If you think you are a failure, fraud, or fool and you hate it, because it’s self-defeating and untrue, feel invited to adopt some of the following behaviors and attitudes as your brand-new healthy habits. This blog post is about how to free yourself from the defectiveness life trap and embrace your soft spots.
Leverage #1: Focusing on your positives
If you habitually look at the negatives of yourself, it needs your extra mental effort and will-power to radically change your outlook towards your positives. The good news is that you have the power to re-train your brain. It only needs your firm commitment to purposefully shift your self-attention and a plan how to develop this crucial skill until it becomes a part of your mental repertoire. Here is your quest: From now on, shift your focus away from your flaws and shortcomings and pay more attention to aspects of yourself that you feel good about. Much more attention!
Daily exercises
To train this new and perhaps “uncomfortable” direction of thinking, make it a habit to end your day writing down three things that you like about yourself. It can be physical as well as features of your character or any other aspects of your identity that you are at least ok with. Do it for one week. The next week, write down 6 things you like about yourself. And the following week 9 things. Maybe the things you write down are always the same. Maybe you will come up with new traits and attributes every time you do the exercise. It doesn’t matter as long as you write it down.
Maybe, during some parts of the process, it will be hard for you come up with something. Try it anyway! If your mind plays thoughts that make it difficult for you to acknowledge your strengths and merits, take another sheet or open another document and write down the spiky and unhelpful thought as well.
After 3 weeks, when you have written down 7×3 + 7×6 + 7×9 = 126 times something good about yourself, take a moment and read them out loud. While reading them out, speak with a soft and encouraging voice. Imagine you are talking to your inner child that had been put down by certain people and events in the past. Feel the pain of the child and use your collection of positives like drops of water that you sprinkle on thirsty flower that deserves to be alive. After you did that, open or take out the document on which you noted down your spiky self-referential thoughts. Look at them with compassion and remember, they are untrue and distorted images of yourself created in toxic social environments.
Leverage #2: Accepting shortcomings and paying attention to context
Think about the frame of reference that you use to measure your own value with regards to certain aspects of your personality. With whom do you compare yourself? And who ultimately decides, who is a better or worse person? Allow yourself for a moment to acknowledge your flaws and imperfections. At the same time, bring to your awareness, that no one this planet is perfect. The concept of “personal weakness” always entails a judgement made in a specific social context in which an attribute is agreed to be seen as a strength or weakness. I will give you some examples of how a perceived personal strength or weakness is nothing more or less than a socially constructed judgment.
Thought experiment
Imagine you dislike the fact that you are too open and honest and that you can’t pretend. There are social environments such as PR-agencies, C-level managements and intelligence services in which such a character trait would indeed be seen as a weakness. However, in many other professional contexts as well as in love relations, openness and honesty are usually positive traits associated with success and personal fulfillment. Or another example: Imagine you tend to be super direct, you don’t have the ability to sugarcoat things. In your culture, directness may be seen as weakness because it is perceived as rude and impolite. However, in other cultures, your perceived or ascribed flaw would actually be seen as a strength. In fact, in Germany and other direct-communication cultures, people value directness and the ability “to speak one’s mind”.
As you can see, depending on your frame of reference, a weakness can appear as a strength OR weakness. Now, every time you feel bad about a behavior or trait of yours, you can conduct a simple mental exercise of hypothesizing circumstances in which your weakness could be seen as a strength. Don’t stop looking for the context in which your behavior or characteristic would be perceived as adaptive and positive until you found one. If you train your ability to switch frames, the chances you will feel how liberating this way of thinking can be. Especially, if you asked the question more, whether an environment fits you than if you fit an environment. Start now!
Leverage #3: Sharing negative self-perceptions and getting feedback
This is about your perception of yourself through the eyes of others. It revolves around the fact, that people do not necessarily like you less, because of your weakness. Interestingly, research has shown that people who can admit problems and talk about their deficits to others tend to have longer lasting and more fulfilling friendships. This is because self-disclosure fosters mutual trust and emotional intimacy. Since perceived perfection in others can be quite intimidating, conversation partners may feel the pressure to meet the high standards they perceive in you.
Your quest: talk about at least one thing that bothers you about yourself
From now on and for the next 10 occasions whenever you meet a trusted person, try to share at least one aspect of yourself that you feel insecure about. Since others will most likely feel empathetic and reminded about their own internal struggles, they may start to disclose themselves. The mutual sharing of aspects that one feels vulnerable about will not only strengthen your emotional bonds, but your ability to develop a healthy balance between accepting and changing whatever you may think about yourself. Lastly, because others are inclined to help you put things into perspective, you may be reassured that you are actually much better than you think and that you can finally start to relax.
Leverage #4: Allowing yourself to make mistakes and feel embarrassed
Based on your already formed commitment to liberating yourself from the mask behind you hide engage in the following exercise:
Think of certain behaviors, expressions or displays that would be embarrassing for you if you performed them in public. Think of the safe things that you could do that would provoke the feeling of shame and embarrassment in you without causing actual damage to your reputation. Make list: What is the most difficult and least difficult situation, you could think of? Rank your items. And then start performing them one by one beginning with the least and ending with the most difficult one. Perform at least one situation per week over a period of 8 weeks. Seek places and opportunities anywhere where you are confident the exercise could not be rationally disadvantageous for you.
While performing the shame-inducing act, observe mindfully what is going on in your body and mind. Just observe it with curiosity and enjoy the liberating effect it will have on your soul. It’s like a social sauna. Sweat out the toxins. If you need some inspiration for your portfolio of I-attack-my-shame exercises, here are some examples:
- Put many items on the belt in the supermarket let them get scanned one by one and admit that you forgot your wallet.
- Go dining and call the waiter to complain about the bad taste of the food and refuse to pay or request an alternative dish.
- Approach a member of staff at a supermarket or other store and ask about the location of a certain products while standing right in front of it.
- Spill or drop something in a restaurant or shop and ask the staff to help.
- Put on two different shoes before you leave home.
- Incorporate misspelling and typos in an email or text message that you send to colleagues or friends.
- Ask a stranger for direction on the streets.
- Ask your neighbor for a favor.
Once you have worked off all your items from the list, you will truly understand the wisdom of a German proverb: Ist der Ruf erst einmal ruiniert, lebt es sich ganz ungeniert 😊