by Christyl Rivers

Created on: August 17, 2010   Last Updated: February 02, 2011

You can be a better person.  It takes merely awareness and presence. Self assessment is key.  Begin, first, to see you are not "Bad," right now, you just can learn from mistakes.

Assessing who you are is not as easy as you may think.  This is due to the fact, that all humans are self deceptive.  It is not deliberate “badness” that makes us self delusional, but an inherited coping mechanism, that proves more often than not to work in our favor.  When it does not work it our favor, when we tell an outright lie, or hurt someone, it can become a huge problem.  However, once we admit to our easily self-deceiving selves that we are flawed humans, we own the power to change it. We have made an enormous difference in our ability to turn this powerful awareness to our advantage.

Most “lies” come easily to us for social advantage. You won’t tell your best friend you think they look really fat, or that it was you who took the last cupcake you know someone else saved, because these little transgressions are relatively harmless.

When our errors really matter however, is when we choose to believe something to be true because we define ourselves, are attached in other words, to that belief.  Nations go to war because one set of people was born into a different religion than another set of people.  We don’t want to look at our part of polluting the earth, or wasting energy, because it helps us feel better about ourselves to stay in denial about such things.  Our society encourages, to our own detriment, that we should do this because corporations and services have a vested interest in making you think you are great, or you are inferior!

There are two reasons why assessing yourself and your behavior really does matter. One is because we are more dangerously destructive as a group than we are as individuals. When we go with the flow of mob rule, not taking personal responsibility, we subconsciously are affected by this.  The other reason is because when you DO take responsibility for your errors, you are more effective, more powerful, and more capable.

It might be said that rather than “The devil made me do it”, you can know, feel, and be assured, that you are the one who decides who you are, and what behaviors matter.  The alternative, whether the other “devil” is a person, a policy, a societal norm, getting out of long explanations, or something like them, leads

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>