The Ugly Truth

It looks like this week will be slightly warmer here in Oklahoma and that alone is reason to celebrate! As thankful as I am for the tiny fact, I am faced with a less than celebratory topic to tackle this week most importantly because I need it.  This week I'm going to look at humility and pride.  First and foremost I have a problem with acting and displaying prideful feelings and attitudes, often without being fully aware of it.  Now, my lack of awareness isn't some sneaky way of saying I should be excused or slightly justified because "I just didn't know".  It's actually an indication of how long I've been like this and learned this behavior, so long until it was completely unconscious.  So, it is my intention and hope to be able to recognize it in myself more readily, isolate the causes and triggers, and hopefully find some ways to minimize and extinguish it completely.  That's my desire, anyway.

As this quote clearly illustrates, to turn this into a "how humble I can be" discussion would be missing the point.  Instead, let's start with why we get prideful in the first place.  It's easy to dismiss yourself from having an issue with pride because I think we understand it a little differently than what it is sometimes.  I used to think pride was high self-esteem, publicly loving yourself or boasting about how great you are. While any of those could be prideful, they aren't the only expressions of it.  In myself, pride finds it's way in self-preservation and trying to know the answer to everything.  The self-preservation is a coping mechanism I think but it results in raising my everything (needs, thoughts, opinions, emotions) higher than anyone else's.  Somewhere along in my life, I felt compelled, as though I was supposed to, to have a ready answer for anyone's question.  Not at all sure why, but it has resulted in me answering whether I have a good reason to or not AND it has fed into me feeling like my answer is probably the best, no matter what! Self-esteem has never been my strong suit and thus it was assumed that of course I wouldn't be prideful, because I struggled with taking pride in myself.  But having low self-esteem, seems to have resulted in a raising up of the self higher because it felt lower.  Seems confusing and silly  when you say it.  It doesn't feel like pride and arrogance when it happens but viewing it through this lens makes it shameful, hard to swallow and worthy of expulsion! 

So there it is, the big ugly truth.  One step at a time, I guess.  So, now I'm looking for triggers or clues that can tip me off that I'm about to jump into the pride pool.    Any suggestions?