If you hate affirmations, you have three choices right now. 1. Hate-read! That’s always fun. 2. Stop now and spend the next ten minutes reading or doing something else. 3. Activate your curiosity and hear me out.
You’re right, affirmations are dumb. It’s dumb to lie to yourself and try to hypnotize yourself into something that you know isn’t true. That’s not how I use affirmations, though. I use them, but first I put them through my process of inquiry. Aren’t you lucky that I’m going to share it with you? (Here you could practice an affirmation: I AM LUCKY, and ask yourself whether you believe that is generally true, or only just now). I am happy to make affirmations about my personal values, because I’m reminding myself of things I believe are important. I AM PATIENT, I remind myself, the few times that I need a reminder. I value patience and I practice it. I’m fine with giving myself credit for that. On the other hand, I would not do the affirmation I AM BEAUTIFUL, because I don’t give a care. That’s not a quality that matters to me. In fact, I find the concept annoying. I also absolutely hate the expression “comfortable in my own skin” because every time I hear it, it makes my skin crawl. Like, what are the other options? Comfortable out of your skin? Comfortable in someone else’s skin?? I fit the description - I have a fantastic body image and a very high regard for my physical self - (and see how I sneaked in a few extra affirmations there) - but I certainly don’t need to use other people’s preferred language to express that about myself. I will be delighted when this phrase falls out of favor and I can quit hearing it. That’s another step in my affirmation interrogation. If I generally like the concept of someone else’s affirmation, I will rephrase it and adopt it for myself. It’s poetic. Maybe one person might respond better to an affirmation in the form of a haiku, or a request, such as MAY I BE PATIENT or: I’m getting better At tolerating these jerks Though I don’t want to. I AM A POET! Argue that one if you like. I say if you claim to be an artist, then you are one. Presto change-o. I also think affirmations work very well as missives of gratitude, such as I FREAKING LOVE TACOS or THIS IS MY FAVORITE! Hang around me long enough and you’ll find that I say stuff like this all the time. Pro tip: You can do this stuff without ever publicly declaring that you are doing it, or making any kind of issue out of it. This is especially important if you find yourself amongst naysayers or those who describe themselves as “fluent in sarcasm.” Ha, now there’s an affirmation if I ever heard one! It comes up in dating profiles all the time. I AM FLUENT IN SARCASM. *snort* (That one is definitely not mine. I think sarcasm is very lazy, mean, and not at all funny). The thing about affirmations is that for most of us, our self-image is far behind where we are actually presenting in the world. Try to compliment a woman - any woman! - and watch what happens. She will fight you. It’s like we’ve collectively decided that there’s a moral hazard in graciously accepting someone’s compliment. That’s the same feeling that makes us so squirmy about affirmations. It feels icky and gross. We’re much better at the nasty kind of negative self-talk, such as: * i am an idiot * Or * i suck at this * Or * i should never have come here * If anyone comes along and tries to talk us out of these dreadful thoughts, we feel compelled to argue our point. Please, let me explain to you in meticulous detail just why exactly I suck so much. I’ve spent some time convincing myself that what is truly important is that this other person, this tricky complimenter, is reaching out and trying to make a connection. Rejecting a compliment is more than just rejecting a gift, it’s rejecting a person and telling them that their opinion and their act of caring means nothing to you. Also, what if they’re right? What if, when they tell you YOU’RE SO SWEET or MMM, YOU’RE THE BEST HUGGER, what if they’re right? What if you allow that factual statement to define you such that you bring more of that desirable quality into the culture? What if compliments are people’s preferred way of building a better world? What if they’re... a performance evaluation? This is how I got myself into trouble. I started forcing myself to do public speaking because I knew myself to be a physical coward. <— Negation alert! Part of public speaking is learning to accept evaluations. You have to accept that if people who don’t know each other give the same feedback, then objectively it’s true. For instance: “Nobody can hear you in the back of the room.” Okay, thanks for telling me! I steadied myself to hear a constant barrage of difficult feedback, because I like to challenge and push myself [yeah, you know what that was just now, *nod*]. Instead, people kept telling me: YOU ARE SO FUNNY! Dang. Now how am I supposed to get my head around that? I didn’t agree with this assessment, but I kept hearing it. People from entirely different clubs would say the exact same thing, over and over, that I had “such a dry sense of humor.” I’m still not entirely sure what that means, but what am I going to do, call these people a bunch of liars? I had to accept that whatever it