Friend or Saboteur ~ What is Your Relationship with Yourself (Part 1)

As a life coach, what I've learned about myself and others is that we are often our own worst enemy.  It's not the external obstacles that stand in the way of our personal happiness and success, but often, it is you and me. 

In this five part blog post, you are going to explore your relationship with yourself.  We will look at five habits in detail, and you will learn how these habits can work for or against you.  You will learn to avoid self-sabotaging behaviors and instead be a friend to yourself.  As we visit each of these habits, I invite you to think about who you are in relationship with yourself.  Are you a friend to yourself, or are you a saboteur?

Habit #1 is managing our thoughts and beliefs.

A saboteur fails to manage negative thoughts and beliefs.

Our thoughts and beliefs come in four different forms, and they can best be remembered by the acronym G.A.I.L.

The G stands for Gremlin.  Basically, your gremlin is the voice of negative self-talk.  It is that chatter that goes on inside of us that will do anything to sabotage our happiness, and convince us that we are not quite good enough.  A great book to get you started on understanding and managing your gremlin is "Taming Your Gremlin" by Rick Carson.

The A stands for Assumptions.  Have you ever made a decision or made a comment based on an assumption, only to find out later that your assumption was wrong?  As I'm sitting at my desk working, my son says to me, "So I guess you don't want to practice baseball with me."  He has assumed that I will not stop working to pitch some balls to him.  Assumptions are dangerous so always clarify before turning an assumption into a fact.

The I stands for Interpretations.  An interpretation is your personal spin on a particular event.  Again, it is not necessarily accurate.  So you're working on a project that your boss gave you, and you realize that you're confused.  You walk into your boss's office to ask him some questions, and he gives you a dirty look and says, "not now!"  Your interpretation is that he is a jerk and he doesn't want to help you.  So you go back to your desk to try and figure things out on your own.  You never stop to consider that maybe he just received some bad news, and he's not in a position to help you in this moment.  Which interpretation is more empowering?

The L stands for Limiting Beliefs.  A limiting belief is any belief that holds you back from living into your full potential.  One of my clients is also a coach, and she has recently taken an interest in coaching doctoral students that are working on their dissertations.  In order to reach these doctoral candidates, she has to call on highly competitive universities.  One day she told me that she wanted to make a list of all the universities that she had a connection with.  This would be the list of schools she would contact.  I couldn't help but wonder why she wouldn't just contact all the universities in her area.  After questioning her about it, we uncovered a belief that she couldn't get an appointment with a dean unless she had a prior connection.  In other words, her credentials were not good enough to obtain interest from the dean.  This is a limiting belief - it was holding her back from getting in touch with all the college deans.

When you are a friend to yourself, you think positive and empowering thoughts.