Next, after commitment, you must be willing to change. You must be willing to become a new person, a different person. And you must be willing to give up old concepts of yourself even before you see your new qualities. The autumn leaves must fall before spring can bring new growth. Death of the old is necessary to prepare for the new.
I love watching children because they can teach us so much about the process of learning. They are focused when they learn something new, as they drink in every drop of information. Why do we so often stop learning and growing as we become adults? Why is it so much more difficult? Isn’t it because we stop questioning or examining what’s around us? We become satisfied that we’ve learned enough. We get comfortable with the habits we’ve acquired. Some people refer to this as a comfort zone, which describes how we tend to hang onto worn-out, ineffective attitudes and habits simply because they’re familiar. Things that are familiar don’t stimulate or scare us the way new situations might, so we tend not to question familiar patterns. But the price we pay for familiarity is that we stop experiencing, and instead repeat old habits over and over.
We also avoid new experiences by being overly judgmental about people and events. We make up our mind ahead of time about how something will be instead of remaining open to the unexpected. In order to find a new you, you’ll have to put aside all your perceived limitations and problems and look at yourself with new eyes. You will have to look at yourself as if for the first time, looking with the eyes of a child discovering something new.
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