Lindsay C. Gibson - How To Get Out Of Your Own Way - Exclusive Live Workshop

the need to put yourself first is absolutely uh essential um in order to not get in your own way and it's not selfish a lot of times people think if you if you put yourself first that that means that you're putting everybody else last and that kind of either or black and white thinking is something we want to get away from because it's perfectly possible to put yourself first and to think of other people as well but I can still put myself first in order to know what it is that I really want and have you ever noticed how little children put themselves first I mean it's how we start out they're the only one who can tell the parent what what it is that they need and that could be you know survival based for a baby and for a small child child so you know thank goodness we start out that way we could just hold on to a little more of

that into our adult lives and be able to you know create the kind of life that gives us good energy and and takes us uh where where we want to go because if you don't do that if you're not putting yourself first in your own life then you are really in danger of developing a false self uh that kind of person personality that is designed to make other people feel more important than you then you start involuntarily applying it to other people like you might be thinking well I gave up what I wanted why can't you give up what you want in a relationship um or you might say you know well I'm I'm self-sacrificing why can't you sacrifice for me I mean that stuff comes out you don't get away from it and so if you own it if you own your inner uh toddler um

the part of you that knows what you want and you think of other people you find a way of getting most of what you want while taking other people into account but you have a guide star you have a a way of knowing which way you're going and what it is that you want to accomplish if you don't do it you also can end up with addictions okay because lots of times people are like well if I can't do what I really want to do I'm going to do something that I can do and they might take a shortcut into the relief or the good feeling of an addiction which is just you know a really tragic loss and people think that addicts are you know so selfish or they don't think of other people I think it's exactly the opposite I think that they shut themselves down for whatever reason so much that they were very

vulnerable uh to the experience that the the substance or the activity brings them and I think it's because they got out of touch with what they really wanted in their lives and had to settle for something else so we want to develop our knowledge of ourself and kind of create an owner's manual for ourselves about what we need um to put ourselves first in life listening to our inner guidance is a a very important way of developing that owner's manual it's the still Small Voice it's that quiet quiet um it's not not showy it's not insistent it's just sort of a quiet small little voice that tells you what you really think or what you really want so in order to hear that voice here are some suggestions like take yourself

to a place where you're a stranger where nobody knows you where there's no expectation that you should have this or that personality and in this place you allow yourself to just see what you're thinking about maybe take some paper with you and a journal with you and make some notes so that you begin to get some inner guidance from it and you're not expecting a big Revelation you're just looking for for a little tiny bit of inspiration maybe a little idea that you could test out but that way of going off to a a new place and then just letting yourself sit and be is a very good way of beginning to hear that voice I wanted to just um read to you a couple of things that help you to differentiate between the

ego voice and the still small voice the voice that gets in your way and holds you back and scares you and the voice that gives you really good information about which way to go next so the still Small Voice uses usually very short unemotional statements whereas the ego voice is very wordy it's very anxious very emotional uh very insistent um has a lot of opinions with a lot of you know heat behind it and the still small voice is just that it's still it just gives you a little idea but it has a quality of truth about it if you listen to it and it also when you listen to it it tends to relieve stress you have a sense of oh I'm now I know what to do or now I know uh the answer whereas when the ego

speaks it feels stressful like oh that's what I've got to do oh I've got to think about that um gee I I don't think I did that well enough it there's a pressure to it so we want to tune into to good feelings relaxed feelings inspired feelings and the sense that we are being pressured um and and pushed uh which is how the ego tends to come across when it comes to the kind of problems uh that are likely to crop up when we um start to find our own path I always I always like to play with the idea that you know maybe there is a constant of problems in each person's life by that I mean you know maybe maybe you're going to have have you know 4,263 problems in your life and that's that's the number um but you can choose

what you want those problems to be it's a useful way to think that what if you're always going to have problems because we're given the set number of problems when we're born but what if you were to decide that I'm going to make 100 50 of these how to get higher education how to get a new job how to start a career in a more creative um type of work what if you begin to think about choosing problems not running away from them not avoiding them but picking your problems that you're going to put your energy into and that when you do that you lose 150 other problems that would have happened if you had done nothing on your own behalf the

