Self acceptance: Living all of your life

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about living your best life.  Since then, I’ve been wrestling with several large challenges in my own life.  Much of the time, not feeling that I’m living my best life!

In the middle of one of these challenges, my 20-year-old niece, Alisha, told me about a website, FMyLife.com, where people write three-sentence stories about bad things that happened to them and other people rate whether they think the story is messed up or if the person deserved what they got.

As a person who makes my living helping people focus on the positive, I was, of course, appropriately appalled.  At first anyway.

Until she had me laughing at some of the things she had read.  And a light bulb went on for me.  Life as a human is often messy.  Sometimes I try to stay so positive and I can’t in that moment.  Maybe I’ll write my story on that website and give others a good laugh.  Ah, full self acceptance . . .

I still have a desire to focus on the positive and help others do the same.  And, I realize that even labeling “positive” and “negative” keeps me from fully experiencing and allowing ALL of my delicious, juicy, messy, sometimes f’ed up life!  

So there’s a new coaching perspective for you.  I’d love your ideas on the subject . . .

2 thoughts on “Self acceptance: Living all of your life”

  1. You asked for ideas, so of course my number one strength of ideation kicked in. First, I went to the website you mentioned, FMyLife.com and found it very amusing. This website is guaranteed to pull someone out of a self-induced funk within minutes. Life is indeed messy and if we only share the best of ourselves, we will live a shallow life. I am learning to hang out in the discomfort of the messiness, tell my safe friends what is really going on, and look to see if there is a bigger message for me than to “look on the bright side.” My tendency to pop out of the negativity too quickly and has left some people I care about to feel disrespected, dismissed or just not understood.

    Currently dealing with some messiness in a family situation and have expressed my upset instead of just playing nice. I might end up suffering some unpleasant consequence, and I trust myself to handle whatever comes up.

    Here’s to the full range of life and avoiding labels as good or bad, positive or negative. And I am pretty sure I will still gravitate toward finding the gold in the pile of dogpoopy. Twinkle.

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