Last week I shared a formula for producing the results you want in your life (The OAR Model: Observer +Action = Results). This life formula illustrates that awareness of your body, language and emotions is critical to determining the actions you take and the results you produce when interacting with others. Likewise, we opened up Coach’s Corner by listing several issues that Black and Afro-Latino communities disproportionately suffer from as a result of the traumatic experiences associated with slavery, immigration, imperialism and oppression. Examples include isolation and discomfort expressing love, care, or anger. In our individual lives, these often show up as low self-esteem, fear and internalized self-hate. Collectively, this translates into entire families and communities with generations of inherited pain and dysfunctional coping mechanisms for how we relate to each other.
Rule #1: Your behavioral patterns, attitudes, and actions are a result of learned responses to past situations in your life. This means that YOU are not crazy or dysfunctional! Your life situation is. In other words, you have developed certain habits over the years in response to specific life situations that do not serve you anymore. What has worked for you in the past is not guaranteed to work for you today or in the future. So today, I invite you to consider a new way to address this familiar scenario by focusing on being your authentic genuine self in your job, homelife and social circles. Let’s begin!
The real you (the Observer of your life situations as they unfold) is genuine and whole, but the drama in your life is reflective of your past experiences, not the person you aspire to be. This explains why you are sometimes misunderstood by others – because they judge you based on observations they have made over time of your general mood, personality (action, attitude and behavior) and your general outlook in life. They judge you based on what they see, not how you aspire to be (which is often how you tend to think of yourself). In this case, the person you want them to know has not yet emerged.
How is this possible? What can you do? Simply put, changing your life situation requires that you value who you are, today! It starts with awareness of yourself in the current moment. Why? Because if you have misidentified your value as a person with specific responses to past life situations, then you likely have unintentionally judged yourself as lacking value. Over time, this can have a spiraling effect because your worldview is an external projection of how you feel about yourself. Therefore, the more you negatively judge yourself (i.e. I make bad decisions, I do not know enough to be successful, I need a particular person in my life to be whole), the more you negatively judge others and project your judgments into your relationships. The result is that you do not honor who you are, which leads you to view with skepticism and suspicion any attempts from others to honor you. Essentially, you avoid intimacy. And by doing so, you repeatedly sabotage any attempts to meaningfully connect with others. Get it?
Until next week!
Your BBN Personal Coach,
Marcus
(BBN Editor’s Note: For you to get the full benefit of this forum we encourage you to read Marcus’s introduction to learn more about the coaching approach he is trained in).
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