Remember Who You Are

Often, as men, we forget who we are.  I got so many phone calls this week from men who I think just forgot.  I wouldn't be so audacious to say the story is always the same, but I will say, more often than not, the problem is more internal than external.  Something doesn't go right, or we get uncomfortable and suddenly we're evil, bad people who can't find our place and don't deserve anyone to rely on.  We're lonely, angry, sad, and afraid and our whole being becomes lost to the lie of who we think we are when we're at a low point. 

For better or worse this seems to be part of the human condition.  The relentless cycle of humanity. We stand up, we fall, and hopefully we get back up again. It seems way too easy to get caught up in the lie and live life behind the tinted glasses of how we think the world sees us (based mostly on what we think of ourselves).  Some people get so caught up in their faults and mistakes, they don't like the reflection looking back at them in the mirror anymore.  All of this because we tend to look at our flaws.  When was the last time you looked in the mirror and tried to only concentrate on your positives?  The last time you consciously tried to see the good you wear on your face and your sleeve, or the ones you carry in your character beneath the surface?

It's great to have people and friends around who can pick you up and remind you who you are.  People who can point out the you which you have forgotten or overlooked.  But there will also be the others.  Those people who bring you down and who remind you of your faults, your mistakes, and point out your shortcomings.  For these reasons we can't live based on outside input alone.  A positive self view needs to come from within.

This can be rough though, because I know my faults more intimately than anyone else.  The way out, I think, is not letting those faults or unfortunate instances define me.  It needs to start with a recognition that I am good.  I'm worthy and I have value, right now, in this and every moment.  Nothing I do and nothing you can say, can take this away from me.  It's a positive self belief, which sometimes I forget, but is always there.  Being good, worthy, and having value doesn't mean I'm perfect in any way.  I don't feel arrogance about them. I recognize when I do something wrong and I try to make necessary changes to right my wrongs.  I move on and I connect to my positive inner self who is good.  Who has got this.  I got this! 

How much better would our lives be if we remembered to keep practicing this?  If we bring ourselves up and out rather than down and in.  You?  You are great!  Today, as you are.  When I stop being limited by who I think I am I can start growing into who I know I ought to be.  When you stop forgetting and know what to remember, the sky becomes the limit.

When it comes to others, help him remember.  Help him do it on his own so he can remember even when you're not around.  May we all learn to remember who we are and shine our light unto others who need the same.

We listen, sure. But do we hear?

Listening.  Seems so simple.  Someone comes over to me and starts telling me something and I listen then respond accordingly.  Easy, right?  But is it? (Que the "duh duh duuuun" mystery music)

So often when others are speaking, we;re not listening at all.  I'm busy thinking of how I'm going to respond, or the same thing that happened to me once.  Maybe he's telling me about how he feels and I'm busy feeling what that sadness, anger, or happiness is like for me.  I may be doing all these or a million other things.  But I'm not listening.

Ok, men. We like to give advice.  Clearly.  But think for a second about how it feels to receive it.  Like it or not we have feelings like like those Venusians and sometimes those feelings just want to be seen and heard.  So what's it like, for you, when you're venting and someone starts to give you advice?  For me it's frustrating.  I've got piece of me which I'm holding inside and I've decided to share with you and you're just giving unsolicited advice.  I don't feel heard.  I don't feel that release of connecting to another human being.  They say a burden shared is a burden halved.  If you're not hearing me, my burden remains full.

There's a difference between listening and hearing.  Hearing a person requires a lot more attention.  More than this, I want to say really hearing a person requires more vulnerability.  When I'm really present enough to hear someone, I create connection.  When I sit for a presentation or a speech, I listen.  When someone talks to me one on one, I try harder to hear.  As  much as the presenter is trying to engage his or her audience, I don't think they're generally looking for connection.   Often, when people speak one to one, connection is just what they're looking for.

I saw a video this week from Dr. Brene Brown (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Evwgu369Jw) and I think this is the difference between sympathy and empathy she's speaking about.  Listening, I can be sympathetic, which surely has it's place.  Really hearing someone breeds empathy and connection.  Sometimes I listen, sometimes I hear, and sometimes I'm so busy with myself that I don't do either.  I've had many times in my life where someone comes to speak to me and I tell them I can't really listen right now (can we do this another time?).  Trust me, I've also had plenty of those times where I haven't listened at all and tried to pull off the ever so suave smile and nod move.  Everything in it's time.  Everything in it's place.

Often I find, the greatest gift I can give someone is to to listen.  To hear him.  To really connect and empathize with him as much as I can.  Sometimes the greatest gift is my presence and silence.  Nothing more than a listening ear.

Have a great weekend.
-Eric

Who wants to be normal anyway?

Sometimes it takes an action to rededicate myself to my work and growth.  Some big bang of an action to remind myself I'm in the game and I'm in it to win it.

