Tag: openness

Trust

Posted on by philipdodson

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What happened to trust?

We are all worthy of being trusted as the default approach.

We could all be afforded the benefit of doubt.

We could all be given the opportunity of innocent until proven guilty.

Why do we have a world now that is so full of distrust? Where we apportion a guilty judgement on someone without hesitation? Often relying on very little. Why are we taught to distrust people automatically based on arbitrary things like colour, race, and so many other false measures?

We have it because the system wants to create judgement, distrust, and distractions. It is easy to get us to focus on hating others, distrusting, and reproaching, while they carry on with their agendas.

We could all just choose to trust everyone first and then modify that if required. We are all trying to do our best and sometimes we make errors. However, that does not make us untrustworthy, it means we made a bad choice.

The world would change overnight if we started to trust others first and then set boundaries when people made bad choices.

Trust, love, understanding, compassion will set us apart as a human race. Don’t drink the poison offered to us of hate, distrust, anger, judgement and prejudice.

The power of openness

Posted on by philipdodson

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Allowing ourselves to be open to different views, to our emotions and to other people gives us a power that once you discover it will make going back to being a closed person impossible.

We limit ourselves in life in so many ways by what we tell ourselves about ourselves, closing our minds to other possibilities. Driven by fear we’d rather close ourselves from anything challenging too. Anything that involves feeling vulnerable.

The biggest one is closing off to our emotions and we more often than not bury them and force them down. The only outcome of that is we then burst out at others and ourselves, we lash out, overreact and cause more emotional turmoil.

We are taught that no good comes from emotions, where in fact everything that matters in life is about our emotions, the things that touch our hearts and souls.

We flourish by learning to be open to our emotions, lean into them as Brene Brown says, to share them with the people who matter and respond to others with empathy. When we learn to open our mind to others, new ideas and most importantly of all, to allow ourselves to be open to the real person inside us, then we realise and believe that we can be who we want to be.

Being open is a question of practice, but as we learn we realise what an amazing new world there is beyond our blinkers and the possibilities are endless.

The other thing is to help the people who matter to us to become open by not being judgemental or critical, by listening and empathising.