Simon Benn explains why parents develop a harsh inner critic from childhood comparisons, and how recognizing you're the observer, not the critic, lets you stop the self-judgment. He uses the oxygen-mask metaphor: you can't support your kids if you're not taking care of yourself first.
Hi, good morning. So today we're going to talk about how to stop beating yourself up. So this I know is a big one. It's a big one for all of us. It's a big one for me as well, and It— I was thinking about this, how best to do this challenge justice, and this challenge, this question, this query justice, because we're all looking for the how-tos, aren't we? We're all looking for the how to stop beating ourselves up. I'm gonna ask a— what might seem to be a counterintuitive question. Okay, so who are you? Are you the one, uh, are you the one that hears the negative voice? In your head, or are you the negative voice? Because it's two— it's two very different things. Two very different things. So we say, I am beating myself up, like I'm putting a Fist to my head. But that's in the physical world. In the world that's inside our head, who are we? Are we the voice in our head that's criticizing us, or are we the one that hears that negative voice? Sounds a bit theoretical, isn't it? Sounds a bit too abstract. Here it is. You cannot be the negative voice in your head because you weren't born with it. You were not born with a negative voice in your head. Therefore, You can only be the one that hears that negative voice. So you are the listener rather than the talker. We all have a negative voice in our head. We have it, but we are not— we aren't— we are not it. The negative voice in our head is the rubbish that we've picked up from the world around us, but it is not us. So this often starts at school. So the teacher says to us, starts comparing us to somebody else. So we're not as good at reading as another child. We're not as good at maths as another child. starts in the playground. We're not as good at, um, football, hopscotch, whatever, you know. Do people even play hopscotch anymore? We're not as good as— so for me, it was, you know, when I was a kid, it was football. We, we are not as good as somebody else. We start comparing ourselves. We start comparing ourselves to other people, but it's not we It's not the we that does the— we are not the comparer, we are the one that hears the comparison. So you are not beating yourself up. You are not beating yourself up. The voice in your head that is beating yourself up is not you. You're perfect. And if you doubt me on this, what would you say to your child? Would you want your child to accept the compliment that they were perfect? Would you choose— would you choose to accept the compliment? I'm giving you a compliment. Would you choose to accept the compliment, or would you choose to argue with the compliment that I'm trying to give you? I would choose to accept the compliment. Because of the negative voice in your head that isn't you. Most of us, most of the time, aren't choosing how we feel. We're not choosing what we think, and we're not choosing how we feel. And if we aren't doing that, then how do we— how on earth do we expect our kids to do anything different because our kids do what we do, not what we say. So these videos are about helping you put your oxygen mask on first. So if in the case of an emergency, they say on the planes, in the case of emergency, oxygen masks will drop to the seat, drop from the drop from the box above you. This is a metaphor from my great friend and mentor Liz Ivory. They tell us, put your own oxygen mask on first and then help your child. And that's what my work increasingly is about. So I've gone from helping kids to helping parents help their kids, because if parents know this stuff, what I'm talking about, then they can tell their— they can share it with their kids. You can't share something that you don't have. So I was Googling something this morning and it said 10 ways to make your child happier. Number 1, be happier yourself. Makes perfect sense, doesn't it? But how many, how many of us, how many parents are there out there that are not putting their gas mask on first, their oxygen mask on first? How come? How many of us, you know, we've got this parent guilt around, we've got, you've got all these, all these parents putting them, putting themselves, putting their their kids before themselves. And if they— if we don't put our own learnings above our children, then how can we— need to be ahead of them. We need to be ahead of them so we can usher them down the, the, the, uh, usher them down the slope to where we truly— what we truly want for them. We want them to be happy. We want them to be confident. We want them resilient. But we can't do that if we're not that ourselves. So you are not the negative voice in your head. You are far bigger than that. You are not the negative voice in your head telling you right now that there's too much to learn to do this, that you can't, you couldn't possibly learn how to do it. Listen, what I've done is I've stripped down everything that I've learned in 10, 12 years of personal development, and I've made it child-friendly. I've made it as simple as I can possibly make it, and that simplicity gives it huge power. And it means that you— it means that what I've got is, uh, to coin a phrase, it's transferable. So parents can learn by The process that I've got that makes— it's the thing, right? A third of the kids I've worked with, 1,600 kids, a third of them tell me after 40 minutes of a positive, uplifting workshop with 2 minutes about bullying that they are bully-proof. Other kids can't accept them, and I can't upset them anymore. That's what they say after 40 minutes. So this stuff is incredibly simple and incredibly powerful. The voice in your head that's saying that you can't learn this stuff from me is a liar, like the negative voice, the negative voice in our heads all the time. It is a liar. It tells lies. And now the negative voice in my head is saying, you said you were going to make these videos 5 minutes long and we're on 9 minutes. I got lost in it, I got lost in trying to point you at something that's really life-changing, but don't take my word for it, check out what I've got on there, on the website and see what other parents and kids are saying on that website. So it's simonbenn.co.uk, Simon Benn, Benn with 2 Ns, .co.uk. And I'll see you very soon. Bye-bye.
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