It's time to shake things up and make a change.  A mentor of mine once said to me, "a difference that makes no difference, is no difference."  It really stuck with me.  I can do all these little things to try and make changes in my life but there's no real change.  I'm not about to discount or discredit the small stuff, I'm all about the baby steps, but sometimes, personally I really need to instigate a big change.

I've seen this graphic many times:

This is part of what I think it's going to take to make a change.  I have a goal in life.  In addition to being a good husband, father, and man in general, I want to make a change.  I want to live my life authentically and with my own genuine self expression.  I don't want to be anyone else, I just want to be me.  With so much outside influence though, it's sometimes tough to figure out who I am.  So I keep at it, trying to consciously be me as often as I remember.  In addition to living my life this way I want to help others find their own genuine self expression and be them.  By me being me, I believe I give them permission to be them.

Sometimes I think my comfort zone isn't really mine.  It's that of others.  I get locked in, to what others think I should be doing, how they think I should dress, act and even how I should feel.  Nuh uh!  Not for me.  No, thank you.  Not gonna work for me.  If I'm going to be who I want to be and accomplish what I want to accomplish, I'm going to need to find my own comfort zone, and even when I do, I'm going to need to leave once in awhile.  Like those times when I'm feeling down and don't know why, or in a funk that last awhile and I don't know how to get past or out of it.

I wasn't created to be like everyone else.  I believe there's a reason for my being here and if I'm like everyone else I don't bring anything unique to the table.
So sometimes, in order to make things happen instead of waiting for them to, it takes a boom.  A big
excursion from my comfort zone in order to find my personal expression and myself again. So how can I make a boom today?




Some personal expression for me today (this was playing in my head while writing this:) ) :

Knives, Hurt, & Quasi-Reality

I cut my finger this week.  It was pretty deep and pretty bad.  I don't do hospitals if I can avoid them so I held it up in the air, put on pressure and waited for it to stop bleeding.  I remember the yelp I let out when it happened but it was the shock more than the pain.  Once it stopped bleeding (at least mostly) I was able to get through my work day with minimal difficulty.  Other than the few times it hit it into something it barley hurt.  Until the day after...

The following day, often when I was using a knife again or looking down at my bandaged finger I'd get this phantom feeling of getting sliced by that knife again.  Those feelings, along with the residual pain of the wound, hurt more and were more bothersome than the incident itself.  True to the introspective person I tend to be, it got me thinking about other kinds of pain.  Emotional pain.

Often in life, the aftermath of something is unbelievably worse than the event itself.  So many children go through horribly traumatic childhoods not knowing anything is wrong, yet when they grow older some realize something isn't right in their lives.  Eventually it comes time to confront their reality and those pieces of a past they've brought with them which may be holding them back now.  In retrospect, an incident or series of incidents may have just past by at the time seemingly having rolled off our backs into the abyss.  Maybe they hurt to go through, but I kept a stiff upper lip and plowed my way through.  As an adult however, we bring in a stronger perspective of right and wrong and remembering and confronting these events of the past can be horribly painful. 

Based on memories, photographs and what we manage to hear from others we piece together the pieces and come out with a collage of what seems to be a path to how I got here.  But I'll never know.  No matter how much I remember (or don't) there will be blanks which only G-d can fill in. So I'm left with my quasi-reality or the reality I've created for myself.  Maybe I create issues out of things that never were issues to begin with?  I actually think this may be quite common and possibly even unavoidable.  I also think however, it's a necessary evil and unless I'm turning my pain into my drug of choice  I'm still on the best track I can be on.  Dare I say...  The right track.

Another potential problem comes about when we don't remember. When we create realities of what happened based on our pain rather than understanding our pain based on reality.  I've seen men start to tackle their emotional issues only to then realize the mistreatment at the hands of someone.  I've seen relationships fall apart as a result of a new perspective on something that happened 20 or more years ago.  While I think confronting the hurt and forming perspective is essential, I think destroying a relationship as a result is rash (unless of course the same treatment or behavior is still happening today).  Each man has his right to choose his direction and what works for him.

Often it does get worse before it gets better.  Way worse.  Sometimes opening up floodgates of grief, loss, pain, sadness, and fear can be dangerous and have repercussions.  Actually, there are probably always going to be repercussions.  The question becomes, what do we do with the new perspective and the hurt? 

First and foremost it's probably important to realize, you are normal.  Just as the healing process for my finger will hurt, so will the healing process for my perspective, my being, my relationships, my attitude, and my soul.  The hurt doesn't mean it's not working.  After that the rest is really individual to each and up to each one of us.  Try and be open.  Continue to allow your perspective to change.  Don't get bogged down by the past or and quasi-reality you've created for yourself today. 


