Honor the Reality of Your Own Life

One of the biggest mistakes people make is trying to live at someone else’s pace instead of honoring the reality of their own life. You must understand that your life moves at your own pace, and your conditions and circumstances are not the same as anyone else’s.

So before you make any decisions, consider the parameters of your own life. Ask yourself whether the choice you are about to make is based on someone else’s life, which is different from yours, or on the true parameters of your own.

For example, if someone decides to spend $1 million buying a house and they are a billionaire, you can’t make the same choice with your own $1 million if all you have is $2 million. The circumstances are widely different.

Another instance: say you were born into a situation where you grew up without knowing the love of both parents, or you lost a parent early. You cannot be making the same choices as someone who was born into a family where both parents were present throughout their childhood, adolescence, and adult life.

Your experiences differ, and hence your realizations and truths about what works best for your unique situation will differ too.

Maybe for you, the closest bonds in your life are your friends, people you do not share parents with. For another person, the closest bonds they have may be with their siblings or blood relatives.

The situations are widely different.

How someone whose closest bonds are blood relatives treats their friends, who they may consider outside their strongest circle, will be very different from how you treat your friends if you have no siblings and your friends are your strongest bonds.

This is something to understand. If you do not understand the circumstances and privileges other people have, you should not assume that their truths are the same as yours, or that you must behave as they do.

You must honor the truth of your own life and the realities you face, no matter how uncomfortable they are or how much you wish you were not in that situation. The only way to find peace and happiness is to look directly at it, feel whatever emotions you need to feel, and then accept it, making the best choices available to you based on a reality you no longer hate, but have accepted.

After acceptance, your eyes naturally open to see the best choices available to you, because you are no longer trapped in avoidance, the avoidance of the negative feelings that come from a reality you refused to accept.

What happens when people do not look at their realities, or refuse to accept them, is that they begin to focus on other people’s lives, lives they believe are seemingly better than theirs. They then try to live by those people’s truths.

But they are never truly happy, because they are living someone else’s truth, not the truth that comes from accepting their own situation. They are running away from it instead of accepting it, and then making decisions rooted in that acceptance, which is the only place truth comes from.

This is a very subtle thing I am trying to explain.

When someone avoids a reality they believe is bad and pretends to be someone else by living someone else’s truth, they may think this is their way of resolving the negative reality they feel trapped in.

But this is a misunderstanding.

It comes from believing their reality itself is negative, and then taking action based on the negative beliefs they hold about that reality.

It may look like they are doing something about it, but they are not really. The difference is simple: they have not accepted it.

For someone who looks at their situation through self-reflection and accepts that this is what it is, that what has happened has happened, something shifts. This takes time. But in acceptance, there are no longer negative feelings about the reality you found yourself in.

Let’s say you do not like the fact that your parents were separated, or that your eye color is blue and you wish it were orange. Maybe you are skinny and would have liked to be more plus-sized. Or whatever it is you feel you do not like about your life, you get the idea? The first step to overcome what you don't really like is to accept the truth that it is there!

The first sign that you have truly accepted something is that it no longer makes you feel bad at all. It is hard to get there, but this is how you know you have transcended it. You may occasionally wish things were different, but there is no lingering negative emotion or desire for it to change.

When that happens, you become available to your own truths. The truth of your reality begins to guide your decisions from a place of consciousness, not avoidance, not suppressed negativity, and not unaccepted pain.

My wish for everyone reading this post is that whatever situation you have found yourself in, whatever bothers you or whatever you wish never happened, you accept it fully, never feel bad about it again, and from that place make the best and happiest choices that truly serve your own interests.

Watch how everything begins to change for the better when you operate from this understanding.

Keep winning!

- Ike