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Here are the Top Five Myths we've encountered about life and people. |
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| Myth: |
Life should be fair |
| Our ego serves us by assessing danger and keeping us safe. It is always measuring and counter-measuring, balancing and counter-balancing, weighing and counter-weighing. As humans, we excel at developing our judge archetype to assist us in this process. Unfortunately, our judge can sometimes become the driving force in our life and we over-focus on where 'things' fall short. The real danger manifests when our judge is married with a reward system, started in childhood, and re-enforced in the workplace. We can devolve into shadowy emotions when we feel short-changed or not seen. If this way of being is also coupled with an external locus of control, we end up blaming the world or God for letting us down. One of my favorite lines is from a prose called Desiderata, "If you compare yourself with others; you may become vain and bitter. For always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself." Always there will be someone that has done more or gets more or owns more or is more religious or more giving, etc. Life is not fair, it just is. |
| Credit: |
Max Ehrmann (Desiderata) |
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| Myth: |
Life should be pain free |
| We have evolved into a society that believes pain should be avoided at all costs. 'Pop a pill and carry on' is a modern metaphor we live by. We also project our ability to control the physiological condition onto other areas of beingness. We want quick, painless solutions for whatever ails us. We want life to be easy street and if pain shows up we use various defense mechanisms to deny or avoid it's existance. We compartmentalize, compensate, rationalize and repress. We too often forget that pain is an indicator of where we need to focus our attention or take action. |
| Credit: |
Emma Freud (Defense mechanisms) |
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| Myth: |
Life should go according to plan |
| Being fully actualized requires setting goals and making plans for achieving those goals. Too often however our plans can take on a life of their own. A wise man once said, "Life is what happens to you when you're busy making plans." In the modern age, we're all in danger of letting our Rat-Racer archetype dominate our life. The shadow side of this way of being is that life can become an endless mantra of serving the should-monster and somewhere along the way it can cease to be enjoyable. Depression and a dark night can set in. Tracy Goss tells us, "life does not turn out the way it should, it turns out the way it does." Our ability to be with what shows up in life is truly a measure of our character. |
| Credit: |
John Lennon, Tracy Goss |
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| Myth: |
People should be perfect |
| We all instinctively know that perfection is an illusion and yet we too often focus on this holy grail. A common universal paradigm is the belief that if I am perfect, 'life will turn out the way it should'. If only we could say the right thing, do the right thing, be the right way. We can spend all our energy in pursuit of a perfection, sometimes even to the point of death.
We can also project an unhealthy perfectionism onto those we love in ways they can never live up to. What is true is that we are all perfect and yet imperfect. We hold within us a plethora of goodness and badness and all the stuff in between. We are all unique and yet all the same. It is our imperfections that make us human. |
| Credit: |
Tracy Goss (The Universal Human Paradigm) |
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| Myth: |
People should know what I want |
One of my favorite questions is ...' well, did you ask them'? And more often than not the answer is 'No'. To truly be successful in life one must be clear. We can miss opportunities to achieve many of our goals (fortune, love, etc.) if we are not explicit in our communication with others. A dominate audio individual may be giving verbal clues that a dominate kinesthetic person may not pick up on, and visa-versa. In a post-modern, multi-cultural, global world we need to be clear to truly be successful. Assumptions can only get in the way. |
| Credit: |
NLP ( more on dominate senses.) |
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