This week ended the 4 year run of the modern series "This I believe" which aired on Sunday mornings on National Public Radio. Like many of you, I was fascinated by the reflective quality of the writings selected for the program. They were penned by ordinary people from all walks of life, writing clearly about the things in life the held on to as beliefs. It got me thinking about an essay I wrote a few months ago of a similar theme. I originally wrote my piece as a personal journal exercise as I tried to discover my foundations, make sense of my current midlife transition and the lessons 40 years have gathered. Here is a portion of what I wrote that day as my contribution to the "This I believe" series:
The opportunity to travel, has been a base from which I have formed many of my current beliefs. Roaming the world, its variety of cultures, the customs and habits of people with diverse values, has brought me to an awareness of the variation in our beliefs. I have gained an appreciation for what it takes from the personal spirit to solve basic yet complex questions of what we believe, in order to survive as unbroken.
I was fortunate to be born into a strongly middle class Ghanaian family that valued discovery, education and exploration. I was encouraged in my youth to wonder about and discover what was around the bend. At the age of 5, my mother placed me on an airplane to go from Accra to London for a school shopping trip. Upon arriving, I recall my wonderment at the different sounds of foreign voices I had never heard. The strongest impression I had on that first significant excursion was that my fears where separated from the uncertainty around me. I had a core sense that if I stayed determined, I would find my way through what I did not understand in that large airport to make my way towards my purpose. I recall the sense of certainty I got within myself as I focused on my mothers parting words to me, spoken in Twe and translated as “you are my greatest expectation”. Those words, drove me on. Her voice lent to me courage to focus on my path and to seek out my purpose for being so far away from home.
At the age of 11 y.o., I left home for good as the family struggled to fight against the military coups and political strife of that era in Ghana. I found my foundations jolted and tested. Overnight, my reality had been turned upside down. I ended up in America by my fathers efforts, living with strangers, akin to foster care. I became a servant boy, taking care of chores and the needs of the families I was placed with. All the while I searched inside for who I was and how I ended up so far away the life I new. I spent many years looking for a way to go back home. To go back to the life I had left behind, to the family that loved me, to the family I loved and laughed with.
As I settled into a reluctant life here in the United States late into my teenage years, I began to gain an awareness that it was truly too late to go back to my family. They had adjusted without me and moved on. This country would be my home. I somehow understood that I need to find a way to embrace the culture and manner of this great and diverse nation. I came to a realization then, that I would for the most part encounter Americans on their terms. In a manner of speaking, I will always be meeting others on their home turf. As that reality became part of my sense of the world, I became aware of the parts of me that I needed to maintain to survive in a fast moving complex world of interactions. Growing up alone, I took for granted those principles which had guided me out of Accra and into America.
I have traveled a great deal since then. I have made four major relocation's as well, each has brought a significant shift into a different phase of my life. Accepting these shifts have not been easy, yet they have shared consistent threads of my awareness of my core beliefs. The value of honesty and integrity in who I am, openness about my deeper purpose towards others, and a willingness to offer others a basic level of trust as a way of connecting our shared humanity.
In my travels and experiences encountering those who have not been so fortunate to have found a way to solve life's challenges, I realized the importance of knowing who you are at your core. Knowing what you believe in as a foundation of strength. Those core values have served me well. They have allowed me to discover within myself that I am not alone and that my journey, although without a family along the way to lean on, is not much different from what we all share.
It has been my experience that others, regardless of background respond to an honest expression of who you are. It becomes a base of finding out who they are. The people I have met in life thus far, tend for the most part to appreciate the open expression of ones purpose towards them. I have found that this has a way of drawing to you those that share a similar path and sending off those that don't share a path. I believe people, even the worst amongst us, respond well to being offered a clear level of basic trust when encountered. This core value of offering trust has protected me from harm in many dangerous places and in situations where focusing on my fears may have ended my life.
My sense of what I believe in is rooted simply in what feels comfortable to my being, what feels right when I spend time with a person, whether they are familiar to me or not. My beliefs are always guided by honesty, purpose and trust. My childhood instinct of determination grounds these beliefs in a base. Encountering others of varied cultures and customs through my travels have affirmed these ways to me. They may occasionally, require some variation in how they are expressed, yet these are my core foundations. I will venture to say they were in me at birth. Perhaps, someday soon, I will travel to a place where I will encounter my mother. I will ask her for myself if she saw these core beliefs in me in the years before I left home that fateful time.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Friday, April 3, 2009
Self-control
Can one learn self-control obtain better life balance?
