“Do Your Best”

Is what I find myself saying in support of the small boy as he walks up to the door to school. I notice that this is not how I communicate with myself. Listening to the monologue of my inside-voice I was re-startled at the persistent criticism I have begun sending recently in my own direction, minute after minute, hour after hour….
The ‘I should have done this’s” & “I’ve forgotten that” and “I should have done that so much better” & “To be honest I made a right mess of that” and “what’s taking you so long” and “you should know this stuff by now ” and “that looks sh*t, start again” and “I’m so rubbish at this” and “I should plainly never have started” and “oh look I’ve made that same mistake again”……… This monologue is so relentless that I am surprised that I make it through each day without quitting entirely and going and hiding right under the duvet….. Forever.

Looking at the phrases above there’s a big clue in there as to what’s really going on. Where there are the words ‘should’ or ‘always’ it can signify two important things. 
Firstly “should” can mean that it’s someone else’s agenda that we are measuring our progress against. “Should” is often just “what” and exactly “how” someone in the past has advised us to do something….. And that may well not be our way!
“Always” can signify that internally we have stepped into a victim role in the drama triangle. It may mean that we are assuming a powerless position over something we could actually change if we chose to.
So we have choices. If we catch ourselves we can choose a different way to speak to ourselves. We could choose to accept and encourage ourselves as we might do for a colleague or a friend If she is doing something new. We could change our language and replace always with “sometimes” or “this time” or “today”.
So we have choices and we can, when we hear a “should” pause, just for a moment, and examine if what we are saying to ourselves is actually Our belief or metric? Is it actually good enough for today? Is it what we are doing what we really want to be investing our time in? Are we doing it the way they best suits us?
So we do have choices, and if we can catch our internal dialogue in time we can, comment by comment, shift our entire perception of ourselves and our worlds. This has a ripple effect over time and It’s powerful stuff!

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