From Thomas Leonard’s (http://www.thomasleonard.com/) 28 Attraction Principles: Principle #17 “Endorse Your Worst Weakness: When you can accept and honor the worst parts of yourself, you are more accepting of others”.  That’s a mighty big sentence to swallow but if we take it in small bite size pieces, I think we can get it down okay.

First piece:  Endorse Your Worst Weakness.

So what does that mean anyway? Was Thomas saying for us to stand on our rooftops and shout for joy for all to hear that, for instance in my case, one of my worst weaknesses is that I am sensitive to the point that I will sometimes go out of my way to make sure someone else isn’t inconvenienced while completely inconviencing myself in the process just so that I can make someone happy or at least not make them sad, mad or disappointed?  Well knowing Thomas, he was probably coming from his 12 step knowledge around acceptance being the answer to all our problems.  Endorsement in this case means to accept fully who we are in all our glory bells and burrs and to be willing to open up our hands and admit our weakness and have the willingness to do learn what that weakness is about and make amends where appropriate.

Second piece:  When you can accept and honor the worst parts of yourself.

Sheesh.  Accept and honor the worst parts of myself? Oh geeze.  First I have to be willing to even SEE the worst parts of myself and then to accept them doesn’t mean I have to agree with them or even like them but only that I accept what they are as the reality as I understand it today.  Honor, for me, means to respect my foibles as a human being and probably even deeper than that it means to love, love, love myself in spite of myself.  For instance, I was really getting down on myself this week because I’d over booked and over committed to do so many things that my options were to either throw up my hands and give up, scream like a wild ninny or possibly disappoint someone (and myself) because I would have to un book and un commit from at least one or two things for sanity.  Honor in this instance is shimming really close to being a form of love.

Third piece:  you are more accepting of others.

Well isn’t that so? I mean haven’t you found that when you realize you are judging the hell out of someone else that when you look a bit closer that who you are really judging is yourself?  There’s a saying around the halls of recovery that says, “if you spot it, you got it”. So wouldn’t the converse be true? When we learn to accept and honor our worst weaknesses, then maybe, just maybe we will be more tolerant of others.

Endorse doesn’t mean to engrave it in stone.  Endorsing your worst weakness means to get behind yourself and trust the process of becoming a real person: mind, body and soul.

Love yourself, love yourself, love yourself, put the oxygen mask on first and then you can really be there to give the love you have to give to someone else.