Incremental Growth

July was a weird month for me. Half of it was spent being knocked down by a nasty flu, with much exhaustion; and the rest of the month was a lot of tumultuous running around and busy-ness and hectic stressful feelings.

I am amazed, yet again, at the human tendency to fall back into old patterns and dysfunctional ways of behaving and thinking. Eckhart Tolle refers to "conditioned thought patterns" -- those ingrained old ways of thinking and behaving that were learned in the past as part of one's coping mechanism. Such patterns can stick around for a very long time and inhibit us from growing into the person we were meant to be. Melody Beattie refers to this backward movement as "recycling" and as a necessary part of a recovery process. She states in Beyond Codependency:

Recycling is a chance to do our recovery work. It's a way to discover what we need to work on and work through. It's one way we figure out what we haven't yet learned, so we can start to learn that. It's a way to solidify what we've already learned, so we continue to know that. Recycling is about learning our lessons so we can move forward on our journey.

Recycling, or regression back into old patterns we thought we had conquered, can feel like banging one's head against a wall over and over and over again. Falling in and out of an exercise routine is but one example. Life should be a process towards self-development and improvement and perfection. Yet there are times when it seems like we're just spinning our wheels, falling backwards along our path. Growth can take place when we catch ourselves in these recycling patterns, learn from what happened, and then move forward. We may fall backwards a little bit, for a little while, but there is still growth, even if only incremental growth.

I am dedicating the month of August to getting back on track, learning from my mistakes and focusing on accomplishing a few key goals. I am determined to observe myself with greater awareness; to become proactive rather than reactive.

As Jack Canfield and others have stated: Take 100% responsibility for your life, your thoughts, your feelings, and your behaviors.

Here's a nice quote from Stephen Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People:

Reactive people are affected by their social environment, by the "social weather." When people treat them well, they feel well; when people don't, they become defensive or protective. Reactive people build their emotional lives around the behavior of others, empowering the weaknesses of other people to control them.

The ability to subordinate an impulse to a value is the essence of the proactive person. Reactive people are driven by feelings, by circumstances, by conditions, by their environment. Proactive people are driven by values -- carefully thought about, selected and internalized values.

Proactive people are still influenced by external stimuli, whether physical, social, or psychological. But their response to the stimuli, conscious or unconscious, is a value-based choice or response.

As Eleanor Roosevelt observed, "No one can hurt you without your consent." In the words of Gandhi, "They cannot take away our self respect if we do not give it to them." It is our willing permission, our consent to what happens to us, that harms us far more than what happens to us in the first place.