Do you act or react in your life? I was with a friend recently who bought an item in a store. He thanked the salesperson politely, but the seller didn’t even acknowledge him. I said, “He sure had a pretty crummy attitude.” My friend replied, “Every time I buy something from him, he’s always that way.” I asked him, “Then why do you continue to be so polite to him?” He responded, “Why not? Why should I let him decide how I am going to act?” I thought about it later and it occurred to me that the critical word was act.
Most people tend to react to others versus act (respond with self-control) towards people as my friend did. Who is in charge of your life? Are you acting, are you in control from the inside out, or do you react to people, to your inner fears, to situations that you think are going to be scary or hurtyou? If you are dependent on what others think or what you are afraid might happen in a given situation then you will tend to react, rather than respond, and let others or your fears control you.
Do you have a sense of inner balance, of knowing who you are, what you stand for and how you choose to behave? Nobody is less happy than the perpetual reactor, where their center of emotional gravity is not rooted within themselves where it belongs, but in the world outside. Is your center of who you are, the center of what helps you make decisions, choices and responses to situations that create fear – is it the result of something that is coming from the center of you or from ‘out there’.
Are you controlled by what people are going to think of you and the fear of rejection? Do you react to situations rather than act? My goal for you is to work towards being able to say, “I am going to start to act, I am going to attack my world, attack my fears. I am going to begin to become centered, to be in charge of my life.”
You might be so anxious and afraid of what others are going to think of you or are so afraid of taking a chance because you feel that you are not enough. Maybe you heard the message growing up that the world is too dangerous and that it is not safe. It is too big and you are so small, not enough to handle what life might throw at you. You have become so dependent on what goes on outside of you, that you have lost your sense of self. Your fear as a child, with possible critical rearing and chaos in your family may have contributed to the insecurity that you feel at times.
Our journey in life is to move, as a child, from being dependent on others, to becoming independent and, then, to finally becoming interdependent in a way where you can have a relationship with someone and say, “I don’t have to lose myself if I’m going to have a relationship with you. I’m going to take into account your needs and I’m going to listen to you and try to be sensitive because I care about you, but I’m still, even in that process, not going to lose myself.”
Many of you have remained emotionally dependent on others. The key question to ask yourself is,
“Am I internally controlled or externally controlled?”
Do you make your decisions based upon what other people think? At a social function, do you stay quiet before giving my opinion, listening to what others’ opinions are? It has been said that emotional dependence cripples the ability of your self-concept to grow and to be creative to make your own decisions, because you are at the mercy of others. You spend all of your energy trying to decide which voice or which opinion to follow. This dependency kills off any chance for you to be creative, spontaneous or take chances. How can you be a risk taker if you are so concerned about what others think about you? The end result is that you become a safe person.
The problem is that, as a result of always playing it safe, you can end up going through your life. and then look back and honestly say that you rarely ever got rejected or hardly failed at anything. Instead of asking yourself what you are achieving in life, you can only say that you got through it – you survived. The goal, for many of you, is to just get through, to survive life. “I don’t want to have my feelings of panic, I don’t want to fail, I don’t want people to laugh at me. If I can do that, I will have a successful life.” To me, that is really sad, because you have so much potential. You have so much inherent ability and there are so much potentially exciting things out there for you.
I challenge you to commit towards choosing to act rather than react – take charge of your life today by stop giving power away to fear and what others think.