In conversations with individuals from different walks of life, I hear expressed a personal frustration from many with the inability to carry through the deeply held intentions of their core selves towards others. These core intentions for this essay are foundations such as listening, hearing, witnessing and seeing others with a minimum of our own inner bias or self-interruption. I acknowledge this is a complicated subject, rooted in the different psychological and sociological make up of each of us along with our unique circumstances. In short, everyone grows up differently. That said, in exploring some of these conversations, I have been pondering the role self-control plays in sabotaging our finest and best deserved lives.
As a comparison, I have been thinking about the people I meet in life who appear to have emotionally balanced lives and do well demonstrating their best interpersonal intentions towards others. What I have come to synthesis as the basic difference that seems to influence the path of the later group’s lives versus those of their counterparts, who are challenged appears to dwell in the concept of self-control.
Self-control is something we hear about often yet most of us take it for granted in how much it plays a roll in how we live our lives, emotional or logical. Personal patterns we demonstrate such as patience, consideration, and understanding expressed towards those we care about can be a challenge for many for different reasons rooted around the concept of self-control. Obtaining long-term goals for ourselves, growing our core self esteem, and the fundamental way in which we chose to live our daily lives are other things that are rooted in our individual self control. They all seem to have so much to do with our ability the quality of lives we live and yet how much focus do we place on developing our skills of self control as individuals, let alone as a society. We struggle with many things, yet I see few people working on self control as a root to many of the challenges of life.
I heard from a friend recently, of his struggles to truly hear his wife when she expressed deeply felt concerns about their relationship. He explained that he often felt defensive and vulnerable at the start of these talks with her first few statements of fact. Even though he new in his heart of hearts that what she was expressing was true, and he knew he wanted to witness fully what she was expressing as a way of validating her, his desire to defend himself overwhelmed his sense of give her the space to express herself. He went on to say he wish he wouldn’t do that, it gave her the impression that he was not on the same page, that they were different types of people. I asked him what about defending himself was that urgent that it could not wait for her to finish, knowing very well that I was guilty of that same misdeed with my dear one often. He gave a very simple and honest answer. He said “look at my life, I lack self control.”
This got me thinking about many aspects of our lives and the roll self-control plays. I thought about people with life long habits and patterns such as those with who succeed in school, those who achieve the highest levels of their lives pursuits, those with good solid families, friends and those with seemingly are organized in how they live their lives. What I came up with was that they all shared an ability to control their impulses at a level that smoothed out their inner process. It seemed that those that achieved success in areas of their lives had developed inner habits that helped them calm the inner urges to leap at a preserved situation that caused insecurity and often could disrupt a more appropriate inner process that served them well in the long run.
It also occurred to me that by our 30’s, most of us innately know the difference between what serves us well and what gets us into difficulty. Some of us struggle with our urges to hold back those impulses that sabotage our inner most held values and intentions towards others and we recognize this in small things we do. We often classify these things with terms and words like self-discipline, laziness, poor character, etc. I heard a speaker on interpersonal skills once say “if we keep doing what we are doing, we keep getting what we get”. This quote is something I have repeated many times to people in my life. I have not always been the best at taking that advise however.
How do we gain control of the self and do a better job of managing those predictable impulses? What is self-control anyway? Is it something we can learn with all other things being balanced? Are some of us destined to miss our fullest potential because we never learned self-control? That seems a high price to pay for life. Many of us do not consider self-control a prison of sorts we make for ourselves. Many of us think of our circumstances as the reason we do what we do. Perhaps they are all related, but as adults can we work on and improve our self control? Is it possible to isolate and improve the habits we evolved when we were younger to dealing with uncomfortable situations? Are some of us destined to put our heads in the sand when life’s heart felt situations call for having self-control?
I will like to offer a notion for thought in this modern world. We can learn self-control no matter what age, we have to come to a place of recognition where we begin that learning from where we are. Like learning to meditate, we must begin with something small like our breathing, we must learn to think of ourselves as worthy of the good rewards we often forgo when we sabotage our needs and those of our loved once through poor self control. Our intentions towards others are indeed our intentions for ourselves. The reflection of ourselves we see in the responses of others to our actions can be extremely painful when its not congruent with our core. Finding a way to hear ourselves inside can be a less threatening inner practiced path to heal and learn how to have better self-control.
I share with those I have spoken to over the years that difficult with self control. I can admit to having lost some of the best relationships in my life because I could not control my emotional impulses to defend what I heard as painful reflections of myself vastly different in my instant mind from what my core intentions were. I discovered along the way after a few lost relationships that I had never learned how to control my self. I discovered along the way that the root of many of my lives challenges were squarely placed in my self-control. Hearing this similar expression from others makes me realize the journey I am still on. We all struggle self-control and it is sad that we spend so little time improving this keep element to being happier people.
