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Truth: Acceptance

personal development

Once you’ve identified what’s true for you with a reasonable degree of accuracy, your next task is to fully and completely accept the truth. This includes accepting the long-term consequences of your predictions.

Consider your physical body. Is it healthy, fit, and strong? Or is it unhealthy, flabby, and weak? What do you predict will happen if you continue with your current health habits? Do you accept the truth of where you’ll likely end up? Are you willing to live with those consequences?

What about your finances? Are you creating such an abundance of value that you’ll never know scarcity? Or are you headed for the poorhouse? What do you honestly expect to happen if your current financial patterns continue? Do you accept the complete truth of your situation?

Of course there’s tremendous uncertainty in trying to predict where your life is headed, but you can still aim for the most reasonable, rational expectation based on the available evidence. If you were looking at someone else’s life that shared the same qualities as yours and you had to place a wager on the outcome, how would you place your bet? Pretend you’re Sherlock Holmes looking at the evidence and trying to predict the outcome. What do you honestly expect?

One of the most important skills to develop in the area of personal growth is the ability to admit the whole truth to yourself, even if you don’t like what you see and even if you feel powerless to change it. When you face unpleasant truths, you’ll often encounter strong internal resistance. This resistance pushes you to avoid facing the truth, running through endless cycles of distraction, escapism, denial, and procrastination. Only by staring directly into these truths can you summon the strength to deal with them consciously. A simple rule of thumb is this: whatever you fear, you must eventually face.

Whenever you’re faced with a part of reality you don’t like, and you feel powerless to change it, the first step is to accept the truth of your situation. Say to yourself: This situation is wrong for me, yet I lack the strength to change it right now.

Openly admit to yourself that even though you’re stuck with complete responsibility for every area of your life, you may not have the ability to fix what isn’t working at this point. Simply accept that this is how things are for now, but don’t deny the truth of the situation. Never pretend to enjoy a job you hate. Never pretend to be happy in an unfulfilling relationship. Never pretend that your finances are strong when they’re really weak. If you want your situation to improve, you must first come clean with yourself and admit the whole truth.

When you fully accept reality, you’ll begin making better decisions because they’ll be based on truth instead of fiction. If you admit that your body is terribly out of shape, you’ll stop pretending that you’re in good health. You’ll stop subscribing to the delusion that your poor eating habits and lack of exercise are acceptable to you. You’ll begin to see that you’ve got to start making different decisions if you want your situation to change—it isn’t going to happen on its own. Once you fully surrender to what is, you can finally begin to create what you want.

* Source: Personal Development for Smart People by Steve Pavlina

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