions were based on information you had at that time.

Later, the volume of such information may have risen which could even have helped you act differently.

But this latter information was probably not available to you when things fell apart in a project etc. So, there’s no point in beating your past self up believing you should or could have done any better.

And if, even after such self-reflection you feel that you still could have done better, the best strategy is to forgive yourself and move on.

Having a trajectory planned for the years to come would help you progress

Be as compassionate to yourself as you wish to be to others

Talking about forgiveness, it’s often the case that even when you want to embrace humanity and forgive the tresspasses others may have done towards you, you forget that you too deserve the same compassion and grace which you are willing to extend to others.

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say this attitude is darkly narcissistic. By denying yourself the compassion you show for others, you are saying you don’t need such things as love and forgiveness to heal.

It’s important to recall at such times that you are part of the human family, part of a species that started its evolutionary journey some 1.3 to 1.8 million years back in time. This is but a blink of an eye in the context of our planet- which is 4.5 billion years old.

But this short(cosmically speaking) period of time has already given us some valuable abilities- one of which is the ability to accept our collective humanism, to forgive others and ourselves our shortcomings and weaknesses, and evolve emotionally.

Every one of us is part of this brilliant cosmic story, and it would be a shame if you wouldn’t permit yourself to mentally evolve, pinning yourself to an action from the past, effectively denying yourself the future for the sake of the past.

Clean Slate to allow yourself to grow

Temenos Vision Lab or TVL is a unique session developed by Temenos+Agility, that helps change agents discover their vision. The journey to this discovery requires the mind to be cleared of distractions etc., helping you feel at ease being yourself.

One of the sessions included in TVL to this end is Clean Slate. Designed specifically to help change agents identify and weed out misapprehensions- about themselves or others- they may have developed from poor past experiences, it enables them to evolve as more confident persons.

These misapprehensions could be viewed as an ocean of weed you need to wade through, so that you could come out into the clear field- from where your future progress begins. With Clean Slate you get to break free from the morass-filled terrain of your mind and into the wide open, where the hope for tomorrow meets the will to pursue that hope.