AuthenticityDialogue’s

SHRINK RAP

                   Number 2                      

How To Get Out Of Your Own Way!

Repeated negative life experiences or failed performance may bring negative self-beliefs as well as negative expectations for the future.  Failures wear a groove into one’s self-belief that colors your present and your prospects for the future.  Attitudes of self-rejection, self-criticism, and pessimism solidify the message that one is not acceptable, flawed and incompetent to the core.

What is needed to break that solid rock is ACCEPTANCE; the calm acceptance that I am good and worthwhile even though I could improve.  The opposite of  calm acceptance is agitated self-rejection, that comes with anxiety, nervousness, anger and self-disgust.  A huge amount of energy is expended when we work ourselves into a spiral of self-criticism.  We must see some hopeful light within the tunnel.  Without that light, there is only the darkness of “what’s the use.”  Light emerges when we are aware of the difference between what we do and who we are.  What we do may be negative and faulty.  Who we are is the best we can be at any given moment. 

Try this out on yourself!

First Step: Who Am I?

Write a list of answers to the question “Who am I?”  The object is to write a long list quickly without censoring.

Second Step: Note Those Things I Like/Love About Myself.

Third Step: Note Those Things I Don’t Like/Hate About Myself

Fourth Step: List What I Do Best.

Fifth Step:  List What I Do Worst.

Self-hatred, self-rejection is the resistance that gets in the way of the energy needed to change.  My acceptance is not approval of my faulty behavior; it is simply a letting go of resistance against myself.

Acceptance is the present and change is the future.

Sixth Step: Do some simple problem solving for yourself.

What I do Now                                     Consequences of What I Do Now

I am living with that now…I could probably go on living with it!   BUT I would like things to be different.  How I would like to be different?

What I’ll have to do to be different.      Expected results of such change.

Am I willing to change or should I keep things the way they are?

CHANGE OR DON’T CHANGE…. 

DO NOT TRY TO CHANGE*

(“Do or do not, there is no try.”  Yoda, The Empire Strikes Back)