The Myth of Self Improvement

You can never lose yourself and therefore you cannot find yourself. You can never become any more or less, any better or worse, any more worthy or unworthy than what you already are.

You are not incomplete. At this moment you are not half yourself, 70 percent yourself or even 99.9 per cent yourself. You are and have always been wholly yourself and it cannot have been any other way.

Who you are does not and cannot change. Your body will change, your mind will change, your circumstances, opinions and ideas will change. In short, all the catalysts that feed and evolve your image of yourself, i.e. your self-concept, will change. But you, that self that you are, is the constant that never changes.   

The desire to create a better self is really the desire to create a more acceptable self-image. After all, you are what you are and have never, even for a moment, been what you are not. But what you “think” you are, is essentially what the whole notion of self improvement is about. When talking about improving or bettering yourself, what you are really referring to is creating and adopting a more acceptable self-image that your mind will be satisfied with.

And yet the mind is never satisfied. This is because the very reason the mind creates a self-image in the first place is to perpetuate this sense that something is incomplete and so needs to achieve completion. It is a sense of lack that drives the quest for self improvement. And even though, the goal of such a quest seems to be to reach a state of self perfection, all it really achieves is to perpetuate the sense of lack, of not being or having enough.

Reflect on every decision or choice you make in your life to change, to manipulate, to improve your circumstances or yourself. Look beneath all the reasons and rationalizations that your mind can come up with: the pros vs cons evaluations, the shoulds vs the shouldn’ts, the analysis and projections in the future. Look beneath all that to the root of what is motivating you in all this decision making and in your choices. If you go deep enough, you will find that more often than not the motivation is fear that rises from an assumption of lack. Our minds are always operating on an in-built assumption that there is not enough and the programmed emotional response to this assumption is fear. The problem is we have become so accustomed to operating in this way that we have a hard time even recognizing that this is the mechanism at work.

Recognize that you are already whole and complete. There is no better, more improved, happier version of you out there. There is no reality to your self-image. What your mind says you are has no connection to the truth of who you really are. It is only a distorted shadow. Your shadow changes from moment to moment at times appearing pleasant and at others appearing terrible. But it is only a shadow. Perpetually repositioning yourself in order to adjust your shadow achieves very little of value. Turn your attention instead to the one that is casting the shadow and rest easy in the knowledge that all is well.