This tip takes the concept of motivation further by examining how we talk to ourselves.
I’ll start by sharing a story. Every night my husband cleans the kitchen and loads the dishwasher. Every morning, I unload the dishwasher, make breakfast, and clean up anything that needs cleaning, like wiping the countertops and washing the pots and pans. Some days, when I see the dirty pots left to wash, I just do it and it’s no big deal.
But some days, it can suddenly become too much for me. It can trigger some pretty strong feelings – everything's out of control and now cleaning the kitchen is impossible and I struggle to get started. Obviously, it's all in my head, in the way I'm perceiving things, because I'm able to do it some days and not others.
If I tell myself to just power through, just do it, or if I chastise myself for not being able to get started on something I do every day, something I should be able to do, then I start to feel really worthless. Maybe I can power through and clean everything, but because I talked to myself so meanly, because I wrapped my self-worth up in my ability to clean a few pots, it affects how I show up to everything else in my day. It affects my interaction with every person I encounter and it colors how I interpret every event, because everything is viewed through a lens of my worthlessness.
My point is that how we talk to ourselves matters. And we absolutely all say things to ourselves that we would never in a million years say to someone else. We can be really mean to ourselves.
Sometimes we’re so used to the reaction, that it’s like a reflex. It’s so sudden that we don’t even realize the mean thought we told ourselves – we just immediately feel overwhelmed and frozen and feel really bad. And we think, this is just how we are and that we can never change and then we feel even worse – more stuck and more like we can’t get anything right.
But that’s not true – we can build our awareness of our thoughts, feelings, and behavioral patterns and we can start to form new patterns and build new reflexes that serve us better.
So, what can we do instead? Let me continue my story!
On those hard days, I ask myself why is it hard today?
Maybe it's because I feel stressed for time. Or maybe I'm just feeling tired. Or maybe I'm feeling the weight of the world on my shoulders.
Then I decide something that's really important. I decide not to beat myself up about why I feel that way. I decide not to tell myself that I'm worthless, bad, selfish, lazy, etc. for feeling the way I feel. That would just make me feel worse and make everything harder. Instead, I just let myself feel that way. I tell myself that it’s ok.
Then I prioritize what I can do and what can wait. Sometimes I'm able to do everything after I give myself grace and accept my feelings. Sometimes I don't clean anything. Sometimes I come back and clean everything later. Sometimes my husband runs the dishwasher for a second time that day for the pots and pans. He delegates the dishwasher to clean those too (which is actually what he probably planned to do all along).
The world doesn't fall apart and I don't let my ability to clean the kitchen (or not) define my self-worth and ruin the rest of my day.
What's funny is, even on the good days, I tend to make breakfast while I empty the dishwasher and get both done pretty fast. But sometimes my timing is off and I find myself rushing between all the little tasks. But I did that to myself - I decided to multitask and added an imaginary timer. So, I can also decide not to do that when it's not working for me.
Just like you can start to listen a little more closely to how you talk to yourself and you can decide if that’s helping you. And if it's not, you can decide to talk to yourself differently.
It can be really hard to do it on your own and if it's resonating with you and negative self-talk is getting in your way maybe it's time to schedule a consult.
I want you to make a choice and decide how you're going to talk to yourself through the rest of these tips to make them work for you I'll be back tomorrow with another one.
Comentarios