The art of Being yourself | Caroline McHugh
So the chances are you’ve looked in at least one mirror today. You had a shave or you combed your hair, or maybe you checked your teeth for spinach, after lunch, but what you didn’t know is that the face looking back at you is not the face that everybody sees, it’s a kind of reverse, distorted back to front image.
For seeing what everybody else sees, you need to look in to a True Mirror.
The difference is that when you look in a regular mirror you look for reassurance, you look for reassurance that you are beautiful or you are young or you are tidy or your bomb doesn’t look bad in there, but when you look in a true mirror, you don’t look at yourself, you look for yourself, you look for revelation, not for reassurance.
Successful people are individuals who managed to figure out the unique gift that the universe gave them when they incarnated, and they put that to the service of their goals.
I think we all come complete, we come complete with one true note we were destined to sing, and it doesn’t dictate your choice of job, what it dictates is how you do it, and when we see this kind of people we invariably call them larger than life.
Which always makes me smile, because how can you be larger than life?
Life is large, but most of us don’t merely take up the space the universe intended for us, we take up the sweet space around our toes, which is why when you see somebody in the field, full of their humanity its remarkable. They shine, they glow, it’s like they swallow the moon!
 People who are afraid to be themselves will work for the unafraid ones.
Now your job is not to be anything like any other people, in fact, your job is to be as unlike them as you can possibly be. Your only job, while you’re here on the planet, is to be as good at being you as they are at being them, that’s the deal.
When it comes to being yourself, when it comes to be in this world, the minute you showed up the minute you incarnated, you were given the life sentence, now you don’t know how long you got, maybe you got seventy years and I got sixty-two, we have no idea how long we got, although when you are born, to whom you are born, all these things have a certain influence or impact on how you become or what you become.
So if you’re born in Switzerland, chances are you got a long time to figure this shit out, if you’re born in Zimbabwe or some part of Glasgow and I’m not kidding, you got significantly less time, so what I am talking about is not what your life expectancy is but what do you expect from life? and what is life expecting from you? those are more interesting questions.
And the two places in life where you are awesome at being yourself are when you’re a kid, because you don’t know how to disguise your differences and when you are wrinkly, and you become more honest, and less compromising. Where you’re young you’re great of being yourself, when you’re old you’re great at being yourself, but the bit in the middle that’s sometimes is the most problematic, that’s the bit where you have to socialize, you have to accommodate, you have to adapt.
The I complex is a model to help you figure out which “I” do you mean when you say “I”.
You very familiar with the superiority complex, if you have superiority complex, you pretty much think that you’re the most important person in the room, if you’ve got inferiority complex, you suffer from an over-modest self-regard, now these are both side of a fragile ego, one of them is about the delusion of grandeur the other one delusion of insignificance.
There’s a third way of being in the world, and I call it interiority, this is one of my made up word. So the word interiority describes a particular disposition, and there are two reasons that might be useful to you, number one, it’s completely uncompetitive.
If you have a superiority complex or you have an inferiority complex, you need other people around. For the superiority complex, you need other people to be smaller, for the inferiority complex you need to suffer from I’m going to be found out syndrome, so somebody needs to find you out.
Interiority is entirely unrelative, so to operate from this position of interiority, it’s like a perceptual vantage point, it’s a sensibility, it’s an orientation, and it’s the only place in your life, the only place in your life you have no competition.
We all have our own thing, that’s the magic, and everybody come with their own sense of strength and their own Queendom, mines can never compare to yours and yours can never compare to mine….
The most visible you that you represent to the outside world is what everybody else thinks of you, and there are as many opinions of you as there are people. I want you to imagine that you are a big USB stick that you plug into the world. You show up on the desktop of the world, and that’s the power of contact, if you don’t understand that bit, being yourself is a no advice strategy, so of course it’s important that you understand perception, but one of the things I’ve noticed in terms of gender, is something I call approval addiction, the need to be liked, the need for approbation, or recognition, or for somebody tell you that it’s ok. I find more women suffer from that affliction than man, and I think it’s one of the most debilitating things when it comes to being yourself, need another people approval, live in somebody else’s opinion and mistaken it for your own.
Free of PerceptionÂ
Tune in to the next circle of the I complex.
