This week, we are talking about observing yourself.
When I say that, I don’t mean sit and look at yourself in the mirror and be like, “hello, aren’t you interesting?” But what you can do is spend a little bit of time just seeing how you’re doing, how you’re responding to things, how you’re showing up. How all of that feels for you in your life.
Do you feel like you’re showing up?
As you are, do you feel like you’re showing up as a version of you? Maybe that version of you is who you think you’re supposed to be?
To explain that a little bit further, quite often in life, as we’re moving through stuff, we pick up other people’s perceptions of us, other people’s translations, interpretations of us. Quite often, we end up adopting those and taking them on as who we actually are. Then it can come to a point where we find ourselves saying – “actually, I don’t know who I am, I don’t know if that’s me, maybe I just think that’s me”. Often that can come if you’ve been through some kind of traumatic experience, or something very intense. Maybe just life has added so many layers of things to you, that you’ve forgotten how to be you.
Here’s an invitation to take a little bit of a look at yourself.
And as always, with all of my suggestions, teachings, call them whatever you like, there’s no judgement in this.
What you’re effectively doing is putting on the lens of love and looking at yourself in a way that just gives you information. Nothing more. There’s not to be any self criticism, no negative self talk. You might hear some of that. But you don’t have to take notice of it. Do this in a gentle, loving way.
Then you can start to think or notice that some of the things you do are things that happen because you think it’s what people expect of you – or sometimes people who are in your world might tell you how they see you. And then you expect that of yourself.
It might be that they tell you that they see you as this amazing, energised, wonderful person and you’re just can’t relate. It’s lovely that they see you like that, perhaps it has you feeling a bit disconnected and maybe a bit of a fraud because you don’t feel like that – you’re feeling as though you’d like to get to her (whoever she is), but you don’t know how.
By spending a few minutes observing, and just taking a look, do this in a journal or a notebook – or on a piece of paper. And every so often, maybe a couple of times a day just check in with yourself and observe – “here’s what I’ve noticed so far today. Something that I felt I really wanted or perhaps something that I felt I ‘should’ (I really don’t like that word) be doing? Is it what was expected of me and I did it because I would have felt bad if I hadn’t done it?”.
Just ask yourself that question. And make a little note of how you see the answer to that question. Think about how that feels.
Think about whether or not it’s real, whether or not it’s something that could do with a little bit more attention.
Maybe next time a similar situation happens. Even the “Me who I really am doesn’t want to be known as the person that just says yes to everything. I’m a bit tired of saying yes to everything. I’d like to start learning or teaching myself a little bit of how to say no to some things, especially when I feel like that are really right for me.”
It will take you some time to get used to this. But I talk a lot about how healthy boundaries are massive in terms of self care. They make such a difference because the better you learn to look after yourself and have clear boundaries, (we’re really talking about where the needs of others end, and yours begin) – if you have that clear line, it can be much easier to understand where it’s something that’s you and something that isn’t really you or what you want.
The people pleasing thing is almost an epidemic on its own, and until we learn to educate ourselves with what we would like to say yes to more often – until we learn that it can be really hard to understand who or what we need to start saying no to. When we start saying no to a person or an opportunity, or just saying yes to everything that comes up, that keeps us busy and it keeps us distracted from what’s really going on.
If you observe and see that happening (and you don’t have to do anything about it right now) you can gently – with the help of my Mirror Moments journalling mini-course – walk through some of that step by step.
By actually observing what’s going on – observing your responses, your reactions, your behaviours, you can spend a little bit more time thinking about whether or not they’re responses, reactions and behaviours that actually belong to you. To who you really want to be, or that you know is there inside.
One of the things that happens when we get caught up in being bottom of the list, and everybody else going before us is we are so constantly ‘on’.
In ‘Gather Yourself’ I talk about the hamster wheel – where we forget to actually just stop and take a bit of a look around and think “Is this where I want to be? Is this who I want to be? Is this who I want to be with?”.
And I don’t just mean your romantic relationships. It could be people that you’re working around, it could be the friendship groups that you have, sometimes you might find they’re not really very supportive. And when you start to take a look at that it can be a little bit of an eye opener – but also it gives you information. That’s all you’re looking for, at this point. Some information to help you figure a few things out so that you can then gently start to look at what you might need to do next. To clean things up a little bit. And do things in a more heartfelt, honest way.
This is all about being much more real with yourself.
The purpose of these blog posts is short and sweet – this time it’s simply the ‘observing yourself’ stage where you’re just taking a little bit of a look at things and thinking is this what I want? Am I where I want to be? Am I being who I want to be? And am I doing that with people or in situations that I want to be?
For now, keep few notes in a notebook – you might get to the end of the week and think about how you spent most of your week not being ‘you’, but being something for everybody else.
Where is the fun in that?
The card pull from my A-Z of self-care card deck that came at the end of the video I did for this teach was the letter K – Know Yourself.
This card simply says trust your instincts.
What do you need right now? What would feel best? So hopefully, in taking a few moments to do this little exercise that we just talked about whether you take notes over a week or a couple of weeks and start to build up a bit of a picture. You will slowly get to see and feel what is actually right in that context. Do you know who you are and what you want? Are you being completely honest about that?
The affirmation for this card says I make time to know myself.
If you’ve ever seen any of my teachings before something I say a lot is that
You are the only person you’re guaranteed to spend the rest of your life with
So you really should start being happier with that person, being more comfortable with that person, being more real and honest about who that person is. Sounds good, right?