What Your Actions Say About Your Character
Exploring the Connection Between Your Behaviors and Personal Values
Photo by Sean Stratton on Unsplash
“When you squeeze an orange, you'll always get orange juice to come out. What comes out is what's inside. The same logic applies to you: when someone squeezes you, puts pressure on you, or says something unflattering or critical, and out of you comes anger, hatred, bitterness, tension, depression, or anxiety, that is what's inside. If love and joy are what you want to give and receive, change your life by changing what's inside.”
Wayne W. Dyer
This quote is a powerful reminder of the importance of what lies within us. It's a metaphor that can be applied to human beings and their emotions. Just like how oranges can only produce orange juice when squeezed, we can only produce what's inside us when put under pressure or faced with a challenging situation.
When someone puts pressure on us, intentionally or unintentionally, we tend to react a certain way. Our reaction depends on what's inside us, emotions, thoughts, and beliefs. For instance, if we're constantly filled with anger and resentment, we'll respond to stress or pressure with more anger and frustration. Likewise, if we're filled with love, positivity, and joy, we'll respond to challenging situations with compassion, empathy, and understanding.
The way we react to life's challenges is a reflection of what we hold inside us. Negative emotions such as anger, hatred, bitterness, tension, depression, or anxiety are all signs of an unhealthy and unhappy state of mind. These emotions can take a toll on our mental health and prevent us from leading a fulfilling life. On the other hand, positive emotions such as love, joy, gratitude, and contentment can enhance our well-being and help us build strong relationships with others.
If we want to change our lives, we must change what's inside us. We must cultivate positive emotions and learn to respond to challenges healthily and constructively. This requires us to be self-aware and to take responsibility for our thoughts, feelings, and actions. We need to identify the negative patterns in our lives and work on replacing them with positive ones.
Clayton is the founder and publisher of the social and political commentary newsletter Think Things Through and the host of the Think Things Through Podcast.
Mixed feelings on this rationale. On a purely internal level, it is indeed a good idea to work on what kind of emotions one allows to govern one's own actions and attitudes. But taken as a template for evaluating the actions and attitudes of others, this is little more than a formula for blaming the victim by default.
Things do indeed happen to people by way of misfortunes and losses which are not actually of their own doing, shockingly enough.
There is, or ought to be, a hard and inviolate line between recognizing what we ourselves had walked right into, and assuming on each occasion that this is the only explanation needed for what anyone else may have experienced. That latter way lies indifference excused by a rationalized absence of empathy, also known as simple bigotry.
It may well be that a catastrophic tornado destroying much of a town not more than sixty miles distant from my own neighborhood last week has brought this into that much sharper focus for me. I have to confess that my first impulse on too many occasions in the past, when disaster had struck the home ground of others, was to tell myself that they should never have made their homes in such a location in the first place. People make their homes in places that are prone to fires, floods, earthquakes, mudslides, droughts, any number of calamities, and I have a feeling that a lot more people than just me have comforted themselves in a 'better them than me' sense by privately judging them for having made their homes there at all. But when Perryton, Texas was wrecked beyond recognition in a matter of minutes the other day, with fatalities, and I realized that what happened there might well happen right here a stone's throw away in Texhoma, Oklahoma and there would be not a damn thing I could do to stop it, I remembered that 'there but for the grace of God go I' is a lot more realistic and humane way of evaluating the misfortunes of others than 'they walked right into it' ever has been.