I recently had this incredible moment of consciousness on my personal acceptance. Moments like this you want to embrace. It means growth, clarity and peace. Emotions can shake us up at times but they do so to pass on a message. So listen to that message. Your subconscious is speaking to your conscious self.
It only took me 45 years to accept some parts of me.
There are parts of me that I may have not accepted yet. Parts which I may be unaware of at this point in my life. But recently, there was this one part that bugged me or should I say kept me from living at my full potential. I finally permitted that part of me to let emotions rise, emotions that needed to cleared out.
I’ve been studying NLP for the past 3 years. NLP — neuro-linguistic programming is the best gift I have ever offered myself. When someone explained to me what NLP was all about by offering me a 10-minute session, I was in.
At the times, I told myself I wanted to have better communication skills that I can eventually bring forth with clients or people around me. Little did I know that my life would take a sudden turn… for something even better.
Communication is important, right?
Communication was even more so important to me especially when you are told your entire life that you’ve never been able to express yourself and to stop keeping things all bottled up.
So what better course to take to learn how to speak effectively.
I fell in love instantly with this entire concept of healing ourselves first to then having the skills to guide others to live their full potential.
Years of therapy saved by entering this fantastic school and acquiring amazing skills and tools to first help me so I can then help others. It’s like that whole put your own mask on first before someone else’s on a plane in case of an emergency. Right?
When we choose to work on ourselves the work becomes a continuous journey without even being aware of it at times. Working on ourselves doesn't end with a single moment of clarity. Pop-ups of clarity, flare-ups from time to time depending on what you are working on and what you allow yourself to let rise up will be liberating.
Allow yourself to heal. Some people are terrified to visit what resides in them in fear of feeling real emotions. That’s OK. They may one day seek change.
Moments to embrace
There are many moments of connections that our subconscious and conscious brain will make towards a personal direction of pure happiness and understanding that we may be seeking for in a life time. But sometimes we need to get our hands and feet dirty. We will cry, get angry, feel confused, be embarrassed but then the heavy weight lifts itself off of us to then feel calm, peace, happiness, alignment, lightness or whatever it is we seek. The work is well worth the results.
Allow yourself to feel.
Is it confidence?
I would say in general I’m a confident person , at least with age I feel I’ve become a lot more comfortable with who I am. But I never realized that I had never accepted who I am.
There is a difference.
When I came to this conclusion of allowing myself to accept that I am imperfect in the bilingualism of French and English, I saw and heard a different world that surrounded me.
The sun was peeking through the clouds
When I was stuck on the fact that I was completely awful at being perfect in any language I only focused on the one that was easier for me. (English)
I ended up creating this fear for years towards my mother tongue that is French. That sounds just insane to me now as I am writing this but it sure made a lot of sense to me at the time.
This fear of imperfection stopped me from learning new skills, or taking courses or communicating with people in my community.
Let me explain, I’m a Canadian girl living in Montreal. The province with the largest French community in the country. A province that fights for their French language. My fear of being judged just kept me quiet. I didn’t allow myself to truly be me and express who I was.
I wouldn’t move forward!
I pulled away and missed out on opportunities as I judged myself. If I feel judged by others I might as well judge myself, right? So, I wouldn’t ask for help.
Funny thing is, when I was 12 years old I met my gang of girlfriends. My anglophone girlfriends and I practiced my ass off to speak better English, to speak it without a French accent. I read English books to learn more words and I would ask questions to understand what they meant.
I had no fear. Just this insane desire to be better.
But something happened between the age of 12 and 45.
My English got a whole lot better. My French accent I would say was gone, my vocabulary expanded, I gained confidence, I mean enough confidence to start writing here on Medium.
But as far as my French writing skills went…let’s just say French is not an easy language to learn compared to English. And my desire wasn’t there for a big part of my life. It seemed just too hard for me to even bother with it. But today, I need it and that’s where the issue lay.
Do I have a learning disability?
I can read an English book with total presence. Devouring every word, absorbing words that I have never seen and classifying them in my brain to use in the future.
When I read French books, I feel like I have ADD. I cannot focus for the life of me. The sentences make no sense and my brain starts to wonder.
What is wrong with me?
How to avoid feeling? Escape!
I retracted myself physically, kept quiet during gatherings, denied invites and I just wouldn’t allow myself to express how I felt when surrounded by my French community. Never feeling like my true self in either community. Well, at least that’s how I felt.
It felt like two different worlds.
I was the wild and crazy French girl when in my English community and the quiet more subdued English girl in my French community.
A duality that was fun to morph into at first but was probably just a cover-up of who I truly wanted to be or allowed myself to be. But I didn’t know at the time who that was.
It was all very confusing, tiring and I never felt accepted.
The gift
One day, through many NLP practices, which by the way I went and took NLP in a French school. You see I wasn’t a total lost cause. I realized that I had a wonderful gift. A gift of being able to understand and speak two languages even if it was imperfect.
My world changed. I accepted it. I am not perfect. Wow! It was liberating.
All of a sudden, or I should say my conscious mind was aware as if like magic, people around me weren’t perfect in their language either.
What people aren’t perfect? This is great!
Not only were they not perfect but people whom I judged thinking they only spoke French actually spoke English or at least shoot out English words here and there. I heard the French express themselves in English. I felt comfortable, I felt like they would understand me, I felt like we were living in the same world.
English words dancing in my French world with simplicity and lightness. It was refreshing to not have that burden weighing on me anymore.
This fear that I had seemed like a weird dream that no longer made any sense.
I have always been a huge advocate to embrace languages. The more the merrier.
I mean, I remember being embarrassed to not know how to speak a third language at one point in my life. Especially here in Montreal where many families come from many different countries. Immigrants entering Canada with their mother tongue, learning English through their travels or because it’s still the universal language and want to learn it and then settling in Montreal where you have to learn French.
My father is an immigrant from Hungary and I don’t even know how to speak Hungarian. My father’s mother tongue lost, stopped, not passed on to his children. How unfortunate. How can I not know a third language?
Courage, some people don’t even have that.
Today, after my incredible AHA moment I embrace the fact that I know two languages and they may not be perfect but I am proud to have the courage and confidence to write because I love to write in English. Fear will not keep me from becoming a better version of who I am.
I also dare to learn, face fears and take action in French. Tweaking my skills and becoming a better communicator.
Some people have wonderful qualities, skills but don’t dare to put them into action. I am grateful every day that I may not be perfect but I do have the courage, determination and confidence to try.
The love of a great community
I am surrounded by fabulous people who have welcomed me, offered me guidance, encouraged me, showed me direction and with every encounter I have been able to let that fear dwindle.
I have surrounded myself with many wonderful communities that create a wonderful world and I get to be a part of it.
I have accepted who I am.
My heart feels at peace and I am embracing my imperfection without fear of embarrassment.
I feel liberated!
