She thought she would enjoy feelings of accomplishment and satisfaction.  Instead, she began to feel empty and depressed.  Her decisions had felt right when she made them, but as she matured, she realized that she wasn’t living the life she truly wanted.  Her earlier decisions had been influenced by others and were based on false beliefs. This discovery devastated her. She realized that she didn’t know who she was anymore. 

Although very painful, this awareness was a positive development. Shirley had moved from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence.  These are stages one and two, respectively, of the Four Stages of Learning.  Contentment with the status quo, a feeling that everything is fine, characterizes unconscious incompetence.  Internal dialogue will discount any discontent, saying “I am in control here and I can improve things by doing x, y or z.” Conscious incompetence is the awakening to one’s new state of mind.  Stages three and four are conscious competence and unconscious competence.

Awareness is usually the result of a wake-up call, something that forces us to take in information that we have denied. A wake-up call flicks a mental switch. In the resulting light, we become aware. We see what was there all the time.

Many problems lend themselves to denial because you are either not ready to face the truth or you doubt you can manage or survive any change in the status quo.  For instance, you think you were on the fast track at work, but suddenly comprehend that you are at a dead end; you were blind to the fact that your daughter is a bulimic or your husband a compulsive gambler; you kept looking for approval and validation from others until it hit you that approving and validating yourself was the only way to get those needs met.

Startled into awareness, you may feel as though your world has been turned upside down. You have become consciously incompetent.  You are in shock and may wonder, “What am I going to do now?”

Take stock. Tell yourself the truth because unless you come to terms with this awakening you can’t move forward.  Some of us can do this quickly; some of us need time.  You might even return to unconscious incompetence and go back to a state of denial. 

When you are ready, talk to someone who can help.  Perhaps see a career counselor, or find a therapist, financial advisor or support group.  Get as much information as you can.  Talk to people who have been through the same or a similar experience or ask friends for recommendations. This is not the time to isolate yourself.  You will learn that you are not alone. Others have survived and moved on to become stronger and happier than they were before.

Decide on a new direction. Begin the next stage: conscious competence. You may feel awkward.  You might have to think about everything you are doing because it doesn’t feel natural. You start and stop, advance and retreat, or practice extreme behaviors until you find a middle ground.  You want to give up because you fail as often as you succeed.

Unconscious competence is the new normal that comes when your new beliefs, thoughts and actions have become natural to you.

Shirley decided to go back to school.  When she went to fill out the registration form for her first class she broke down in tears.  She asked a trusted friend to accompany her when she enrolled.  With each new accomplishment she overcame her fear and started feeling happy and confident again.

Are you due for a wake-up call? What stage are you in?  Acknowledge your fear of moving forward. Know that others have gone through these stages, and trust that you can do it, too.

John and Mary

Johnny wants better relationships but his Core Belief is that the world is a hostile place so he is always on guard. In order to protect himself, he is either defensive or aggressive with friends and family.  He acts the same way at work.

When he walks into a room of strangers he is energetically drawn to anyone with a hostile attitude.  If someone he meets is not hostile, he finds a way to provoke them.  Because of this belief and his behavior based on this belief, people respond to him in hostile ways.  At the end of the day Buster tells him: See I am right.  The world is a hostile place.

Mary believes the world is a friendly place, so she treats her friends, family and colleagues with a warm and open attitude.  She welcomes new people into her world. If she meets someone with a hostile attitude, she seeks out common ground and turns them into friends. People respond in kind and she gets to be right.

Core beliefs can be either negative or positive.  They provide the flavor for each slice of our life. 

What would it take to change Johnny’s belief (The world is a hostile place.) to an affirmative one: The world is a friendly place?

Our unconscious belief system controls us.  In a negative belief system affirmations are alien and don’t fit anywhere. Before we can integrate an affirmation we must tune into our neutral observer and become aware of Buster. Once we are clear about and accept that Buster exists and has an agenda, we are no longer compelled to follow it.  At any point in time we have a choice.  Do we allow Buster to sabotage us or can we choose to pursue what we truly want?

 What core beliefs are preventing you from having what you want?

We need to start paying attention to the voices in our head; become aware of our thinking. After observing our thoughts without judgment for a while we become aware in the moment. Awareness is the next step in the process of change.

Jesse realized that most of her interactions with Clara, her mother, made her feel guilty and angry. Her mother had a negative opinion about everything Jesse did and didn’t keep her opinions to herself. Even though Jesse was an adult, she desperately wanted her mother’s approval and love and blamed Clara for her own unhappy life. She reasoned that if her mother were different she could be happy.

Jesse didn’t realize how much time she spent playing this scenario in her head until she started Observing with her non-judgmental mind. With her new awareness of her own blame voice and how it controlled her, she recognized that she was giving her power away. She needed to break free—not of her mother—but of her thoughts.

