Ashok Gupta on how your achiever part creates chronic dissatisfaction by constantly judging your wins. Contentment and self-acceptance are internal states you choose, not things external success gives you. Retraining your inner parts through self-love is how you break the cycle.
Now, something that's really important about the achiever, the achiever part is the achiever part, like many of the other parts, can create a constant background feeling of not feeling relaxed and contented. So this is something to watch out for. If we look at life and our achievements, we look back over our life and feel disappointed with our life. That is coming from our achiever who doesn't feel contented and passes that ants in your pants type feeling, you can only describe it like that, onto your own nervous system, your whole nervous system. And this is a really subtle point. We get so used to feeling dissatisfied with our achievements and our life that it becomes the norm. And we don't recognize that that has actually ramped up our nervous system continually in the background. Because once again, I said the most toxic thing you can do for yourself is to put yourself down and criticize and blame yourself. The next one down from that is to criticize your perceived lack of achievement or not feeling contented with your life. You might say, Ashok, well, you know, I don't feel contented with my life and I think I could have achieved more and I wish I'd done more and whatever. You know, this idea that you're going to achieve all these amazing things and reach that holy grail of contentment. You know, the most discontented people are the millionaires and the billionaires, right? Because once you've achieved that level of success, you're desperate to hold onto it. Look at the most successful people in inverted commas of what society judges. So that might be actors, actresses, musicians, pop stars, the pinnacle of what we define as success in modern society. And yet they're often the most insecure, the most discontented. They're often, you know, this isn't a stereotype, those types of people. But you know, you know what I'm getting at, right? And that is because once you've reached that level of fame or notoriety or success, you want to stay at that same level and maintain it, which is impossible. And so if pop stars and famous a list celebrities and millionaires and billionaires have that level of insecurity and dissatisfaction and discontentment with their lives, then there is no reason we should justify it to ourselves in our lives and say, well, look, I haven't done this and I haven't achieved that. It doesn't matter what we have or haven't achieved in life. Contentment is a state of mind that we choose no matter what we think we have achieved or haven't achieved. That is the greatest gift we can give to ourselves. Acceptance is very closely related to contentment. Contentment follows acceptance. You accept yourself, your life, the mistakes you made, the forgiveness for yourself of your entire life is so important so that you can go from acceptance to a deep contentment with who you are and your life and the achiever. And all these parts will try and justify discontentment. And people mentioned the book the Power of Now, which is one of the only ones we recommend because it's just very simple and to the point about the busyness in this mind and how to observe it and let it go. And so just recognizing that, because when you recognize that, you see, ah, I can see that there is this ongoing tension within me, this ongoing dissatisfaction, this feeling that I'm not good enough, which comes from often the achiever. And now that I recognize it, and now that I see that I deserve this sense of contentment and happiness and love in my life just as much as anyone else. And the only person that can give that to me is me. The only person who can fill that gap is me. The biggest magic trick that's been foisted amongst human society is this idea that when you feel bad, something on the outside can fix it. Something on the outside simply triggers you on the inside to feel better about yourself. The classic example being relationships. We suddenly have a relationship and we feel suddenly loved and we feel great and we feel brilliant about ourselves and we feel we're on cloud nine and we could achieve anything in life and we sud suddenly filled, full of confidence. Now why is that that person has not injected us with oxytocin and the love hormone or suddenly affected our internal physiology in any way. That person has simply given us permission to love ourselves. But why don't we bypass the first step and go straight to the source which is our own love and contentment with ourselves and our lives and who we are. And the reason this is important is because all of those exercises I've given you, those audio exercises, have the ultimate aim of helping you as the loving, wise self, retrain these parts to feel loved and contented just the way you are, without any need for external validation, any gap filling from the outside situations and people becoming self reliant. That your self esteem is based upon the love you have for yourself. And that is the liberation that we talked about in that little audio exercise I did earlier. So watching out for the little tricks that the achiever plays on us, the little tricks our mind plays on us, you might say, Ashok, isn't it the nature of human beings to be discontented? That's what drives them forward, motivates them to do great things and, you know, invent mobile phones to computers, to engineering projects. Now, you know what? That I want you to ponder on, and we'll talk about it next time, because that's a whole conversation in and of itself.
