Day 201 - Why we take things Personally

 

I made vlogs expanding on this topic, but our Internet has been extremely slow so I have not been able to upload it yet. I will upload it as soon as our Internet allows or when SA finally invests in decent Internet speeds and solutions. Unfortunately the latter is highly unlikely, because most of the funding goes into the pockets of our government officials and pays for their mansion upgrades and goes towards increasing their vehicle stock while millions of SA citizens are in poverty struggling with daily life.

Enough with ranting for now and back to the topic at hand - Why do we take things personally?

This has been a tough point I had to work with, because i used to take a lot of things personally. It could be someone said something to me or they did something and I would react. A basic example was I remember when I was in school and my teacher was explaining physical differences between people and I do not remember why. She said that i have a big nose. Now this is a fact - proportionally my nose is a bit large for my face. She was simply stating fact and in no way meant anything by it, but I took it very personally and was angry. Now the question is why did I take this personally?  

The reason for me taking it personally is that I had a judgement within myself about my large nose - I judged myself and did not like having a big nose. So within this I was the one who created the anger based on a judgement I had within myself. It had nothing to do with the teacher - I cannot blame her for the anger, because I created it. The reason i took it personally was because of a self judgement.

This can be applied to everything related to taking things personally. NO matter what is said to you or what anybody does, in the end you alone are responsible for yourself and your reactions. YOU are the one who take things personally - you yourself create that based on a judgement you have about yourself. In a way the other person is actually showing this to you so instead of getting angry at them - thank them for showing you and giving you a point to work on. Once you move pass the self judgement it will no longer have control over you. I eventually got over my nose being too big so when someone comments on my nose I do not take it personally. To recap - Taking things personally is a self judgement and something you alone created and you are the one who can stop it.

 

PS - this blog will have no cool picture in it, because it then takes longer to upload. Blame SA for this horrible inconvenience they caused. Thank you.

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Fighting with Myself - Leadership

 

One of the points that came up was fighting with myself within being in a leadership role. How i was in the beginning a person with no leadership skills and quite lazy to diving right into the role of being a leader and my idea of what i leader is or should be.

Before I came to the farm I was a lazy person. In school I did the least possible and generally stayed away from doing allot of work.

When I first came to the farm I did not know what to expect. We saw that there was quite a bit of work needed to be done and got started on it right away. Now there is me, my whole life trying to avoid any kind of work, now facing it head on. Understand that I looked forward to it, but faced allot of resistance when I started.

The first thing we did on the farm was unpacking everything. There was some heavy lifting involved. I don’t know if any of you ever moved to a new place, but the new farm was quite exciting so unpacking everything and settling in was fun. I did not feel like doing the work, but did it anyway.

At that time there were only 2 able bodied guys. LJ and I. I was the oldest so I took it upon myself, or more I believed I should take it upon myself to take the responsibility of being a ‘’leader’’. I did not have any idea what that means, I just dived right in.

I noticed that people would come to me when needing some advice on a particular task and I felt important within it. I believed it important to be in a leader position.  I defined myself as a leader, and to be a leader Is to have discipline and not be lazy. So I believed that I should fight myself, my laziness to keep it from creeping up on me and hinder my definition of being a leader.

Every time when I am faced with a feeling of resistance - I would fight it. The thoughts that would come up is: can’t give up, can’t give in, must push. I experienced it as a feeling creeping up bringing me down and that I would fight it to stop it

And I fought, hard. Eventually on some of the points it became natural, I changed. Where I no longer needed to fight myself. I was disciplined within myself in tasks. There were still some points I fought myself with.

 

What is interesting is that within all this my experience of myself was like me being hyper all the time, placing myself in hyperdrive in order to do everything believing it was the only way to get things done, but its not. Pushing through resistance does not mean fighting it - because the resistance is me and thus pointless to fight myself. I have been slowing myself down the past few weeks and breathing and stopped the endless fight with myself.