There's Room for our Quirks

Photo by Sue Ivy

“Our similarities bring us to a common ground; our differences allow us to be fascinated by each other.”

~Tom Robbins

I’ve been interested in personal growth since I was a child. I’m highly sensitive and naturally curious. I’m also the youngest of eight siblings with strong personalities (awesomely diverse personalities—in case they’re reading), and as a teenager I became curious about the various temperaments I was seeing in my extended family.

I studied psychology in college and loved learning about people and what motivates them. In recent years I’ve been drawn to a newer field called “positive psychology,” which explores the concept of what makes us flourish in life rather than just coping or making it through. It looks at how we can increase our resilience, happiness, fulfillment, confidence, gratitude, and joy.

I’ve come to believe that at the heart of all these good things is authenticity, which is why I include the word “authentic” in the name of my blog.

Simply learning to be ourselves and allowing others to be themselves—that’s what leads to healthy, mature, and satisfying relationships and careers that we can be proud of.

There are two things that get in the way, though. One is our basic personality differences. We find it hard to understand each other because we are simply wired differently. We know this, and yet, we spend an inordinate amount of time and energy fighting it.

But there’s a better way.

We can acknowledge the disparity and make it a point to learn more about personality traits. It’s interesting stuff, I promise. Armed with that knowledge, over time we can begin to change our thinking so we don’t expect others to think and act like us.

There’s room for all of our quirks. We don’t have to be clones, and boy, would it be a boring world if we were!

The other thing that gets in the way of our authenticity is our conditioning. Unfortunately, very few of us were allowed to be as genuine as we would have liked when we were growing up. Well-meaning parents and teachers, trying to keep us from harm and trying to help us be successful and liked, trained us in ways that led to the development of the false selves we often show to the world.

Don’t get me wrong—much of what we were taught was helpful, especially while we were young. And most of it was well intentioned, if misguided. Parenting is a hard job and we don’t spend enough time preparing parents for the job. (More on that in future posts.) But we’ve outgrown many of the protective admonitions of our childhoods and we need to shed them if we really want to thrive.

As adults, we need to unlearn many of those old scripts that are no longer serving us well, to peel back the layers and uncover the real us. Because most of us are really, really good people, striving to do our best. As Oprah says, “This I know for sure.”

To the extent that we follow our hearts and go towards the things we’re drawn to, and especially when we tap into our natural abilities, we soar. Where we get into trouble is when we’re not ourselves, because it doesn’t feel good, and it makes us tense.

In relationships, if we’re honest with ourselves, most of our defensiveness and hostility is a fear reaction—we’re afraid of being found out. Of not being loved for who we really are.

My goal for this blog is to help us all to move closer and closer to our true selves—to feel good—no, great, actually—about who we are and what we have to offer the world and each other. We’ll take it one step at a time, and we’ll do it together.

Affectionately,

Elaine