Dr. Aziz distinguishes between lying to yourself and being on your own side. He uses a parenting example about kids practicing instruments to show how honoring your values means recognizing when effort is required, not offering false reassurance.
Does being on your own side mean lying to yourself? Telling yourself things that aren't true, that make you feel better in the moment? That's a question I got recently from a client, one of my groups. I said, that's a great question. Because he said, you know, sometimes I'll avoid something. Like I'll avoid speaking up in a work meeting and I'll tell myself afterwards, hey, it's okay, you'll get this. Don't worry about it. It's like, am I just lying to myself? Is that just making myself feel better or is that true? I said, I don't know. That's a great question, right? Because okay, so being on my own side. I have a book called On My Own side that covers this in depth. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it. But most people, you can see if this is what's true for you. Most people are not on their own sides. Very self critical, angry at themselves, harsh. They treat themselves way worse than you'd ever treat a friend or a loved one. That's what's typical. And so this concept of being on your own side is like, well, hey, is this how you treat someone you love? A niece, a nephew, a friend, a lover that you're into at the moment? Not an embittered lover that's fallen out of favor? No, but you know, someone you love, would you treat yourself that way? Would you treat that person that way and then test it with yourself? And there's so much nuance to this, right? Because if someone that you love is doing something that's not going to get them the result that they want, wouldn't it be loving to tell them that? So just a simple example, my kids started these little music lessons with a keyboard and each have their own music lesson. And one of my kids seems to like to practice, and one of them seems to not like to practice during the week. And so if I, let's say the one that's not practicing, if I told him, hey, don't worry about it, you'll get it, that's not really true because he's not practicing. So he's not really gonna get it. At least not in any significant way. Like he'll get it a little bit when he's during the lesson, but that's not enough to actually learn the instrument. And another more effective form of being on his own, my own side, or in this case, on his side, would be to say, well, the amount you're practicing probably won't help you learn the instrument. And I guess the question would be, do you want to learn the instrument? If not, I don't know. If you do, you need to. Is it okay to not learn an instrument? That seems okay to me. What do you really want? And if you choose something that you really want, whether it's an instrument or a sport or something else, in order to be able to do it and do it well, you will need to practice. It's the only way to get better at anything. And you get to choose, though, what that thing is and to what degree you want to excel at it. Do you see how that's like truth and compassion and honoring his values and seeing what he really wants and encouraging that he could learn whatever he wanted. Now, of course, it's just me talking to my son, right? It's not you talking to yourself, is it? So what if you say that to yourself? Hey, you didn't speak up at work today. Yeah, yeah. Do I want that? Why do I want that? Why does that matter to me? What would that mean if I could do that? What would that open up for me? How would that feel? Wow. I do want that. Yeah. Okay, well, let's practice. The only way to get better at anything, right? How could we practice? Let's look for small opportunities to speak up. Let's look at an opportunity to speak up with a colleague. Let's speak up in that Zoom meeting. Let's ask a question, let's share. Let's. You'll find the way. When you really want to know. When you really want to create something, you will. Fantastic. So there's a tip on being on your own side again. Check out the book. If you want more, you can find it on omosbook.com omosbook.com as well as a 10 day free OS Omos Quick Start course and other goodies there as well. So check that out until we speak again. May have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level that you're awesome. Talk to you soon.
