Today is my regular life mentoring day. In this work I am able to emphasise my ability to work with people who are determined to change their live around.
That’s a wonderful thing. Although it often involves digging in deep to their inner voices to understand what judgements are being played out. Because those often emphasise the negative rather than the positive. I know that this is true of me too. Most of my life I have compared myself to a long list of shoulds, musts, oughts and duties. I call these my SMODs. They have tangled me up in all sorts of situations where I should have said no or walked rapidly in the opposite direction. Yet I didn’t. Mostly because that list shifts the responsibility for everything onto me. Not leaving it with the people it really belongs to.
The list tends to emphasise all the expectations, opinions and judgements that other people have of me. I have run around time after time trying to please everyone. Or believing that making people happy, contented, safe or well off was my job. That’s how powerful these SMODs can be. Of course all I was doing was setting myself up to fail. It took me a long time to realise that I can’t make other people happy. Or take responsibility for the life they choose to end up with. Though I did try my best for a long while to juggle my life to meet the needs of almost everyone else. Until I realised that all I ever emphasised was my inability to do what I thought I ought to.
By th time I recognised that I had to emphasise something else I had nearly exhausted myself. My light had gone very dim.
I had wandered into a dark place without really knowing how I got there. Finally I started to listen to my inner conversations with myself. They seemed to be full of negative judgements. I blamed myself for all sorts of things I had no control over. And I noticed my tendency to be very hard on myself. So hard that I wouldn’t let myself say nice things about myself. Even my talents and skills were being ignored or rubbished. No wonder I was in a mess. Or that my life emphasised my apparent failures. The Universe was sending me what I asked for. Plenty of it. And I was stuck.
Until I decided that it was time to change the script. To talk to myself with praise instead of criticism. That’s not an easy shift to do. I found that I had years and years of judgements to shift. The SMODs were buried so deeply I wondered who I would be if I let them go. Because I knew I would be different. But that was a frightening thought too. However, I started to focus on the positive feedback I was getting. I also spent a lot of time going through my list and crossing off lots of stuff. I kept reminding myself that I had choices not duties. Every day I looked for something to praise about myself. I said thank you to myself for all sorts of big and little things. Finally I learned to challenge the negative voice. And reject what it was saying.
To emphasise positives sounds easy. Yet I know how hard it can be. It’s worth doing it though. I came back into a light place. I found a new me. Now I love sharing that me with the world. Are you shining as bright as you can? Or is it time to find the positive, powerful new you?
Day 568 of my blogging challenge