{"id":5493,"date":"2017-08-30T15:31:58","date_gmt":"2017-08-30T19:31:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lettinggo\/?p=5493"},"modified":"2017-08-21T15:38:32","modified_gmt":"2017-08-21T19:38:32","slug":"live-life-terms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lettinggo\/2017\/08\/live-life-terms.html","title":{"rendered":"How to Live Life on Your Own Terms"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Question:<\/strong> Why do I care at all about how I appear in the eyes of others?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Answer:<\/strong> Please follow this explanation carefully. It will set you back on the road to having your own life. You have always believed that the better people feel about you, the better you can feel about yourself. However, you may have never really considered that the opposite of this belief must hold equally and unhappily true, and that is: The less you are approved by others, the more alone and uncertain you feel. This helps to explain why you think you have to please people, as well as why you resent those you feel you must please. Being approved by others has become a strange kind of life-support system wherein, after a lifetime of depending on it, you unconsciously believe that there won&#8217;t be life without someone there to approve you into existence. Just the opposite is true. The more you depend on others to confirm you to yourself, the less real life you have of your own.<\/p>\n<p>The chief cause of why our lives so often wind up in the hands of others is not that they are superior or that the world is too strong for us, but that we don&#8217;t want to face the uncertainty and aloneness that we think we are too weak to bear. This is the real cause of all of our wrong relationships in life. We have been betrayed by a belief in our own weakness.<\/p>\n<p>The conscious refusal to go along with your weakness is what invokes and finally delivers real inner confidence. This new kind of strength gradually becomes the cornerstone of a true individual existence &#8212; the life you&#8217;ve always wanted. The stakes are actually eternal &#8212; but self-victory is as certain as the fact that light always triumphs over darkness. If you will stay in the middle of this struggle for true self-possession, not asserting your individuality but allowing it to flourish and to blossom &#8212; bearing what you must bear by refusing to submit yourself to negative,self-betraying influences &#8212; you will come to know the highest approval that life can award: Reality itself will approve you. And when it does, all of your struggles will become a thing of the past. You will possess yourself. No one around you will suspect that you now live in a new kind of bright inner world &#8212; a world that is always on your terms, because your terms and the terms of this happy new inner world are never in conflict. You have won your own life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Question: Why do I care at all about how I appear in the eyes of others? Answer: Please follow this explanation carefully. It will set you back on the road to having your own life. You have always believed that the better people feel about you, the better you can feel about yourself. However, you&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":232,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,73],"tags":[1970,2852,2851,2853,1679,2850,861,1043,201],"class_list":["post-5493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-enlightenment-self-realization","category-love-relationships","tag-fawning","tag-have-your-own-life","tag-lacking-inner-confidence","tag-life-on-your-terms","tag-loneliness","tag-people-pleasing","tag-seeking-approval","tag-uncertainty","tag-weakness"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>How to Live Life on Your Own Terms - Letting Go with Guy Finley<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lettinggo\/2017\/08\/live-life-terms.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How to Live Life on Your Own Terms - Letting Go with Guy Finley\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Question: Why do I care at all about how I appear in the eyes of others? Answer: Please follow this explanation carefully. It will set you back on the road to having your own life. You have always believed that the better people feel about you, the better you can feel about yourself. However, you&hellip;\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lettinggo\/2017\/08\/live-life-terms.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Letting Go with Guy Finley\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:author\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/Guy-Finley-260924340633\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2017-08-30T19:31:58+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2017-08-21T19:38:32+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Guy Finley\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@guy_finley\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"How to Live Life on Your Own Terms - Letting Go with Guy Finley","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lettinggo\/2017\/08\/live-life-terms.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"How to Live Life on Your Own Terms - Letting Go with Guy Finley","og_description":"Question: Why do I care at all about how I appear in the eyes of others? 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His ideas cut straight to the heart of our most important personal and social issues - relationships, success, addiction, stress, peace, happiness, freedom - and lead the way to a higher life. Finley is the Founder and Director of Life of Learning Foundation, a nonprofit Center for Spiritual Discovery. He is the acclaimed author of \"The Secret of Letting Go\" and more than 45 other books and audio programs that have sold over two million copies in 26 languages worldwide. His work is widely endorsed by doctors, business professionals, celebrities, and religious leaders of all denominations. Through Life of Learning Foundation, Guy has presented over 5,000 unique self-realization seminars to thousands of grateful students throughout North America and Europe over the past 20 years and has been a guest on over 700 television and radio shows, including national appearances on ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, and NPR. The Foundation's popular Key Lesson e-mails featuring inspirational quotes by Guy are read each week by a hundred thousand subscribers in 142 countries. Guy speaks four times each week on inner-life principles at Life of Learning Foundation's home in Merlin, Oregon. These meetings are ongoing and open to the public. For more information about Life of Learning Foundation, Guy Finley, and their life-changing messages, visit guyfinley.org. \"Guy Finley is...one of the leading experts at the forefront of human potential.\" -Nightingale Conant \"Guy Finley has helped millions live fuller, more peaceable lives.\" -Barnes and Noble","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.guyfinley.org","https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/Guy-Finley-260924340633\/","https:\/\/x.com\/guy_finley"],"url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lettinggo\/author\/gfinley"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lettinggo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lettinggo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lettinggo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lettinggo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/232"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lettinggo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5493"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lettinggo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5493\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5494,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lettinggo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5493\/revisions\/5494"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lettinggo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lettinggo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lettinggo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}