“Personal growth lies within the unknown; courage permits you to explore this space.” Yogi teabag
What makes personal growth scary? For me, I was afraid of what I might find out about myself. I’m talking about the thoughts, ideas, beliefs, shame, judgement, prejudices, the stories I was telling myself and what they meant – all the things about myself I don’t want people to know about – my shadow side.
If you are anything like me, you want people to see your bright side, your goodness, your compassion for others, your love and joy. And, I wanted to keep my shadow side buried deep. Unfortunately, we are whole human beings and we all have a light and dark side to ourselves.
If we try to ignore this dark side, eventually, some aspect of it will show itself. It can be embarrassing, frustrating, painful and make us feel vulnerable around people we know and love and complete strangers.
So, how does one go about ‘exploring’ their shadow side?
The more we ignore this shadow side of ourselves, the smaller we become. We stay small so no one will see us and we won’t get hurt. In my experience, this is very life limiting.
What I have found is that the mistakes I’ve made, the hard things that have happened in my life were and are actually blessings. Personal growth means going into the unknown, that place inside us we work hard to ignore.
This is where the opportunity to let go of memories, stories, actions and all the rest to reclaim your life, to change the path you’ve been on to live a life you design and create for yourself. It requires courage and, believe it or not, we have courage in spades. We just don’t remember that we have it.
2025 has just started. Will you use this new year to tidy up your shadow side, let go of what has been holding you back and allow yourself to live your WHOLE life and not just the part you might have been living so far?
Come to my free online conversation to learn the steps to do a little tidying this year!
Click here to learn more: https://tinyurl.com/yckxjenz
