Be Able To Look At Yourself In The Mirror And Say You Give Your Best
I’ll be honest with you…I get sick of seeing myself in a video and reading my own copy, and I think most people do. After all, we see ourselves more often than anyone else, and it wouldn’t matter who I was looking at or reading, I would get sick of seeing anything that often of anyone’s….
…but ya gotta fall in love with yourself…
Falling in love with yourself doesn’t mean you think everything you do is great, but it does mean patting yourself on the back for giving your best, even if your own imperfections make you cringe.
The truth is, people who try to be perfect in performing their videos and writings, are usually not very good communicators. They come off as being stilted and mannered.
As with any message, it isn’t only what is being said, but the energy and authenticity it is being said. In the end, it is this subliminal level which decides the effectiveness of a presentation of any kind. …
As spectators and audience members we see and hear things that have been edited down, rehearsed, cut and pasted until they are perfected. The world of showbiz and media is a very refined product….
…you don’t see it in it’s ugly duckling phase so our perception is automatically that those people must be perfect at it. The truth is…
…the best in the world is no better than anyone else.
The best in the world at something is someone who is giving their best and being able to accept and build on their shortcomings.
As a kid, and sometimes as a grown up, I would get discouraged about something, and get mad at myself and grind on myself because I couldn’t get it right and expecially didn’t want to hear from anyone how to get better at it. I wanted to be good at it, NOW!
You ask yourself the question about how I have any right to stand up here and say or do this and why would anyone listen anyway, I’m not good enough.
The only solution is to be in love with yourself enough to accept those faults and work on them with the confidence that you will get it learned and mastered without beating yourself on the head all of the time about how it is all progressing too slowly.
The world is full of people who aren’t giving their best because they don’t think they are the best so they stop working on themselves and their skill set and give up on everything, get bitter that the world and nature hasn’t been fair to them and gripe and complain about the injustice in life.
Then there is the bred of folks who give the bare minimum for the maximum amount of reward. I see this all of the time in businesses where employees are just barely hanging on to their existence, making peanuts and making sure that their attitude and work ethic balance that equation so they aren’t giving any more than they are getting.
My mother is a great secretary. She was always loved and praised by her bosses because she was so good at what she did. She is very smart and extremely organized. But, she also always made peanuts. Now, here is a person with a million dollar skill set and work ethic and worked all of her life at the lowest end of the pay scale because she never thought she was worth more. She had always had the experience in life that it was some kind of virtue to work hard and get paid peanuts…I continually tried to encourage her otherwise, but she never did want it.
There is no reward for self-depreciation. Regardless of how much one sees sacrificing as a virtue, the truth is, it gets you nothing…but unappreciated, disrespected and easily expendable. (Every now and then someone may throw you a crumb.) It isn’t even about how much money you make, it is more about making sure you value yourself for being the great person you are.
Life isn’t an accounting process. You can’t live well by making sure what you get is the full reward of what you give. The point I want to make is that the balance should be between how much we have to give and how much we actually give and not giving up on it because we don’t think that what we have to give isn’t good enough.
Really, all anyone has to give is their best. This doesn’t mean you have to be the best. Just don’t quit because you don’t like what you see in yourself, take what you don’t like and continue to work to make that better, that is all that anyone needs to do, but 95% of the population doesn’t do it.
Why is that? I think it is because people are afraid to be seen as being less than good at something and so the best way to not show your insecurities is to hide yourself from being noticed.
Please don’t get me wrong. Not everyone is meant to be a shining example of humanity. Everyone is totally free to live the life they are comfortable with…but consider the mouse scenario…
Mice are little creatures. They live in little cubby holes, spend their life running from one hiding place to another, and follow their nose wherever it goes. I see a mouse as living a life of comfort. They have their little house, don’t want to be seen and take the scraps from a world of plenty, never more than they can eat, but all that they can eat. Their only contribution is cleaning up the mess left behind by others but do their absolute best not to be caught doing it.
The “meek” are like mice who hide and get what they need to survive a relatively comfortable existence and they may even work hard at it. They aren’t really doing anyone else much good, but they get theirs and that is all they want from life. They serve a purpose, but try not to be seen serving it.
Again, it is ok to be that way, but it is NOT giving your best….or maybe it is for some folks.
When I sit here and blog, something I enjoy doing, I am exposing myself to the world. It is a strange thing. It is easy to get into the self talk of nobody wanting to hear what I have to say or what I have to say is all BS or it has all been said before…but the real issue at hand is, when I write am I giving my best?
The answer to that question must be yes, if not…it is only cheating myself and the world of my being.
I was watching a video of my friend’s daughter giving a speech at her 8th Grade graduation. She was class president and he said the only reason she wanted to be class president was to be able to give the speech at the end of the year!
But, my point is, she was talking about the upcoming years in high school and meeting the challenges of that….
You have 4 years of high school. What do you make of that experience? Do you coast through, being a wall flower, get your diploma and endure until you graduate. Or, do you embrace alll that the high school experience has to offer kids. Be on an athletic team, the band or choir, be in clubs, make friends, go to dances, get good grades and actually embrace what they are trying to teach you? Do you want a full high school experience, or do you want to just survive it?
I thought about this and was making the same evaluation of life. The universe exists in eternity. Life on earth for hundreds of millions of years, and one lifetime, if you are extremely lucky, 100 years tops. A lifetime on earth is just like the 4 years of high school. You do it only once. Do you participate in all that life has to offer or do you just try to survive? Do you engage in your surroundings or do you avoid it? Do you try out for the team, or do you hide in the crowd? Do you participate and give your best in class or do you just tricle through? In life, are you going to make friends, and relationships, have children, build a family or just exist for a couple of decades trying to get to the grave in comfort?
I guess these are hard questions, I ask them of myself today…but the bottom line is always going to be…Am I giving my best to the life I have?
No, I don’t want to be a mouse…but I will be, unless I give my best and accept whatever that is as perfect in itself.