Your entitlement
A person never has more or less than they think they are worthy of.
If your boss is treating you like a cow, that’s what you have attracted, and if you are fully honest with yourself, it’s how you treat yourself.
If your partner is an grateful, and complimentary, rude and ignores you, they are doing no worse than you are doing to yourself.
I will not pretend that I have always treated myself as a king. Sometimes, usually when nobody is watching in some far-off land while travelling on business, I have treated myself like a pauper.
I have often in my early years, treated myself like some sort of slave. I have been a slave to greed, to food, to my appetite for sex, and to some spiritual paradox, that I have tried to explore and find Nirvana inside.
There are two stories I wish to tell which demonstrate this from opposite ends of the spectrum. The first is while I was in Canada and asked by the federal government of Canada to run a retreat in a very expensive resort for people who had been working remotely and who needed to develop more self leadership and greater communication capacities. The group arrived, late. That was not entirely in there control as the flight landed late.
I had made a promise to the government that I would do a great job, but what I have not taken into account was the attitude of the attendees. These individuals were obsessed with Timeout, they just wanted to party. It was an extreme dilemma as we only had three days at this very expensive resort, and all they wanted to do was drink, eat and party. At the extreme opposite end of spectrum, all I wanted to do was teach and work and put into practice, the months of preparation I had done for this retreat.
By this time in my life, I had come to the realisation that nobody treat you better or worse than you treat yourself. I was not going to be diminished to be some guy who got paid a fortune by the federal government to chill out for a weekend drinking and partying and not fulfilling my obligations. But to the attendees, that’s who I was because they didn’t ask for the training, they asked for a timeout.
Now this might sound extreme, but the end result was I stood in the lecture room at the appointed start time all the way to the appointed finish time, and spoke to an empty room. I ran the program whether there were people in the room or not. Of course this was an extremely antagonistic attitude, I was treating myself as a king, but I had no subjects.
Of course, to the degree, that I polarised myself to treat myself as some elite executive Way above the clouds of reality of this audience, they polarise to the opposite, and drink more longer and harder.
The learning I get from this and learning that I take into my future is that somewhere between being a elite executive trainer and a party drinking player was really who I was. I was actually pretending to be that extreme person and they were pretending in return to be those extreme people. A more wise option would have been to have allowed some alcohol into the training room and lightened up a little bit so somewhere between their position and my position the way I was really treating myself would have been obvious.
This is the difference between the public and private personas we present to the world. On the one hand we can put on fancy clothes and dress ourselves up in pinstripe suit or fancy shoes and go to work and claim to be some elite executive who is way inspired to be a leader in business, but then go home or on the way home and treat ourselves like an absolute slave. Then, we might complain that people are not treating us as we want to be treated at work or at home. And that’s the beauty of nature. She does not enable facade.
I think you have no doubt Heard the quote that small things matter. So it is quite easy to focus on having a fancy car and wearing fancy suit and speaking. All authoritative Lee at work and then come home and treat yourself as you were brought up as a child, and with little respect.
Yesterday I heard a beautiful quote; “I used to live in relationships with expectations of how people would treat me. Now, I just won’t settle for less.”
The environment you live in and the environment you working, cannot be distinctly different. The way you get treated at home and the way you get treated at work will eventually average to the way you treat yourself. The way you manage your environment at home in terms of the food you eat and the way you walk and talk, cannot be distinctly different to the way you walk and talk at work, they will eventually reveal the average of the way you treat yourself.
I love to say make your private public. This does not mean running around town naked, but what it does mean is that if there is some aspect of your life which can only be done in secret and you are not proud of it that if somebody had a video camera and watched you in your private life, and they put that on TV for entertainment then they followed you around at work and put that on TV for entertainment. Would there be the Jekyll and Hyde would there be to discredited individuals? Make your private public means do you have this dichotomy between the person you are in work in meetings and in your relations with professional people and the way you treat yourself and others in private.
Never more conspicuous is this making your private public, then when you start to explore the realms of organised religion and organised spirituality such as yoga classes. This dichotomy is not exclusive to one particular face or religion, but if you go to a place of worship, you will see people performing the rights of passage to the blessings of the greater power of their life. But if you then follow them home. You will often find a very abusive, and rather ungrateful soul.