The Serenity Prayer gives us a formula we can use in situations like Jesse’s: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Jesse can’t change her mother no matter how hard she tries. While trying she is robbing herself of the opportunity to change what she can. She can change a couple of things: her thoughts, when she becomes aware of them, and the only physiological process she has control over: her breathing. By changing the station playing in her mind she can tune into constructive thoughts and transform her self-defeating behavior.

Using positive thoughts sets us in the direction we want to go. Here are some affirmations to start us off:
The path I choose is the right path for me
I learn lessons from everything I do
Conscious breathing brings me clarity and serenity.
I am willing and able to change old ideas and dysfunctional patterns
My mind is open to new possibilities every day
In any given situation there are options that never occurred to me before
I am in charge of my life
No one can make me feel inferior without my consent (Eleanor Roosevelt)
My choices are limitless; the power to choose is mine
I take responsibility for my choices
I act in ways to empower myself

Our thoughts create our world. How have you used affirmations to break free of old patterns?

When we wake up in the morning, the radio in our head is playing. The negative litany begins and doesn’t stop until our head hits the pillow. Some of us can’t sleep because our minds don’t stop. In the morning our eyes open and we pick up the issues we obsessed about yesterday and spend the day possessed by our radio-mind.

We don’t even know what’s playing or that we can change the channel. And although the radio has many other stations, like paying attention to your breathing, being grateful for our blessings, appreciating the people and systems that support us, and marveling at the beauty of music, art or nature, we don’t even think of them.

This is what makes us victims: persons with no choices; we must do what we must do and think what we must think.

The first step in overcoming our self-imposed victimhood is to notice what we are thinking: Observation.

1. Find the part of your mind that is free of judgment, which is a neutral observer. You are a scientist in discovery mode.

2. Stop what you are doing 3 times a day and observe your thoughts and ask, “What am I thinking about now?”

a. Are you worrying about something over which you have no control?

b. Calling yourself names and berating yourself or playing any other negative “station” named above?

3. Choose your most recurrent type of thought and using your neutral observer, stop and notice your thoughts 3 times a day for a month.

4. In future posts I will explain that Awareness, Acceptance and Change must follow Observation. The problem is most of us fail to develop our non-judgmental, neutral observer and want to Change as soon as we discover our negative thoughts and so we berate ourselves for berating ourselves.

5. If we have been doing this for years, correcting it will not happen in an instant. Be patient with and kind to yourself!

If we want to change something about ourselves or the way we live, we can. But, change takes time, patience and a willingness to do the hard work of self-discovery.

Our daily concerns occupy our thoughts. We try to manage our lives responsibly but in a sense we are victims of faulty thinking, self-sabotage, and unconscious programming that is a result of past experience and the way we were treated by those we need and love. As adults, most of our decisions are made automatically because we have always done it this way or we have become creatures of habit and don’t know how to free ourselves.

Let me tell you about my nominees.  I nominate Sharon D. and her husband Mort for the clutter-free award.  Several years ago a friend hosted a scavenger hunt for 8 couples.  We were divided into 4 teams and given a list of items to retrieve.  Mort and two other people I didn’t know were on my team.  We huddled in our corner reviewing the list, each of us ticking off the things we could contribute and strategizing the hunt.  I debated whether to embarrass myself but finally opted to fully engage in the game. So, despite the fact that it was a mess, I brought my 3 new friends to my house to gather some of the things on our list.  As we entered through the garage I apologized for the disorder.  In addition to all kinds of things you would typically find there, my garage was the repository of all kinds of paraphernalia otherwise known as junk. Everything I no longer wanted but couldn’t part with was hung on the walls or taking up floor space.  We had to pick our way through to find a path to enter the house. I quickly gathered my 2 contributions to the hunt—a Nat King Cole LP and an old-fashioned seltzer bottle–and the 4 of us proceeded to Mort’s house. 

When we entered his garage I was blown away.  I had never seen anything like it and was rendered speechless. It was hard to believe people could live this way. The garage was bare. Bare walls, a bare floor.  Nothing.  Zero. Zilch! There was no sign of life at all.  I know other people who live a similar lifestyle.  When I visit my sister-in-law in Florida and spend the night, I am afraid to put waste paper in the waste paper baskets because these containers sit there so pure and pristine daring me to defile them.  I stuff my dirty tissues into my pockets.  The newspaper gets delivered and can be found in the trash if you want to read it.  Every surface is free of paper.  Nothing is ever out of place.  It stresses me out.

