Acceptance affects your confidence and life choices

Acceptance has a key role in our life. It dictates our reality, life choices and affects our confidence. Everyday life happens to you and you choose whether to accept it and agree with the situation you are in, or to change something about it. Our opinion about ourselves is dictated by past experiences and other’s opinion about us. But everyday we have the choice to accept the current situation or to change it.

Even though we know what to do in order to live healthy, to lose weight and stay fit most of us just don’t do it, until it is not totally necessary. We have accepted the situation we are in. People around us have also accepted us for who we are. Nobody expects more from us.

Below is a quote, that perfectly describes the role of acceptance in our life and how it affects the choices we make based on our past experiences.

“Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it.”
― Charles R. Swindoll

Think about when you were a little child. If you were not always listening to people around you, your parents and relatives would express their opinion about you as a naughty child, but you have the choice to accept it, or do something about it. Think for a while – who can really tell whether it was actually like this? You were compared with your friends, brother or sister and compared to their behaviour you were naughty. In a different situation you may have been an obedient child. Later on you go to school, where your performance was also compared to other children your class. Such experiences build up our confidence and expectations from ourselves.

Everyone has the same potential of becoming the best, or the worst we can be. The difference is whether you accept the opinion of others and let it become your own reality, or disagree and prove they are wrong. Every situation you fall in, you can react with acceptance or disagreement. And this reaction determines your reality. Every day you have the choice to accept this reality or to change it!

Self acceptance

Acceptance is an agreement with yourself to accept, appreciate and support who you are right now without attempting to change it. Not accepting yourself and your life, such as it is at the moment, on other side gives you the opportunity to change it. Before you change something you don’t like in your life, you first have to realize it, recognize it and then act to change it. If you are overweight, you have the choice to accept the facts and do nothing about it, or to realize that you are the only one who has the power to change the situation. If you don’t like your current job you also have the choice to accept working it forever or take action and change it. If you always fall in bad relationships it is probably, because you have accepted a certain man behaviour for granted and normal. For you it may look like normal, but for many others it doesn’t.

Every day you have the choice to accept yourself as stupid, ugly, fat, not talented and useless person or to prove to yourself that you can be smart, beautiful, fit, talented and inspirational person. The difference lays in the power of your mind, trust in yourself and in your efforts to change the current situation. In order to change something, you need to take action.

Social acceptance

Social acceptance has a huge impact on our lives and choices. We, humans are gregarious and social creations. We would more likely agree with the opinion of others, than resist it. And how negative this opinion is, how less we have the power to stand against it. But social acceptance comes after self acceptance. What this means? You meet someone who tells you, you are stupid – you are the only one who can accept this qualification and allow it to become your reality or to prove that they were wrong. Another day someone else tells you, you are fat. You have the choice to fall into a depression because of this, which will make you even more fat, or tell yourself – ok, may be it is time for me to start eating healthy and exercise more.

I accept that I am overweight and I can’t do anything about it, or I don’t accept to be fat, that’s why I am going to take action and change the situation in which I am at this moment.

If your husband treats you as housemaid, instead of the most beautiful and attractive woman on earth, it is very likely that you have accepted this role yourself and this is your own opinion about yourself.

To change the world around you is enough to deal with your own thoughts and feelings. When you change yourself, everything around you will change. When you accept things as they are – nothing will change.

Don’t expect from others something, that you can’t give yourself alone! If you don’t love yourself unconditionally, if you are angry with yourself, if you criticize and insult yourself all the time, people you meet will be your own mirror.