undercutting ourselves
“Don’t compromise yourself. You’re all you’ve got.”
Janis Joplin [quoted in the Changing Course newsletter]
But we may often do that: compromise, stifle ourselves, shut down what we are capable of.
“You may feel like dwelling on your limits or your fears. Don’t do it… A perfect prescription for a squandered, unfulfilled life is to accommodate self-defeating feelings while undercutting your finest, most productive ones.” ~ Marsha Sinetar, “To Build the Life You Want, Create the Work You Love“
That sort of self-limiting attention on what is deficient or inadequate about us and our abilities is all too easy to fall into. Especially if you have a tendency toward perfectionism. [see a page on that topic]
“Consult not your fears but your hopes and your dreams. Think not about your frustrations, but about your unfulfilled potential. Concern yourself not with what you tried and failed, but with what it is still possible for you to do.” — Pope John XXIII
That is a quote from the TIPS for Extraordinary Living newsletter [Jan 8, 2006], by Philip E. Humbert, PhD [see archives on his site]
Dr. Humbert refers to failure: “Everyone knows of the Wright brother’s ultimate success at Kitty Hawk, but few remember the plans that didn’t ‘fly.’ Most people know that it took Thomas Edison 10,000 ‘failures’ to invent the electric light bulb, but few seem to have learned the lesson.”
That is another way to undercut our potential - assuming a defeatist, negative attitude about so-called failure, rather than seeing the lesson.
And, as Guy Finley of the Life of Learning Foundation says, “The only time we ever ‘fail’ at anything in our lives is when we walk away from a challenge before we’ve allowed it to teach us its lessons.
> see more quotes on the page on failure
