I work with clients to help them become mature versions of themselves. Sometimes they need indicators of our progress.
Here are 10 signs that you are NOT becoming a mature version of you.
- Your work lacks energy and a sense of calling. Calling is available even in the pursuit of the mundane as long as you are using your strengths to glorify your Creator.
- Your focus is pleasing others rather than being free to be you, making you incapable of passing that gift along to others. Serving others is great, but living to please others is a trap.
- You can't say "no" - you lack boundaries for the garden that is your life.
- You keep lists of what you need to change about yourself and nowhere on those lists are opportunities to develop your strengths.
- You are learning the wrong lessons from life, like believing that you need to change fundamentally who you are and the preferences that you have.
- You can't articulate your personality type, preferences, or strengths.
- You live hypothetically - "if only" - rather than focusing on what is actually yours.
- You believe others are better than you and that you should become like them rather than focusing on becoming a mature version of you.
- You fail to see the uniqueness of everyday opportunities that no one has but you. What opportunities for positive influence in the lives of others are uniquely yours out of the more than seven billion people on this planet?
- You are consumed with dissatisfaction with who you are rather than thankfulness for the opportunity to be you. You are living the words of Carly Simon: "Their children hate them for the things they're not; they hate themselves for what they are" (from "That's the Way I've Always Heard It Should Be").
Thankfully few people struggle with all 10 of these signs. My challenge to you: Rewrite these 10 signs to express what you should be experiencing and then concentrate on their realization. (I almost did this for you, but thought it would be more effective if you did this for yourself, rewriting each in your own words.) |
Copyright � 2015 by Dr. Stephen Julian. All rights reserved.
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