Читать книгу Step into Your Moxie - Alexia Vernon - Страница 9
ОглавлениеCRITICS, COPS, AND CHEERLEADERS…OH MY!
People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing — that’s why we recommend it daily.
—ZIG ZIGLAR
Two weeks before my sixteenth birthday, my grandma passed away from pneumonia. The year proceeding her death was one of the darkest periods of my life. I got my first B+ in a math class, due to missing several weeks of school while I sat bedside with my grandma hoping, in vain, that she would come off her respirator prior to her death. Integrating the reality that I may not be as Andrea Zuckerman 90210 smart as I’d been led to believe with the reality that I would have to live the majority of my life without one of my favorite humans, was a bullet train ride into depression for me. And as a theater student, I went big. I plotted what I could do with a bottle of over-the-counter pain pills I had in a medicine cabinet, went on a long drive (because I was too physically and emotionally depleted to consider running away from home), and was prescribed a series of antidepressants (and even a mood stabilizer) — none of which could pull me out of my funk.
Before this episode, I might have been typecast in the role of Sally Sunshinepants. (Don’t bother looking up that reference. It’s not a thing, but it should be.) Sure, I could slide into teen-girl angst from time to time, but overall I defaulted to seeing the positive in most people, places, and things — even while I trudged through some objectively awful experiences. But something happened after my grandma’s death. I stopped working so hard to manage the voices in my head. Instead, when life gave me lemons — in small, mundane ways like getting a mosquito bite, not getting the parking spot I wanted, or being left at prom by my date (okay, that wasn’t quite so mundane. I think my freak-out was pretty justified in that instance) — I ate the lemon and then ruminated on why it was so dang sour going down. In other words, I chose to speak to myself in a way that set me up to feel miserable.
The Orchestra in the Head
At any given moment, most of us are strolling around with one of three voices prattling on in our heads. None of them is really us, and none of them is setting us up for inner or outer communication success. While the presence of self-talk, and the impact it has on how you think, feel, and behave is likely not a new concept for you, if these voices still exist for you and, more important, if you are struggling to manage them, well, then, we need to address them. In this chapter, we’ll jam on how to talk back to them — since they play such a profound role in how we show up and speak up.
The first voice that might be hanging out in your noggin is the voice of the Critic. She’s an unapologetic mean girl. She’s also not very creative. She sets you up to perpetually feel like you are an impostor in your own life and gives you unwanted immunity against your own greatness.
She says things like:
You’re not smart enough.
You’re not pretty enough.
You’re not experienced enough.
You don’t smile enough.
You don’t have a big enough network.
You’re not skinny enough.
You’re not curvy enough.
You’re not hairless enough.
Okay, maybe that last one is just my Critic speaking.
When the Critic in your head holds the mic, you never believe you are enough. You doubt your decisions and the choices you have before you. And, above all, you feel as if in every moment the world is seeing you as a contestant on a reality TV show the minute she lands in the bottom two — and everyone watching, including the contestant, knows she’s about to lose and be voted off. When you let (because it is always a choice) a chatty Critic run the show, you live in your head, disassociate from your body and spirit, and often censor your outer voice — believing that nobody wants to hear what you have to say.
I lead a mastermind group for female entrepreneurs and changemakers who want to use speaking to spread their ideas, grow their businesses, and make a positive impact on the world. The participating women all have the opportunity to film speaker reels and receive photographs of themselves onstage speaking.
I see these women’s Critics show up big-time during this process. Whether a woman is in her late twenties, nearing her golden years, or somewhere in between, the feedback she provides my team when reviewing her materials is rarely related to her speaking content — or even to her performance. What we hear in spades are comments like:
My roots are showing.
My face looks like a drawing on an Etch A Sketch. Can the elevens between my eyes be Photoshopped?
Why didn’t you tell me a wrap dress makes me look like a ruptured pork sausage?
Now, these women are doing significant work in the world, in many cases not only changing but literally saving people’s lives. Many are active in women’s empowerment, and yet when they view themselves speaking, what they consistently see are their blemishes rather than their beauty marks.
Unfortunately, the Critic is not the only voice that likes to eat up our mental and emotional bandwidth and compromise our communication success. She has a bestie, whom I affectionately refer to as the Cop. And the Cop, as Cops are wont to do, polices your decision making and turns everything into a dichotomy. In other words, there are a maximum of two options in any situation — and they are at odds with each other.
