25 ‘Unflattering’ Behaviors That Actually Mean You’re Cutting Through The Bullshit And Finally Changing Your Life

1. Outlining the anatomy of every disaster you’re in. Everything from your debt to the root of the warped self-image you’ve been carrying around since childhood. Getting clear on exactly what’s wrong so you can finally make it right.

2. Getting angry. Getting so angry at how you’ve held yourself back, how you’ve obeyed your fear, how close you are to the life you want and how long you’ve held yourself at arm’s length.

3. Softening your anger until it’s sadness, and then crying out everything you’ve been trying to avoid.

4. No longer spending more time creating an image of how your life looks more than you do nurturing how it feels.

5. Realizing that chasing perfection was not chasing happiness. It was chasing acceptance. It was chasing fear. It was chasing the hope that if other people adored you, you could find an ounce of love for yourself in the ruins.

6. Beginning the unglamorous job of rebuilding yourself. Choosing new habits that don’t always satiate a desire or chase a high, but help you to build a future you will be proud to arrive to.

7. Letting some relationships come to their natural end. Letting people from the past just… go. Knowing that it is hard to become the person you are meant to be when there are a dozen people expecting you to remain the one you were.

8. Unfollowing any account that brings you anything other than inspiration or laughter each day.

9. Using social media as a force to motivate and encourage you, not defeat and dissuade you.

10. Letting people think what they want of you. No longer wasting your energy trying to fight an opinion that you could never control anyway.

11. Not letting what other people project on you become you.

12.  Making space for complexity. Knowing that you don’t know what you don’t know. Being willing to learn, and to change. Approaching the unknown with curiosity, not defense.

13. Living within coexisting truths. Letting yourself be who you were while embracing who you now are, knowing that one does not have to cancel out the other.

14. No longer betraying who you are to fit in with other people.

15. No longer negotiating your worth against someone else’s. No longer believing self-worth is something that is reduced or appreciated in the presence of another person.

16. Being grateful for what you have while you have it.

17. Recognizing that the willingness to be vulnerable is the secret to healing.

18. Recognizing that the willingness to be vulnerable requires the willingness to let others see you as you actually are.

19. Choosing noble goals not because you think you should, but because you want to. Shifting from wanting to be successful to wanting to live in complete peace each day – and knowing that the latter is the epitome of success.

20. Learning when anxiety is just nerves. Or discomfort. Or natural, human heartache.

21. Learning when anxiety is more than “just nerves.” When it’s a problem and needs help.

22. Learning how to ask for that help. Knowing that we are all here to serve one another in different ways, and that allowing others to guide, assist, mentor, heal, teach or care for you is fulfilling part of your own diving purpose as much as it is theirs.

23. Dreaming bigger than other people ever dared to let you.

24. Dreaming for more than you ever thought you could.

25. Appreciating how things feel more than how they look, even if that means accepting (what seems right now) like your less than perfect body, your okay pictures, your average life. Recognizing that it is loving what you have that makes a life extraordinary – anything else is just an endless, maddening chase.