Issue #76: What True Growth Really Looks Like

You can’t disrespect yourself and hope to end up in a place where you respect yourself.

You can’t beat yourself up to a place where you honour yourself.

You can want improvement and growth, even new patterns and beliefs, but you can’t hate on yourself to get there.

You can’t treat yourself like a piece of shit and hope to like yourself.

And you can’t reject huge parts of yourself and hope to magically accept yourself.

It’s understandable, isn’t it? To see something in yourself that you don’t like, something that might have been judged or shamed in the past, something you might have judged. Something that feels inferior - that makes you feel inferior - and want it changed. Or fixed. Or gone altogether.

But the moment you do that, the longer youpersist with it, the more you are in rejection of part of yourself.

And each part of us is connected to the whole. Therefore, it’s an all-inclusive package deal.

Rejecting part of yourself while at the same time hoping others won’t reject you, is kind of a self-defeating move, don’t you think?

You can only fear judgement from others if you think there is something judgment-worthy about you.

By definition, this is you believing there is something wrong with you. It’s you believing a story about yourself and projecting that onto others and into your interactions with them.

It’s not true. It’s a belief.

The work isn’t to get people to like you, or to become immune to their judgement. It’s to understand that the belief isn’t true. And it’s to like yourself - to do the work of accepting yourself.

It is to understand that you belong. That you are worthy of love and belonging despite any little things you think people might judge you for.

Don’t work on changing other people’s minds. Work on changing yours - on how you see yourself. On the idea that you have to be this perfect and unjudgeable person to gain love and acceptance.

Do that and you’ll relax into yourself.

You’ll become more appealing too, by the way, as you stop needing the world to convince you of your belonging.

You then become a model of grounded security - something other people want to emulate and embody.

I don’t mean that as a judgement of you, simply offering a critical perspective on it.

This work has to be about love and acceptance of self, about how you can bring your whole self to the world, to those who love you. Or will love you.

It cannot be about constructing an approvable identity.

Your soul doesn’t want perfection - it wants a fully lived experience (to paraphrase Francis Weller).

A fully lived experience requires a fully expressed and fully accepted self.

“Full self-expression” isn’t an overt and expressive person. It’s simply you expressing yourself authentically, in a way that is aligned with who you want to be and not by all of your triggers and unprocessed pain and trauma.

You get to work on aspects of yourself and live to a higher standard - but a standard has to be set by yourself for yourself. Others are great for feedback and accountability, but if the success of some of your personal work depends on their interpretation and judgement, then you render yourself powerless.

From here, you can work on how you show up for others, on the contribution you make, despite how others may praise or judge you for it.

This is what being an Unfuckwithable man is.

If you’d like to start your journey towards that, you might want to consider joining the Unfuckwithable Man Daily Membership.

If you have questions about it - ask me. Reply here and I’ll make time in my calendar over the next week to respond.

Have a cracker day.

Mike