Wow, what a month! I am not sure about all of you, but for me, the month of May 2021, was a doozy. Now I am not going to get into all kinds of details about the pros and cons of my month, I do however, want to share with you the personal mental growth I had. Hopefully you can get something out of it.
First of all, there were no new posts due to glitches with the program. It has taken me hours to try and figure out. Extremely frustrating and I would often have to look up the definitions of the instructions so I could follow them. To no avail, until, one day, today, I log in to clear out spam and the white screen of death was gone and here I am posting.
Yayyyy Universe
OK, personal growth. So many of us I find, are trying to find our way in the world and do our part as a participant in society and in our community. So many of us are doing our very best, and even with low anxiety, are able to fight through anything seemingly difficult. For many years I was the person with much self doubt on many of my capabilities. This is called a lack of self confidence. It wasn’t until my state of mind or my state of thinking started to get me down, that I started to think about the why.
Personal Experience
As we know, in the world, there are many different cultures, many different personalities. Some people have the ability to just have worries roll off their backs and others absorb them. The same goes with criticism. I recently was faced with a whole lot of criticism and much of it was unexpected, leaving me feeling blindsided. I reacted ok at first, however, at a certain point I started to react defensively and could feel my emotions getting the best of me.
For the sake of privacy I am not going to talk about the details, but my reaction was tense. When I left the situation after, and was alone in my car, the tears and feelings of incompetency came flooding out. I literally had a break down crying.
I felt overwhelmed with emotion. It was so hard to process. I had a stopover at my favorite spot at the beach and called my best friend.
I told her the whole story from one job and the intense scene that happened there and feeling blamed and criticized as if the whole incident was my fault, to the second job, where the blindside of criticism came after 5 months working there and having know idea the owners felt the way they did. My best friend is what I needed. She listened as I broke down some more and offered support and agreement where I needed it the most.
Once home I was still very emotional. As a recovering perfectionist, I am constantly re-evaluating and because I thought I was doing a great job the criticism hurt more. I know I had internalized and went to defensive state. I reacted because I did not want to disappoint and by being critisized, I felt bad as I disappointed. This is internalizing as failure. It is NOT.
I told my youngest son who could see I was not in the best state of mind. He said one thing,
“I can see it in your eyes mom, your mental health is worth something!”
I had to give that some thought. I was processing, going over the past situations in my head, thinking about my emotions, and why did I end up feeling this way? What were the triggers? I even spoke out loud to the voice recorder on my phone, playing it back to hear what I was saying. I was trying to blame outside reasons, look at the other persons faults to lesson mine and I tended to get louder as I felt my character and self image getting threatened.
To cut myself some slack, I realized that I had a full day of criticism and needed time to process. My brain couldn’t handle anymore. I realized that I had many things that I did right, and I was of value. It was the perfectionist in me that was hurt, because I felt as though I failed somehow, when in fact, that was so far from the truth.
The best part of this experience was the awareness I had. Talking about it and sorting through some of the details. This had helped me process all the great I really did have and to start focusing on the positive, rather than the negative.
Being to hard on yourself
You are of value and have tons to offer
I believe that our past influences, have a large significance on how we are today. Any negative statements made to us before we are even in school have great impact on our psychological state. We tend to be hard on ourselves when we make one bad decision. When we grow up and hear negative comments about ourselves either personally or for our work, we tend to internalize it and all our childhood memories of negativity rise up, then leaving us emotionally done.
In the moment
Give yourself time to process and stop negative self talk
I was listening at first and paraphrasing the person criticizing. I acknowledged and apologized for giving off that vibe. Then, as the criticism continued I could feel my emotions crack. I could hear myself getting louder. That was pointed out, as I was told this was elevating them. I wanted to give reasons for the faults they were speaking about, and found myself getting defensive. I started to feel hurt, and offended and all I wanted to do was run. Fight or flight, for me flight.
I stuck it out though.
In hindsight, I think we need to give ourselves time. Acknowledge the critic, take a deep breath and try not to justify what was said and deciding if it was true or not. After, you can say your side of the story and be willing to apologize if needed. Stop the negative self talk and remember it is an opinion. You can decide if you need to make some personal changes and definitely try not to dwell on it.
Moving Forward
We can learn and growth comes from mistakes
One thing I have to remember and I want you all to know, we can learn from our mistakes. We don’t want to spend energy on all the wrong things we did or wrong things that happened. I had to make sure that I take personal responsibility and learn to handle things with grace and be the bigger person. I often tell my boys don’t try and figure out who to blame but rather look for solutions. I also need to realize that feedback helps us grow. Feed back doesn’t always come gentle and we need to remember to:
Take feedback with the head and give feedback with the heart.
Let me know in the comments below if anything like this has happened to you, and what did you do or how did you handle it? Please tell me if anything said here helped you in anyway. In the meantime, stay real, stay positive, have courage and never give up!