more problems I picked that had to do with me going after more of what I was interested in or more of what I wanted the fewer problems I had that were generated by other things things like you know being unhappy being frustrated um not making as much money as I wanted to uh not feeling as fulfilled as I wanted to I Really noticed the shift in the type of problem I was facing so that a lot of times I'm I'm thinking yeah this is this is a huge problem but aren't I lucky to have this kind of problem this is in the service of you know having a a bigger better life that's going to bring me more so yeah I don't know if we can truly pick our problems but I do know that when you decide what you want to put your energy toward I want my

struggles to be very high quality as high quality as I can get them anyway because I don't expect that I'm not going to have struggles that I'm not going to need to um call on endurance or persistence I know that's going to happen if I'm trying to do what I what I dream of but keep in mind that just because something is going to cause a problem or it's going to be hard there're plenty of other things that you could be doing that would be just as hard and and just as problematic but you wouldn't be getting any payoff from it because it wouldn't be something that you had initiated for your own life so how do we get rid of or how do we change these uh early schemas the first thing is you must know what the schema is if you can write down what the belief is that's holding

you back or that's causing you fear causing you anxiety you are taking the first important step to get at an old depiction of reality you have an idea about reality and then include yourself that is not serving you well if you can get that into words then you have a chance of really changing it remember I said that you know they these ideas these schemas exist like in a grab bag and uh you can reach in there and pull them out and they don't necessarily have to have anything to do with each other lots of times they're they're contradictory but we don't know that because we're really pulling them out one at a time and by themselves they look like that they make sense or that they're you know like the voice of God you know some kind of absolute truth it isn't until you begin to think about them and this is very important

notice your feeling about them it it isn't until you can do those things that you begin to be able to tell whether or not these schemas are you know true and are they able to guide you toward what it is that um you need and what you want I had a client once she was having trouble submitting a proposal for something at work that was a very big deal and she had a great idea she had come up with this she knew that it was really going to be an important uh suggestion and and um offering to her work team and so she's ready to do it and she's like petrified scared to death all of a sudden she can't think straight she has self-doubt she wonders if it's really such a great idea or not she remembers that guy that always you know looks down his nose at everybody in every meeting she thinks about how her boss you know really seems to prefer

this other person on the team to her she goes into this whole thing and so I asked her like focus on the feeling describe the feeling to me as best you can like sit in the dirty diaper stay with that feeling and keep talking to me out of that feeling so she's saying you know I feel terrible I feel scared I feel you know and I'm like there is a a view of yourself in there somewhere what is it who are you when you are feeling this way about what you're doing think about what you are believing about yourself right this second and she said oh I'm a dummy and that clicked back into something that her mother used to say to her a lot uh when she was trying to get her to you know stop being so

rambunctious and she say stop being such a dummy she had an old belief a schema that was very deep in there it caused all these awful feelings and I asked her how she felt when she thought that thought I'm such a dummy and she said well everything that I just told you so what I asked her to do is I said a part of you believes that you're a dummy okay yeah it could be any statement just it's just got to capture the feeling that goes in there this is not an intellectual exercise it has to be a feeling capture the feeling have the statement and write it down on a piece of paper and then every day for the next week I want you to read this statement out loud to yourself twice a day that's all I want you to do now the interesting

thing is that we were able to get to what the schema was and I really questioned her about that quite a bit like is there anything else in there does that capture it and finally we got to yep I'm such a dummy was it so that was the thing we put on the card and that's what she did so twice a day she would take out the card she would read it out loud and say I'm such a dummy and she would also think of what she thought of herself now as an adult and she was like I'm a capable you know um valuable part of my work team I have good ideas that's all I wanted her to do I didn't want her to try to change her mind I didn't want her to to uh contradict uh the statement I just wanted her to present it to her brain out loud so she could hear it so she does that for a week and she comes back

in and she says it's gone said it that made no sense at all well what happened was that the brain does not like to be presented with two things that can't possibly coexist you can't be such a dummy and be a valuable member of your work team the difference that so this is so different from cognitive therapy and other types of therapy where you're trying to change a person's thought we're trying to change a schema which has an emotional component and a strong belief component when the brain is told two things that can't possibly be compatible can't go together the brain will pick the one that is most based in reality because the brain you know after all these Millennia of Being Human Beings it's really big on ascertaining what is

reality that's what the brain does so when you give it those two statements and you hold those two bubbles together without trying to change either one of them then what happens is that the brain will get rid of one of them it just kicks it out