There are good people and bad people.
There’s the right vocation; all others are my karmic mismatch.
I can be a rock star, or I can be the roadie.
When our Cop directs the show in our heads, she strives to make everything black-and-white. Sinful or sacred. As a result, we forget that most of life exists in the gray, too often underused, space between these extremes. So much discourse in the world right now is mean, one-sided, one-note, and judgmental. When we have a Cop in our heads, we inevitably are too.
When I began my coaching business, I worked with a lot of twenty- and thirtysomethings who were in the throes of career transition. Many of my clients were habitually changing jobs, as my generation is inclined to do. In some cases, they switched jobs after only six months, or less. One woman, whom I’ll call Ruby, was one such client.
I met Ruby at one of my facilitation workshops. At the time, she had a university leadership position, and she felt stymied by all the institutional bureaucracy. She wanted more substantive face time with students, and she sought tools for facilitating deeper transformation — and this is how she found herself in one of my workshops. When we began working together, she quickly decided she could never have what she wanted in the environment she was in, so she took the opportunity (and a financial step backward) to manage transformational programs for a holistic center in a rural community. Within less than a month in this new role, Ruby felt she had made a terrible mistake. She missed her friends, she missed her coworkers, and she missed living in a big city. And although she loved the vision and mission of her new employer, she felt even further away from her goal of facilitating transformation now that she was a manager and had little interaction with people, outside her small team. Ruby decided to take the first opportunity she could get back in her old city as a departmental administrator, and in doing so, also took her second demotion in less than a year.
When you are a coach, your agenda is always supposed to be your client’s agenda, but I’ll be honest, I had my own agenda for Ruby, though I wasn’t experienced or brave enough to articulate it at the time. I wanted her to realize the role her Cop-like self-talk played in her somewhat manic job-hopping. Ruby, like so many other perfection-seeking women, kept telling herself there was a right job for her — and that everything else was dead wrong. As a result, the minute she didn’t feel cozy in a new opportunity, she bailed, for she interpreted her discomfort as a sign that she was fundamentally off purpose. Instead of living and learning through an experience that was happening for her, she interpreted the situation as happening to her. She also barely moved the needle when negotiating either of her offers — which, while shocking, given that she had taught negotiation workshops, makes sense. She was so mired in her Cop thinking, she had a hard time coming up with creative alternatives to money when her employers failed to concede more than a few thousand dollars on their offers.
In addition to the voices of the Critic and Cop, there is a third, equally self-sabotaging voice. Unlike the Critic and Cop, this voice is usually pretty positive — she is a bit of a frenemy. This voice is the Cheerleader. The Cheerleader is, as the name suggests, extremely adept at cheering you on. She tells you:
I’m cool with my client’s passive-aggressive emails.
I can pull a second consecutive all-nighter to get that financial report done.
It’s fine that I have a big presentation in an hour, my partner is out of town, and my kiddo’s school just called to ask me to come pick her up because she’s got a raging fever. I’ll figure it out. Always do.
Now, in all fairness, the Cheerleader voice, in moderation, isn’t such a bad thing. In moments when we have to bulldoze through something uncomfortable and necessary — our first week at a new job, a negotiation, an illness (ours or somebody else’s), or telling a tantrum-prone kiddo to put her stickers away — we definitely want to empower this voice. However, when we go to her by default rather than by design, ultimately we are going to feel frustrated and tired. It’s going to make us feel like we are playing hopscotch on hot coals, and we are going to get sick, wear out, and step out of our moxie because we aren’t addressing the real issues in our lives. Usually, it means that while we appear almost clown-like, with a smile painted across our faces, inside — even if we are in denial about it to ourselves — we’re one trigger away from unraveling. And when we do, we often verbally flog the person or people closest to us.
That’s why my grandma’s death jump-started such a scary, seemingly bottomless downward spiral for me. Yes, we were bonded at the hip (and ankle and ear — and everywhere in between). Yet in hindsight, I realize that her passing also killed off my Cheerleader voice. I couldn’t tell myself, Everything will be fine, because without my grandma in my life there was a ginormous chasm and nothing, especially me, felt like it would be fine again. Up until this point, my identity was also completely enmeshed in my academic achievement and artistic performance. That B+ started a chain reaction of tectonic movement. But just like a volcano that often erupts in the aftermath of a big quake, the lava (in my case my Cheerleader-like self-talk, which had been masking a lack of intrinsic worthiness), had been building for years.
