I wish you the strength and courage to show vulnerability, empathy and emotion.
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As someone who has spent a major part of my life (17 years) as a professional soldier and even more than that participating in combat sports, kickboxing and boxing, I have always thought I was pretty tough. In fact being tough was a major currency in my life.
But being tough and not showing any form of weakness ultimately became my weakness. I just wasn’t tough enough to admit it. The irony huh?
When you allow yourself to experience love… you will experience life, love, happiness and significance on a whole new level.
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For the majority of my life my toughness caused me to reject emotions, feelings, love and it pushed away many people including the one woman that truly loved me. Then I would feel it was even more important to be tough and show no emotion, feelings or love. It was a case of believing – well if I allow people in close enough to hurt me, then I can be hurt so I won’t let anyone that close.
This was a vicious cycle that just kept revolving around itself and for me, it was giving me evidence that I was correct – people did hurt you when you let them in. People did leave you when you loved them. So if I don’t let them in, if I don’t allow myself to love them or them to love me, then it makes perfect sense that I couldn’t be hurt.
But the truth is I was hurting myself. See deep down we all want to feel loved, needed and significant to someone else or even to many people. We don’t just want this, we actually need it. So when we play the tough guy we’re actually harming ourselves and then after being hurt we repeat the process in an effort to not be hurt again. We’re back on the merry-go-round.
Now you have choices. You can choose to tell yourself this story of how tough you are, how no-one can get close to you, how no-one can hurt you and as humans we seek evidence to prove our beliefs to be right. So you will spend the rest of your life proving yourself right and in the process collecting massive amounts of data to be right rather than to be happy.
Let’s get real for a second.
When you allow yourself to experience love, I mean to fully allow someone to love you and for you to in fact love yourself, love who you are and the people you have in your life, you will experience life, love, happiness and significance on a whole new level. Drop the bullshit for a minute and give yourself a chance.
My issues, and I believe yours too, come from years of conditioning. The way you experienced things in your childhood. The meaning you attributed to those things. The beliefs or story you put around those things and finally the evidence you collected in order to be right in your beliefs.
Here’s a few points for changing what you believe which will result in changing your actions and behaviours. This will ultimately end in you changing the way you’re experiencing the World. If you’re not happy with the way things are going, this can be a good thing right?
Step One: Get to Know You.
This is a vital step and one that requires you to get away and really get to know you. Not the story of you that you show to the world or on facebook. That’s how you want people to perceive you. Not the story of you, the story that you’ve told yourself for many years.
This step is about sitting down and working out who you are. I do this by writing down 3 or 4 significant milestones in my life. Things that changed and shaped my world in some way. These require you to go really deep. In my early days of studying to become a life coach I had to complete a similar exercise. It was confronting, it was hard, it was uncomfortable but it was also very rewarding.
Change is hard, change is challenging, so if you don’t see any reason to move away from certain behaviours and actions then you will never take the necessary steps.
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I went so deep that I brought up issues I had totally pushed out of my mind for so many years, or issues that I felt I had resolved or moved on from but in reality I hadn’t. There was an incident when I was 13 years old where an ‘Uncle’ of mine was taking me away for a holiday and on the drive he gave me a gay porn newspaper (I had never seen porn of any sort at this stage in my life, pre-internet days, other than the occasional topless shot of Samantha Fox in a People magazine). He said to me “What do you think about that?” and placed his hand inside my thigh. I freaked out and threw the paper and yelled at him to take me home immediately which he turned around and did.
I told my parents about this but to my knowledge nothing was ever done. In fact this guy would still visit and we were told to hug and kiss him or sit on his knee, which is what we used to do previous to this incident. I used to hide.
When I completed this exercise I realised that by my parents not coming to my aid, I read this as them not loving me. This was a start to my story of not having love and not giving love. I needed to protect myself. This story would ultimately stick with me throughout life and cause the loss of friendships, failing in relationships and sadly the loss of the one person I feel truly loved me in my life and I loved her.
This first step is crucial. Get into your deepest spaces and find out where your beliefs and behaviours come from.
Step Two: Identify Behaviours
Once you have an understanding of the major milestones that have shaped your beliefs and the way in which you behave, step two is to identify where those behaviours have been present in your mist recent years.
How have these behaviours manifested themselves in a negative way? What have you lost as result of having these behaviours and holding onto these beliefs?
The reason we need step two is because you have to understand the pain these beliefs and behaviours have caused you. If you don’t see that there’s a need to change them then you won’t change them. Change is hard, change is challenging, so if you don’t see any reason to move away from certain behaviours and actions then you will never take the necessary steps.
Once you’ve identified these behaviours and what you have lost through them, the next part of step two is work out what behaviour and beliefs could you replace them with? These are behaviours and beliefs that will move you toward the person you want to be, to attract the type of person you want to have in your life.
