As a comment on a recent video I published called Affirmations Suck! Try This Instead, my friend Laurence wrote:
“Our society has a strong bias now towards the quick-fix lie…we fake it ourselves in order to polish our persona. It is highly narcissistic (in the clinical sense) and does not really prepare us for the challenges of life as persona will fall away under pressure. Forging the self takes time and effort but to transform the soul you must face the shadow and all the self doubt and fear that is held there. This is something to build a life on!”
He was so dead on.
The ‘quick fix lie’ is what I’m fighting against with my work.
Most personal development training attracts and massages the ego. Self-help events are typically mass collections of what I call ‘ego-minimalists’ – people gathered under the common bond of a low self-esteem narcissism.
Ideas like ‘limiting beliefs’ become buzz words that unite them.
“I’ve got 5 limiting beliefs. How many do you have?”
“Just 4 now, but I used to have 10!”
Course after course, book after book, they find more and more places to lay blame as they drive themselves deeper and deeper into victimhood.
They come together in online forums and at weekend events, following gurus promising a magic elixir for their tiny, brightly burning egos .
They trade credit card debt for toxic hope that this time it will work…this will flip the switch and make my life beautiful.
But nothing changes.
To the light they look, while what they are searching for sits in the darkness waiting to be taken, but only by will.
They sit, numb, dazed, scribbling notes they’ll never read, empty of courage and wallowing in their self-pity, while the world burns beneath their feet.
“In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
– Martin Luther King, Jr.
If you really want to help yourself, then forget the ‘self’ you are trying to protect. Enter the darkness, move towards the heat and get on with creating something greater.