In conversations with individuals from different walks of life, I hear expressed a personal frustration from many with the inability to carry through the deeply held intentions of their core selves towards others. These core intentions for this essay are foundations such as listening, hearing, witnessing and seeing others with a minimum of our own inner bias or self-interruption. I acknowledge this is a complicated subject, rooted in the different psychological and sociological make up of each of us along with our unique circumstances. In short, everyone grows up differently. That said, in exploring some of these conversations, I have been pondering the role self-control plays in sabotaging our finest and best deserved lives.
As a comparison, I have been thinking about the people I meet in life who appear to have emotionally balanced lives and do well demonstrating their best interpersonal intentions towards others. What I have come to synthesis as the basic difference that seems to influence the path of the later group’s lives versus those of their counterparts, who are challenged appears to dwell in the concept of self-control.
Self-control is something we hear about often yet most of us take it for granted in how much it plays a roll in how we live our lives, emotional or logical. Personal patterns we demonstrate such as patience, consideration, and understanding expressed towards those we care about can be a challenge for many for different reasons rooted around the concept of self-control. Obtaining long-term goals for ourselves, growing our core self esteem, and the fundamental way in which we chose to live our daily lives are other things that are rooted in our individual self control. They all seem to have so much to do with our ability the quality of lives we live and yet how much focus do we place on developing our skills of self control as individuals, let alone as a society. We struggle with many things, yet I see few people working on self control as a root to many of the challenges of life.
I heard from a friend recently, of his struggles to truly hear his wife when she expressed deeply felt concerns about their relationship. He explained that he often felt defensive and vulnerable at the start of these talks with her first few statements of fact. Even though he new in his heart of hearts that what she was expressing was true, and he knew he wanted to witness fully what she was expressing as a way of validating her, his desire to defend himself overwhelmed his sense of give her the space to express herself. He went on to say he wish he wouldn’t do that, it gave her the impression that he was not on the same page, that they were different types of people. I asked him what about defending himself was that urgent that it could not wait for her to finish, knowing very well that I was guilty of that same misdeed with my dear one often. He gave a very simple and honest answer. He said “look at my life, I lack self control.”
This got me thinking about many aspects of our lives and the roll self-control plays. I thought about people with life long habits and patterns such as those with who succeed in school, those who achieve the highest levels of their lives pursuits, those with good solid families, friends and those with seemingly are organized in how they live their lives. What I came up with was that they all shared an ability to control their impulses at a level that smoothed out their inner process. It seemed that those that achieved success in areas of their lives had developed inner habits that helped them calm the inner urges to leap at a preserved situation that caused insecurity and often could disrupt a more appropriate inner process that served them well in the long run.
It also occurred to me that by our 30’s, most of us innately know the difference between what serves us well and what gets us into difficulty. Some of us struggle with our urges to hold back those impulses that sabotage our inner most held values and intentions towards others and we recognize this in small things we do. We often classify these things with terms and words like self-discipline, laziness, poor character, etc. I heard a speaker on interpersonal skills once say “if we keep doing what we are doing, we keep getting what we get”. This quote is something I have repeated many times to people in my life. I have not always been the best at taking that advise however.
How do we gain control of the self and do a better job of managing those predictable impulses? What is self-control anyway? Is it something we can learn with all other things being balanced? Are some of us destined to miss our fullest potential because we never learned self-control? That seems a high price to pay for life. Many of us do not consider self-control a prison of sorts we make for ourselves. Many of us think of our circumstances as the reason we do what we do. Perhaps they are all related, but as adults can we work on and improve our self control? Is it possible to isolate and improve the habits we evolved when we were younger to dealing with uncomfortable situations? Are some of us destined to put our heads in the sand when life’s heart felt situations call for having self-control?
I will like to offer a notion for thought in this modern world. We can learn self-control no matter what age, we have to come to a place of recognition where we begin that learning from where we are. Like learning to meditate, we must begin with something small like our breathing, we must learn to think of ourselves as worthy of the good rewards we often forgo when we sabotage our needs and those of our loved once through poor self control. Our intentions towards others are indeed our intentions for ourselves. The reflection of ourselves we see in the responses of others to our actions can be extremely painful when its not congruent with our core. Finding a way to hear ourselves inside can be a less threatening inner practiced path to heal and learn how to have better self-control.
I share with those I have spoken to over the years that difficult with self control. I can admit to having lost some of the best relationships in my life because I could not control my emotional impulses to defend what I heard as painful reflections of myself vastly different in my instant mind from what my core intentions were. I discovered along the way after a few lost relationships that I had never learned how to control my self. I discovered along the way that the root of many of my lives challenges were squarely placed in my self-control. Hearing this similar expression from others makes me realize the journey I am still on. We all struggle self-control and it is sad that we spend so little time improving this keep element to being happier people.
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