For many of us, personal growth begins with the assumption that something about us needs to be fixed. We work harder, change our habits, manage our reactions, pursue success, and search for the next insight that might finally make us feel more secure, peaceful, or complete.
Years ago, I encountered the work of spiritual teacher Anthony De Mello at a time when that familiar formula was no longer making sense to me. His perspective challenged something I had rarely questioned: the idea that happiness was waiting on the other side of becoming better, accomplishing more, or finally correcting whatever seemed wrong with me.
De Mello offered another possibility. What if the deepest change does not begin with fixing ourselves at all? What if it begins with becoming more aware of ourselves?
That distinction stayed with me because it turns personal growth in a completely different direction. Instead of beginning with the question:
What is wrong with me?
we can begin with something more curious:
What am I seeing, believing, expecting, and reacting to right now?
Like many people, I grew up with a fairly conventional equation for happiness: work hard, become successful, and happiness will follow.
For a while, that equation can seem reasonable. Achievement brings rewards. Recognition can feel good. Goals give us direction. But eventually I began noticing how fragile the promised happiness could be.
When life matched my expectations, I felt good. When it did not, the emotional machinery started immediately: disappointment, anxiety, frustration, resentment, and worry about what might happen next.
Without realizing it, I had given circumstances enormous authority over my inner life.
There was also another layer. When I was unhappy, I often believed that unhappiness itself represented some kind of personal failure. Now there were two problems: the difficult experience and my judgment of myself for having difficulty with it.
That can become an exhausting way to live. We keep trying to arrange the world correctly so that we can finally feel okay inside it.
What struck me about De Mello was the simplicity of his approach.
Rather than prescribing another system of self-improvement, he emphasized awareness. Notice what is happening. Notice the thought. Notice the expectation. Notice the fear. Notice the reaction without immediately becoming the reaction.
That is very different from trying to force ourselves into a better state.
The idea is not that behavior never needs to change or that difficult patterns should simply be accepted forever. It is that meaningful change may become more possible when we can see ourselves clearly without beginning from condemnation.
That principle sits at the heart of Stop Fixing Yourself: Wake Up, All Is Well, a volume drawn from De Mello’s teachings and edited by Don Joseph Goewey. Its premise is provocative precisely because it challenges the assumption that we must repair ourselves before we can experience peace.
Awareness sounds simple until we try to practice it.
Most of us are accustomed to evaluating our thoughts almost as quickly as we experience them. We become angry, then judge ourselves for being angry. We become afraid, then decide we should be stronger. We feel insecure, then begin searching for evidence that confirms the insecurity.
Awareness creates a small amount of space between the experience and the story we build around it.
Instead of immediately saying, I should not feel this way, we might first notice: This is what I am feeling. Instead of Why do I always do this?, perhaps: This is the pattern showing up again.
That small shift does not make the emotion disappear. But it can keep the emotion from becoming the entire reality.
It is closely related to something we explored in How to Feel Your Emotions Without Letting Them Control You: emotions can be acknowledged and experienced without automatically being given executive authority over what we do next.
When I began experimenting with this idea, I spent time simply watching my reactions. I paid attention to the thoughts and expectations underneath stress. I noticed how quickly my mind interpreted events according to what I believed should be happening.
Most importantly, I tried not to turn what I saw into another reason to criticize myself.
One experience made the lesson unusually clear.
I was in New York’s Grand Central Station after missing a train. I was late, irritated with myself, and facing a long wait before the next departure.
My first reaction was familiar. Frustration began generating more frustration. My mind wanted someone or something to blame. I could feel how rapidly one inconvenient event was becoming an entire emotional environment.
But this time, rather than immediately trying to get rid of the feeling, I watched it.
I noticed the tension. I noticed the thoughts. I noticed how much of my suffering was coming from my argument with what had already happened.
And gradually, something changed.
The situation itself had not changed. I had still missed the train. But my attention widened. I began noticing the architecture of Grand Central, the movement of thousands of people, and the extraordinary human theater unfolding around me.
The beauty had been there the entire time.
What changed was my ability to see it.
That experience helped me understand what De Mello meant by awareness in a way that an abstract idea never could. Freedom did not come because reality finally cooperated with me. It came because I stopped demanding that reality become different before I allowed myself to experience the life that was already present.
That raises a larger question about happiness.
How much of our dissatisfaction comes from what is actually happening, and how much comes from comparing what is happening with what we believe should be happening?
We can become so focused on the missing piece that we stop seeing what is already here.
That does not mean ignoring genuine problems, tolerating harmful circumstances, or pretending pain is not real. Awareness is not denial. If anything, it asks us to see reality more clearly.
But clear seeing includes noticing when the mind is adding suffering through expectation, comparison, fear, or constant resistance.
Sometimes the life we believe we are waiting for is already occurring around us while our attention is somewhere else.
This idea feels especially relevant now because the language of personal growth has become so deeply embedded in our culture.
We are encouraged to optimize almost everything: our careers, health, routines, relationships, productivity, mindset, emotional lives, and even our rest.
Much of that can be helpful.
But self-improvement becomes something else when the unspoken message beneath it is: The person you are now is unacceptable.
Growth does not have to begin there.
We can want to change something without rejecting ourselves. We can notice an unhealthy pattern without turning the pattern into our identity. We can become more conscious without making every difficult emotion evidence that we are failing.
That is also part of what sits underneath How to Think More Highly of Yourself: learning to recognize our own worth without confusing self-respect with arrogance.
And we can pursue a larger life without treating the present one merely as a waiting room.
The idea of “stop fixing yourself” does not mean stop growing.
It may mean changing where growth begins.
Instead of beginning with deficiency, perhaps we begin with awareness. Instead of asking only what needs to be corrected, perhaps we become curious about what needs to be understood.
That question has stayed with me over the years, and recently it became the starting point for a new Soulivity reflection, You Are Not a Problem to Solve.
The language has evolved for me, but the underlying idea remains powerful: growth does not have to require self-rejection.
Sometimes the next transformation does not begin when we finally discover what is wrong with us.
It begins when we become present enough to understand what has been there all along.
Passion. Purpose. Living.
Here’s to creating a more meaningful life.
— Brian Johnson
Soulivity