The reason I have bought this up today is because we have been working on goalsetting for the entirety of the January period. A good part of goalsetting for you and for me is about branding. Self branding is when you develop the character and the charisma of the position you want to attain in your work life, and therefore get noticed and promoted. Branding has a strong commercial and leadership aspect and we all understand that people will not treat you better than they think you are worthy. Much of that treatment is cosmetic, but some is also communication. And so it is all too easy in our new western world that is pumped up with social media and masks to develop a brand that, is a facade that nature will destroy.
When we talk in Innerwealth about living as nature intended, we are not suggesting that a bear does not hibernate. And we are not suggesting that if a bear with cubs is confronted, it will not attack. That is the full spectrum of nature. What we are suggesting is that there is a gap a dichotomy between our relaxed self who is hibernating for the evening and our working self who is protecting the cups. The only question will be the degree of facade that we present as to whether it is authentic or not.
Authenticity means embracing the diversity of being a real human being. That is not always as simple as it sounds, because sometimes you have to be tough, and sometimes you have to be weak and soft as demonstrated by my event with the federal government of Canada group. All this comes down to self judgement.
If you judge yourself with shame for your behaviour at home, then this reveals a facade of privacy that is going to cause you to overexaggerate your corporate facade persona. If you are rude to people at home, or they are rude to you at home, and you don’t recognise the Mira, you will be absolutely intolerant of rudeness at work. And so it is quite often the person who is being bullied at home? Becomes the bully at work. It is quite often. The person who is powerless at home, becomes the one who seeks to be powerful at work.
One of the mottos of Innerwealth is change, one change all. It means that if you change one habit or one area of your life, it will inevitably impact all areas of your life. But it also means change one person in a family and all the family will change. Our reactions and our facades and our self judgement create the environment of our home and our working life. These aspects of ourselves cannot be separated as we think into public and private. That is a mess.
The other aspect of this story is when we really get to meet people that we normally just brush past. As a keynote speaker travelling the world speaking professionally I estimate that I would have spoken to hundreds of thousands of people each year and felt like I knew everybody. The reason for this is that we are always treating others as we treat ourselves, and therefore, when we speak to a large audience, we think we are speaking to the diversity of ourselves. And therefore it comes as a big surprise, when not everybody in the audience enjoys what we say. Never was this more conspicuous than when I would travel the US and Canada speaking to audiences, and from those audiences people would book to come to Nepal with me on a journey.
As a speaker, I thought I knew all of these people, because I had spoken to them in the audience or even personally after the presentation about Nepal. But after they arrived and checked into their hotel and started to come to the realisation that what a NEPAL hotel calls 4 star is actually two star. And then the track would begin, and they would realise that what they thought would be a hill to climb up in the mountains, became far more confronting than they had anticipated. As challenges mounted up for them, their true sense of self would be revealed.
They’re happy, friendly and warm, excited personalities for coming on a wonderful trip in the Himalayas would turn to an angry disappointed and frustrated human being, who from one extreme of having a good heart, and a good approach to interpersonal relations would turn to the devil. Others would go the opposite direction and surrender because deep inside, they didn’t believe in themselves, or their capacity to handle hardship. Neither of these two personalities reflect my true nature, and so I was always surprised to see that people would handle difficulty in different ways based on their own personal truths.
And this is where entitlement comes in. Some people feel they are entitled to be happy, and that happiness should come at any cost even to the well-being and welfare of other people. That is also a level of entitlement. Some people believe they are in titled to live pain-free, and therefore, whenever the going gets tough, they feel like something has gone wrong because it confronts their entitlement. It is very difficult to separate our entitlement from our belief system. Especially when entitlement becomes an emotional entitlement.
To understand, and maybe improve the quality of your entitlement. The best method is to observe how you treat people who are different to yourself. Some people breakdown under stress and do you treat them as weak inadequate and therefore go in to try and rescue them or reject them.
Other people become quite mean and vindictive when they are under stress. What do you do with these people? How do you treat them? Do you try to fix them or pacify them or improve them? Your reaction to other people’s behaviour reveals your judgements of those same behaviours inside yourself. Any reaction reveals judgement, and therefore an opportunity to grow your authenticity.
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