Strong self-belief helps us weather life's storms with ease and grace ...
The Universe doesn’t make ninnies. Gregge Tiffen (Tax Time: Are You Taxing Yourself?)
About this time last year, I penned a blog post inspired by two important people in my life: my amazing stepson who had just written a short post about unconditional love on Facebook and my coach who proposed the idea that self-belief “provides the freedom for individuals to acknowledge one another’s beliefs without interference”. In my reflection, the two wove together creating the idea that “self-belief is the foundation for love”. (You can see that post here: cindyreinhardt.com/blog/self-belief-is-the-foundation-for-love). And, I wrote about its relationship to personal peace earlier this year (cindyreinhardt.com/blog/the-gift-of-self-belief).
This week as I was preparing for an interview, last year’s post caught my eye. It led me to take time to review Gregge Tiffen’s writing on the subject and to look at my own self-belief.
I started with a fundamental question: What do you believe? Then, as I reflected a bit, a distinction began to emerge: What is the foundation of your beliefs? Are they grounded in what you do or in what you are? I sensed a clear difference.
If beliefs are grounded in what you do, you will likely find yourself continually pressured to do in order to ‘prove’ your worth. Most of us know this first hand. We’ve ‘been there/done that’ and we live in a culture that seems to call us to stay on this treadmill. We do, do, do and, yet, make little progress other than checking things off of our ‘to do’ list. Standards and expectations constantly change so we are forever ‘doing’ just to feel like we are keeping up.
On the other hand, what do you believe about what you are? Over the past year of changes, I’ve deepened my belief in and understanding that we live a benevolent Universe as beloved children of that Universe. (Yes, I am loved. I need do nothing to prove it. And, the same is true for you!) In his writings about self-belief, Gregge shares that we are created in the image of the Universe as “strong, dependable, creative, self-assured, intelligent, harmonious, complete.” Nothing (NO thing) needs to be added.
These qualities reside in every cell of our body. We OWN our cells and part of our learning is to discover how to direct them. If you are reading this post, you are alive. You have navigated the valleys and challenges of life by doing just this, perhaps with little or no awareness, but with a level of determination and conviction that got you through.
With this awareness we can embrace these many victories and allow them to nurture our self-belief. Yet, all too often we see a list of qualities like this and stories about how we fall short crop up in abundance drowning out any urge to celebrate. Our job is to stop such stories in their tracks. We do so by remembering both what we are and that ‘the Universe doesn’t make ninnies.’
I believe that it is here in our self-belief that we make real progress in life. In self-belief we find success, security and all those things that we have struggled to acquire. We struggled because we looked outside ourselves (our cells) for what truly is an inside job.
... And, to not take ourselves too seriously. (Mom, can we go play now?)