Just like you can focus too much on your flaws, you can focus too much on your success.
Many people who like themselves do so because they perceive themselves to be successful in one form or another, whether that be their success at a career, their smarts, their beauty, their wealth, their athletic prowess and other endless ways they might measure themselves. This might be all well and good, especially when you are young, but it doesn’t deepen who you are. Worse yet, the success that built that good feeling about yourself might someday crumble. Probably a good chance of that.
None of this is a bad thing, it just that we need to know where to turn when success isn’t cutting it any more. We start to think, “is this all there is?”
Again, as I have alluded to in Liking yourself, part one, we have to stop playing the worthiness game. Invariably in life, we either start to lose where we had once won, or the “winning”, or succeeding, doesn’t carry the satisfaction it once did. Remember Henry David Thoreau, the 18th century author and naturalist, who once famously said, Most men (and women) live lives of quiet desperation. Maybe this was what he was trying to get at. When we live only for the exterior rather than the interior or the authentic, we dead end.
If we find ourselves at the dead end, or better yet want to avoid the dead end, we need to stop attaching our worth, our identity, our happiness to what we succeed at.
There is a joy that comes from simply being, and allow life to come to you as it is one moment at a time. It’s a subtle thing. As we live this way, we become more present and strangely alive. Any restlessness tends to fade away. We seem to inhabit ourselves more fully. We become more authentically ourselves.
To be clear, this does not mean we give up on having goals, being productive, or even having satisfaction from our accomplishments. It just means we don’t overly attach ourselves to these outcomes. Our connection to other people becomes more important.
We learn to enjoy other people because we have learned to enjoy ourselves – without the big expectations and judgements. As we slow down to these realizations, “other people” are no longer the enemy.