For each of these voices — and to be sure, many of us (yours truly included) are blessed with an ability to house a Critic, a Cop, and sometimes even a Cheerleader simultaneously — the solution is the same.
We must develop the right, succinct messaging to talk back to ourselves in the voice of the Coach.
Wait, what?!
Yes, we’re inviting another voice into our mental menagerie. But before I unmask her, let me explain why she’s necessary.
Many of us strive to hit the mute button on our self-talk. We erroneously believe that if we put a muzzle on our Critic, Cop, or Cheerleader we can force her into submission and reconnect with our real voice, with our moxie. But as we explored in the previous chapter, it’s not enough to pump ourselves up with affirmations or meditative and visualization practices designed to enhance our capacity for presence. Our Critics, Cops, and Cheerleaders are piping up in response to an underlying problem that must be addressed. And until it is, any and all efforts to quiet these voices — well, they will be as successful as telling ourselves, I’ll just have one scoop of ice cream. That might work if you are in an ice-cream store. But if you are at home, in less than five minutes, one scoop usually leads to an empty pint and a bloated belly. And so it is with our self-talk. When we say to ourselves, Stop it. Use your theater voice, our self-talk whispers turn into the finale of act 1 in The Phantom of the Opera (when the chandelier crashes to the floor).
How Our Self-Talk Impacts Our Moxie
Our communication with ourselves has a profound impact on how we feel, how we behave, and ultimately how we speak up in the world. In her book My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey, neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor (who at the pinnacle of her career had a stroke and worked for eight years to fully recover her physical functioning and thinking abilities), writes provocatively not only about her own harrowing experience but also about the direct relationship between our thoughts and our feelings. And by feelings I (and Dr. Jill) don’t just mean whether we are happy, sad, scared, angry, or bewildered but also how we physiologically feel in our bodies.
As Dr. Jill explains, the moment we have a thought, a chemical is released in the brain. It travels throughout our body, and we have a corresponding physiological experience. In other words, if you tell yourself I am a moron (or a more colorful version of that), then you are going to feel like somebody rubbed your internal organs with jalapeños. On the flip side, if you think I am built for greatness, then you are going to feel like you’re in the final two during the last five minutes of a reality show — and this time you know you are going to get picked — as the winner!
The physiological sensation you experience as a result of your thought is not permanent. Dr. Jill writes that our physiological experience will last about ninety seconds. After these ninety seconds, we’ll have a new thought, and a corresponding new physiological experience. This is great news if we are adept at choosing higher-level thoughts during the many moments when we identify that our Critics, Cops, and Cheerleaders are producing physiological sensations that are mucking us up. Of course, for most of us, this is as simple as winning the Tour de France without doping. After those first ninety seconds, most of us go right back into the same Critic, Cop, or Cheerleader thinking, again and again, and our physiological responses go on loop.
Think about the last time you got up to present an idea that deeply mattered to you. Undoubtedly you had the thought, I’m scared. (There was probably also a dirty adjective on the front or back side of scared.) Then your body reacted. Depending on your wiring, your heart rate may have sped up, your knees may have started knocking, or it may have felt like your large intestine swallowed your small intestine. Yum.
Then, when your ninety-second physiological reaction was up, I’m banking you went, Oh, [insert your name]. You’re [insert the thought that triggers the same physiological response]. This pattern continued, endlessly, like a mockingbird calling out for its mate through the night and into the dawn. As a result, when you finally did speak, you were a hot mess. More specifically, you were in your head rather than in your body, the words you used may have been coherent but it’s unlikely they were particularly compelling, and you almost definitely failed to foster genuine connection with the person or people you were striving to make a positive impact on. You (we all) need an intervention — one you both create and execute. In other words, it’s not okay to do what I’ve been guilty of doing (what most of us have been guilty of doing), which is to read about a new behavior or strategy, say to yourself, Woah, that sounds ah-ma-zing, and then not do a darn thing about it.