In my house the living room is clutter-free, but the kitchen and den, where I spend most of my time, are populated with papers and books.  Sometimes, it is hard to find the tabletop.  One day my friend Marlene, who is the clutter-free type, came over.  She was in crisis.  Her husband had disappeared.  We sat in the kitchen making phone calls until we finally found him.  To calm herself down she repeatedly cleaned the papers we generated off the table while I spread them out to calm myself down.  We had opposite de-stressing techniques.  It was clutter combat!

But while I certainly qualify for creating chaos, I nominate Shirley B. as the champ.  Shirley accumulates mail for months without opening it; purchases treasures from QVC that she never unpacks, and lets dishes languish unwashed in the sink.  Although she is not a coffee drinker, she has 30 jars of coffee in her pantry that she got for free using double coupons at the supermarket.  She is a packrat who saves old newspapers and magazines just in case.

Thank God, I get to be clutter-free once every other Wednesday when Roxie comes to clean.  I am forced to sort through everything that is scattered around, putting it away so Roxie can do her thing.  It is a pleasure to come home after Roxie’s been there but it feels like someone else’s house. It doesn’t take me long to make it my own again.  I open the mail, and without fail, create the chaos that feels so familiar. Before long the tabletops sag under the weight of the books, catalogs, and daily junk mail.  It is amazingly satisfying when I put the first discarded tissue in my empty waste paper basket.

Since I knew what my needs were, I was able to take care of myself.  Once my tray was full, I stopped at their table and thanked them for making room for me.  I told them that I truly loved them all but I needed some time alone and was going out to the pool area.  I enjoyed my breakfast without giving it a second thought.  No guilt, no resentment!  After breakfast, I took a leisurely bath and got dressed.  I was ready to socialize again.  Afterward, my close friend, who had been at the table, told me she understood completely.  She knew what it felt like to need some down time.

In my relations with others, when I’m not aware of my own needs I often find myself with only two choices: resentment or guilt.  This is the way it works:

On the one hand, I tune into other people’s needs, which are either overt or covert and immediately adjust my actions to please them or get their approval.  Their needs prevail.  If I have a different agenda for myself, which is usually the case, I become resentful.  This resentment is unacknowledged and goes underground.  It pops up unexpectedly in inappropriate places and appears as rage.  I either lash out at some unsuspecting, undeserving someone or get angry with myself.  I’m sarcastic, cutting and contemptuous.  At the start of this unfortunate cycle, I’m motivated by my unrecognized need for approval and my fear of disapproval.  Ironically, my payoff for this course of action annuls the approval I’m seeking.  By setting my own needs aside and putting the needs of others first, I eventually end up feeling self-loathing and self-disgust.

On the other hand, if I try to please myself when others appear to need me, I feel guilty.  As a result, instead of enjoying what I’m doing, my time is spent feeling badly about not meeting other people’s needs.  In either case, it’s a no win situation.

There is alternative way of being that I have learned.  I can respond to my own needs while letting others know I care about them and trust that they will learn to adjust. In the situation described above this was simple, in other situations it is more complex.  In all cases it is essential that I become aware of my needs and the dynamics of my own thinking and decision making.  Once I establish a pattern that others come to expect, they learn to expect that pattern whether it is that I sacrifice myself or take care of myself.  It can be very difficult to break a pattern of self-sacrifice once it is established, and loved ones, in particular, can get very angry.  Let me assure you that when I’ve taken care of myself and others have been disappointed, they’ve gotten over it.  Usually when I try to please everyone, nobody’s happy.  When I try to please myself, I know at least one person is happy–me.

Today, I got a call from my former boss.  I’d called her last week to discuss a job opportunity we had spoken about.  She said she couldn’t talk then and that she would call me on Sunday.  She asked if we could get together some time today and wanted to include our husbands.  In a joking way she reminded me that she had not seen my new kitchen, suggesting that she come to my house.  This was not what I expected.  I was not prepared for her suggestion and was at a loss for words. My moment of truth, what should I do?

 We’ve been to her home, and she hasn’t been to mine.  I didn’t want to get dressed today.  I wanted to relax at home.  I didn’t want to entertain.  What am I going to do?  She said she would call me later today.  What are my needs?  How am I going to negotiate this everyday dilemma?

Is there a right decision, here?  I know that I have an inner guidance system that speaks to me in a quiet voice.  That’s the part of me that I need to ask for the solutions to these tricky sticky situations.  The bottom line is I have to live with myself.  If I envision the consequences of either choice and choose consciously, I can remind myself that as an adult I can decide what is right for me at this time.  Nobody can force me to do something I don’t want to do and I am not a victim. This means that if I invite her and her husband over, I can’t be resentful and if I don’t I can’t feel guilty. Right or wrong, I can live with and take responsibility for the outcome and learn from it for next time.

Barbara Plasker © March 2000