Ninety Percent of the Friction of Daily Life

Is Caused by the Wrong Tone of Voice

A demanding wife continually nagged her husband to conform to her very high standards: "This is how you should act, this is how you should dress, this is what you should say, this is where you should be seen and this is how you should plan your career!"  She insisted every aspect of his life be honed to perfection.  Feeling thoroughly whipped, the man finally said, "Why don't you just write it all down:  Then you won't have to tell me these things all the time."  She gladly complied.

A short time later the wife died.  Within the course of a year, the man met another woman and married.  His new life seemed to be a perpetual honeymoon.  He could hardly believe the great joy, and relief, he was experiencing with his new bride.

One day he came across the list of "do's and don'ts" his first wife had written.  He read them and realized, to his amazement, he was following all of the instructions--even though his second wife had never mentioned them.

He thought about what might have happened and finally said to a friend, "my former wife began her statements, 'I hate it when...' but my new wife says, 'I just love it when...'"

The Seven Powers for Self Control

Lesson 6:  The Power of Acceptance

Until you feel your feelings, you will not allow others to feel theirs.

"But the Lord said to Samuel, “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him. For the Lord sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.”

—1 Samuel 16:7

In Lesson 4 we learned that no one can make us mad or upset without our permission.  The only person that we can change is ourselves.  This does not mean that we are to beat ourselves up and give up on ourselves because we have not lived up to our own standards.  Lesson 5 taught us that we are to love ourselves first and foremost.  If we don’t love us, then who will?  I think the big lesson in both of these is that we are to understand that we are human, and are therefore bound to make mistakes, and probably the same mistakes over and over again.  That’s called being human.  It’s more about the lessons you are learning from your mistakes. 

Lesson 6 is about the Power of Acceptance.  Acceptance means favorable reception or approval.  There is nothing in that definition about other people.  It means everyone, including and especially, yourself.  Becky Bailey, in her book Conscious Discipline, says, “We must discipline ourselves first by changing our beliefs.  By changing our beliefs...we change our thoughts.  This changes our feelings, which changes our behaviors.”  If you change your beliefs to say that “I am a lovable and capable human being,” then you allow yourself the privilege of loving yourself just the way you are, warts and all.  You understand that you will do your best and that your best, on any given day, may look different … and that’s OK.

My student, in Lesson 5, had not learned the lesson of acceptance.  I had not walked in his shoes, I don’t know exactly why he was driven to perfection.  I can make assumptions, but that is all that they are and I am not here to make judgments against anyone.  Far from it!  I am here to assure you that when you seek, when you crave perfection, you are destined to a life of never being quite good enough.  You will always find fault in what you have, what you do, and who you are.  While I’ve never reached the level that this young man was at, I’ve struggled with the idea that to be loved, I must meet someone’s criteria.  I’ve looked for things to fill a void in me that couldn’t be filled, for when I got the “prize” there was always another just ahead. 

It wasn’t until I learned that to be loved, to feel loved, I had to love myself that I began to really understand.  Loving others, accepting others, isn’t really possible until we can and do love ourselves.  So what do I mean when I say love ourselves?

“But there isn't any second half of myself waiting to plug in and make me whole. It's there. I'm already whole.”

Sally Field

Here’s what I’m talking about:  Loving yourself means accepting ALL of the parts of you, the parts you like and especially the parts you don’t like.  We all have them, both of them.  Acceptance of the parts you like is pretty simple.  If you don’t have any of these or only a few of these, then we need to have another discussion.  I want to focus on the parts you don’t like for now.  These parts are here, within us, to teach us lessons.  Remember, we all have them.  I mean every one of us!  Instead of fighting them, instead of being angry with ourselves over them, we need to love them and when we learn to love them and accept them as lessons, then they will begin to dissipate.  Remember, what you focus on, you get more of.

If you beat yourself up for your mistakes, then you are focusing on the bad behavior and you will get more bad behavior.  If you change your belief to say to yourself, “Well, there you are again ___________(whatever your mistake or issue).  What lesson are you trying to teach me today?” then you are not fighting any longer with yourself.  You are accepting yourself and when you accept yourself, you change your beliefs.  Change your beliefs…change your thoughts… change your feelings…change your behaviors.  This is the key to making those changes that will last a lifetime, those changes that we so want to make in ourselves.

When we love and accept ourselves, all the parts and pieces of ourselves, we are better able to love and accept others just as they are.  We understand that life is a journey and we each have our own lessons to learn on this journey.  We demonstrate to those around us that we are able to care and love, because we first love and accept ourselves.

 “When you find peace within yourself, you become the kind of person who can live at peace with others.”

Peace Pilgrim

The Seven Powers for Self Control

 

Lesson 5:  The Power of Love

See the best in each other.

The Beatles sang "All You Need is Love."  Thomas Carlyle said, “A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.”  Samuel Taylor Coleridge said, “All men, even the most surly are influenced by affection.”