This intervention I’m about to share with you works. It’s simple. And really, like any habit that takes a bit of time to create (approximately twenty-one days if it’s a brand-spankin’-new habit and ninety to 120 days if it’s a habit that is replacing an existing habit, which this is), it simply requires a commitment to consistently practice it. And this new habit I’m asking you to create, your self-talk intervention, is inviting in the Coach to talk back, disrupt, and ultimately change the tone of the communication in your head. I promise, this isn’t woo — or high theory. It’s incredibly practical, and it works.
The voice of your new soul sister and friend, the Coach, is curious. She asks you questions that empower you to see opportunities amid obstacles. This part is massively important, so let me repeat it again.
Your Coach always asks questions.
Sometimes, lots of questions. This empowers you to turn your inner monologues into dialogues, rewrite your mental script, and prompt feelings that support your most high-powered speaking. Your Coach, she is a great conversationalist. The more face time you give her, the more you will reclaim your role of protagonist in the narrative running in your head. Through this process, you’ll also be set up to address the source of your unproductive self-talk. Fear. A lack of worthiness. A nagging in-law. (FYI: I have very supportive in-laws, fortunately, but I’ve heard some stories.) Simultaneously, you will boost your self-confidence. And as a result, the way you feel in your body and how you communicate in it.
I want to be very clear. While I want your thoughts to create feelings that lead you to be a confident and competent speaker, I am not telling you that you aren’t entitled to all your feelings, including the gross ones. When somebody constantly interrupts or belittles you, or you experience a devastating loss — a divorce, a death, a dance party gone wrong — punch your pillow, ugly-cry your way through a box of good chocolate, and hug everyone on your contact list who will let you. The only way through what you’re feeling is — wait for it — through what you’re feeling. What I want, as it pertains to your communication, is for you to liberate yourself from the unpredictable moment-to-moment physiological responses your self-talk is producing, particularly when it comes to high-stakes communication. Then and only then will speaking be something you look forward to doing, something you do well, and something that produces the results you want for yourself and others.
So how do you translate all this into practice? In real time? How do you let your Coach talk back to your Critic, Cop, or Cheerleader? Well, for example, if you find yourself being in the audience of your Critic, you might be saying: I don’t have the credentials to apply for the director position in my department.
When you invite the Coach in, she asks: What results have you achieved in your current role, and how do these make you uniquely qualified to fill this new role?
If the voice you wrestle with the most is the Cop’s, she may poke at you with something like: You can stay in a j-o-b that you enjoy as much as a colonoscopy — or you can quit, move into your parents’ guestroom, and try the whole entrepreneurship thing. What’s it going to be? (Disclaimer: About two years into my business, and two years into my marriage, my husband, Steve, and I moved cross-country and lived in my parents’ guestroom for two years. We saved heaps of cash, and we bought our first home as a result. If this option sounds like defeat to you, know it actually wasn’t so bad for my hubs and me, or for my parents — or so they say.)
Nonetheless, your Coach is bored by the narrow worldview of your Cop. Even if shacking up with family is what you ultimately decide to do, your Coach wants you to explore other options before settling on a decision. Therefore, she responds by asking, What are possible third, fourth, and even fifth scenarios I can consider? (Quit and take on some freelance jobs while building my business. Ask to go half-time in my current role so I can take on private clients two days a week.) It’s equally important that you invite your Coach in to pull your Cheerleader out of the clouds and back down into reality. Consider this self-talk messaging.
It’s fine that you are hosting a big retreat during a weekend when both your husband (co-parent) and mother (backup childcare) are out of town. A toddler would make a fun playmate for a dozen women who’ve made a big financial investment to work with you. Yucko. If your Cheerleader is anything like mine, she can be as snarky as she can be sweet. In this case, you could (I did) deal with your equal parts crappy situation (and in my case, delusional impulse solution) by asking: Who are the people constantly offering to watch your daughter, and how can you send out an SOS and ask for some much-needed childcare coverage?
I hope it goes without saying (but I like to dot my i’s and cross my t’s, so I’ll risk being what my uncle used to affectionately call me from time to time, an oracle of the obvious, and make it clear) — when your Coach enters the conversation and asks a question (and sometimes she may ask a few questions), you answer them. No, this doesn’t make you ripe for a psych evaluation. It means you are laying the foundation for stepping into your moxie — by empowering your communication from the inside out. You allow yourself to dialogue with yourself, as long as is necessary, until your Critic, Cop, or Cheerleader retreats and your Coach is left alone to host the show in your head.
