Between Tolerance and Complacency: A Fine Line

How tolerant do you consider yourself? And how much of your true feelings and needs do you sacrifice in the name of tolerance? If you look it up on the dictionary, tolerance is filled with positive definitions and intolerance only with negative descriptions.

Yes, I know, respecting other people’s opinions, rights, and choices is a very good thing, but through our social conditioning we have muddled the value of setting personal boundaries with intolerance, selfishness, or lack of love, and this confusion ends up hurting our relationships and deterring us from attaining our goals and nurturing our own sense of self. We become complacent in spite of ourselves.

Most of us have learned to tolerate a lot. As a matter of fact, we’ve been trained to tolerate pretty much everything and are told that doing so shows love, resilience, strength, and courage. That it’s a good thing. So we put up with, accept, and take on what others want or expect from us and then, more often than not, we end up being dragged down by other people’s behaviors, frustrations, problems, and toxic emotions.

If we want to manifest our dreams, it is crucial to establish an undimmed vision of what we want and this means being clear about what we are and what we are not willing to tolerate. First, because our own unconscious permissiveness creates expectations, in ourselves and others, and also because doing things without making a conscious choice establishes a dysfunctional dynamic all around.

What you allow—out of habit, lack of clarity, or indecision—impacts your energy, time, goals, and actions, which in turn affect your inner allowing of fulfillment, abundance, and joy, which in turn also disturbs how you feel about yourself, your business, career, relationships, life, and so on. It is all interrelated and can easily become a vicious circle.

What Are You Tolerating and How Does It Affect You?

The easiest way to be honest with yourself is to put things in black and white, as they say. So take ten minutes and write down the stuff you are tolerating in your life. This is work in progress, so feel free to add more to your list during the day if things bubble up.

Now draw a line around what you just wrote to box it all in. Think about what’s inside the box and realize that this is the box you allow yourself to be placed in by keeping in your life what’s in it. In other words, this is actually a box you keep yourself trapped in to maintain a sense of safety, belonging, relationship, love, and so on, even if it means sacrificing your independence, sense of self, and the freedom to be and express who you truly are.

I am not saying that you should just go ahead and start fighting for what you want, breaking all your relationships and starting life from scratch. Because if you did that, you’d probably end up with more of the same. Your reality is shaped from within, so you’d need to change your self-image first and the beliefs that hold that image to see any change on the outside. And yes, you may have to let go of certain toxic people at certain points in your life, but you can do it by raising your awareness and vibration so that their frequencies and yours no longer match. Then they will just go and you’ll be ready to let them go as well.

So Where Do You Draw the Line?

Now look at your box of tolerations for a few minutes and become aware of your thoughts and feelings. What do each of these make you feel about yourself and others? What are the emotions that all the things and people you tolerate create and maintain within you? Be absolutely honest with yourself, but don’t judge anything. Just observe the emotions without justifying or denying them in any way.

Simply becoming aware triggers your consciousness toward the vitality, creativity and power to start creating change. Then you can begin eliminating, growing through, and resolving these tolerations: how they manifest in your relationships, your work or business, and your life in general. This is the first step toward a long-lasting transformation and the creation of a more fulfilling environment.

Now write outside the box what you have to do to begin that transformation: the conscious actions that you need to take before you can break the lines of the box that your own life may have become. For example, if you feel unappreciated, then you need to take the steps toward appreciating yourself. What are things you can think and do that would make you feel appreciated—by you?

Once you have written what needs to happen for change to manifest, then you need to commit to make it a reality. This is where complacency ends and responsibility—for absolutely everything in your life—begins. Remember that life is a process, so this is work in progress. You may have to draw and redraw your box as you move on…

Of course, sometimes stepping out of the box is tricky because you cannot see your blind spots and may have a hard time identifying the beliefs that keep you tolerating what really doesn’t serve you, but that is what I am here for. So contact me if you need help breaking free from your self-image and limiting belief-box to start creating a more joyful and abundant life!

© 2012 Yol Swan. All rights reserved.