Choose Your Highest Self
Posted January 9, 2019 • Change,Conflict Mastery,Leadership • by Jennifer Goldman-Wetzler, Ph.D.
If all goes smoothly, the book I am writing, Optimal Outcomes: Free Yourself (and Others) from Conflict–At Work, At Home, In Life, will be due to hit bookstores at this time next year.
After a book deal with HarperBusiness and an eight-month writing process, I can see that the theme of the book, about how to free yourself from conflict, is really about something even larger. It’s about being your highest self.
In the Week in Review in this Sunday’s New York Times, Roger Cohen noted that prize-winning Israeli writer Amos Oz, who recently passed away, once spoke about making peace as requiring the ability to have big and generous thoughts.
I couldn’t agree more.
Freeing yourself from conflict requires you not only to have big and generous thoughts– to think and act at your highest potential– but to sustain it.
When you experience a situation that threatens to drag you down into cynicism, blame, jealousy, hatred or paranoia– to name only a few of the challenging emotions that conflict typically raises– it is your job to instead call up your best self. Your most generous, loving self.
The self that, when you look back at your life at the end, you’ll be the most proud of.
Every day– every moment, in fact– each of us has a choice to make between letting ourselves get dragged down by our circumstances versus allowing our highest self to emerge and to lead.
What will you do to allow your highest self to emerge?
What practices will you put in place to sustain it?
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