You Learn To Overcome Fear
Fear keeps us safe in many situations, but it prevents our personal growth by trapping us inside a wall of imagined terrors and troubles that might not ever come true. Fear can keep us from making the inner changes that would, in fact, help us avoid many personal disasters.
The first obstacle to overcome in the process of reinvention is always fear.
Fear of change and fear of the unknown create a barrier to reinventing ourselves. There’s also the fear of loss. Changing who we are, requires letting go of some things to get others.
Even when we fully understand that personal transformation is what we want, the ear of letting go can inhibit us from taking an accurate inventory of ourselves.
Without that personal inventory of who we are, what we value, who we love and what we want, it’s impossible to reinvent ourselves. Going through that process of reinvention once teaches us that fear is an obstacle, not a brick wall.
Inner Changes Determine Your Role in The World
Inner changes are very important because they help you to decide how you will function within the systems that you interact with.
The systems that you interact with are constantly affecting you in ways that you cannot control but what you can control is how you feel or react to those interactions. A great way to look at it is with a quote popularly attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt: “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”
You can’t control what the system does to you, but you can decide how you let it affect you.
Inner Changes Cause Outer Changes
You can often look at inner changes as the inspiration that lead to outer changes. The example above listed being more helpful as an outer change because it impacts the way in which you interact with the system. However, being more helpful is most likely to have been inspired by a desire to be a better person, which is an inner change.
Where Inner Change Begins
The question of where inner change comes from can become a little complicated. Sometimes inner changes actually come from within. This can happen if an inner change is inspired by an epiphany, a flashback, or a dream.
More often, however, inner changes that we make come from some action by the system. Maybe you were inspired to be a better person by a dream, or maybe by something that you saw on your way to work. Maybe you decided to be more responsible because of a memory that you had or maybe it was because of something that someone said to you.
Inner Change And The World
One important thing to know is that inner changes are always genuine.
Reading the above paragraph may have been unsettling. After all, if inner choices can be inspired by things that happen around us, can we even make inner changes, or is everything just a part of the system?
The philosophy called “Determinism” is kind of a secular version of predestination. While predestination holds that all things that occur are decided by God, determinism holds that all of our choices are the result of external influences.
Take this article, for instance. This article may inspire you to make an inner change. Does that mean that your inner change is no longer your own choice but simply a result of your having read this article?
To the contrary, that is exactly why the idea of inner change is so important – because it inspires outer change.
Inner change can be the result of outer change and outer change can inspire inner change in others. That means that every inner change that each one of us commits to has the potential to change the entire system. Our choices to change ourselves can change the world.
Inner Change And You
The concept of personal choice and how it affects and is affected by the world around us is a complicated topic that has been discussed by philosophers for decades. New theories are constantly coming to the surface to try and explain where our choices come from and what potential they have to change the world.
The world isn’t your personal responsibility, your place in it is. If there’s something that you want to do to make the world a better place than do it and as long as it makes you a better person you can be sure you’re doing the right thing.