Who do you Want to be this Holiday Season? ?

The Holiday Season is here and you get to decide who you want to be.

I don't mean if you want to be Santa Claus. I mean what kind of person do you want to be? Do you want to be a person who chooses your actions according to your fears of rejection, of getting hurt, of ridicule, or of being taken advantage of? Or do you want to be a person who chooses your actions from your deep desire to be a kind, loving, caring person?

We all have free will to choose who we want to be each and every moment.

Your choice of who you want to be comes from your choice of intent: to be controlling to protect yourself from your fears of getting hurt, or to be loving, and open to learning about loving, even in the face of fear. Your intent determines whether you are a warm, open, kind and caring person, or whether you are a closed, defensive, hard, or angry person.

Your intent also determines how you end up feeling. While you might want to believe that it is others' rejection and uncaring behavior that causes your anxiety, depression, hurt feelings, or anger, it is actually your own choice of who you want to be that causes these feelings. While others' choices to be unloving can cause sadness, loneliness, heartache and heartbreak, if your choice is to protect against feeling these feelings and taking responsibility for nurturing them, then you will likely close off in reaction to others’ unloving behavior. It is 100% your choice to close off or to stay open and take responsibility for your own feelings.

Actually, you get to decide who you want to be each moment, not only during the Holiday Season. But why not use the holidays as an opportunity to look deep inside and see who you have chosen to be most of the year? And to ask yourself, are you going to decide to take the risk of loving yourself and others just during the holidays, or all year?

Perhaps there is a part of you inside who says, "If I'm open and caring, I will be too vulnerable to being hurt and used."

The ego wounded part of us often believes that it is stupid to be open-hearted - that it leaves us too vulnerable to being hurt and walked over.

Yet the opposite is actually true. Here's why:

In order to be truly open, loving, and caring with others, you have to first be open, loving and caring with yourself. If you are giving to others without first taking loving care of yourself, then you will likely have an agenda attached to what you give. When you have not taken responsibility for filling yourself up with love, then you are likely giving to others to get love from them. This makes you very vulnerable to rejection and to being used and controlled.

However, when you are truly devoted to being loving to yourself, you develop a strong, powerful inner loving adult who is fully capable of not taking rejection personally and of setting limits against being used or taken advantage of. When you are taking loving care of yourself, you would never reject yourself by giving yourself away to avoid others' rejection. As a strong loving adult, you know you can loving manage hurt, so you don't need to protect against it. One of the most freeing decisions I ever made in my life was that I was willing to feel hurt rather than close my heart to protect against it. Developing my loving adult through practicing Inner Bonding gave me the confidence to know that I would be fine even if I got hurt.

This Holiday Season, take a chance and devote yourself to being loving to yourself and others.

Consciously shift out of your intent to protect against being hurt or used and into the intent to be open and caring with yourself and others. You will be deeply rewarded by a wonderful sense of inner peace, fulfillment, and personal power! 

Join Dr. Margaret Paul for her 30-Day at-home Course: "Love Yourself: An Inner Bonding Experience to Heal Anxiety, Depression, Shame, Addictions and Relationships."