The Courage to Be Yourself
ADHD Education
“To be nobody but myself- in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else-means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting…”
E.E. Cummings
I love this quote, and although I don’t want to think of it as a fight, there have been many days where I personally felt I was involved in an overwhelming battle of my own mind. It was a huge conflict with what I wanted to be vs. who I was told I had to be.
I think in today’s world it really takes courage to be different and unique.
I think it takes courage to say what you mean and act naturally, using your unique talents and intuition to take a different path than everyone else.
Our society, and its major institutions, often dictate what you have to do and how you have to do it.
- They also tell you the level of performance they expect from you even though they have not taken the time to determine the best ways for you to do it
- They have not encouraged you to go out and explore creative, diverse ways of thinking and doing the mandated tasks and assignments you are being told to complete.
- Our institutions have not taken the time to collaborate and enlist your cooperation by inviting and encouraging you to look at doing mundane assignments in creative and innovative ways.
They tell you to: “Just get it done in the allotted time or else.”
They haven’t considered what new, improved, interesting and more effective alternatives you could provide if they would only let you think out of the box, with different creative approaches to the same boring problems.
The pressure to perform in standard, uniform ways that demand you adhere to the status quo is diminishing the creative power of each human being. The current modus operandi of business and education are impeding people’s ability to bring their special talents and unique ways of thinking to every task and project that needs to be reinvented.
When you mandate a process of how to do things, you isolate people not only from others but from themselves. You make them feel like robots being programmed to solve standard, unchallenging problems rather than inviting them to be divine people with an inner brilliance that can illuminate the world with their own source of creative thinking.
You are a human being that wants to imagine possibilities, not just a human doing working under pressure to perform routinely.
Innovation and creativity do not come from a pressure to perform. They are created in an environment that encourages acceptance, depth, diversity, uniqueness and freedom of ideas.
Our country was founded on these principles and we seem to be moving in the opposite direction. It is evident all around us; just look and you’ll see it.
What are you doing today, to be your creative self in a world that demands you be somebody else?
