But I’m always…. Are you really?

Is it possible to always be anything? Not according to these guys, “No one can consistently get everything wrong. Such perfection does not exist.” (Introducing NLP - Joseph O’Connor & John Seymour)

For “wrong” you could substitute:

• at fault
• stupid
• to blame
• angry

in fact anything you’re “always” accused of. But the principle remains the same.

I used to hold the belief that I was “no good and to blame for everything” and it took me many years to challenge that belief. Looked at literally, that belief means I am responsible for Mugabe’s terrible crimes against the people of Zimbabwe and my father dying of lung cancer. It means I am to blame for HIV and AIDS and whether or not the sun shines.

Clearly I’m not, so clearly my statement is wrong. Too many times though we take ownership of these global statements without even thinking about what they mean. As children we had no way of knowing if they were true or not, so had no choice. But now as adults we do.

Have you really always been wrong? If (like me) you’re 43 years old, that means you have lived over 13 1/2 MILLION seconds so far. Now can you honestly say of that huge number there wasn’t at least a few, at the very least one, second of being right? If there were, “always” is out of the window. And isn’t it conceivable that if we have accepted without question the “always” label that maybe we have also mistakenly accepted being the thing we are accused of when actually we’re not?

I think it’s time we challenged these beliefs, not only about ourselves but also about others, for aren’t wrongly held global beliefs at the base of many atrocities and most discrimination? Let’s concentrate on the times, however few they may seem to be, when we are happy and responsible and good, etc. This way the next time someone says, “Your always….”, rather than just accepting it, believing it and so BEING it, you can stand up and say, “No I’m not!”

This entry was posted on 03/07/2008 at 01:59 pm and is filed under Seedlings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.