How do we feel—on a personal or professional level—when we realize we’ve set an unrealistic and impossible goal for ourselves, after investing time and energy in trying to achieve it?
The answer is obvious: we feel frustrated and inadequate, and our self-esteem plummets.

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
The Serenity Prayer

The Unhappiness Industry

This is exactly what advertising—and the media in general—does when it presents us with men and women as role models, for whom being “beautiful” is literally a profession—men and women who spend much of their lives tending to their appearance and are assisted by teams of massage therapists, personal trainers, makeup artists, and photographers, all dedicated to creating fabulous, captivating images for magazines and advertising campaigns. And if the image isn’t perfect yet, it can always be digitally retouched.

If we allow ourselves to be seduced by these manipulators without realizing that we’re measuring ourselves against an impossible standard, the inevitable result is discouragement, frustration, and dissatisfaction. And this is precisely the purpose of advertising—what I call “the unhappiness industry”: through every subtle and persuasive means at its disposal, it seeks to make people dissatisfied with who they are, so that they will buy a product that promises to resolve the tension that has been deliberately created; as every marketing expert knows, happy and satisfied people don’t buy anything.

Things are not much better when it comes to our mental and emotional lives: the endless success literature of recent decades tries to persuade us that we should spend our lives in some kind of permanent state of grace: always positive, optimistic and motivated, never experiencing so-called “negative emotions.”
And if we listen to these gurus, we may start believing that a moment of anger, frustration or sadness means that something is wrong with our mind — which gives us yet another reason to feel guilty and frustrated.

When self-acceptance becomes another cliché

So it’s no surprise that all this “brainwashing”—which promotes role models that are impossible to emulate, with the sole purpose of making us feel inadequate and unsatisfied — has sparked a backlash. It’s a whole philosophical movement that’s trying to say “no” to all of this. We refuse to go on starvation diets anymore, we refuse to spend our days at the gym, and we refuse—with even greater determination—to resort to cosmetic surgery just to keep up with the latest trends; instead, we’re learning to “accept”
just as we are, with all our flaws and imperfections. Advice such as “be yourself” or “accept yourself as you are” has thus become a cliché, an integral part of any psychologist’s, coach’s, or motivational speaker’s repertoire, and is presented as if it were some great cosmic truth or pearl of wisdom.

The problem is that, like many clichés in the world of personal development, this idea can become harmful if it is not properly understood. Instead of helping us, self-acceptance can become an obstacle to expressing our potential — and a convenient excuse for making no effort to improve ourselves.

Accepting the parts of ourselves that cannot be changed is certainly good advice. Trying to change the impossible is a reliable way to condemn ourselves to a lifetime of failure and frustration.

But why should we stop improving the parts that can be changed?

Why shouldn’t we work to express our potential?

Acceptance means not judging yourself

The misunderstanding comes from the way we normally talk about “self-acceptance.” We tend to think mainly about acknowledging those aspects of ourselves — physical, mental, emotional or behavioural — that we consider somehow “negative” or “wrong” and that we would normally prefer to hide or deny.
But “positive” and “negative,” “right” and “wrong,” are simply judgments produced by our evaluating mind when it compares what it sees with what it believes should be there — often according to completely arbitrary standards, most of them imposed by other people.

Acceptance means something different: it means acknowledging the factual reality of what we are without immediately attaching a label to it.
We are so accustomed to judging ourselves, and so accustomed to giving ourselves poor marks, that it becomes extremely difficult simply to observe ourselves without making some kind of moral evaluation.
At first, it is difficult even to understand what “observing yourself” without activating the judging mind really means. But when we begin to observe ourselves without judgment, when we try to put the Socratic advice “Know thyself” into practice, the rules of the game change completely and self-acceptance takes on an entirely different meaning.

Self-acceptance also means accepting your potential

It no longer means merely accepting what we consider our defects or our physical and mental limitations, whether those limitations are real or imagined; it also means recognizing the extraordinary potential within ourselves and that can be overwhelming.
As American author Marianne Williamson famously observed, our deepest fear is not simply that we are inadequate, but that we may be powerful beyond measure.

Because once you become aware of what you can do, certain questions inevitably arise:

Who am I, really?

What could I achieve if I truly wanted to?

Am I making the best possible use of the resources available to me?

How can I contribute to the development of the world around me?

And once we become aware of that potential, ignoring it — and refusing to act upon it — may become the road to a life filled with regret.

Don’t die with your music still inside you

Accepting our own greatness—accepting that we can do and be so much more than we are right now—means not letting our talents go unexpressed; it means—as Wayne Dyer put it with a very moving metaphor—not “dying with our music still inside us.”
So, let’s accept all of this and discover what we can truly be and manifest. Because if, instead of categorizing everything as “good” or “bad,” we had the courage to acknowledge that there are only two things in the universe—the possible and the impossible—we wouldn’t feel compelled to choose: do we focus on the impossible and become frustrated, or do we direct our attention and energy toward the possible and become victors?

What positive thinking should really mean

This, to me, is the real model of positive thinking: a way of thinking centred on potential, possibility and personal power (all words that are derived from the Latin verb “posse,” meaning “to be able to”); positive thinking does not have to mean denying reality or pretending that everything is fine when it clearly is not. It means choosing to concentrate our attention on what remains possible.

And ultimately, even in the most difficult circumstances, there is only one question truly worth asking:

What can we do now?

Only then does self-acceptance take on its full meaning: recognizing our own centre of power, that core of authenticity that makes each of us unique and allows us to grow, learn and contribute.

And this leads us to one final realization: in a world increasingly moving toward standardization and uniform thinking — a world that tries to convince us that there is only one type of success, one acceptable body, one correct way of thinking — our real value lies precisely in our uniqueness.

That may be the one thing we truly need to accept.