Tag: self-awareness

How do you talk to yourself?

Many of us tend to engaging in negative self-talk. It happens often unconsciously, we are so used to doing it without questioning it.

Watching my favorite show, The Great British Bake Off, I noticed this behaviour among the candidates as well, many times, men and women alike. Putting themselves down, being overly self-critical or calling themselves “stupid” when making a mistake.

I did that myself many years of my life, thinking that I needed that sort of criticism because I messed up so often. Well, let’s face it: messing up is part of being human. It’s totally normal to make mistakes, but in my mind it was not because I expected perfection from myself. 

Since then I have learnt a lot and moved on. What I focus on now is doing things in a slow manner for starters and not judging myself when I make a mistake, whatever it is. Beating myself up is not going to change what has happened anyway. But it releases stress hormones in my body, damaging my wellbeing in the long run. It’s not worth it.

This reflex is hard to stop though. Human beings are innately judgemental, towards themselves and others. It’s so easy to point out the obvious: what went wrong and then to punish ourselves or somebody else for that mishap with words. Children pick it up from their parents, and might still experience at school that mistakes are followed by ridicule and punishment.

Doing things slowly and focusing on what I do, one thing at a time, is a good way of preventing mishaps in the first place. Whether it is at work, while cooking a meal or communicating with others. It requires intention, concentration and being present. No multi-tasking.

When I am not present but being somewhere else in my head, that’s when mistakes are bound to happen. That’s why rushing in stressful situations is never a good idea. 

Ambulance workers for example don’t rush when they arrive on the scene of an accident. They are very intentional in their movements and that requires a lot of training and self-awareness. This approach certainly serves the people needing their help best.

Just keep good spirits when things are sometimes difficult, everything will work out later, and nobody can do at the beginning what he would like to do.

Vincent van Gogh

But once I (inevitably) mess up I try to stay calm and breathe, and then continue on with whatever I was doing. No blaming, no complaining, just taking a few breaths and then calmly continuing. No need to wreck my day by making myself feel inadequate.

That I managed to get this far is a huge achievement already. In the past I used to call myself an idiot. I have moved beyond that since.

I am human thus I am not perfect and I don’t have to be. And that’s what I am telling myself.

The temptation to get angry in that kind of situation is of course always there. Any deviation from my self-expectations can trigger me easily. 

A big recurring challenge for me is when my day does not go according to what I planned. Hardly any day unfolds according to plan, in fact. This is just my normal reality and I decided that getting angry with myself over it is not helpful. This has now become my practice of accepting a degree of uncertainty in my life and going with the flow. 

No chiding myself. No judgement. Be open. Just breathe and let go.

I repeat these words quite often in my head.

Good point in fact: don’t forget to breathe. In stressful situations I tend to hold my breath, therefore I give it extra attention.

That’s step number 1: quitting negative self-talk and allowing myself to make mistakes.

Moving on to positive self-talk is step number 2: acknowledging and encouraging myself. You did good. You’ll be fine. It’s ok to feel that way. 

It takes a while to internalize it, but things do get better. It takes awareness and constant practice. As always, I really need to make an active choice to change my behaviour and aim to responding instead of reacting.

Be a lamp to yourself. Be your own confidence. Hold on to the truth within yourself as to the only truth. 

Buddha

Accepting life as it is. Accepting what is (Byron Katie). Accepting the inevitable.

It sounds easy but is so hard. It’s a very big deal, in fact. It makes you humble, realizing just how fallible we humans are and that nothing in life is a given.

We do not need to know or understand or be able to fix everything, or to slide through life perfectly well. These were once my beliefs I setup as a child. I let them go since and found more peace. They are still surfacing sometimes but they don’t control me anymore.

Riding the waves of life, navigating the everyday currents is essentially like bouncing up and down. This practice takes courage, acceptance and humility. 

The only thing we can do is trying, every day again, to do better tomorrow and to treat ourselves better. 

And acknowledge our small victories every time we succeed. 

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The story I am making up in my head…

As Brené Brown puts it in her fantastic book “Dare to Lead”: making up stories is what the human mind is designed to do. We have the need to make sense of something we do not – or not fully – understand, so we fill the information gaps with our own interpretations. Sounds familiar?

We all experience it. It is bound to happen almost daily, because we usually only have part of the information which we actually would need to assess a situation or a person’s behaviour in a proper way. 

And what comes into play here are our own fears and insecurities which determine the shape of the story unfolding in our head. What we do is more or less brainwashing ourselves, sending us into a negative spiral quickly getting us into a bad or defensive mood. It may leave us feeling hurt and often causes needless conflicts with others. 

It happens many times a day and everyone does it, in every context, if work related or in personal relationships. To move to the point of becoming aware what we are doing and why, then stop for a moment and reflect on the story we just made up is not easy and takes a lot of practice.  

It is definitely worth it though to do some regular “fact-checking” of our self- created stories, because it can give us a spin into a different and more positive direction. It can avoid conflicts. It can make a difference in our day and determine how we sleep at night. It can give us a feeling of achievement if we manage to beat the odds from time to time, and moves us closer to developing a healthy, positive habit interacting with our fellow human beings. 

Some weeks ago I became aware of it again while reading these chapters in Brene Brown’s book and applying her advice to a work situation. Having had a conversation with my manager earlier who – even though sharing my concerns – reminded me to give a colleague “the benefit of the doubt”, was a starting point making me realize that my thoughts and interpretations were filling indeed an information gap. I certainly did not know the full story. We never can. 

That’s why it is so important not to assume too much about other people’s intentions. There is always a reason why people do what they do, and the easiest way to find out more is actually to ask them. We can and should always ask more questions.

Even knowing that, I also noticed how hard it is to get out of this blaming habit, and how easy it is to just keep on giving out about others who are not doing what I think is right, and get worked up about it. I try to actively stop myself each time I fall back into that behaviour in a stressful situation, but I don’t always succeed. Yes, it’s hard.

Don’t believe everything you think

Katie Byron’s “The Work” offers a similar concept. She proposes to ask ourselves certain questions whenever we are assuming too much – and usually negative  – about a person’s intentions or a situation. Questions like: “Can you absolutely know this is true? What does this thought do to you and what would you be without it?” It leads to more self-awareness pinpointing our behaviour of making up stories.

There are several different ways to get to more self-awareness which is the first step toward influencing this seemingly inevitable behaviour. Once it becomes clear that we are the creators of our thoughts we can take control. We have the freedom and also the responsibility to decide otherwise, even if it takes more effort and is easier said than done.

Ultimately, it is about deciding how we want to communicate with others. What feels better for ourselves and is in sync with our core values: being antagonistic, judgemental, getting back at someone – or being kind but setting clear boundaries? 

We do not fully see people until we know their values. (Brené Brown)

What Brené Brown calls “the assumption of positive intent”, she defines as “extending the most generous interpretation possible to the intentions, words and actions of others.” (Brené Brown, Dare to Lead)

Which means that it makes our lives easier once we are assuming people are doing the best they can, instead of thinking they want to annoy us on purpose. We can never know it for sure of course, but assuming others’ positive intent is certainly the better premise to start from. It ties in with having a glass half full approach, believing that most people are indeed pretty decent.

And once we take this approach we are often in for a nice surprise, realizing that the perceived problem might in fact not exist outside of our head, and a a completely innocent or touching explanation is at the heart of the matter which got us so worked up. Showing someone else that we care to know more about their reasons can strengthen our connection to them. 

Wanting and trying to understand is human, however, the manner we employ to get to this understanding is up to us.