The Biggest Mistake In the World

On a daily basis while doing therapy, my clients share stories with me. These stories, as surprising as it sounds have a main villain in common.

Just about everyone in this world is familiar with this villain who may be sneaky and may hide from its victim. I have found that age, ethnicity, race, religion, sexual orientation, or  financial background has no effect over this villain.

Alright, it is time to say who this horrible villain is and I am sure you have had an encounter with it in your life too. This villain is known as FEAR.

Fear is that negative feeling that prevents people from achieving their dreams. It’s a main reason why relationships fail or why you react the way you do whenever your plan didn’t occur as expected. It is even the reason why your plan took a detour in the first place.Unfortunately, we aren’t normally taught that surrendering to fear is the biggest mistake in the world.

Why is it the biggest mistake? Because fear is the opposite of faith, and faith is the root of happiness, success, and satisfaction.

Faith is constantly mentioned in religions, in self-help books many people read, even in movies, and all over the internet. Why is it then that we lose faith? Well, faith is by definition a belief that has no physical evidence. Let’s be honest, we all want to feel, touch, see, and smell before we believe. Throughout history we had been taught that until we see it we can believe it. We have become nonbelievers as we grow up because “you need to grow up and stop fantasizing” or “life is not a fairytale, life is hard”. I understand that life is not going to be exactly how we plan it but I do not think that life is actually hard, we are the ones that make it hard with our expectations and our perceptions. Life could be so much easier if we were believers. Believers of what we like, in who we are, in our dreams, in the good of this world, in the goodness of life and our destiny. I am not saying that we cannot create our destiny because we actually can but we need to be flexible. Every disappointment could be a learning experience that leads to something better, but nobody teaches us that life is a time to learn. We are told that life is “bad”, “tough”, “difficult”, “not easy”, etc. Nobody says “hey  if you do not learn you will have the same experience in a different environment and different people”.

Ok so I think I made my point on what faith is and how faith and flexibility can do for us. Now I would like to show how fear becomes an obstacle in everybody’s life.

People fear that they are not enough for somebody else because they do not believe in themselves. What happens? This person is not able to have a healthy relationship that is built on trust because if “I am not good enough, why would somebody love me?” or “Maybe I am so imperfect that he/she will cheat on me”. This is only one way that fear can be the root of misery, let me give you another example. Lets say that a child wants to be an artist and his parents fear that he could never be successful enough by being an artist so they make him think that he needs to be a doctor. This child follows his parent’s fears and becomes a doctor, even though his passion is painting and he is amazing at it but thinks “well, painting will never pay the bills”. This individual could always feel unsatisfied, he probably would hate what he does for a living and he experiences mixed feelings about himself since he was not honest with himself. Finally I would like to say that oppression of many many people has been and still is the result of fear ( I don’t think I need to explain this one).

Being a successful anything is about believing in what you do and on yourself. Fear of the uncertain is human nature, but we can change that. Life goes on even if there are changes in your life because if you believe that you can make it, you will make it. It all goes down to having faith and conquering those fears that freeze you. Most successful individuals in history had fears but they conquered them. A good example of this is  Walt Disney. This man never gave up on his dreams and even though he “failed” at first, he got up ,learned from his mistakes and became “A pioneer of the American animation industry”.

I hope that you can see now why I say that fear is the biggest mistake in the world. The good thing is that fear is an illusion that can be dissolved with FAITH. Do not let your fears go wild, instead destroy them and LIVE YOUR DREAMS TO THE FULLEST.

 

With love,

Evelyn Nuñez

How To Be Happier?

Many self-help books and even some religions refer to happiness as “the purpose of life.”

Even if you have never read a self-help book nor are religious, you may have experienced the desire to be completely happy. True happiness is a concept that many of us are unable to describe or explain because ironically we have difficulties experiencing this amazing emotion in a continuous manner.

One day, I was thinking and analyzing the stories I have heard as a therapist and something came to my mind as if I finally found an important, if not the most important factor of why we have difficulty achieving complete happiness. This factor is what I coin as “created self-concept” which is everything we have shaped in our heads since we were little children. Our culture, our peers, and our family have influenced our thoughts and our created self-concept has been a lifetime in the making. Unfortunately, our concept of self sometimes becomes so strong that there is no place for flexibility and when it is jeopardized, we might become sad and continue to focus on the idea that our idealized self-concept was not achieved as planned. For example, a young girl believes she will be a ballerina because she comes from a family of dancers. She tells herself throughout her early years that she is going to be a successful ballerina and works hard to become a great dancer. However, the girl who longed to be a ballerina becomes a mother and is no longer able to dance, shattering her created self-concept.

Do not get me wrong; it is not that we want to focus on the unattained self-concept. I am sure the mother would rather focus on the blessing that motherhood can bring, but it is an unconscious habit leading her to focus on the longing she had to become a ballerina. Unconscious habits are difficult to change since we have not paid enough attention to our inner-self, which is required to build self-understanding and the realization of any concepts we have created for ourselves.

The question now is how do we achieve happiness after understanding our created self-concepts and their inflexibility? I think you might have the answer to this after looking into you own self -concepts. The answer is become flexible. It sounds easier than it is, but if we allow ourselves to bend the ideas of who we are “supposed to be”, how we are “supposed to live”, or what we are “supposed to think”, we become flexible to other concepts. Life does not always give us what we planned for and this is not necessarily a negative thing. Sometimes life brings us things that are even better than what we imagined. However, if we only focus on what we do NOT get as opposed to what we DO get out of life, we will continuously experience that lack of complete happiness. We must be mindful and grateful and we will find a sense of fulfilled happiness in our lives.

I hope this is helpful to you and invite you to leave feedback. I am looking forward to hearing from you.

 

 

With love,

Evelyn Nuñez