I wanna be brave, and kind, and … How you can too leverage the beauty from within & change to be all that you want

I recently watched the movie Divergent. It is about a woman in a dystopian world where society is divided into fractions. There are the intelligent ones, the brave ones, the kind ones, the honest ones and the selfless ones. Children grow up in one fraction with their families and then at a certain age they all do a test. This test determines which fraction they are part of from that moment on. However, they can also choose something else.

The woman however is different. Her test does not lead to any result, because she is called divergent. A person that belongs to more than one fraction. Later on in the movie there is another person, who also turns out to be divergent.

I won’t go into too much detail about the movie, to not spoil too much, but there is one quote within the move, that I like a lot and it comes from another diverget person in that movie that says:

I don’t wanna be one thing. I can’t be. I wanna be brave, and I wanna be selfless, intelligent, honest and kind.”

I love that quote so much, as it shows all the beauty that we have within ourselves. And there are two essential concepts it reminds me about that I want to share with you in this article.

We can deliberately choose to be what we want to be

We sometimes believe ourselves to be fixed. To have specific traits. And that is “just us”, this is “just me”. I cannot change myself and maybe I also do not want to change myself. It is exhausting, and I don’t like it. I am fine with how things are.

It is the easy way for sure, but it is also a sad way. A sad way as we never experience what else we could be, what else we are capable of. I can for example say “I am a shy person, that is who I am”. Or I could say, “I am really afraid to go out and meet new people, I am just not brave enough to do that”. Or I could say, “I would love to learn to code, but I was alwas bad in math and I am just not good enough for it.” We have these sentences and beliefs in our mind that give us an understanding of who we are. And often these beliefs let us believe that we are one thing or the other. In the case of the claims above, they let us believe that we are shy, afraid and dumb.

What do we do? Do we keep going through life being shy, afraid and dumb?

How our beliefs decide how we act

Those beliefs do something with us. They determine how we act, what kind of decisions we take and how we interact with strangers, friends and family.

I called myself shy when I was younger. And people would call me shy as well. Whenever there would be strangers around me, but also family members or even sometimes friends, I would not be able to look them in the eye, I would hide behind my mothers legs when I was very young, and later would stop talking, I would look down, I would freeze, I would leave the room, I would mumble-wumble my words and nothing would come out, I would get red in the face, I would start sweating and would look for any way possible to leave that interaction as soon as possible.

Because I believed that I was shy, I depressed everything that would have allowed me to free myself from my own reaction to the situations at hand. Indeed, I perpetuated my belief any single time when there was an interaction. “I am shy”, I would tell myself and that is why “I cannot build friendships”, this is why “I cannot have a normal conversation”, and that is why “things always turn out so badly when I meet people”. It was a self-fulfilling cycle where my own belief let to more of those interactions in which I acted that way, which then supported the belief further.

And with that cycle, there can fast be an even deeper layer of beliefs. Not only the belief of shyness, but then, when each interaction turns out the way it does, by people leaving and being irritated, the layer of “people do not like me, something is wrong with me”. And this is what happened to me too. I fell into that cycle and believed that something was innate wrong with me. Somehow I could not interact with people and so they would not like me and so they never like me and so if they never like me, there need to be something wrong with me and not with them, so there is something wrong with me, then I have to fix my wrongness or otherwise what else is there to do? (I am not a therapist, so if that is too deep for you, stop reading and find a therapist) I never had suicidal thoughts but by writing this, I realized that there is a chance for people to have them at this point and so want to make sure that no one comes to the idea to have these thoughts, simply because of a spiral of negative thoughts. Because there is a way to get out of these beliefs. It worked for me. And it can work for you too.

But let’s go back. You see, how easily a belief turns into a whole direction of additional beliefs. And how these beliefs shape how we act, how we decide and what we do.

Due to my “shyness” and my experiences with my shyness, I anticipated me being shy in various situations and thus I did not participate in a variety of activities that may otherwise would have proven to prove my un-shyness. Instead, I stayed in my shyness mode. “I am too shy, I cannot go to that event, people will laugh at me”, or “I cannot go there, I am so sweaty when there are all these people and then people will see the big watery round below my arm, that looks weird and they make even more fun out of me” and so on. With that mindset and belief, for sure, I missed many beautiful moments and events, simply because I could not let go of that belief.

And the danger is that even if we at some point realize that we are growing and starting to behave differently and are seen differently, it is difficult for us to let go of what we believed to be ourselves and our identity. So often, it is us who holds us back more than anyone else does. It touches on our innate wish to be understood, safe and us, being a “self”. If we take that away, it feels, that there is nothing left that defines us.

And how we can change our beliefs to decide differently

This however, again, is a belief that is not treating you well. It is an attached mindset. It’s a belief that attaches you to words you need to define yourself and to create an identity around yourself. It is a fixed thing. “I am shy”, “I am dumb”, “I am what I am, I cannot change that”.

But yes, you can. And that is beauty of it. You can change exactly that belief. As you can change any other belief that is there. It is a liberating feeling to do exactly that. and that is why I love that quote so much. Because it allows to make a deliberate choice to change a belief. And to say: “I want to be brave” or “I want to be kind”. It is this internal willingness within us to be and act in a way that is desired by us and then act accordingly. It is the beauty of change.

This sounds easy, right? I agree, it is often not easy. It is a long way to let go of beliefs that hold us imprinsoned in our own mind and being. Beliefs that are so ingrained through our own actions that it is the actions itself that we need to change to change our beliefs. And changing actions is not an easy endeavor to do. We need to be able to look at our own actions and determine how we do specific things — unadorned and honest — , how our own behavior supports specific beliefs we hold and then lastly to change that behavior step by step to match what we intend to be. But the more we do that change, slowly, step by step, the more we change our actions towards what we want to be and then we are able to change our beliefs.

When we do that work, though, then we let more beauty into our life. And that is, why I love that quote a lot as well.

The beauty of us being all we want to be

When we realize the change that we can intrigue within ourselves, we free ourselves from the convention of being in a fixed being. We free ourselves from the iea of being able to being only one thing, or more things, but fixed things. Like the people in the movie. They are fixed to being one thing and only one thing. They can be either brave, or selfless, or intelligent, or kind, or honest. But they cannot be all of it. And they cannot chose for them themselves. They are fixed into these categories and they are not allowed to change. External forces do not aloow them, but also internal forces keep them from allowing themselves to allow for that change from within.

Through our ability to see that “shyness” or “being afraid” (compared to real fear in dangerous situations), or “being dumb” (compared to our IQ definition, which is a different topic) are characteristics we give ourselves through our own beliefs, we are able to let go of them and practice to change them to other beliefs like being kind, and brave and intelligent.

And when we want to go even one step ahead, we may realize that we do not need these categories for us, but instead they describe how we act and how we decide. They guide our actions, because we deliberately decided that this is how we want to be. For us and for ourselves.

And then we can be all this. we can be kind, and smart, and beautiful, honest, brave and selfless. We can care. Care for the world, care for ourselves, and care for the beauty of change from within. And there lies real beauty. Beauty from within.

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Did you like this article? Did it resonate with you? I would love to hear about your view on it, your stories, your experiences.