was I was doing, the audience liked it and wanted more of it. Who was I to refuse? As an affirmation, I wouldn’t go so far as to say I AM SO FUNNY, because that’s practically inviting my inner self to step up with an attack and a negation. I can, though, tell myself that my strong points in speaking are humor, research, and informational speeches. What comes out of that kind of affirmation is a resume. It leads directly to a dispassionate and objective assessment of your marketable skills. That in turn leads to better jobs and contributing at a higher level. Is it fair for a surgeon to affirm that I CAN SAVE LIVES? Is it fair to say something like I AM ACCURATE or I AM CAREFUL or I WORK HARD? Can we grudgingly allow ourselves to admit, secretly and in private, that maybe we’re not 100% terrible? If we come across an affirmation with which we disagree, shouldn’t we ask ourselves why we feel that it is not true? Something like I AM WORTHY or I DESERVE TO BE HAPPY? This is how I use affirmations. I introduce something that is new to my self-concept, something that objectively seems to be true. I talk myself into why this is true and why it matters that I agree with it. It’s allowed because we’re allowed to grow and change. In fact, we’re supposed to, partly because it makes life better for other people. Whatever you are, be a good one. Learning to distinguish between different types of inner and outer voices is a key skill in learning how to think strategically and get better at making decisions. What are these thoughts that bubble up? Whose are these opinions that are floating around in my consciousness? Are these voices actually wise, or even correct? Which voice is truly my own voice?
What’s left of this identity known as “me” if I remove all of the anxiety, worry, received wisdom, memes, quotes, naysaying, and other external opinions? My people tend to be almost unbelievably reluctant to make decisions. Sure, everyone can hesitate over the truly big stuff like whether to marry someone, have a child, or go in for surgery. I’m talking about whether it’s okay to throw away a receipt for a single bottle of water or whether it’s okay to delete a junk email. Utterly trivial non-decisions! This hesitation comes from total lack of trust of one’s own intuition, feeling that making personal choices is not permitted, absence of future vision, and emotional overwhelm. The ability to distinguish between the various types of inner voices can help with this. First, let’s identify some external voices. Family naysayers. The closer someone is, the longer they’ve known you, the more negative they are likely to be and the harder they’ll try to quash your every dream and wish. What makes them experts? What credentials do they have? What outcomes and results are they living? Pop culture. News articles, blog posts, memes, posters, t-shirts, bumper stickers, coffee mugs, fortune cookies, and basically anything with writing on it will peddle generic pedestrian beliefs. Anything that commonplace is probably more valuable as a basis for “Do the Opposite” thinking exercises, because that’s the only way any original thought can be extracted from them. “Authorities.” Interestingly, a Realtor will advise you to buy the house, a stylist will talk you into a shorter haircut that requires more visits, an orthopedist will recommend one more MRI, et cetera. Consider whether the person advising you has a vested financial, professional, or reputational interest in that advice. Get a second opinion, preferably from someone in a different field. Note: Just because advice comes from a parent, authority figure, or a poster with a kitten on it doesn’t necessarily rule it out or make it wrong. Please first spend some time using your powers of discernment before relying on a single source. Now let’s talk about inner voices. Professional expertise. People who work in different fields tend to look at every problem through the lens of their professional expertise, which may be excellent most of the time and disastrous part of the time. Many great jokes are based on this problem. We want to pause and remind ourselves that in any given situation, an engineer, a lawyer, an accountant, and an astrologer will probably give predictably specific advice. It’s important to trust your own professional expertise over that of unqualified outsiders WHEN it’s your own field. When it isn’t, don’t let yourself be distracted by your own feelings of certainty and competence, which may be fallacious. Anxiety. Anxiety correlates with intelligence. This means that the smarter you are, and/or the more educated you are, the more likely you are to talk yourself out of anything that feels risky. Where you identify risk depends on your personal temperament. For some people it’s romance, for others it’s finance, for others it’s physical. For my people, the voice of anxiety very firmly orders them to hoard material objects, avoid leaving the house, manipulate their emotions with food, and obsess over rejection and criticism. If the message is “stay awake far into the night perseverating” then it’s the voice of Anxiety that you’re hearing. Legacy. “If you can read, you can do anything” is a bit of legacy wisdom that I carry from a great-grandparent. Legacy