In a class I’m currently teaching, a woman, now retired from the military, told me she wanted to be a pilot. Rules back then prohibited women from going to flight school. Thank goodness those rules have changed, but it made me think of how often we set up our own rules and carry them around long after they’ve become anachronisms.
Best-selling author Bob Goff, in his latest book on distractions that can disrupt our lives, talks about how the rules we create when we’re young or vulnerable can continue to wreak havoc on our lives. As an example, he explained he had a traumatic experience as a kid and decided never to let himself get close to anyone, he would just be funny and superficial and protect his vulnerability. So, the 20-year-old man woke up one day realizing he had no close friends, it was the rule he had made and it was time he changed it.
“I want us to go figure out what the rules were and revisit them,” he explained. “And maybe rewrite those rules. They invented the pencil 100 years before they invented the eraser. Well, now that the eraser is here—let’s use it!”
The stories we told ourselves once, the rules we created, were designed to help us navigate where we were at the time. As I examined my rules I have created to survive, I discovered one that has impacted my life for years. I had to go through the process of asking why I felt a certain way and where on earth did that mind set come from, in order to see the ineffectual rules I’d been living with for way too long. If we have rules that are challenging our lives in some way, we need to examine what we once believed, that is no longer valid, and start erasing. If you’re like me it’s probably past time to do some inner house cleaning!
