13 – What You Elicit

Many approaches to self-improvement and personal change are largely focused on self-understanding, on learning about one’s problematic or limiting beliefs, tendencies, and self-destructive actions.   Although this perspective on the internal, personal factors that may be responsible for a person’s discontent is important, it is certainly not the only perspective worth considering and, in my view, may actually limit what can be learned from other vantage points. Sometimes, how you see yourself, your problems, difficulties, and issues, is far less important than how you impact others. More specifically, what you elicit in others activates powerful relational and social dynamics that ultimately dictate your experience in the world far more than how you see, or feel about, yourself.