POWER UP YOUR INNER COACH
Directions: As you’ve read this chapter, you’ve likely realized that your Critic, Cop, and/or Cheerleader has had a lot to say to you over the years. In your journal (or, if you prefer, you can download a worksheet at AlexiaVernon.com/MoxieBook), identify the message that most often appears in your head when you find yourself thinking about stepping into your moxie. Then identify whether it’s coming from your Critic, Cop, or Cheerleader.
Example
Message: Lex, you are a sorceress of suck, and you have nothing of value to offer the world.
Whose Voice? The Critic
Then identify the question your Coach can ask when this voice starts to speak. The question should be short, easy to remember, and able to fast-track you back to being in your moxie.
Example
COACH’S QUESTION
• What’s a moment of personal awesomeness I can remind myself of?
Now it’s your turn!
Not sure what your Coach can say to reset your power in the moment and, ultimately, long-term? Here are a few of my favorite Coach questions, by category.
Favorite Coach Questions
FOR CRITICS
• What’s a more accurate depiction of myself?
• What would I say if [insert name of loved one] talked about him- or herself this way?
• When have I been resilient in the past?
FOR COPS
• What are other possible options?
• How is my judgment undermining me?
• Who do I need to forgive to set myself free?
FOR CHEERLEADERS
• Who can I ask for help?
• What can I take off my plate?
• How can I adjust my timeline?
QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION
• What would be the payoff for asking your Coach’s question each time the message you identified above pops into your head?
• How is the answer you get when you ask your Coach question not only empowering but also a more accurate reflection of who you are — than what your Critic, Cop, or Cheerleader says?
• How might the voice(s) of your Critics, Cops, and Cheerleaders be a default safety mechanism?
• How is your outer communication evolving as your Coach voice becomes a habit?
Let’s chat a bit about this second-to-last Question for Reflection. Our Critics, Cops, and Cheerleaders — yes, they impede our inner and ultimately outer communication success. However, they are also there to protect us, in their own way. Ultimately, we have to make a choice about whether we want their so-called protection.
Whenever we step into our moxie and take strategic risks by speaking up for ourselves (or others), we are declaring to ourselves (first and foremost) that we are built for greatness. That we reject playing small in our lives. Our Critics, Cops, and Cheerleaders — they’re testing our resolve. Are we ready to play to our edge and capitalize on our potential? Or do we need an excuse, a.k.a. our self-talk, to stay quiet, underearn, hold on to toxic jobs (or clients), and not realize our dreams?
Yes, choosing to invite the Coach in each and every time a Critic, Cop, or Cheerleader speaks requires consistent practice. But this need not be complicated. It requires less time than a bathroom break. It’s a simple choice.
Do you believe that your voice matters?
If your answer is yes (and I’m sure it is, because otherwise, why would you be reading this book?), you will make the commitment. You will invest the time to shift your self-talk and activate your most powerful voice. Sure, en route to putting your Coach on autopilot there will be times when you forget, but your commitment will be resolute. You won’t make excuses for your mediocrity. You’ll stay focused on the results you want and buff up the communication muscles needed to achieve them.
You’ll also develop the ability to unhook from other people’s opinions of you. Truly, when you stop using, What if people don’t like me? Or what if my boss/clients/partner/parents/accountant/ personal chef (a girl can dream!) disagree? as the filter for how and what you choose to communicate, you stop yourself from sculpting encyclopedia-like messages in your head that you never get out into the world. You fall (back) in love with your voice. You stop yourself from speaking diluted, inauthentic versions of what you want to say. You live and speak from your whole body — knowing that what comes out of you is what you are supposed to say. Stepping into your moxie is as much about (okay, actually much more about) surrender as it is about elbow grease. It’s also about being flexible, integrating our feminine with our masculine, and allowing our communication to be as mindful as it is magical. In chapter 3 I’ll share one of my favorite metaphors for thinking about and activating your most authentic and high-impact communication in the world — so that you can develop a speaking presence as powerful as your self-talk.
