A slight Shift
An interesting side-bar to last week's study, and this weekend's activities. This weekend I spent a lot of my time collecting data so I can feel organized, and my wife wondered if I was over-doing it again, and here's what I met up with. My organizing was about evaluating myself again. Being prepared. What I decided is that it is true, I am evaluating myself again, and I always have. My entire focus is still "how well am I doing what I am doing?" and last night I realized that it's time to focus on what I am doing for the client, the relationship, and not how well I am managing the relationship and being a provider. To my mind it goes like this: I am much more highly emotional than I have presumed. to the point that I want to stop evaluating anything about myself. Evaluating is about feeling. I am much too much overwhelmed by judging how I am feeling instead of WHAT I am feeling! AND, to stop evaluating everything according to what I am doing. Let me try again: from an entrepreneur's point of view, what does the person I'm interacting with need? What needs to be done here? Not how well will it feel to do something? Or, is it the correct thing? ("Correct" being an emotional evaluation.) It is me becoming aware of just how much of my mind is about feeling, and not thinking. What needs to be done here in front of me; not how do I, or will I, feel about it? It is a pole-swap. It is slowing down to become aware. The "slowing-down" is the managing the emotional reaction viewpoint and habit from the typical "excitement over how am I being judged" to "what needs to be done, no matter what the feelings is. It's like numbing the need for feelings. at least for everything I am doing or contemplating doing.
I'll go now, so I can evaluate how well I am able to do this change in habit today.
Ooops!
I'll go now, so I can evaluate how well I am able to do this change in habit today.
Ooops!
Replies
Hi Rich,
Good for you about recognizing all of this. I think that is one of the hardest parts for self, identifying our own behaviors (and at least for me, irrational thoughts). Organizing is a huge thing for me, too. It is a never-ending goal, lol. I actually love that topic, and I can definitely go overboard with it. Sometimes I think I forget that the point of organizing is to function better, that is, the goal itself is not just to organize, lol.
Anyway, I digress. LOL about your last remark! :-)
Keep the Faith!
Shar
Yeah, Shar. I feel the organizing is about getting it \"right\", and not looking \"stoopid\", both of which are evaluations.
The one strange thing, or idea, that stood out today was a very simple question of myself: \"Am I enjoying what I\'m doing?\" I\'ve never stopped to ask the question before, I don\'t think; at least not seriously. And now may be the time. I find it hard to enjoy the things I\'m doing when all I do is evaluate how well I\'m doing whatever I\'m doing to decide if I\'m doing it well enough to feel good about my efforts. (W...T...F...!!!) It\'s hard to enjoy myself when I\'m being watchful and critical, of my own self-consciousness.
I did struggle today with catching myself returning to improved thinking, as in: \"Let it go, \'we\' don\'t think like that anymore.\" Or \"That\'s just negative fear-thinking, you\'re making too much out of it. Stop doing that.\" I feel the lesson of \"stop evaluating myself\" is a good lesson for me to learn. It\'s not always about me, but it has always been about EVALUATING me! The reason I have been so self-conscious IS that focus on how well I am doing whatever I\'m doing, and the \"I MUST be doing it WELL\" thinking and feeling in order to justify feeling happy with what I did.
It seems it\'s always been about feelings, even though I denied the feelings by hiding behind logic and reason as a distraction from how I am feeling, which would probably be negative, and negative about myself.
One of the lessons I give others is that all \"addicts\" use substances to feel better and block bad feelings, and it seems that \"over-thinking\" was my drug of choice to distract me from my feelings of evaluating myself as \"less-than-best\" by feeling better about being able to explain how everything is organized and makes sense. \"Making sense\" feels good, being \"understanding\" allows me to tolerate blocking how I really feel, which is not good, due to the evaluating all the time.
It would probably be a good thing to stop doing...Ya Think?!
I feel it is time.
Now for the saving mantra; telling myself: \"I don\'t do that anymore!\" and mean it.
Yeah, too. I thought you\'d get the alluding to the mindful awareness in that last line. \"Pay attention to your thoughts, Right?\" \"Listen to how you\'re talking to yourself.\"
Am I Happy? That\'s the question. What am I doing to feel happy? And then if I\'m not doing the things I need to feel happy, who am I blaming if I\'m not blaming myself? What am I doing if I\'m not doing things to make me happy? What am I doing instead? And what\'s my excuse for doing it and not doing something else?
I need to stop now to organize my thoughts about this to see if I understand it well enough yet...Ooops!
;-)