Overcoming Your Doubts

Have you ever noticed voices in your head?  Our ego - our sense of self - has multiple parts including a cast of Inner Protectors.  These Inner Protectors’ job it is to keep us safe. Back in the day, they helped us determine who was friendly and who was not, how we should behave, and in combination with our instincts and intuition generally kept us from getting eaten or murdered.

For most of us, the level of daily danger and peril has really come down in the past few thousand years, but our Inner Protectors are still on the job. Today they’re the source of our doubts and limiting beliefs.  When things are going well and we’re functioning inside our comfort zone, these voices are quiet.  But contemplate something new or different, something “dangerous,” and these inner protectors start talking.  The bigger the change or the further outside our comfort zone we contemplate, the louder those voices become. 

I’ve identified 3 main voices for me:  a Risk Manager, a Critic, and a Skeptic.  You may have some of these same voices or perhaps you have an Image Consultant, a Judge, a Cynic, or a Cry Baby.

The picture in my mind’s eye of the Risk Manager is an old-fashioned banker.  He wears a dark pin-striped suit and smokes cigars.  He’s very condescending, and wants to make sound decisions.  When I decided to leave a corporate career and start a coaching business I felt strongly that if I didn’t do it now, I never would.  My heart was in charge of the decision, so I had to spend a lot of time arguing with my logical and data-driven Risk Manager (and a few friends), who said,  “Hmmmmmm… you do read the news, don’t you?  We’re in a recession; do you understand what that means? You don’t have unlimited money, and you’ve never run your own business.  This sounds risky.  I need to see a budget and business plan.”

When I think of my Critic, I see the Church Lady from Saturday Night Live.  “Well…aren’t you just special? There are thousands of coaches; why would anybody hire you?”  It took me a year to get a website up and running because nothing was ever good enough for my inner Critic.  

My Skeptic voice is quick on the draw and has a panicky edge.  I was at a seminar in March, and walking into my hotel room after a long day I had an epiphany.  That’s the only word I can think of to describe the feeling.  A voice – strong and sure – said “I’m going to get 100,000 people to contribute to Women for Women International in a year.”  It came out of the blue, but the voice and the goal were so clear.  Just as I was thinking, Wow, where did that come from, another frantic voice screamed:  “How the hell are you going to do that?”  It hit me upside the head and was so immediate and adamant, it made me laugh.

My Inner Protectors are there to keep me safe, but I used to give them too much power.  They kept me from taking chances and pursing my dreams.  So I had to develop a different strategy:  I turned them into an advisory committee.  When those voices pop up, I just say, OK, I’ve got a pencil and paper, I’m listening, give me your list of concerns.  The Risk Manager usually wants more information, the Critic is concerned about quality, and the Skeptic wants to know the plan. 

Those things then become part of the solution rather than being unmovable obstacles that stop me in my tracks.  Try that strategy next time you hear an inner voice planting seeds of doubt and tickling your limiting beliefs.

Room For Growth

Mom said to me yesterday, don’t get old – it’s hell.  I said, too late!  Even though I’m getting older (and aren’t we all?), I aspire to be like my friend, Gary Schmidt, who said to me today that he always wants to be learning and growing. 

The pairing of learning and growing results in evolving – stretching, making adjustments, and incorporating new ideas and new information.  However, if you’re toting around a heap of baggage accumulated over your life, you don’t have room for anything new.  Like an emotional hoarder, you’re trapped by things that aren’t serving a purpose in your life now, but are unwilling or unable to let go.  

A dear friend, Michele, was just diagnosed with breast cancer as well as a growth on her thyroid.  For many of us, these diagnoses would be frightening and paralyzing. She’s viewing it as a wake up call, a challenge, a call to arms.  Actually it’s the latest in a series of wake up calls she’s gotten lately starting with a car accident a few months ago, but now she’s finally listening.  Michele told me the emotional wall that she had built up to make her feel safe has just fallen away.  All of those thought patterns that she clung to like armor such as having to prove herself to people she doesn’t even care about have just disappeared.  She’s become more accepting of herself and feels more powerful than ever. Unfortunately it took a crisis for her to come to that realization, but she’s there now.  This is enabling her to be strong and brave facing the fight to regain her health.

What about you?  What are you hoarding?  Do you have relationships which are draining you but don’t serve you anymore?  Do you have long-held beliefs that are now habitual?  It’s one thing to have a belief because it honors one of your core values, and it’s another to live your life on auto-pilot, never evolving from your experiences. 

I don’t watch a lot of reality tv, but I confess that I enjoy Gene Simmons’ Family Jewels on A&E.  I’ve watched it for the past few years, but this season Gene’s family life has undergone a seismic shift.  After years of living his rock star lifestyle, he’s had to confront the consequences of his bad-boy behavior when his ‘girlfriend’ of 28 years and mother of his two children, Shannon Tweed, has come to the realization that she wants something different for her life after the kids left for college.  They’re each having their own mid-life crisis taking them in two different directions.  It’s been sad yet thought-provoking to watch Gene confront his long-held beliefs about family and about being married.  Faced with the crisis of losing Shannon, he’s found that those beliefs aren’t serving him anymore.  They aren’t delivering the deep-down results he truly wants for his life now.  This season’s episodes showed him traveling back to his birthplace in Israel to meet family he never knew he had and making peace with his estranged father at his graveside, as well as getting therapy back in LA which has brought to the surface how he really feels about his family and his role in it.  In the finale filmed months ago he proposed to Shannon, but recent articles say they’re still estranged.  He may have been too late.

Are you on auto-pilot?  Will it take a crisis to create your shift or can you identify and let go of aspects of your life which aren’t working for you anymore?  It could be a career path, vampires disguised as friends, old beliefs which served as armor to protect your wounds, or even the pursuit of old dreams which may have been what you wanted 20 years ago but aren’t anymore.

We often aren’t even aware of the baggage that’s not working for us. Like making assumptions, which I wrote about last week, they’re ingrained and unconscious. If you’re not getting the results you want, it may be time to start listening to your life in the Now.  Contact me for a 30 minute complimentary session, and let’s start clearing out your baggage.