“It’s my party and I’ll cry if want to”…as the song goes, but what about us and our own lives?
The thing is our journey and how we see it is ours and ours alone to own, it isn’t up for others to decide if it is right or wrong. How we see our situation is all that matters. It is our story, now that doesn’t mean that we can not change it, but it is not for others to decide or re-write. It is our own party and we can cry if we want to.
How we feel is how we feel, and again not open for others to debate or want to alter that.
It’s our life and it is important to take complete ownership of it all and not allow others to shape it to what they believe it should be.
Being ourselves, as in our true authentic selves, requires us to be vulnerable, to brave enough to step up onto the stage and be in the spotlight of other people’s views, opinions, and often judgement.
There is always something to say, and we all have a unique journey and much to share with others. Our learning is unique to us as we are all uniquely different and what works for one does not necessarily fit another’s path. However, there are similar experiences that we all have and we can share learning and if wanted, we can share advice with others.
It is the unsolicited ‘fixing’ others type advice that is not what we want, we want people to understand us, not to tell us what happened to them. We are not interested and we want others to listen. We have to always seek first to understand, then to be understood. We have to be the first to stop the telling and do the listening.
Listening is not pausing to think about what we are going to say next. We have to listen to others in the way that we would want others to listen to us. Listening is something that we are poor at as humans, we are good at talking and mainly about ourselves.
There is one certainty, people who feel understood are more likely to listen to you and understand you. However, we can’t wait for them to listen, we have to be the one that takes the first step.
Whatever we want in life, we have to be the first. If we want more love, then we have to love more, if we want more trust, we have to trust more, if we want more hugs, we have to hug more, if we want more respect, we have to show more respect, if we want people to understand us, we have to understand more.
It is that simple, it always starts with us and we manifest the exterior world from how we choose to act. The world is how we choose to see it and is always a reflection of ourselves. We have to be brave enough to be the ones to change first.
Try it…see what happens, even within a few days.
There is an indigenous saying from North America ‘listen or your tongue will make you deaf’ and that is what will happen if you don’t listen.
Philip Dodson 