The Trouble in Being Congruent with Self

The text defines congruence as “thinking, feeling, and behaving with consistency, genuineness, authenticity, and honesty toward others.”  This sounds simple enough, but there are a lot of stumbling blocks in attempting to achieve Congruence.  The biggest issue I face is that there are different “me’s,” and I do not think that I am alone in this.  For example, I learned at a very young age that behaving a certain way was appropriate for different circumstances (in class you needed to be quiet and attentive, but during recess being as loud and as rambunctious as you wanted was okay).  And a little bit of that has carried over to how I act today.  The “thinking” and “feeling” parts of the definition do not give me any problem; it’s “behaving” consistently.  Your thoughts and feelings aren’t going to change, but the way you present them can based on who you are talking to.  Suppose I am talking to Sharell, or Tyler, or someone from our General Fraternity, the same thought is going to go behind what I’m saying as though I was talking to anyone else, but things like my body language and my word choice will be different.  And consciously or sub-consciously I think most people do this; they approach the same situation from a different angle depending on who they are talking to and the influence that person has over the situation. 

                One other thing I wanted to touch on was the concept of burning out.  I have certainly felt burnt out at times this quarter and I think the quote at the beginning that “Perseverance is not a long race; it is many short races one after another,” does a great job of explaining where a burn out comes from.  Having big goals is great, you always want to dream big and hope for the best possible outcome, but if you don’t give yourself smaller goals and checkpoints along the way then that big goal can really start to weigh down on you.  I am finding that celebrating the small victories and focusing on what good has been accomplished rather than what good hasn’t been really makes this job a lot less daunting and at the end of the day helps you to breathe a little bit easier.