When I first began questioning things in my life I started reading business and self-help books. I was in my early twenties and up until this point I had laughed at people who read that kind of stuff. ‘Who needs a book to tell them how to live their life?’ I thought. Evidently I did.
I read a lot of stuff that my friends would say was, “very American.” The thing that stuck first was Tony Robbins’ work. I couldn’t get enough of it. I read his books, went to his weekend seminar in London and then signed up for his full ‘Mastery University.’ I loved it and got a lot out of the events. I’d come home high fiving everyone in sight, excited about my life and setting big goals.
The shameful thing though, was that in those early days I tended towards denial of pain and problems, choosing to reframe them as ‘challenges’ I could overcome with a positive and proactive attitude. I thought everyone should read Tony Robbins’ books and go to his events. That’s not shameful; to this day I think his work is incredibly valuable. The shameful part is that I denied, dismissed and oversimplified people’s emotions, problems and life situations. Including my own.
Of course including my own. The whole reason we negate other people’s experiences and emotions is because we’re desperately trying to not feel those things ourselves. I’ve thought a lot about why I did that. About why I so badly wanted to believe that I didn’t need to ever look back, that I could solve my problems by being positive and looking forward, and that I could do all of this by myself. Was it a reaction to the depth of vulnerability I felt in my quiet moments? An attempt to crowd out my own feelings of fear and inadequacy? Or maybe it was a result of growing up in a traumatised culture where emotion denial and pain minimisation were necessary coping mechanisms.
I think it was a combination of all of those things and probably more still buried in my subconscious. Anyway, it didn’t take long for life to teach me that it’s not that simple. In time I discovered that positivity and being proactive is important, but it’s only useful and effective after space has been made for all the emotions that you and the people around you are experiencing. If you don’t have space and time to acknowledge and process what you’re feeling then you can’t progress and those emotions start to control you one way or another at a subconscious level. Before you can truly be proactive, you must first soften.
It wasn’t until I dropped all of this forced positivity that I started actually becoming my real self more in my life and work. During the Tony Robbins days I told myself I was finally being the real me and ‘stepping into my full potential’ but a puffed up version of yourself is not the real you. The real you is soft in the belly, strong in the heart, and covered in scars with a few wounds still weeping.
