Egotist: 1. A person who is his own best friend. 2. An I specialist. 3. A man whose opinions all change, except the one he has of himself.
You either walk inside your story and own it or you stand outside your story and hustle for your worthiness.
Wholehearted living is not like trying to reach a destination. It's like walking toward a star in the sky. We never really 'arrive,' but we certainly know that we're heading in the right direction.
When I look at narcissism through the vulnerability lens, I see the shame-based fear of being ordinary. I see the fear of never feeling extraordinary enough to be noticed, to be lovable, to belong, or to cultivate a sense of purpose.
Joy, collected over time, fuels resilience - ensuring we'll have reservoirs of emotional strength when hard things do happen.
Effort + the courage to show up = enough.
If you put shame in a petri dish, it needs three ingredients to grow exponentially: secrecy, silence, and judgment. If you put the same amount of shame in the petri dish and douse it with empathy, it can't survive.
Each one of us is like that butterfly the Butterfly Effect. And each tiny move toward a more positive mindset can send ripples of positivity through our organizations our families and our communities.
When we speak of being vulnerable, it suggests being especially vulnerable to pain. People for whom personal dignity and self-sufficiency are everything, do all they can to shut it out. Noli mi tangere. They are well aware that any intimate relationship has pain in it, forces a special kind of awareness, is costly, and so they try to keep themselves unencumbered by shutting pain out as far as it is possible to do so.
Mastery is proven only in limitation, and law alone can give us freedom.
Blended-reality technology could play in a limited, walled-garden world, but history suggests that it won't really take off until it offers broad freedom of use.