is neutral. Sometimes it’s incredibly toxic, sometimes it’s obsolete, sometimes it’s harmless, sometimes it’s like rocket fuel that can propel you to the heights of happiness and accomplishment. Sometimes legacy voices can compete and give contrary, mutually exclusive advice. (After all, decisions are choices and strategy is guesswork. There are no correct answers). Conscience. Attending to the voice of conscience will serve to increase conscientiousness, which is one of the Big Five poles of personality. (The others are openness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism). Conscience asks us to be more thoughtful and considerate, to care for others, to contribute, to apologize, to give more than we take, to act with integrity, to avoid regret. My fascination is when someone reports that the voice of conscience is asking more in a certain situation than the voice of legacy would. Desire. Desire, like legacy, is neutral. Following your bliss is usually harmless, totally fair, fun, and ultimately in service of the greater good. Desire, though, does not always lead to bliss in either the short or the long term. An example would be the massive YES that I felt toward a rental house when my husband and I first got engaged. It cost 25% more per month than the house we moved into. But I waaaaaaaaaant it! Inside of many people is a spoiled wannabe celebrity whose demands will lead to chaos and disaster, no bliss in sight. The voice of desire often pops up as “my body wants.” The Id. The voice of the id is selfish, narcissistic, greedy, restless, jealous, and destructive. The id is obsessed with “respect,” attention, and procuring shiny objects. I saw a gannet bird pick up a slice of pizza on the sidewalk in Iceland one day, and try to swallow it whole, pointy end first. That’s a pretty solid image of what happens when the voice of the id takes over. Certainty. Oooh, poison. The inner sense of certainty is what we want the most when we try to foist our decisions onto others. My students, clients, friends, and occasionally family members try to abdicate decisions onto me all the time. Probably half of my text messages and DMs are of this nature. TELL ME THE RIGHT ANSWER! People absolutely stone-cold hate having to make their own decisions and live with the consequences because we hate the idea that we’re choosing our own future outcomes. It’s a rejection of the gift of free will. Certainty tends to equal stubbornness, stasis, stonewalling, fixed mindset, and, well, simply being inaccurate and incorrect. The only way to predict the future is to create it. The Muse. Many artists of different fields talk about being in a creative state in which the work seems to produce itself. The book writes itself, the painting paints itself, the character takes over while the actor is merely the vessel. I suspect that this is the pre-verbal right brain being tapped. It doesn’t speak in text. Sometimes people refer to receiving this voice as “being in the zone” and I think it also relates to System II thinking. Spirit. Here is where I talk a bit about what I call ‘woo-woo.’ The voice of Spirit speaks infrequently and usually in a baffling, unpredictable way. Spirit tends to demand things of us that are uncomfortable, confusing, challenging, and inconvenient. For instance, I knew it wasn’t Spirit encouraging me to pressure my newlywed husband into a house we really couldn’t afford; it was just desire. Spirit has pushed me to befriend people when I wasn’t in the mood, give money when I felt stingy and broke, and go out for errands at odd hours that then led to weirdly serendipitous meetings. The last time this happened, I went for a walk at 10 PM, gave someone directions, and then found a $20 bill in a bush five minutes later. For the curious, there are perhaps other varieties of inner voices out there. The daimon, as referenced by Steven Pressfield. A tulpa. Ancestors reaching out from the other side. Maybe all of those things at once, in the craziest multi-dimensional cocktail party of all time! It could be fun to pretend, anyway. Ultimately, no matter what inner or external voices someone might be hearing, what matters is how we react. What choices do we take? What actions do we make? Just because a random thought crosses your mind doesn’t mean it’s necessarily your thought, or what I refer to as your “final answer.” It’s unlikely that every possible voice will suggest the same course of action. This is why it’s sound policy (see what I did there) to distinguish between them. Give them names, draw pictures of them, assign them theme songs or mental ring tones. With experience and practice, your own true inner voice will start to speak more clearly and project more volume. |
AuthorI've been working with chronic disorganization, squalor, and hoarding for over 20 years. I'm also a marathon runner who was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and thyroid disease 17 years ago. This website uses marketing and tracking technologies. Opting out of this will opt you out of all cookies, except for those needed to run the website. Note that some products may not work as well without tracking cookies. Opt Out of CookiesArchives
January 2022
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