Get Real With Yourself And Avoid Emotional Traps!

Want to avoid emotional entanglements? Follow my four simple tips to help you become real with yourself:

1. Be Honest About The Way You Feel: This could be about the way you feel about a person (including yourself), a situation and/or experience. And accept the feelings and emotions that show up such as fear, grief, loss, hurt, etc. But don’t settle there. Take steps to bring about your restoration.

2. Stop Hiding: Don’t be afraid to reveal your real self to others. It takes a lot of energy to keep a mask on, whilst keeping up a pretence. By the way, hiding can involve you hiding both your good parts (e.g. qualities, skills, achievements, experience, etc) and your bad parts (e.g. shortcomings, failures, challenges, etc). If the people around you are not comfortable with the real you or don’t accept you for who you are, I suggest you consider changing your network.

3. Accept The Person You Have Been Created To Be (warts and all): Many of us spend our lives trying to be someone else or change ourselves as opposed to discovering and maximising all that we are. And as a result, you may find yourself being unfulfilled in certain areas of your life (if not all). To avoid this, I encourage you to rediscover yourself. By this I mean taking the time out to understand who you are, what makes you tick, your qualities, likes/dislikes, talents, personality, passions, desires, strengths and areas of development. I call this your personal inventory. Once done, you now have a basis to make smarter decisions and choices for your life.

4. Avoid Dancing To The Tune Of Others: This happens when you have no real clarity of the person you are and/or you are inclined to being a ‘people pleaser’. In so doing, you allow others to call the shots of your life. Years down the line, you look back and wonder how you ended up where you find yourself today (e.g. your career, relationships, finances, etc). To overcome this, you will need to take charge of your life. After all, you are the CEO of Your Life Inc. So start by creating strategies and a plan of action based on your life vision, mission and purpose – not that of your parents, family, friends, boss, religious leader, etc.