Are you your worst critic?

Hi, good morning, good morning and welcome. I hope you are well this morning. So today I wanted to do something a little bit different, and for that it will require me to put my glasses on. Hello. What I'm going to do is I've been looking through some of the questionnaires that parents have answered about their concerns about their their, their children. Uh, and, um, this is for the book that I'm, that I'm writing at the moment to, to help kids. Sorry, yeah, to help kids, but to help you as parents help kids. Um, and I came across this, uh, this, this questionnaire that really— well, my heart really went out to the mum who wrote this, and I thought I'd read it out to you. There's obviously— there's no names, and only she will recognize herself. I'm going to send a copy of the video to her, but in case anybody else is feeling like this, because it's horrible. Okay, so she— it's at the end of the questionnaire, and I— and she is answering the question, what skills would help you address your concerns about your child? And she said— she says, maybe being less overwhelmed and debilitated by guilt. And questioning the inadequacy of everything I do as a parent. The skill of ensuring the focus is her and her experience and feelings regardless of how I feel inside, if that makes sense. I wanted to feel heard and understood and supported. I endured a lot of trauma throughout my life, I'm undergoing therapy, etc. Sorry if that's all irrelevant. Just trying to explain. Wow! That's a tricky one, isn't it? That's horrible. That's horrible. My heart goes out to you. She's so. She's struggling, isn't she? She's really struggling, and that's why I want to see if I can help at all. And something I heard yesterday, I think, might help. So just going back to the first bit, questioning the inadequacy of everything I do as a parent. So the title of this video was, Are You Your Own Worst Critic? And this, it would seem, it would seem that this mum is her own worst critic. But she isn't. There is a voice in our— in all of our heads. We all have a voice in our heads that tells us that we're not good enough. All of us. Me too. That voice in our head isn't who we are. We, and here's, here's, I hope you can get that. That voice in your head isn't you. And I'll give you a few reasons. Because the mind likes logic on this stuff. This stuff is deeply, deeply personal, but the mind wants logic. So your, your, your mind will be questioning this because it's a, it's a little bit of a tricky concept. It's perhaps the word— perhaps your, your, your, um, And you haven't come across it before, this concept, the idea that the voice in our heads isn't us. So the mind is going— the mind is going to be running rampant, roughshod on this. Okay, here's the thing. Here's the number one reason that it's not you: because you can hear it. This is a bit— you can hear it, so it can't be you. When you hear a— just on the phone to a tech guy trying to solve out some tech problems with my email list, which is driving me nuts. That's one of the voices in my head. Why can't you sort your tech out? Yeah. There was a police siren in the background when I was speaking to him, which is a little bit off-putting, clearly, when you're trying to get to the, the nub of some technical problem. I can hear that siren, so I can't be that siren. Yeah, you hear the voice, we all hear the voice in our head, so it can't be us. We're the ones that hear it, we're not the ones that say it. So that's the first reason. The voice in your head can't be you because you're the one that hears it. Second reason, you weren't born with that voice in your head, so it's not part of you. It's what the psychologists call conditioning. It's some rubbish that you've picked up on, uh, as you've gone through life. And we all pick up this rubbish as we go on through life. So it's, it's not us. It's, it's a, it, it's a useless thought. It's a pointless thought that we've picked up. So we're the ones that kind of picked it up. So again, it's, it's not us. It's something that we picked up. And the third reason is not you, because you wouldn't choose to feel that way. So if you're feeling that way, if we're— whenever any of us are feeling bad or guilty, or that we're not enough, good enough parent, good enough children's happiness expert, We're not choosing. We wouldn't choose to feel like that. We wouldn't choose to think those thoughts, and we wouldn't choose to feel like that. So we're not choosing. It is not our fault. It's not your fault that you feel a way that you didn't choose to feel. It's not your fault. You are off the hook. And that's a big thing because so for me, for me, I used to blame myself about feeling bad. I used to think that it was my fault that I was feeling bad. I still do sometimes. I still do. But I know in my heart of hearts that it's not. My fault. It's not my fault that I sometimes feel bad, because I'm only feeling bad because of some rubbish, some conditioning that I picked up at some time along my— in my life, to the point where I'm now 53. I picked up some rubbish, and it's not me, so not worry. So my, my heart, um, my heart goes out to this, uh, to this mum who's struggling this way. And my heart goes out to any of you who are struggling on this stuff. The fact is that we have, as one of my coaches— I've still got a coach, yeah— we all need that external coach sometimes to give us some perspective. And Lovely lady called Liz. She says we've got to put our own gas masks, oxygen masks on first. You know, when you— nobody, not a lot of people are flying at the moment, clearly, with all the COVID stuff going on, but they tell us when we get on a plane, don't they? Put your own oxygen mask on first. If you've got a child and the oxygen mask sign comes on, put your own mask on first. You gotta put your own mask on first, and that means you're in a better place to help your child. And that works with physical oxygen. That also works with kind of like emotional oxygen, emotional energy, our ability to cope, our ability to cope. Our ability to do what this mum says. So she wants to the skill of ensuring the focus is on her. Well, I'm not sure whether that's a skill. I think that that's something that comes. It comes naturally. The the more confidence we have, the less we're beating ourselves up. The less we're bit. we're believing the voice in our head, the more able we are to help our child. So that has been a big— this has been a big learn for me. I didn't understand how important that was because the earlier part— I've been doing this 7 years— in the earlier part of what I was doing, I was just working with the kids. I wasn't working with the parents. Working with the parents has come later. And it's become really clear to me that we need to put our own oxygen mask on first. That's why on the website I've got 31 Ways to Be a Happier Parent. So what, you know, what on earth is a children's happiness expert doing writing about how to become a happier parent? Well, I'm writing about how to become a happier parent because I want you to be able to put your own oxygen mask on first. The happier you are— and I'm using happier clearly as a shorthand— the happier you are, the more confident you are, the more resilient you are, the better place you're in, the better place you're in to help your child. So I, I hope that helps, and see you very soon. Thanks a lot. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.