No One Can Pursuade Another To Change...

Do you ever run across one of those concepts, or books, that you really wish you would have found earlier?  What if you had already READ the book that you find so useful now, but you weren't ready to receive the information it contained yet, so it just winged right over your head and your heart?

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is that book for me presently.

You see, I KNOW I have read this book before.  I read it in college, in a Nutrition Services Management class I took.  But I don't remember reading THIS BOOK. 

THIS BOOK is amazing and I feel like my head is going to explode because I'm so excited to begin building these 7 Habits! 

Something that really struck me in the set-up of the book was Marilyn Ferguson's quote "No one can persuade another to change.  Each of us guards a gate of change that can only be opened from the inside.  We cannot open the gate of another, either by argument or by emotional appeal."

I suppose the professor of my Nutrition Services Management course hoped that she could convince us to absorb this book between our ears, but I don't think I was ready to hear what it had to say then.  I know I wasn't.

For any who have read the book and retained its contents in your brain, for most of my life I have been in the "Dependent" state of being.  Blaming others for my situation in life, relying on others to tell me who I was, asking others why I was important or mattered, and really being devastated if I found out that someone didn't think well of me.  My self-worth was very much dictated to me by others.  The book draws an analogy of being on an amusement park carousel, on a horse, with all the mirrors around you showing you what/who you are.  And you are relying on the input of all of your externals to come to some sort of assessment yourself about who YOU are.

Yep.  That was me.  "You are lazy".  Oh, I guess I must be lazy.  "You are slow and fat."  OK.  Check.  Got it.  Be slow and fat because that's what everyone expects me to be.  And the classic, the boy in junior high, who, while we were running around the track, called me "Chicken Legs".  OK.  Right.  Chicken legs.  Add that to my list of "who I am".

"You can't do anything right" may not have been what my father said VERBALLY, but he said it in every other way possible as I was growing up.  At least that is what stuck to me.

In through college, and for most of my adult life as a morbidly obese person, I trusted those external evaluations of who I was.  They became part of my inherited identity, that identity that was put upon me by other people.  I never chose those things, those labels.  But I accepted them.  And it made for a very sad and lonely internal thought life.

The last 7 years I have spent breaking those paradigms and developing new ones.  I have been doing it on my own, and with Dr. A's Habits of Health, and with my own desire to write my own story.  To create the best version of myself possible.  Three years ago I harnessed the powerful life changing tool of Take Shape For Life, beginning with those first few days of eating according to the Medifast 5&1 Plan, and beginning to change who I was on the INSIDE.

And now I'm ready to continue.  I'm ready for this book.  I'm ready to fully move from DEPENDENCE on others for my self-worth, to INDEPEDENDENCE, and then finally to INTERDEPENDENCE as the book highlights. 

One of the game-changing statements so far of the set-up of this amazing book is this:

"Dependent people cannot choose to become interdependent.  They don't have the character to do it.  THEY DON'T OWN ENOUGH OF THEMSELVES."

And this is SO true in the process of self-discovery, owning enough of myself.  I want to OWN ENOUGH OF MYSELF so that I can truly be at peace with who I am, rejoice with others in their victories while experiencing plenty of my own, and all of us together being part of something bigger.  Something meaningful.  For me, that is helping to get America healthy.  One person at a time.  Starting with me.

And guess what?  The "wah wah wah I wish I could have a Sprinkles Cupcake" isn't even on my horizon.  Why?  Because I am mastering myself.  And my TRUE self is not a whiner.  True 'Dat.

Have a great weekend!