TAMING THE TERRIBLE TWINS WITHIN:
BECOMING WHO YOU CAN BE.
By
Bill Cottringer


I have had a struggle all my life and I now wonder how common it is. The struggle is the ongoing ‘war’ between this and that. Here are some examples of various forms of my own ‘this and that’ terrible twins. Do any of these seem familiar?

Thinking vs. feeling self
Ideal vs. real self
Helping vs. hurting self
Good vs. bad self
Honest vs. dishonest self
Successful vs. failing self
Rational vs. creative self
Likeable vs. unlikeable self
Patient vs. impatient self
Lazy vs. ambitious self
Loving vs. hateful self
Happy vs. unhappy self
Obedient vs. rebellious self
Selfish vs. unselfish self
Peaceful vs. restless self
Calm vs. excitable self
Egotistical vs. humble self
Giving vs. taking self

The above list can go on, with opposite pares of things. Now call it what you may—reconciling, joining, merging, agreeing to disagree, becoming whole, or whatever—but this effort is certainly a challenge none of us can avoid or accomplish easily. Of course the object is to get the various forms of this and that to cooperate and compliment each other to resolve conflicts, solve problems and get results. The rest of this article is about my own failures and resulting success strategies in doing this. If you are aware of a gap between who you are and who you can be, and want to close it, consider tryingt these four strategies.

COMMIT TO SELF-UNDERSTANDING AND SELF-ACCEPTANCE

I think I wasted a lot of my life on thinking I already knew and accepted myself and others, without even making any serious effort to do so. Realizing the falseness of this knowledge can be a real wakeup call. It was for me. Then my own personal mantra became, “what you think you know may not always be so.” I suppose this was a central part of my awakening—understanding that you have to know what you don’t know before you can really begin to learn it, much like having to fail before you can succeed. Sometimes without even knowing it, we are already beginning to see the inter-relatedness between “opposites.”

Maybe this conundrum is worsened by psychology aimed at telling us all the secrets that we really want to learn on our own. In the end, we can only learn the few things we have in common from others and leave the uniqueness we have to personal self-study that may go on throughout our lives. In other words, we are all a work in progress and keeping an open mind as to who we are and who we are becoming may be the best approach to getting to our best.

GET IN TOUCH WITH YOUR NATURAL CREATIVITY

Great progress in increasing success, happiness and contentment can be had in getting in touch with your natural creativity. And one quick way to open the creativity door is to redefine the most important words in your life, like, creativity, truth, happiness and success. If success and creativity and other “prizes” such as these have to involve exceptional results that only extremely gifted persons can access, most of us will not get to the door and end up sacrificing dreams of thriving for the reality of surviving. Expanding the definition of these things is bringing the door closer and running faster, both at the same time which is a very creative solution to the paradox of how to have your cake and eat it too. This is something we all want to figure out how to do, because it is the only way to tame the terrible twins within.

Learning to ask important questions as opposed to looking for clever answers, was a very new definition of creativity for me that expanded my creativity tenfold. I began seeing creativity as looking for ways to understand how opposite appearing things could be combined to produce something new and unusual or how adding a slight revision to something made it more useful. So was redefining success, as “making your best effort right now to use your God-given talents to make a situation you are part of, a little bit better. What important notions of yours may need redefining?

WORK ON DOING AWAY WITH JUDGMENTS AND EXPECTATIONS

I think the second half of life, in which we restore order to the chaos we created by taking things apart, was a transition that helped me see how the two halves of things really do work together to produce creative progress in life. And in this process, you finally get a chance to spot the few things that don’t need opposites to be productive. Two of these for me are acceptance vs. judgment and open-mindedness vs. expectations. The trouble with getting here, is that we are brainwashed into believing the value of making right judgments and having right expectations.

The only think I know about this difficult task is that you have to have enough discomfort from the failure of these two habits to be motivated enough to see the connection between what you do believe and how that effects what you get. And you won’t ever get to that point, until you slow down to slow-motion where the distractions start blurring instead of the lesson. And, another dilemma is what you need and expect on the conscious vs. unconscious level. Getting these particular twins to share information is a real challenge, but one to keep at because it can make you much smarter.

LEARN WHAT THE TWO VOICES OF GOD ARE ALL ABOUT

This last crucial realization can only come after much patience in trying to see how the many opposite appearing things are really just different sides to the same coin—night and day, rain and sunshine, winter and summer, and life and death. But this takes time to understand how do actually fit together as halves of something. In dealing with people, you eventually learn that to be successful you have to use the same two voices God uses to run the universe. We know these voices too well, and so easily forget their power.

Of course the main stumbling block to knowing this central insight is the basic opposite dichotomy of God vs. no God itself. Making a choice as to which is true and real in the right direction, is related to understanding God and life’s two voices, especially the correct order, frequency and magnitude in which to use them. The two voices are: (a) loud and frequent shouts of unconditional love and acceptance, and (b) gentle, occasional whispers of encouragement to learn, grow and improve.

One of the most valuable things I have learned so far in my journey is this: When you keep an open-mind in striving to learn, grow and improve just because if feels good, without needing to have particular expectations or to get preferred outcomes, meaning, satisfaction, contentment, success and all the rest of the good stuff, emerge on their own. By this time most of the terrible twins within have been tamed.


William Cottringer, Ph.D. is President of Puget Sound Security in Bellevue, WA. He is author of You Can have Your Cheese & eat It Too, Passwords to the Prosperity Zone, and The Bow-Wow Secrets. Bill can be reached for comments and questions at (425) 454-5011 or bcottringer.pssp.net