maybe you're forcing it.

getting hasty about self-improvement can backfire on you

have you ever noticed the times when pushing your comfort zone just makes you feel icky?

you committed to a bold move, like asking that girl or boy out, or being vocal with what you want with others, or pouring your heart out on a blog post.

but once you’re done with saying what you wanted to say, it didn’t feel that good. this can be due to a couple reasons: we make bold moves and still feel self-conscious about it, so any kind of negative reactions to your move stings a lot more.

this is pretty common, but there’s another situation why we don’t get the feeling we wanted from an action that we thought should have taken us there: it was the wrong move, at the wrong time.

patience is a virtue that only some of us have a lot of. for the rest of us impatient ones who are in the world of self-development, we devour courses and books and guides about our inner world in the hope that something just clicks, and we can sail through our inner problems like we’re on vacation.

we hoped that quickly blasting through a huge volume of knowledge would get us to where we always wanted: fulfilled and at peace.

there is already this impatience in acquiring knowledge; it’s even worse while practicing this knowledge!

we read the literature and are so excited to implement it, so the next person we see, we try to practice it on them and see if we’re finally embodying the knowledge. maybe it goes well, maybe it doesn’t.

either way, a lot of people will feel that something is off. my theory is that people are practicing knowledge, and finding varying results, but they aren’t letting the knowledge live.

a lot of people describe wisdom as “living knowledge”. whereas knowledge creates action, wisdom creates being.

we impatient ones are acting on knowledge, acting on the hope that it worked because it worked for someone else. without the wisdom to truly know whether it works for us as individuals.

this line of thought connects with the post “self-discovery through grand theft”, where i argued that we truly need to know ourselves before copying other people’s ideas. when we act on newly-acquired knowledge, we are skating on thin ice, without the strong foundation of our own wisdom to power the action.

it feels icky because we aren’t truly expressing ourselves; we are expressing the accomplishments of others as if it's our own success.

you read a dating book that gave you info about asking someone out; you went through a course about taking back your own power by expressing your needs; you read from a writing expert about how to pour your heart into your writings.

but if we just try to follow instructions from these sources, we’re going to act without backing. we’ll see how thin the ice truly is when we see the results of our actions.

we will feel centered and authentic when we understand the knowledge we’ve been given through the shining prism of the heart and spirit. we need to pass this information through ourselves so we can make adjustments, developing action that only we could do.

in this authenticity of action and spirit, we will feel clean, and empowered, even if the response is not what we expected or desired. we know that we made movements of integrity, rather than of repetition.

so if you’re ever trying to practice something new that you’ve learned, but even with great results for others, it’s not feel good for you, take a moment to pause and ask yourself, “what can i do to make this knowledge mine? what do i have to bring to that which i’m learning today?”

when we make this pause, i believe we are taking away the momentum of force that pushes us into situations we regret, even though we had the best of intentions for ourselves and others.

by not forcing it, we will make our bold moves into a flowing effortlessness.