Category: Josh Feingold Blog

I recently found out that I am a “highly sensitive person (HSP)”.

Now honestly, I have known this all my life, but sometimes, it takes a someone else to give a concrete term to bring to life what you already know.

What HSP has always meant for me is a gift.  I can read people and situations incredibly well.  Scary well.   It’s almost a sixth sense.  (Of course, it has it’s bad parts too, but its beyond the purpose of this post.)

So with that in mind, let’s review the thought from yesterday, that people put up a facade when dealing with others to protect themselves and their, oh so fragile, self-esteem.

There is a certain percentage of the population that I bump into, that really bothers me.  They are loud.  They are outgoing.  They are smiley.

Now don’t get me wrong, some of my best friends, are loud and outgoing, and in the past a few of them have also been quite smiley.

However, these people that I meet, rub me the wrong way.  My spidey sense goes off.  These guys are faking it.  I just couldn’t stand being around them.

It’s interesting, but these people, often find themselves in positions of power.  This is NOT to say that everyone with these attributes in positions of power are like this, but it seems to me that a higher proportion than expected of these people get to these positions.

You have probably met similar people as salesmen along the way.

I realized recently that I don’t have much of a tolerance for these people, and perhaps it is because, I myself was being fake about who I was, in my own way, and that internal struggle made me very uncomfortable.  I wonder if now that I am being myself, if I will find myself more tolerant them, and just feel sorry for them, and their unfortunate situation.  I hope so.

The general take away from this is that when we are frustrated at someone else and judgmental towards them, the true reason is often because we are really frustrated at ourselves for not fixing our own issues – otherwise, we probably wouldn’t have even noticed the issue with them in the first place.

In fact, I recently heard an old saying that talks directly to this point, “when you point your finger towards someone else, there are three fingers pointing back at you.”  So remember, that next time you don’t like something about someone else, perhaps it is time to look within and see what you don’t like about yourself.

 

I read a few books over the weekend, which really added value to my life.  After all, self-help books are the poor mans therapist, right?

Anyways, one of the books that I was reading (Risking, by Viscott) said the following, and I thought I would share it.

He explained, that the only if we are being true selves, and allowing people to accept us for our true selves, can we ever actually experience true self acceptance – and feel worthy of being our selves.

I am going to take a step back and apply this to myself, a little, and perhaps it will serve as a reminder to myself when I look back on this in the future, and a lesson to the rest of you.

For much of my life, and perhaps even now, I wanted nothing more than to be accepted by the world.   The basic fallacy that I was living with, was that if the world knew who I was, they wouldn’t accept me, so I pretended to be someone else.  Now in reality, the change between the “real Josh” and the “pretend Josh” wasn’t that great.  However, in my mind, the result was that I never really found world-acceptance since they were only accepting the pretend Josh, and therefore never actually found self-acceptance.

However, once I was able to tell myself that I didn’t care what the world thought of me, and that I wasn’t going to show them a  “pretend Josh” any more, I quickly found that no one stopped liking me, or dropped me as their friend, and my life kept going on as before.  Well, this soon lead to self acceptance.

Which leads to the  following irony: The path to self-acceptance is through not caring what anyone thinks about you AND realizing that people like you for who you are.

 

Do you understand the power of projection?  I didn’t.  But I do now.

Let’s cut to the chase.  We view the world through our eyes.  Well that seems obvious, but the scary part is that we just don’t realize how deeply engrained this habit is.  (Now of course, I am writing this blog and projecting on you that you too have a deeply engrained capacity to project, and perhaps not, but I’ll assume that for now!)

The upshot of our projection is that we go around in a daze overestimating and underestimating ourselves, and not really being in touch with the real world.  We live in our own made up world a large percentage of the time.   Pretty scary if you think of it.

We project how much people like us, or dislike us.  We project how honest someone is, or dishonest.  We project how caring someone can be, or how heartless.  It’s all in us, and while it might be rooted in reality, it is equally possible that it is baseless.

So I challenge you to look at your world through the eyes of someone who IS projecting.  Make that assumption.  Then once you know you are projecting certain things on other people, really judge them and see if they meet your projection – or if perhaps the reality if different than you have made it.  Perhaps you will justify things but perhaps you will figure out that you have been living in a world of illusion.

I hear voices.  Constantly.

Before you call the looney docs, let me explain.  Please.

As far as I can tell, there seems to be two voices inside me competing for my attention.  The guttural and the analytical.  The guttural voice underlies everything, but is typically drowned out by the louder analytical voice.  Now, every once in a while, the guttural voice pops out and has a chance to say its part and the analytical voice gets to take it into account.

However,  I feel that for me too often, it is only in retrospect that my guttural voice is telling my analytical voice “I told you so.”

So it is time to learn to quiet my analytical voice, since only by being able to hear BOTH voices can I truly be conscience.

And with that introduction, I began the process of finding a good meditative practice.

It’s funny, but the world tends to think that they know better than us who we should really be.  What role we should play.  What is right.  What is wrong.  What is fun.  What is boring.  What is cool.  What is blasé.  You get the idea.

The problem is that we tend to believe the world, and ignore ourselves.

Why is that exactly?

Because, it is very hard as an individual to stand up to the world.  The basic reason is that we tend to think that the world is right and we are wrong.  However, in truth, often times, we need to keep what the world says and take it seriously, but really listen to ourselves, because we know what is best for US.

The upshot is that we need to be willing to look at ourselves, in our raw form, and say, that’s who I am, and accept that as who you are.  This isn’t to say you can’t strive to be a better person, if YOU believe that it is the right thing to do, but the key operative is that this is your belief, and not the worlds.

Only once we accept ourselves in the face of what the world say we are, can we find the freedom to be ourselves – and for that matter to get our needs met in interactions with the world.  So be the authentic you and learn to not accept the messages of the world at large about who you should be or how you should act – unless they jive with your own personal beliefs.