“No one ever made himself great by showing how small someone else is,” Irvin Himmel.  I love this as a follow up to yesterday.  When we own our power and step into our authentic selves, there is no concern to make ourselves appear a certain way because simply become and be who we are.  There is no need to worry about how other people look, to bring others down to make ourselves seem higher.  We simply use our flame to light other people’s candles because their candle doesn’t diminish ours, we glow brighter together.  Build each other up, straighten each other’s crowns and build the world we are meant to live in through helping each other achieve goals. 

I spent a lot of my life bullied and discriminated against for my appearance.  People took one look at me and assumed I was incompetent, too young, or that I was incapable and my words were dismissed before I even opened my mouth.  This isn’t a sob story, I use this to demonstrate that appearances can be deceiving and that the act of cutting someone off before we know them has impact.  No matter what we think of a person there is something else underneath, something that person doesn’t share.  We never know the full story.  Even in this day and age we still judge books by their cover.  With that being said, there are people who too often spend time smearing someone else’s story rather than writing our own.  When we focus on other people’s issues or try to make them seem a certain way, that is time spent away from our own objective.  Time we could use to work toward our goal.

The long and short of it is keep your own house in order.  Take time to objectively, literally, and figuratively water your own grass and see how green you can make it rather than taking time to smear others.  You don’t get very far wasting your time being critical of others, running around the base of the mountain telling others they are doing it wrong, when that time can be spent climbing the mountain.  It takes a lot to shut out the noise and focus on goals.  It takes even more practice to shut out the noise from others.  But make sure we aren’t the ones creating noise for the sake of hearing our own voices in other’s lives.  Don’t cut people down for the progress they’ve made, we don’t know what it took to get there.  Celebrate our greatness and celebrate the greatness of others.