So what do you want? Why do you want it? How will your life be better as a result of having these things or these people in your life?
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Every action in life has a reaction. So in order to successfully remove an old behaviour that is negative, that is not serving you in a good way, you will have to replace it with another behaviour. It’s important that you make this a positive behaviour. When you see people that quit smoking and then they put on weight. They ultimately blame the not smoking as they see the link between when they stopped smoking and the weight started to increase. The truth is they most likely replaced the smoking behaviour with eating or drinking. This caused the weight gain. However if they had replaced the smoking with gym work, drinking water, eating healthy or some other positive behaviour then the weight gain would not have been an issue.
The key – choose your new behaviour carefully and notice very quickly if you’re not a positive result. Be willing to use some trial and error to get the right behaviours.
Step Three: Know what you want
The above steps can’t work if you don’t know what it is you want in life. This step is partially covered in Step One – Getting you know yourself, but the first part is identifying what you don’t want and changing behaviours towards that. This step is now reorganising and clarifying what it is you do want.
As you start to rid yourself of negative unwanted behaviours, you will start to organise and reorganise the priorities in your life to step you toward the person you want to be in life, and the people you want to attract to your circle in life.
So what do you want? Why do you want it? How will your life be better as a result of having these things or these people in your life?
Answering these questions is going to give you clarity around where you’re heading.
Step Four: Get Over Yourself
There are so many ways to get out of your comfort zone and get over yourself. Pick something that makes you feel almost ill with nerves and makes you want to cancel before you walk in for the appointment.
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To change behaviours is going to take a lot of work. It’s going to challenge you and you will want to slip back to old behaviours because they’re safe, they’re familiar and they’re known. Yes they’re also unresourceful and not serving you well but when we look for change we will often find comfort in the familiar. When the going gets tough, and it will, we look for safety in what we know versus what we don’t.
There’s a lot of ego in a guy’s mind when it comes to change because you have to admit there’s a problem, that you’re not perfect or that you’re not happy with where you’re at in life. By trying to change you risk ridicule, gossip or people having an opinion about you. This may or may not be real, but that’s what you sense.
My response – get over yourself.
Let go of your ego and get over yourself. Your ego is what has kept you locked into these behaviours and beliefs in the first place. It’s the reason you are where you are. If you don’t mind where you’re at and you feel the behaviours and results are ok then all of this is irrelevant, but if you’re honest and you do want change then you must be prepared to get over your own ego in order to achieve that.
How do you get over yourself?
Go and do something or a lot things that make you feel wildly uncomfortable. Put yourself in situations where you feel embarrassed or out of control. This feeling is where you will lose your ego and grow as a result. Growth in any area will lead to growth in all areas.
- Take a hip hop dance class for a term
- Learn an instrument and then perform on stage
- Learn to sing and then get in front of a crowd and sing for your partner. Don’t let them know.
- Do a stand up comedy routine
- Take a public speaking course
There are so many ways to get out of your comfort zone and get over yourself. Pick something that makes you feel almost ill with nerves and makes you want to cancel before you walk in for the appointment.
Finish off:
No matter what you’ve been through, don’t use it as a crutch to mistreat someone else. Don’t keep reliving it either, process it and move on.
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I have learned a lot of lessons in life and life will keep teaching you those lessons until you get it. If you want to have different outcomes, if you want a better life for yourself then you have to be willing to do the work. It’s not going to be easy but I can tell you from experience that it’s much easier than watching the person you love walk away and no longer feel for you.
I would move mountains and jump the moon to have that feeling of her loving me again, of seeing that look in her eye when she looked at me. That glimmer, that desire, that love. It was all consuming and I threw it away out of ego and not being willing to change.
Just remember that you must love yourself before you can allow others to love you.
You cannot erase the past. In order to move past it you must agree that events in the past were wrong, they hurt but you can’t keep revisiting them in an effort to justify or blame your actions towards others or circumstances in life on the past. No matter what you’ve been through, don’t use it as a crutch to mistreat someone else. Don’t keep reliving it either, process it and move on.
Don’t bring the failures of yesterday into today and pollute a potentially amazing day.
I wish you the strength and courage to show vulnerability, empathy and emotion. It’s not weak in fact it’s the very epitome of strength to be able to show your vulnerable side to others. It shows that you’re strong enough to go unprotected into the world and have faith in who you are.
I promise you will never regret this and you will strengthen your current relationship or have a more fulfilling next relationship and yes, we all need that.
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Photo: Getty Images
I heard once that it’s smart to buy a child a pet because a pet’s life span is short relative to a human and it will teach the child about death. Could the same thing be said about love? A childhood friend from the dojang has a garden. It’s a beautiful garden. I have one, but it’s a vegetable garden because I can’t eat flowers. Maybe lose the practicality. Love is a little impractical.