These “who am I to” statements came from a place of fear – fear of risk, fear of judgement, fear of getting hurt or embarrassed or shamed.
This voice of my inner critic is trying to keep me safe. I understand that.
But by trying to keep me safe, it keeps me small. It keeps me from growing and evolving and becoming the most realized version of myself.
I recently realized that he first letters of the phrase “Who am I to” represent the message of the phrase itself very clearly: W.A.I.T.
Self-care is what keeps us feeling good, both mentally and physically. When you feel both physically healthy and mentally strong, you are able function at a level that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. I’ve written before about why self-care and self-advocacy are not selfish. It allows you to effectively and resiliently support all the people in your life who are counting on you.
How, then, do we introduce more self-advocacy and self-care into our busy everyday lives when we’re so often focused on everyone else?
You know how it is when you’re so excited about something you can’t stop talking about it? That’s how it’s been for me these past few weeks after reading The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks.
If someone mentions a worry, BOOM – I bring up how worrying is a strategy employed by our upper limit problem. If I notice someone deflecting a compliment, ZIP – I swoop in and explain how our inability to maintain positive emotions is tied to our perceived self-worth.
It feels particularly serendipitous that I stumbled across this book and its description of the upper limit problem this month, because it perfectly aligns with our current theme of letting things go.
When I speak to groups of students or educators, I make sure to touch on self-compassion as an important part of mindfulness practice. Typically, I begin with the statement above, shortly followed by, “…it’s not working, nor is it doing what you think it is.”
I start my overview of self-compassion with this because the experience of mentally beating oneself up is rather universal in our culture. Just about everyone does it, and I would guess that you do, too.
Negative self-talk and the inner critic are so pervasive because many people see it as useful. Some people even resist being gentler with themselves because they think self-flagellation is how they “hold themselves accountable” or “stay in line” or “teach themselves a lesson” when they mess up.
You might feel that you are too busy to stop and consider this question. I understand. You might not actually want to know the truth of your experience right now. I get that, and I realize it can be uncomfortable and perhaps even scary to find out what the answer to the question might be.
Just yesterday I was sitting on a metal stool, eating my lunch at a counter. Everything was fine, and then I got a sharp pain in my left leg that felt like a bug bite. That was manageable, but the pain caused my leg to jerk to the side, thereby whacking it on the stool leg and creating way more pain than the original sensation.
I swore like a sailor (because profanity is one of my guilty pleasures), rubbing my leg until the pain lessened adequately, and continued eating my lunch. Then, as I was finishing up, I took a swig of my seltzer and some of it went down the wrong tube, resulting in that kind of coughing that is more reminiscent of eye-watering and gagging noises than anything else.
Then the burst of rage came.
