Well, it’s the new year and everyone is making new year’s resolutions. I love the optimism people have at the beginning of the year. The excitement people feel with goals they wish to attain. This is the time of year when most people’s determination matches their actions. This is the winning place. This is the place where goals are met. Stay there!
If those plans fizzle around the middle of February 15th, Regroup and imagine the goal again. What you wanted to accomplish and why. Then devise a new plan and start over on February 20th. It’s easy to say, “I’ll start back later.” But often we don’t. We can’t sit around wishing for good things to exist, goals don’t get met without a plan. Give yourself a break if you are burnt out. But set a date. That’s what January 1st is isn’t it? It can be any date you choose. Just don’t abandon it. We are creators of our own happiness. We hold power within us to completely redefine our lives. But so often we give up just before we start to see results. We will reap the benefits of what we work toward. Cause and Effect. It works with good intentions and bad ones. So, we should keep our mind focused on what we want the future to look like.
My mindset held me back for years. When I fell off working on a goal for a week, or a month, I saw it as failure, and stopped completely. Instead of coming up with a revised plan and moving forward. Every day is a new beginning, a new opportunity. We can start over every day if we must.
I now choose to see those bumps as lessons instead of failures. Lessons of what not to do. Plans don’t always work the way you think, and it’s good to relook at them from
time-to-time and refresh. Stir up some new excitement.
For much of my life I did this continual cycle of setting goals and quitting instead of revising my plan. I wanted so badly to get to the bottom of why I sabotaged myself. I did some deep soul searching for answers to why I held certain ideas and had little faith in myself. Where did that come from?
I was ready to break that thought process.
I spend almost all my spare time drawing or painting. It is such therapy for me. I put my earbuds in and can work out anything going on in my mind while I create. I was struggling with why success seemed unattainable to me. And when I did succeed, why did I have imposter syndrome for accomplishing it? So critical of myself. I realized I had been that way for as long as I could remember. I decided to go back in my mind to the first time I ever felt that way, and why.
It was when I was in the first grade. My first day was a Monday and my dad dropped me off. I didn’t get to spend much time with him, and I cried the whole day because I knew I wouldn’t see him again until next time. And there I was in a new school with new people. All alone as far as I felt.
My teacher was as mean as a hornet, and I had to spend 5 days a week with. Math terrified me, hell it all did! She would have us answer problems in front of the class. As someone who was extremely shy already, this brought anxiety a child should never have dealt with. I would rather have died at that desk than be on display for my newest friends to witness my lack of understanding.
You don’t make a lot of friends after that. I had a hard time with comprehension and froze up for tests. I had shit teachers from 1st -5th grade. I didn’t have a teacher that was interested in knowing me personally until I was in 7th grade. I’m sorry, but that is pathetic!
As I got older my failing grades were ammunition for my brother to pick on me too.
He was smart and seemed to breeze through school with good grades, while I struggled to get a C. As a child you hear conversations about you between the adults in your life. My teachers were constantly meeting with my mom. Which only reinforced the idea within myself that I was a failure.
We become boxed into beliefs that we stay confined in. Before long that is how we view ourselves too. The more we hear and think about something, the more we believe it. If I know anything to be true in life, our thoughts greatly impact our outlook. I was a straight A student for a time when I lived with my dad. My stepmom was a teacher, she had me on my homework as soon as we got home, and she helped me patiently until I got it. She made me feel good about myself and the accomplishments I made. That was the one and only time I excelled in school.
I learned differently than others, and some kids really need one on one. Public school has a way of expecting everyone to learn at the same level, in the same ways. Not so much these days. But when I was growing up little was known about learning styles or customized teaching. I would also completely shut down after doing one thing for a long time.
I am still that way.
Even when I’m working on a project or writing, which are my favorite things to do. Stepping away and doing something physical keeps my mind sharp when I go back to it. I saw this as a parent. All three of my boys had different learning styles. It took three different methods to keep them focused. One of my boys wanted to get it all done at one time, he was easily focused and a fast learner. With another he needed to have short spurts of a lesson. Solve a few problems and give him a break. He was more like me in that aspect. Shorter focus time, because the need to move around wasn’t something he could shake. My other son was just a wild child that had rules of his own. So that took a completely different approach.
I began to discover where these ideas of myself developed, and they weren’t true. I wasn’t a failure, and I wasn’t dumb. I loved learning as an adult, and I challenged myself to new skills all the time. But I was learning on my terms, and not within the confines of the standard method used across the board.
I had low opinions of myself for far too long. So, I began to reshape my opinion and my expectations for my future. Negative self-talk will play over and over and at some point, just become who we identify as.
We can connect with our inner child and resolve so much we carry and change the trajectory of our course. For me, I set out to find out what that little girl needed. If I had been an adult in my life as a young girl, what would she have needed from me? I needed encouragement and someone to take interest and believe in me. I carried false ideas around like an old suitcase well into adulthood. Just a heap of baggage and shit. Dragging it around my whole life.
I’m not placing the blame on anyone. That isn’t at all my intention with this post. I lived with my mom growing up, but spent a lot of time with my grandparents, aunts and uncles, and my parents’ friends. Many teachers I had also constructed the narrative that began in my mind. Looking back, several of them had no business working with children! My mom wasn’t equipped to deal with a child with sensory and social issues and a learning style out of the ordinary. That was in the 80’s and early 90’s. Very little about psychology was known publicly. I think some adults in my life thought I was just rebellious. Which I did become that way. I didn’t set out to do that, but it was how I dealt with it.
When you feel like you aren’t understood and heard, a teenager tends to act out. That leads to a victim mentality. Which is where I found I lived for way too long.
I knew I had to let those mindsets go if I ever wanted to excel in life. Going through my childhood and feeling all those emotions that I had as a child from my adult perspective was as healing as it would’ve been if I had shown up to that little girl back then. It was so healing. I began to see all the wonderful attributes she had, a tender heart and compassion for others. She had curiosity and endless possibilities for what life held for her. At one time failure had never entered her mind. It was like all at once, she met me, I met her, and we healed together.
We are shaped with ideas of who we are, how we fit in and who we become, by our experiences and environment. But we can reshape what that looks like at any time. We don’t have to live within the confines of our upbringing, or our circumstances. For heaven’s sake, encourage children! Believe in them. Support their interests! Any negative self-talk you deal with may not go back to your childhood. It may be linked to a job, a relationship, anything.
I’ve gone back to this same practice to understand many negative thought processes to get a better understanding of myself. From body complexes, insecurities, and the need for approval and acceptance.
This is a new year, and I’d like to challenge you to examine your self-talk and narrow down where the negative is stemming from. Where did it develop? Because we can put tape on a broken pipe, but until we fix it, it will continue to leak. Eventually it will flood the house. After you identify the problem, you can reconstruct it. This is a new chapter. I believe in you!
You are powerful and can change anything you set your mind to. Even years of negative self-talk. Tracing it back to where it started was one of the most healing things I’ve ever done. There were other courses of action I put in place to combat the negative thought pattern, knowing the root cause of it made it easier.
Too many people have achieved their dreams. They aren’t special. Many of whom had the odds stacked against them. They just knew what they wanted and kept their eyes on the prize. So, my hope is to inspire you to examine what has held you down. Not to begrudge who caused it, change the narrative and proceed to win. Because without new perspectives we not only hold ourselves back, but all those whom with we hold influence.
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