Acceptance comes in many shapes and flavours. Acceptance can create a sense of peace, balance and harmony in your life.
- Accept yourself
With all your limitations, flaws, imperfections and vulnerabilities. This is what it means to be human. This is the first step. Nobody is perfect. Accept yourself for who you are and move on. - Accept your past
You can not change it however you can change your relationship with it. Whether it’s good, bad or ugly. Doesn’t matter. Just accept it. It was who you were. Your past doesn’t have to define your future nor your present. - Accept your mistakes
Regrets don’t add any value to your present or future state. Let your mistakes serve as a reflection and learning point. Accept them. Mistakes are important in shaping the person you become.
(Read my post on Making Mistakes) - Accept others as who they are
Not an easy one to do, however, one of the key elements of fostering sustainable relationships. Acceptance of others is also a way to understand what you can/cannot control. You can influence people, try to convince them but how they act is, ultimately, out of your control which is to say, you cannot control others but only yourself. So it is important to accept others, for everyone wants to be recognised for who they are. - Accept you have limited control
Not many things in life are in your control. The sooner you realise and accept this the better you can be at spending your time, effort and energy on things that are in your control. - Accept that your time is limited
Whatever you need to do, do it now and stop wasting your time procrastinating. Stop putting things off to tomorrow as one day there will be no tomorrow. Sooner or later you will die and leave everything behind. Let that encourage you to get your shit in order and start taking massive action.
(Read my post What Death Can Teach Us About Living for a bit of perspective on this) - Accept that you will fail
Failure is the first step to success. Those that have not failed at anything have hardly ever tried anything new. If you are putting something off for fear of failure, DONT. Sooner or later you will fail at something in life, accept it. The ultimate goal is not success but the ultimate goal is to become a better version of yourself and failure is vital for that because success hardly teaches us much. There is no reflection and dissection after success. After failure, however, you assess, reflect, learn and try to do a better job the next time.
“Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently” ― Henry Ford - Accept that you control your future
Everything in life is a choice. Yes, everything. How you react to a certain situation (which you may have no control over) is also a choice. Your life and your future is determined by the choices you make. Not just the big choices like which job to accept or whom to marry or where to live but the small choice too. Your life is an aggregate of your choices to date. Poor choices reflect a poor life. So, your future is determined by the choices you are going to make from this moment on. Not fate or destiny or whatchamacallit. - Accept change
This is perhaps the most elementary yet the most difficult one to do. Not only is change the only constant in life, it is inevitable. Everything is constantly changing, from big to small. The sooner you realise and work with it the better. Stop resisting change and start accepting it.
(Read my post on Embracing Change, and while you are at it also read Why We Resist Change in the first place) - Accept your need for social approval
We are social beings. We have an evolutionary need to belong to groups and gain the approval of our peers (whether we like them or not). Somewhere, somehow everything we do, on some level, is for social acceptance, no matter how ‘cool’ you think you are. We need the herd and their acceptance. Learn to work with people. - Accept that there will be suffering in life
According to Gautama the Buddha, there are four universal sufferings in life; birth, aging, sickness, and death.
Suffering, ultimately, is inevitable and is part of the human condition. You cannot avoid suffering no matter how healthy/rich you are. You can, however, be prepared for suffering to cushion the impact. You can train yourself psychology to respond better. At some point in life, you will suffer (old age, disease, death of a loved one, your own death), so don’t try to resist it. Accept it and be prepared for it. - Accept things as they are
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” ― Blaise Pascal.
We are always trying to influence and change things. Always trying to control and manipulate things, situations and even people. Whether it’s a personal state or that of a culture or a nation. In the name of progress, improvement, religion or just a change of the old ways. We hardly ever accept things as they are, and don’t misunderstand, it is important to change things for making progress but sometimes it is the exact opposite that we need to do – Accept things as they are. It creates harmony, it creates peace and calm. It is the surrender of control and acceptance of our role in the grand scheme of things. It’s easy to debate and often feels good to talk about how things should be but takes toughness, humility and openness to accept them as they are.
4