Trading Fire For Light

I don’t know how people are constantly in competition with other people in life. Because for me, it’s always my yesterday against my tomorrow. I always want to ensure that whatever I’m doing today is better than what I did yesterday.

So for a long time, I’ve known that my toxic trait is provocative criticism. I would just criticize anything and anyone bluntly. If you did A, I tell you A with no decoration whatsoever. Just as it is. And most of the time, I wouldn’t even think about the emotional turmoil the person would go through. I feel like I’ve degraded myself enough, so let me just break the good news.

I have been working on it for a while now. It was very hard when I started. You know that most times, things are very easy when you think of them but very different when you actually begin to do them. So it was very easy to actually put my mind to it that I was going to work so hard to change.

But then when I began, it was more than a clash of the titans. It was very difficult. I had to do a lot of mental psyching to understand what I really wanted to do. I started by being very cautious of my thoughts. And by doing that, I made sure to always remember that we were all different people, which is one of the important things I’ve learned in life.

Anytime I wanted to talk about someone’s actions, I would try to understand why they did that. And that’s actually very hard. It’s hard to know and understand the reason behind people’s actions. Funny part? Sometimes, there’s actually no reason at all, which, to me, doesn’t even make sense. But tell you what. It does to them.

So I moved on to always acknowledging people’s effort first. No matter how little whatever they did was, I would just make sure to commend their actions first. And sometimes, the smile I would see after commending them was just so nice. And so at the end of the day, I just forgot about the wrongs they did and kept acknowledging the good.

Now, I don’t even have to say the bad I see. After acknowledging the good, the person often confesses that they know very well that they did something wrong and they would try to improve upon it. And that has been the whole point of this journey.

So I am glad and proud to say I’ve actually turned this toxic trait around for the good. It feels like I just strategically outsmarted my old self on this one, and I feel so good about it.