When there are guests at the Cotswold Coaching Retreat for a one day workshop retreat, we often look at 'the story of ourselves' as a way of understanding what might be causing a lack of confidence or paralysing guilt. It is a great way to gain insight and clarity into who we see ourselves as and who others might see us. What is better is that people soon come to learn that your story is not set in concrete but can be written with a new storyline and a better one...
What I mean about Your Story is the description or label that you tell yourself you are. For example: I'm no good at intimacy/ I'm the dumb one in the family/ I can't speak in front of a large crowd... the list goes on. Normally these types of stories have come from some point in our childhood and more often than not from someone close to us whom we deeply respect or whose opinions we value. And then we hold onto that description/label and as we grow and develop our identities, that label becomes a part of who we are.
Note: it does NOT have to be who we are. It is a label we have picked up and forgotten to discard. And that is where the joy begins. To understand that whatever label we are choosing to carry around as part of our identity can be discarded at any time, if we choose to let it go! And then we can begin to write and develop our new labels and identities; we can create limitless potential by choosing to be: the successful one/ the confident one/ the one in a healthy relationship. How fantastic is that?
My colleague Lisa, from Holistic Health wrote very eloquently on the same subject after a Mojo workshop retreat the other weekend. But what I wanted to add to this is the idea that perhaps what most things come down to is balance. Those things which we often berate ourselves over or put ourselves down about are often good personality traits which have got out of balance: being organised is a strength, but being paralysed by mess or not being able to cope with a sudden change of plan shows this strength is out of balance. If we are able to identify the early signs of being 'out of balance', then we have a fighting chance of it not taking over and becoming a negative or crippling aspect of our personality.
I would like you to give yourself a break. Take a look at what you might be getting down on yourself about and think about how it could be something positive and worthwhile that's got a little out of balance. By taking this different perspective, we allow ourselves to gain distance from it and it becomes more manageable to change: you don't have to become a whole new person, you just have to rein in an otherwise very useful or positive element of your personality...
Trackback(0)
TrackBack URI for this entryComments (0)
Subscribe to this comment's feed
