Our thought life is very important. However, many of us don’t enough attention as to whether what we are thinking about is true when it comes to negative self-talk. Work and life can get so busy that it feels as if you’re constantly on a treadmill and you just keep on going and going, unable to reach the stop button.
Because of this, negative thoughts such as ‘you’re not good enough’, ‘who do you think you are?’, ‘everyone else is better than me’, ‘they won’t select me’, ‘I can’t do it’, and so on… take control and we start to believe it.
Believing these things, can make us not pursue the careers that we want. Or we do, but we don’t do it to the best of what we are capable of, because we’re so consumed by those negative, unhelpful thoughts that have shaped our belief.
This doesn’t just apply to introverted women, it can apply to men and to extroverts too.
Sometimes we distort things
I regularly have clients who feeling anxious and lacking confidence when going for promotion interviews. One of the big worries for many of them, is how they come across. Many have thought that they come across as foolish. But when we take a deep dive into their previous experience, there is no evidence to support this.
For one client who believed that they came across as foolish, they had been unsuccessful a couple of times and thought that the panel thinking they were foolish was the reason for this. When I asked them what feedback they had been given, they said they hadn’t had feedback.
I was then able to challenge them as to why they thought that they came across as foolish, when there was no evidence to support their belief. This helped them to shift their perspective and seek out feedback.
No longer believing that they came across as foolish, they were able to go into interviews more confidently.
Another client was feeling anxious about an interview, appearing foolish was one of the concerns she was worrying about. Challenging her about this, I asked her how many interviews she had experienced in her career, and there had been a lot.
However, when asked about how many of them she had come across as foolish in, there had only been one, and she got the job. Do you really think that if she had come across as foolish that she would have been offered the job? Neither did she after reflecting on what I said.
Many of us do this. Distort reality and blow things out of proportion, letting our thoughts and beliefs hold us back, or get in the way of being our best selves.
I hold my hands up to this too
I too am guilty of this. Ten years ago, when I did my first webinar, I had 34 people on it and asked for feedback from participants, to rate their experience on a scale of 1 to 5. The majority of people rated it a 4 or a 5, and one person rated it a two.
That was it. I totally ignored the 33 positive reviews and focused on that one rating of two. And I thought to myself that I’m not doing any more webinars as I’m clearly not good if rated it so low.
The negative self-talk gremlins had a field day as I dissected the webinar piece by piece, reading through all the comments, to identify where I went wrong. And I felt the stress and anxiety from it rise.
But thank God for self-awareness. Being quite self-aware, I quickly recognised that I was self-sabotaging. I was focusing on the one negative piece of feedback to the total exclusion of the 33 positive ones. With this realisation, I put the situation into perspective.
I went to bed that evening much calmer and no longer feeling stressed because of it. Furthermore, when I woke that morning, I had received two emails from participants thanking me for the webinar and letting me know how much it had helped them.
Imagine, if I hadn’t had the self-awareness to stop and challenge my thoughts and put things into perspective. I could have been plagued with a lack of self-belief in my ability to do this, and my confidence would have taken a big hit. I may not have gone on and done all that I have achieved since and may not be writing this article for you today.
Likewise, if the clients mentioned hadn’t challenged their thoughts and beliefs about coming across as foolish, they (like the many different examples that I could give) may have continued to get in the way of themselves.
Give consideration to your thought life and make the time to step off the treadmill to pause and reflect on how helpful or unhelpful your thoughts are. Just because you think it, it doesn’t automatically mean that you have to believe it.
What unhelpful thoughts have been holding you back or getting in your way?
First published on LinkedIn.
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