"Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent"

The truth of this statement just hit me hard. Because feeling inferior is a very deep process. There is a lot to it, and every step of the way you are accepting a "truth" you need not accept. To feel inferior to somebody you must: know their standard of value. Accept that it is true. Accept that their standard of value is also your own. Accept that based on your accepted standard of value, the other person is "better" than you are, and you in turn are "worse" than the other person. Accept that because of this, you should feel bad about yourself. Here is the most important step: you accept that because of this, you WILL feel bad about yourself, and you do.

This is the importance of having your own standards. When you have your own standards and live in alignment with them, you are the only person who has the power to judge you. You don't even have to qualify yourself. You know the truth. An insult is only as good as the reaction it gets. And if you have your own standard for yourself, how could you possibly give a fuck what anybody else thinks of you? Because if you think about it, any congruence test is just trying to see whether you care about what somebody else thinks more than you care about what YOU think. Whether you feel that you deserve to be judged by the outside world for the actions you take. And the only thing that matters is that in your own mind you refuse to be judged by anybody except yourself.

THAT is being un-reactive. It's simply having your own standards, and only allowing your own standards to measure your value. You don't have an ego because your standards are your own. You are not measuring yourself against society, or against other people, and you do not care what other people think of you. You can think that you are amazing, but that does not make you better or worse than anybody. You live your life. They live theirs. That's it. It's not what does the world want me to be, or what do my parents want me to be, it's WHAT DO I WANT ME TO BE. Good. Be that person.

Even if you realize that you are in the wrong, you realize it through your own eyes and your own standards: you did not allow somebody else's standards to influence how you felt about yourself. You will be judged by the people around you. Do not fear it. Do not let the fact that you are judged cause you to judge yourself. Sometimes somebody will say "you are being unrealistic." And you will know that they are right. No state drop, no feeling bad. You just know that you are wrong. But being wrong should not have any stigma attached to it. Admitting you are wrong is high value behavior: most people can't do it. Too much ego. But you don't feel bad about being wrong: if you never knew you were wrong you would never know you were on the wrong path.

Having somebody with similar standards to your own point out a flaw is how you grow. This is why a bootcamp is so powerful. Because you are looking at a person you admire and respect and all they are saying is "you respect the standards I have for myself and my students. Trust that when I tell you something, it is because I want you to grow." When you have high standards for yourself, you have high standards for the information that you take in as well. You know what you need to grow, you know what will hold you back. Taking advice is not low value unless you believe that you are low value for taking advice.

I have a lot to learn in life. I am not perfect. But I know my purpose, and I am on my path. I can see the person I want to be, and one day at a time I am working towards getting there. I accept something as true when I FEEL its truth. When it reverberates. Truth has no paradox. I know that living by your own standards is the only way to live. Nobody can impose standards upon you. You can adopt standards from others, but you are only living by your own standards, through your own intentions, when you fully see what these standards mean.

You have your own criterion for what it means to be successful. The level of value that you perceive for yourself is based on your own standards of success. Everybody has this idea in their head. Whether they are living up to what society tells them to live up to, or whether they have done the work to find out what it is they themselves value is a different matter. As Manwhore says, most people judge themselves based on where they think society would place them. This is beta. But don't think I'm judging you: you are judging yourself. If you had your own standards, if you knew your own value intuitively without thinking, nothing I say could possibly phase you. I would simply be reinforcing what you already knew.