How do you listen to yourself and how you listen to others? This is perhaps an unfamiliar exercise, to observe the filters through which we are hearing ourselves and others. It affects how we interact with the world.
I was personally confronted this weekend. My default listening (you know, that pesky inner voice we all have) was saying to me, “I am inadequate. I’m a small, helpless Chinese girl who should be seen and not heard!” This is outrageous compared to the reality of who I say I am in the world. That is, a woman who is committed to helping women achieve prosperity in their lives; prosperity in their health, wellbeing, finances, community and the world. Who I say I am is another voice I can and DO put into the mix, it is the one I can choose to believe as the truth.
I know I am an amazing coach as I know I have helped facilitate people changing their lives. The women I coach take bold actions and lead amazing lives. When it comes to myself however, I don’t always listen to as powerfully. Like anyone else, I can easily slip into negative thinking about myself. Then I read feedback from clients that say, “You changed my life! Because of you, I quit my job and am creating the life of my dreams.” And I am reminded, maybe she’s right, how dare I wimp out on my commitment to help women create amazing powerful lives?
When I stop believing in myself, I stop believing in the future I create for myself and for others. I also know that when I’m “on” (as in taking action), I am energized, creative, fun, and building miracles in the world.
So why do I trip into my default listening as frequently as I do? Perhaps I have not been responsible for my listening of myself. I am noticing how often I put myself on the bottom of the totem pole of care. Take care of myself? Ha! I’m frequently too busy and promise myself to do it later (but I inevitably don’t). Well that does not work inside of my commitments and it doesn’t work for me to that anymore.
Take a look for yourself: Where are you short-changing yourself? Where do you need to start a new inner listening to block out the default one?
Now my personal manifesto for me is to create a new conversation for myself and to keep repeating it until it becomes my new default conversation. This is not easy to do alone, as we have seen the inner voice can cause havoc. This is one reason I created the Prosperity Accountability Groups. Imagine a group of like-minded women meeting every week and reinforcing the listening you want the world to have of you?
So where do you think you are failing? What do you say to yourself in that unguarded moment and is it empowering you? Get out of that default listening and get in touch, I would love to hear from you.