When you Google quotations about love you get 173,000,000 hits.  It seems that everyone has something to say about love.  The kind of love we’re talking about here is the kind of love you have for yourself, first, and then the love you have for those around you.  It may be your spouse, it may be your children, maybe it’s your co-workers or your teammates.  All of these people require you to love yourself, so that you can love them. 

Why would it be necessary to love yourself before you can love anybody else?  Well, it’s really simple.  If you can’t love yourself, care about yourself, how can you know how to love and care for anyone else?  It’s impossible.  Love comes from within you.  It is a respect you have for yourself, because you know that you are valuable and worthy of it.  If you don’t have this knowledge, then you can attempt to love others, but it will be a selfish kind of love, more about you than it is about them.  You will fail in loving others when you have no internal foundation upon which to build their love.

We have to find a way to see the best in ourselves.  This means, as in Lesson 4, that we have to take a look at ourselves and determine what there is to love.  We all have good things and bad things about us.  There will be those things that you are really proud of.  You ‘love’ those things about yourself.  Make a list and post it somewhere.  The truth is we all spend more time dwelling on those things we don’t like, than the ones we do.  Certainly, we need to address those negative things and work to make them things that are now positive, but there are those things, even if it’s a very short list, that we at least ‘like’ about ourselves a little bit.  Remember, what you focus on you get more of (Lesson3) so focus on the good stuff and you’ll get more. 

Faith makes all things possible.  Love makes them easy.  No one knows who said this but it is true.  When you love yourself, it becomes a simple task to love those around you and when you love those around you, you are able to see the best in each other.  This isn’t something that just happens, however.  It is a commitment to look for the good.  As we’ve talked about in the other four lessons, it is always easy to focus on the bad things, especially in others.  It is easy to decide that they are the ones who need to change.  Finding others’ faults is relatively simple.  Finding the best in each other could take some practice.

I had a student in public school, fourth grade, who was a perfectionist.  If he didn’t get one-hundred percent on his papers he was determined that he had failed.  It was a problem we worked on for quite a while before he had a total melt-down one day over a math paper.  It was the first homework assignment on long division and he had missed just one.  Because he had done so well, I wrote a great big GOOD at the top of his paper with my signature smiley face embedded in it.  As I handed out the papers the next day, he brought his paper to me with tears in his eyes to ask me why I would put this mark on his paper when it, obviously, was not ‘good.’  I tried in every way I knew how to help him see that missing one problem, on something so new to him, to all of them, was a very good thing, but he absolutely refused to see it.  He had missed one, therefore it was bad.

When I talked with his parents about my concerns over his perfectionism, they shared their concerns as well, but as we talked it became apparent that his father also shared this perfectionistic tendency.  In fact, his first question to the boy was why he had missed that one and gotten all the others correct.  It was not a question intended to teach.  It was a question intended to belittle; “If you could get all the others right, why not this one?”  I learned very quickly that there were lessons here for the father as well as the son, and if I couldn’t help the father, I probably wouldn’t be able to help the boy either.  I have no doubt that the father never came right out and told the boy that his work must be perfect, but he said it in so many other ways  that the boy had very clearly heard and taken to heart. 

As with most of my students, I don’t know what happened with this one.  I hope that there was some easing of his burden after he left my room for the next grade.  I’m certain that he was very successful in whatever field he chose.  I hope that it was his choice, whatever it was, and I hope that he is happy with the work that he does.  As for the father, I doubt that I made much difference in his thinking.  He may have been a little less quick to voice his ‘concerns’ at least in front of me, but I am certain that he still holds the highest expectations for himself and his children. 

Expectations are not a bad thing.   In fact, I have been quoted as saying,  “Children will live up or down to our expectations.”  If we set them too high, then they become unattainable as with this young man and his father; no one is perfect.  If we set them too low, then we tell them that we don’t believe they are capable of anything too difficult and they learn to not even try.  It is a fine line that we walk in setting our expectations reasonably, knowing the abilities of our children, or our spouse, or our co-workers, and then expecting that they will live up to what we believe them to be capable. 

I have also had parents who were so afraid of letting their children fail that they ‘helped’ them with each and every assignment.  You know their work when it comes in, obviously not that of a ten year old, alone.  My son always complained at the Pinewood Derby  in Cub Scouts because we helped him with his car when it came to using the power tools but the rest of the work was all his.  Inevitably, on race day, a lot of the other boys would come with their cars that had obviously had a lot more ‘help’ than our son’s.  It was always a great day, when his car defeated some of those other cars.  We had told him that we believed him to be capable and he was.  We expected to see the best in him, and we did.

It comes down, as always, to choices.  We will see what we choose to see.  We will find what we choose to find.  Choose to see the best in each other, but choose to see the best in yourself first!