You ever get yourself into a high pressure situation? Who am I kidding? Of course you have. Even at age 2, when you’re in a death match with Mommy and Daddy over ice cream, that’s totally high pressure. Imagine for a moment, these high pressure situations: someone on your team unexpectedly passes to you the opportunity to make the game winning shot, you want to ask a special person out on a first date, your boss asks you to his office because he needs to talk to you. All of a sudden, your fears and worries flood your thoughts.
“Can I make the shot? Am I good enough?”
“She’s never going to go for a guy like me. What do I really have to offer?”
“Oh no, what did I do this time? Am I going to get fired?”
You start to notice that there’s a pattern in how you respond to most, if not all, these types of situations. You often have a self-talk that occurs before or right after the situation arrives. That self-talk is usually negative. You also start to realize that this negative self-talk is negatively impacting your chances of successfully resolving these situations in which you find yourself. Unfortunately, you also realize those two negatives aren’t bringing you a positive. You want to do something about it, but you don’t know how or what you can change to stop feeling this way.
Let’s first talk about how this situation came about:
This story you tell yourself, most times, were not stories you actually told yourself; not initially anyway. It was a story someone projected onto you. When you were 6 years old and you attended the first day of first grade, a mean boy told you that you were too ugly to be friends. That was not your story, it was his story of how his parents did not love him enough. However, he had no where to direct that energy so he blew it up in your face. When he did that, you gave him enough respect to turn that into a part of your story.
You somehow survived elementary school only to arrive at the land mine filled testing grounds of junior high school. Hormones were raging everywhere, even in your own body. You finally muster up the courage to approach your 3 year crush after years of “stalking” him from a distance. Shortly after you say “Hi,” he makes the ugliest face imaginable and runs from your presence. You don’t get a second word or a minute longer to demonstrate that you were more than the one word he allowed you. This was not your story. It was his story of how he was too shallow to see your depth.
In your defeat, you go to the theaters and watch the latest movie to come out, “She’s Out of My League”. The movie only confirms for you that when you’re a 3, you can’t expect to ask out a perfect 10. That kind of stuff only happens in the movies; even this movie felt disingenuous. So not only are you unattractive and unworthy to members of the opposite sex, society deems you not worthy of anything at all. This was not your story. It was their story about prejudice and finding humor in other people’s pain.
I think you’re already seeing a pattern here: Throughout your life, people often projected their own brokenness onto you. You have to decide if you will accept it and make it your story too or reject it and never let it break you down. As much as we’d like to think that we are Wonder Woman blocking all the machine gun bullets fired at us, some eventually get through. Every hundred blocked insults, at least one gets through the thick wall you have built around yourself. The one insult that penetrates is also the one that hurts the most. Therefore, it becomes the most convincing.
Over time, the collection of insults, degrading thoughts and feelings of worthlessness pile up into a mountain of pity with you sitting on the top. You’re the king of your own pity. No one needs to tell you that anymore. In fact, you own up to it proudly. You begin to tell people the things that you think they are thinking.
“No, I don’t play basketball because I suck.”
“I’m still single because I choose to be.”
“I didn’t apply to be the manager because I’m not good enough.”
As time goes, the negative self-talk becomes more than just about basketball or dating or working. It becomes a pattern that you use to deal with every high pressure situation and some not so high pressure. It becomes a part of your character and it shapes the the path in which you travel. You know it’s not your path, but you feel powerless to stray from it. For some, it may feel like a heavy piece of lead holding down the helium balloon that wants to be blown into the sky. This is the part where hypnosis can help you.
In hypnosis, those persistent words and thoughts can be released from your mind. Your shoulders know what it is like to drop that heavy weight it carried for so many years. Once you release these words that were never meant to be a part of your journey, you may be directed to the path that is best suited for your happiness.
If you’d like a free consultation to see if hypnosis can help you achieve all your goals, please reach out to me at hypnoelevate@gmail.com.