Friends & Enemies



It's easy to distinguish between your friend and your enemy when they are out there - visible to the naked eye, not only for how you recognize their faces, but also due to how you recognize what they do to and for you, proving by those words or acts the fact that they are your friends or enemies.

It's slightly  more complicated to recognize when we're talking about the friend and the enemy we all have inside of us. You know - the voice that tells us we can't, or that we're not good enough, or that we'll never make it, or that we're a failure. That voice - the voice of our inner enemy - is insidious and potentially so sabotaging that it might prove itself right if we commit the mistake of believing it. Furthermore, that voice is often heard within the secure confines of our comfort zone and hence it keeps us there, and by so doing, it keeps us from growing.

But we also have another 'person' inside of us, and that is our friend. That's the one - although its voice is often much, much weaker than the voice of our enemy - that says yes you can or it may say of course this is possible, just give it a try or it may say remember when you did such-and-such and you believed you wouldn't be able to manage it and yet you did ... you made it ... just do that again, and so on. This is the voice we need to listen to and this is the inner person that needs to receive precedence in what we believe and what we don't. This is also the one you need to foment, and help grow in strength. One of the easiest ways of doing that is by robbing the other voice of its strength. So each time the other voice pops up, tell yourself that while you don't yet know how to get where you want to go, you choose to focus on the encouraging voice. And so you pivot in your mind away from the thoughts that sabotage towards the thoughts that - while you may not yet be 100% certain of them - at least are encouraging you to move in the direction of your dreams.

Become acquainted with those inner people of yours and make sure that you can easily distinguish between your friend and your enemy and make even more sure that you make the conscious choice of showing one the door and giving the other your hand. There is a wonderful Costa Rican proverb that goes: All people have their friend and their enemy within themselves. 

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Books by Dr. Gabriella Kortsch

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