Pride
President Ezra Taft Benson expanded the definition of pride
beyond thinking that someone is better than everyone else. While such
selfishness is part of pride it does not fully define it. Pride involves
enmity, either enmity between God or one of His children.
There are many subtle ways that pride can sneak into a
relationship whether it is with your spouse or other relationships. Pride can
take place in the form of lack of understanding, fault finding, cold
shouldering, being unforgiving. President Ezra Taft Benson’s talk beware of
pride explains in more depth the dangers of pride as well as how we can avoid
it. Below is a link for you to read it in its entirety.
More important that being aware of pride is being aware of
how we can overcome it. Pride stems within a person when we allow the natural
man to affect our feelings about another. Pride becomes much less influential
as we recognize it at its stem and take actions to change. I recently completed
a reading assignment for another course, I read the book, Happiness by Matthieu
Ricard.
In this book Ricard provided the reader with several
practical applications that can help them overcome pride and other actions that
lead to unhappiness. It is through replacing these actions with positive ones
that people are able to discover and experience true happiness and the peace
that comes along with it.
One powerful way that we can eliminate pride from within
ourselves is through striving to see the other’s perspective. Try to see the
other’s potential and intentions rather than dwelling on how their actions
affected you negatively. It is important to forgive people for the little
things that they do to offend you, they may not even be trying to offend you in
the first place.
Try today to be a little less prideful than you were
yesterday, simple daily improvement is life changing overtime.
Resources:
Gottman,
J. M., & Silver, N. (2000). Die 7 Geheimnisse der glücklichen Ehe.
Düsseldorf: Von Schröder.
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