Take a moment and describe yourself. What kind of words spring to mind? Are you intelligent, hard-working, angry, peaceful, successful, stifled, or fulfilled? There are seemingly endless adjectives that you can use to label who you think you are.
Some people find this exercise easy to do. Others not as much. If you are proud of who you think you are, then it is probably much easier to say I am successful, appreciated, ambitious and loved.
If you are feeling not so proud of who you are and where your life is right now, then this may be more difficult. Or you may be overly cruel.
Calling yourself a loser or a failure is not the purpose of this. Finding something beyond those harsh judgments is much more beneficial.
If what you are doing isn’t working, you are not a loser. If you are fired from a job, you are not a failure. The results were just not the ones you intended to produce.
Consider yourself as the captain of a ship, and the ship is you. If you are negligent about the direction in which you are sailing, you may ground your ship on a sandbar or crash it into an iceberg. These are fairly serious predicaments that force you to start over if you are still actually afloat.
When your ship sinks then the game is over.
As long as you are still seaworthy, you make adjustments and hopefully learn to be more present and focused on where you are sailing. You don’t just drift along, paying no heed to what is ahead until it is too late.
Many of us are drifting with no clear intention as to what we want or where we want to sail in life. That is not the makings of a successful captain.
Begin by becoming clear as to who you think you are right now.
By identifying the language you use to describe yourself, you can instantly change the narrative and begin to set a new course. If you identify as being shy, you can decide to assume an air of confidence, knowing that you have every right to be here and to live your life the way you choose.
Leave the good judgments of others with them. What someone else thinks of you has nothing to do with you and everything to do with what they think of themselves.
There is only one opinion in the world that matters, and that is your own. There is strength in knowing who you are, deciding who you want to be, and then taking action to close the gap between the two if one exists.
There is nothing that can stop you except for you. Use any negativity that is directed toward you as fuel to propel you forward, knowing that you must really be making progress if it is making others uncomfortable enough to try to hold you back.
When you begin to move toward becoming the best version of yourself, there will be those around you who will fell threatened. It is because they see in you what they wish they could find in themselves.
No one can say cruel things about another person unless they are abjectly unhappy themselves. Successful and happy people are too busy enjoying their own lives to worry about yours.
Fix in your mind the adjectives you want to use to describe who you are. Then find a clarity in knowing that you can be that person starting in this moment and for every moment to come.
Sail with purpose and intention, and you will never find yourself up against the rocks ever again.