Thomas "The Tank" Dade

BE HONEST & HARDER WITH YOURSELF

Just recently a good friend recommended a book called “First Man In” written by ex special forces soldier, successful Everest summiter and famous TV presenter, Ant Middleton. Within the book Ant brings forward some ideas and thoughts I couldn’t agree with more. One of them I wish to highlight in this article as I believe it can really make a positive impact on peoples mindsets. This being, we need to be honest with ourselves and accept and admit both our strengths and our weaknesses. All of us have some sort of weakness or something we don’t like about ourselves, whether it be a physical attribute, an emotional attribute or certain behaviours we hate about ourselves. Mine for example are: I’m awkward and struggle to hold a conversation, I’m obsessive with my training, I’m embarrassed about the breast tissue around my nipples, I’m insecure about people working harder than me and I’m skinny. Most of us try to hide these weaknesses, ignore them or flat out deny them because that makes us feel better. As a result we become insecure and worry what other people may think about us and this is debilitating. It places a permanent dark cloud above our heads which constantly hovers over us, affecting our conscious and subconscious thoughts and emotions. So how do we free ourselves from this cloud? Theres only one way and it’s one of the hardest things you can do, you need to sit down and write down everything you don’t and do like about yourself. You need to be honest and hard on yourself both with your strengths and weaknesses. Doing this is one of the hardest but most enlightening things you can do. Its like lifting a weight you didn’t know you had off your shoulders. Once you’ve done this a few positive things can happen:

1. You stop caring what others think, once you’ve done this you’ve become your hardest critic and accepted who you are. Theres nothing no-one can think or say that will hurt you. For example if someone says “you need to lose some weight”, your response “yeah I know, thanks for bringing that to my attention”, “your ears are massive”, your response “yeah I know but my eyes are pretty impressive”. See no one can touch you, once you’ve admitted your dislikes about yourself but also reinforced what you do like about yourself, to yourself it doesn’t matter what others have to say. You’ve accepted who you are. As a result you’re no longer insecure, you walk tall and proud of all of yourself, both your weaknesses and your strengths.
2. You can improve yourself or be happy with who you are, for example once you’ve decided you’re overweight and you don’t like this about yourself you can take action and start trying to lose some weight. Or if you don’t like that you struggle to talk to people you don’t know, you can start to try and rectify this by talking to people you don’t know. If you have big ears, you can accept this and realise you have other features that you do like. Instead of hiding from it you can fight it, get over it and eventually kill it. Making yourself a better you.

So give it a go, sit down and write down every positive and negative thing about yourself. Once you’ve done that, be happy with your positive attributes, accept the bad things you cannot change about yourself and work on the ones you can change. After that watch yourself grow.