In December 2022, I was sitting in my office crying my eyes out staring at a photo of me as a 2-year-old.
It was an exercise as part of a wider coaching course to expand emotional intelligence – to look at your younger self and connect with them. Would you have the courage or perhaps audacity to talk to that 2-year-old, like you do to your adult self?
Cue the waterworks…
This course was all about promoting the inner ‘sage’ as they called it. You might know it as the more ‘helpful’ voice in your head, or the white angel on your shoulder. This is versus the ‘devil’ on the other shoulder, the negative voice, or the inner critic. That’s where you’re sabotaging from – the nasty you.
“You’re self-sabotaging!”
We all know this one. Either you’ve said it to a loved one or someone has said to you. Or you might have seen it thrown at someone else in a friendship circle discussion as you all catch up about what’s happening at work or in your personal lives.
The usual way we go about dealing with this is advising our friends, or ourselves, to just stop doing that. Whatever it is.
And then we ask the why. “Why are you doing that?”
The usual response: “I dunno…”
I found my answer in December 2022 to longer term mindset resilience.
The answer is because we have to accept that we have two sides of us. The side of us that wants to push-through, power-up, do-it-differently next time! This side knows there’s more than likely a better outcome for us. But then the other side of us wants to stay-still, procrastinate, push-away, take possessive control, or yield caution (to name a few…)
One is the equivalent of our brain evolving to deal with the reality of today.
The other is the brain that was made for hunting and the cave.
We are not built to deal with the amount of complexities and uncertainty we face in the reality of our lives. Things aren’t getting simpler with humanitarian and technological advances – it’s just getting more difficult!
And it’s led to new norms of our era: self-questioning, second-guessing, doubt, paralysis, self-talk, imposters, maskers (“everything is just fine…”), low self-esteem, low mental-health, unhealthy thinking…
It’s impossible to communicate the valuable lesson to a 2 year-old: Please don’t end up like me, beating yourself up and giving yourself such a hard time.
But there’s a chance to still save yourself.
Or a part of yourself.
Accepting you do have a sabotage inside of you. Whether it’s banging the drums in percussion, or seemingly gently humming the flute – it’s there. It has noise. And by accepting it’s there, you can start to, to use a phrase I rather like – befriend it.
How did I get there to identify and start befriending my sabotaging self? I looked at my child self starinf back at me. I followed instructions in the exercise: talk to my child self, like I would to my adult self. That was when the tears flowed.
And I realised – wow, I’m really nasty to myself.
And then I realised I had to stop this.
It can be an extremely helpful exercise to identifying your sabotaging self. What do you say to yourself most of the time? Try saying it to your younger 2 to 4 year old self… Look at yourself, like me staring into my baby photo.
The more you can connect to your sabotaging self, the more you will see when it rears its ugly head i.e. when you are triggered – by thoughts, beliefs or an event that then triggers a thought or a belief.
By pro-actively becoming more self-aware of when and how we are sabotaging ourselves, the more likely we are to notice it the next time it’s happening and be able to take control.
Self-awareness = more control of response to triggers = potential to dim the sabotaging self.
The opportunity to dim the noise on your sabotaging self will support you to build longer term mindset resilience. If you want to know more about how I define mindset resilience and the first step to building mindset resilience then check out my previous article: How Elastic is Your Mindset?
