Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the strongest one of all?
Hi everyone! I hope you’re having a wonderful weekend. After the emotionally challenging week I’ve had, I felt inspired today to blog about strength, specifically emotional strength or as I call it e-strength. You’d probably agree the word strength is very commonly used in the context of our physical strength. In addition to our physical strength though, I believe our emotional strength is just as important & vital to our overall sense of well being. While our physical strength keeps our physical body in balance, emotional strength keeps our emotions & feelings in balance.
We all have a pretty solid understanding of what it takes to develop physical strength. The ways in which we harness & develop e-strength may be a bit more subtle and less understood. So here are my thoughts on the topic…
Where does our emotional strength come from? It was no coincidence that I chose “The Talking Mirror” for today’s blog. I chose it because it’s known as always telling the truth and because metaphorically speaking it’s our best tool to build e-strength. Our e-strength is anchored in our personal truth and the level of self love we have towards ourselves. No one wants to admit weakness but wise people realize that the weakest part of us runs our life. Being brave enough to face that mirror so the raw truth can reflect back is where our strength lies…it’s the only way to grow. Below are some questions we can ask to gauge where we are on the scale of harnessing e-strength in both the areas of truth & self love.
Truth
1. Are we willing to look in the mirror and take responsibility for our part in an unpleasant outcome or do we continue to point the finger outward and blame others, convinced we executed our part flawlessly. One example that easily illustrates this concept is a student that might blame a poor test score on the instructor rather than his or her lack of preparation.
2. When and if we accept our part, do we face or avoid the true reasons for our unacceptable behavior to protect our self-esteem, self-image & self-concept? To continue with the example above, once we accepted the level of preparation as being the reason do we fabricate a story that strokes our self esteem such as saying we didn’t prepare because we prioritized our chores over our preparation or do we find the courage to dig deep inside for the real reason we didn’t prepare, which may be that we have a bad habit of procrastinating.
3. When and if we face the habit & pattern that has been following us most of our life, are we brave enough to face the fears or limiting beliefs that underlie those patterns? The example above, that involves procrastination may be driven by the following fears:
?Fear of failure. Probably the most common one.
?Fear of the unknown — the task is not familiar to you, so you don’t know what to do or where to start.
?Fear of the uncomfortable. It’s easy to do things we love or we’re comfortable with, but doing necessary unfun things is uncomfortable so we put them off.
The bottom line is, are we willing to face that mirrow and do what it takes to understand & remove emotional conditioning that we gathered during our earliest years of life? All the unconscious stuff that ends up running our lives like a computer virus. Sometimes our loved ones are the mirror reflecting back to us those things we cannot see about ourselves. Are we willing to listen and accept their feedback?
Our e-strength comes from digging deep enough until there’s nothing but raw truth left, and changing THAT about us.
Self-Love
1. When we look in that mirror and discover unpleasant truths about ourselves do we meet that with compassion and self-acceptance or do we judge & criticize ourselves? To put any energy into beating ourselves up is really quite useless. We are human. We all grow up with a set of fears and this does not make us broken it simply makes us imperfect.
2. Can we find forgiveness for ourselves, our imperfections? When you take a look in the mirror, do you experience love or mostly contempt? Realizing who we are on a cellular level & forgiving ourselves each time gives us incredible e-strength because with that acceptance and forgiveness comes tremendous freedom in all areas of your life. Those fears that live inside of us, lurking in the dark have tremendous power over us and cause us misery despite our best intentions…but only until we shine the light on them and take our power back.
Onward!
Much love,
Dee?❤️
Thank you. I really like the part about forgiving yourself. I wrote myself a letter forgiving myself for all kinds of things. It was so freeing, but probably something I should make a habit of. Not a once and done thing
Love you! Just now saw this!