never_quit’s BodyBlog

I am realizing that I will never accomplish my larger goals in life if I don’t acknowledge all the little goals reached along the way! My inner critic dismisses all my little accomplishments with such phrases as, "it’s not good enough" or "I should have done more" and turns positives into negatives, which then become a no win situation. Why continue if no matter what I do it is not good enough? SO! Constant reinforcement of the positive! Some people may not relate to this at all, and I ENVY you! But for me, it is a constant battle.

Part of the battle is allowing myself to be human, and to not have completely unrealistic expectations. Unrealistic expectations just guarantee failure, which in turn reinforces the inner critic. That inner critic is like a maniacal nightmare zombie that keeps getting up, and that is what I have to do to beat it-kill it every day over and over! Because you see, it will eventually stop coming around every day, it will get tired of me killing it over and over. I will get better at stopping it, and do it easily-and when he stops coming around all the time then I’ll have time for visits from positive guests

I need tools to kill the negative zombies! The more tools the better! One tool that I remembered from a class I took once is a nice little positive daily ‘perspective check’ that consists of 4 simple questions. You see, when the negative zombies dismiss all my small daily accomplishments, they go in for the kill: they attack my self worth. Once they nullify the small hurdles of my daily successes, all that is left is defenseless me. I’ve done nothing good, what I did do was so small and pathetic that it was worse than doing nothing, I don’t even deserve to try or to even hope that I could ever do anything positive. All I deserve is pain and agony and being miserable and maybe that will make up for being such useless trash.

So-to change my perspective and fight to protect my self worth, I will ask myself 4 little questions every night:

1. Who loves me? As I start listing people that love me, I realize that the list is much bigger than I realized, and that I admire the people who love me and value their opinion…so maybe I’m lovable after all? And the zombies lose strength…

2. Who do I love? Again, the list starts growing-larger than I realized as I think of family members, family members who are in heaven, my animal companions, friends that I have in my music world and so many friends in my karate circle…and maybe I go back and add some of those people to the first list… I’m loved and I love… and the zombies lose strength!

3. What did I do WELL today?! This is what changes my focus and my skewed perspective and sucks the power away from the zombies and gives it back to me! This is where I DON’T GIVE THEM MY POWER! Last night I asked myself this and yesterday I taught my trumpet student and gave him a good lesson and he got better. Every time he told me what he COULDN’T do I asked him to tell me what he COULD do! A 10 year old kid! And he is already being attacked by the zombies?! And I learned from my student-I took what I was teaching him and used and applied it to myself What else did I do well today? I let down some emotional walls with my husband. I shared with some close friends how very much they mean to me. I remembered this daily exercise and actually did it and shared it with other people. 

4. What would I like to do better tomorrow?  And this question is great-it is phrased in such a positive manner and makes improving yourself a wonderful motivational circle. What’s my kneejerk way of doing this that guarantees failure? I list all the horrible things that I did-"I ONLY lost 1 pound last week, I didn’t work out yesterday-I’ll try and be less of a total waste of air tomorrow…etc." NO! I’m so tired of this going on in my head! So, I’ve listed all the things I did well, and tomorrow I would like to do these things better: I would like to work on my homework some more, I would like to do another 30 minutes of aerobic exercise, I would like to spend 10 minutes stretching again-that felt great…etc.

The nice thing about this site is that it is another tool to accentuate the positive. There are other people out there fighting the zombies-and it is much easier fighting them with help than alone!

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 27th, 2008 at 9:45 am and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.