Lesson number one from the book “The Courage to Be Disliked: How to Change Your Life and Achieve Real Happiness,” : written by Fumitake Koga and Ichiro Kishimi
1. Freedom Through Self-Acceptance: True happiness comes from accepting yourself as you are, flaws and all. When you stop seeking validation from others, you free yourself from the fear of rejection. This self-acceptance is the foundation for genuine self-confidence and inner peace.
Wow! This is something I needed to be reminded about. I used to be so happy with who I was. Now I have come to believe it’s even more important than I realized to be careful who we let into our lives. Maybe it’s not so important in our outer circle, but most definitely important in our inner circle. I never realized before what an influence our inner circle can have. I mean maybe I just always had the most amazing inner circle humans so I never really had to consider it before. I have always marched to the beat of my own very happy drum. Most of the time I always had a smile on my face and not really a fake one either. My life was hard, but I had spent many, many years focusing on the positive side of pretty much everything. I let people affect that this year and I let people into my inner circle that didn’t have the same morals or values I had. The constant negative view of the world and circumstances rubbed off on me. I am still recovering. The area that affected me the most was being dragged into the social media world and all the fake parts of it. Don’t get me wrong I’ve always been on social media and honestly I have always loved it. All my friends were real life friends and I loved following along on their journey, but being influenced to buy into the negative side of social media and feeling the need to keep up an appearance that was touched up and fake so that I could fit in, left me always feeling like less. Did I mention I’m still recovering? It’s been a very long year. Every day I spend a little less time on social media. I’m going for a slow and painful fade! (insert face palm) One day the pain of it all will be enough and the detox will finally be over. Every day I gain a little piece of myself back. It is hard for others to value us when we don’t value ourselves. I have always felt that true beauty comes from within and I have never felt so ugly as I did this past year. Now somedays I get a glimpse of the beauty shining through. It’s radiant and undeniably my favorite part of myself. We don’t need to compete with others. I compete with myself every day to be a better version of myself than I was yesterday. Remember your beauty comes from within! Like the author of the book said “Self-acceptance is the foundation for genuine self-confidence and inner peace.” Remember to focus on self-acceptance and not acceptance from the world or those around us. Be careful not to get dragged into the social media circus. You Are Enough and You Are Beautiful! I’d love to partner with you on your journey to Freedom!