                                                                                  Hang in there,
                                                                                                     Eric

Modesty?

There's a common misconception I've encountered with people being ashamed of themselves, their bodies, and their behavior.  The problem with shame is we tend to sit and stew in it rather than use it to move us along.  In my life, as a rule, anything that doesn't move me, isn't serving me.

I received a question from a friend recently who was on a retreat with his buddies and encountered a locker room situation.  Some of the men walked around in robes or towels being careful not to show anymore skin than they were used to, carefully undressing beneath, only removing it behind the shower curtain, and blindly reaching for the towel  hook while holding the curtain against the wall.   Then...  Well, then there were the other guys.  The men who walked around proudly strutting their naked bodies with a towel flung haphazardly over their shoulder or left behind entirely.  My friend being part of the former group, asked me, "How do they balance modesty?  On one hand I wish I could walk around like they do but on the other hand I'm supposed to be modest in the way I present myself."
 
I thought it was an excellent question and it got me thinking.  There's surely what to be said for having inner and external freedom to walk around like that, but what about modesty?  I think maybe the answer is in the understating of the word modesty and how it's completely different than shame.  So I started by answering him, shame and modesty are so far from being same thing.  My friend was floored just by that simple idea even before I offered any explanation.  Modesty is about being humble and free from vanity and egotism or from showing off.  Modesty is about preserving the beauty of my internal self. Shame is about believing something is wrong with my internal self.  Shame shrinks me and tells me there is something wrong with me.  This man had spent his entire life believing that his personal modesty meant he was supposed to be ashamed, and even more so, actually embarrassed of his body.  This couldn't be further from the truth. (Not to mention, in our society today there's  a huge problem of over-sexualization of our bodies which makes it more difficult for men to be comfortable. A great article from another blog: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/badcatholic/2012/06/naked-men.html).  Modesty is about preserving the beauty within, not about feeling like there's something wrong and we therefor need to hide it or cover it up.

So I don't have an answer about what's right or wrong for this guy.  But towel or no towel, what I do know is shame shouldn't be what holds him back. 

  

Authenticity>Toothy Smiles

There's a disconnect in the world we live in today from who we really are.  I wear this mask for this friend and change for the next.  We turn on this persona for work and then change who we are completely for play (if we play at all).  I have a facade that comes out in groups and another when I'm alone with someone. We are a result of a pop culture telling us to keep our teeth perfectly white and straight, our hair thick and tidy, and to only wear clothes with brand names.  We're told to be happy and bouncy all the time while the late night infomercials tell us about this anti-depressant and the next, with possible side effects of depression and death.

The truth is, we're not happy all the time.  Some of us would love to be leaders and lights who just radiate joy all the time.  That's not practical, however.  By nature, as human beings our emotions are fluid.  We constantly move from one to the next often without realizing the causes. Many of us have trained ourselves not to feel this feeling or that one, having picked up along the way that anger is bad or sadness is weak. But they're there and the longer we fool ourselves into thinking they aren't, the more we cheat ourselves of being fully human and authentic.  Chances are, if we're blocking ourselves from anger of fear, we're also keeping ourselves from joy in many of life's moments.

One of the many avenues I've found that help men on their road to being fully expressive is authenticity.  Now that's a fancy word that may or may not carry a lot of meaning to you.

What is authenticity?  Webster's defines authentic as follows:

au·then·tic

adjective \ə-ˈthen-tik, ȯ-\

: real or genuine : not copied or false
: true and accurate

: made to be or look just like an original

Great! All set.  Now what?  

It is my belief, for a man to show up as his authentic self takes risk and vulnerability.  Now I know sometimes the word vulnerability can be scary as Hell.  Especially for men who are taught to be solid and manly (said in a deep voice with a grunt for good measure) all the time.  Seems to me though, that being able to be vulnerable and real with how I'm feeling takes guts.  Pardon me for saying so, but it takes balls.  Guts and balls are manly.

I once heard someone say "men are naturally tribal.  We're meant to be together."  So that's a start.  We all need safe communities in order to feel safe to be fully authentic and real.  Cause let's face it, my office isn't the best place for me to decide to finally unwrap the anger I've been sitting on, and my the dinner table with my spouse probably isn't ideal for me to let loose my pent up fears.  But there are other men out there who can and will support us in that.  I've just gotta take a chance.  It may be close friend or they may turn out to be therapists, coaches, or mentors.  But these men can help us open up, be real, and authentic.  They can help us be free. Ain't that what living fully is all about?!  I think so, because though possibly very comfortable most of the time, the mask gets really heavy now and then. The best part..?  When I give myself permission to be fully expressive, not only does it expand me, it unconsciously gives those around me permission to do the same.  Your bravery not only helps you, it's a gift to others.

I know this is where I started.  Together, we can start a revolution!

A song:

You're awesome,

Eric