Picking A Fight is So Unnecessary

For the past 7 days I’ve been participating in Jeff Goins‘ 7 Day Intentional Blogging Challenge.  The exercise for day three was to pick a fight with someone. Here we are at the last day of the challenge and I have yet to pick a fight.

I’ve thought long and hard about this. Who should I pick a fight with? What do I want to challenge? What do I believe in? With all that searching and reflecting I just couldn’t come up with anything. I realized that I don’t want to pick a fight with anyone over anything. It simply goes against my personal motto, a motto I think everyone should adopt.

My personal motto is to Be Really You. Not just a little bit of you, but 100% of you. Not the you, you pretend to be or feel forced to be. I believe everyone should be the you that they really are.

I also believe that life conditions us at a young age to suppress who we really are. I’ll never forget going to a senior ditch day breakfast during high school. Everyone was talking and laughing. Someone said something I found to be funny so I laughed. Apparently loudly. My classmate said to me,”You laugh loud!” In that moment I felt myself shrink. She picked a fight with me and I started to wonder if something was wrong with me. I didn’t rehearse that laugh. It is just what naturally came out of me. Now, I felt the need to monitor my laugh. I felt the need to not be so loud next time. I felt the need to study other people’s laugh to learn what’s acceptable. I felt the need to not be me.

That’s how it happens. You go through life with people picking little fights with you here and there. They pick a fight over your laugh, your clothes, your dreams, your thoughts. And one by one you change your laugh, you change your clothes, you change your dreams and you change your thoughts. Until one day you find yourself surrounded by chaos or feelings of insignificance. You don’t know who you are. You don’t know what you want. You don’t know how you got here or where you’re going. So (ideally) you start to knock down the walls, peel back the layers, and remove all the masks you’ve been wearing. You start to search for who you’ve really been all along.

I believe life is best lived when you are your true self. Joseph Campbell said, “The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.” I agree. That’s why I do the work that I do. I help people embrace who they really are and live their truth.

For that reason, I don’t go around picking fights with people when they share their truths. I celebrate them. I honor their courage not knowing how long it took for them to get to this place. I respect their journey not knowing how close they are to shrinking back like I once did.

It takes great personal strength to stand up and be seen in a world that is so judgmental, vain, or self absorbed at times. I refuse to fight against those who do. And with that, I’m picking a fight with you, Jeff Goins. Put your dukes up.