The Inner Voice

Just to update people on my life, I gave two weeks notice at Mimi's cafe this week. I was really tempted to just quit, but decided to go with the more responsible thing, and gave two weeks. I had been thinking about quiting sometime soon because its a lot to manage to have two jobs and go to school, but I felt sort of bad about it because when I was hired I had told them I would be able to work through the school year. Then a funny thing happened. I got in like a petty fight with my boss. This is something that's never happened to me. Make-out with my boss; yes, but fight with them, never. As fights go, it wasn't really too exciting. But the interesting thing was, that it made me completely hate the job. What I realized though was that I'd always sort of hated it, but had been lying to myself about it. I'm really good at lying to myself. I have a whole system which I would like to share.

When I was younger I had some pretty serious problems with anxiety and depression. When I went to college the problem sort of peaked until I found that I really couldn't stand myself. Through a combination of therapy, talks with family, and just thinking about it myself, I came up with a very successful cure for myself. See the problem was that I had very high standards for myself, so when I had successes, or achievements, I didn't celebrate them, because I figured, "of course I could do that, its only what's expected of me." But when I didn't meet my standards, it was devastating. I was really hard on myself and would look back on why I wasn't able to do whatever amazing thing I thought should be easy for me, and blame different characteristics of my personality and tell myself how dumb, or lazy, or weak, or careless, or spacey, I was. The dialogue I had with myself was extremely negative. So here's the cure: stop saying mean things to myself. Be as nice to myself inside my head, as I would be to anyone else. I can still look critically at my performance, but I have to be gentle in the way I address areas for improvement. And I need to congratulate myself for the things I do well. So I've found that by complimenting myself during tasks that I don't naturally enjoy or feel comfortable with, I can fool myself into thinking that I actually like them. It's never a complete illusion, but I can at least endure most anything.

Since I'm recommending this program, let me explain a more relevant way to use it. Pick something you dislike about yourself. For the example I'm going to use messiness. I've been really messy lately and it's something I'd really like to work on. So I have a belief that I'm a messy person (right now, not always). What I'm going to do is start noticing all the times that I do clean things. It doesn't happen all that often, but every now and then, I find I put my clothes in the hamper right when I take them off. What I will do is make a big deal of these occasions in my mind. I'll tell myself how wonderful it was, and how good I should feel about myself for doing the clean thing. When your just starting the program, it helps to assign a time interval during which your going to notice at least one positive thing about yourself. So every hour when I'm home, I'll think of one clean thing I did recently. Maybe not everyone is as manipulatable as I am, but for me, as I realize all the clean things I do, I start to change my belief that I'm a messy person. And then, almost magically, I won't be a messy person anymore. Please try it.