So this is your wish image, this is what you will like everybody else to think of you and it’s not about being fake or fat or pretending, it’s about moving, it’s about possibility, it’s about potential it’s about sup-possession, so there’s a part of you that is like a backbone. This part of you is about you wishbone, your construct self, and that’s unique, nobody in the world has had the same experiences or influences that you have, but this is the you that keeps moving, that keeps changing all the time.
What I want you to think about is that every year your job is to be better and better and better, at being all you already are. This is not a cosmetic exercise, you already different! Your job is to figure out how and then to be more of that.
Now there’s a certain time in your life that lend themselves to change that make change quicker deeper, and I called them interval of possibilities. You know the occasion in your life that you sense that the potential for change is heightened, you meet a stranger in a bar, you get to decide what you gonna do, your boss comes to you and offer you a new job, you know what you want? you want to keep doing the same thing or you want this new job, and you know that if you make that change the speed of your life will change.
Unfortunately some of this intervention, some of these intervals of possibility are catastrophic, in fact, most of it is catastrophic. Because most of the people will rather sleepwalk until something happen to wake us up. That something happens that rocks you back into that inner self and make you then ask the question I ask you in the beginning. Now the problem is when this happens catastrophically you’re vulnerable, you’re weak, and my question is why you wouldn’t ask yourself this question when you’re strong, from the perception of health, when you are in a job, when you’re loved. That’s when the question becomes more useful. So the question on this one is if you could be the human of your dream who would you be?
The thing that might stop you from being the human of your dreams is the next circle, and that’s what you think of you. So now you’ve got:
- what everybody else thinks of you,
- what you like anybody else to think of you,
- what you think of you (and you have good deeds and bad deeds right?)
There are days when you wake up you think you are the beastnees, another day when you wake up, and you can’t even say your name even your cell phone feels too heavy, so on the days when you wake up and you feels that you are the beastnees, it’s not even like you’ve got a reason, it’s like free-floating joy in your body and your hair’s fabulous and everything just works, everything works on those days but the other days nothing works, your legs don’t work, your mouth doesn’t work.
Those are two extremes of your ego and one of them is about self-congratulation and the other one is about self-castigation.
Now your entire life, your entire life from birth up until now has been about building a stable relationship with your ego.
You need an ego to live in a western capitalist world, if you don’t have an ego you’ll be toss. But your challenge is to take the ego from its dominant position and pull it back so that it’s in service to yourself, that’s when it becomes useful.
In order to do that you’ve got to find the still point right in the middle of these two extremes. So that’s what I will call equanimity or equilibrium. And it became the state of mind that can not be perfume in any way by anything that happens outside of you, this kind of confidence that comes from there is like the confidence of the sky, right now it is dark outside, but you know if you went out on a plane, even in the stormiest of day the sky is brilliant blue underneath, so when you look at the sky and it’s made out of rainbow and it’s absolutely gorgeous, there’s no question that the sky out there going huh did you see my rainbow, or when it’s terrible grey gloomy days the sky is going to apologize, no the sky just is, because the sky sees impermanence of the clouds and the impermanence of the rainbow, and you have to develop an inner state of mind that is impervious to all the good shit and the bad shit that happens to you as the sky is to the weather.
In the western context, we would call that feeling humility.
So last the last you, the opposite of least is the ever-present unchanging you this is the you that you’ve been since you were seven and the you that you’ll be when you’re a hundred and seven.
In India, you’re raised with this feeling that you are a spiritual being who happens to be in a physical body, wherein the west much more into the physical body and than when we are old enough and long enough we kind of get interested in the spirit.
Gandhi was getting on a train and a journalist called after him Gandhiji! Gandhiji! what’s your massage to the world?, and Gandhi turn to him and said, My life! My life’s my massage!
Your life has to be your message, otherwise why are you here, it’s not like you’ve got a spare. So when you think about your identity, when you think what it is to be alive, when you think about why you deserve to exist, you’re not your thought, because you think them, you can’t be your feelings, because otherwise, who’s you that feels them, you’re not what you have, you’re not what you do, you’re not even who you love or who loves you.
There has to be something underneath all that, and when you look at people who have managed to transcend all the judgment that we put upon them, we see how they seem to be a verb, a process, a flow.
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Dial into you’re personal power, and if you can do this not only will the speed of your life get quicker, not only will the substance of your life get richer, but you will never get superfluous again!
Text Adaptation via The art of being yourself | Caroline McHugh | TEDxTalk
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