How to stop criticising yourself and become a more confident person
A letter to a younger you and a rubber bracelet will help you on this very hard path
You have been criticising yourself for years, and it hasn’t worked. Try approving of yourself and see what happens. / Louise L. Hay
Do you remember your early years? Do you remember words of inspiration and motivation from your parents? Or it was threats and comparisons to the others? I don’t remember any of them, even so, I was a happy child. But where did I get this awful habit of criticising myself? It doesn’t help, it doesn’t make me a better person, it doesn’t let me be proud of myself.
Where the stress hides
There’s an interesting thing about the humans’ body. We call it Body Language. It shows us signs of our inner condition all the time. What do you do when you’re nervous? Shake your leg, touch your hair or cross your arms? I found myself touching my body with my fingers like caressing. This is like I’m telling myself: ‘Calm down, be patient, everything is okay’. When it became an obsessive behaviour, I started to research.
I found that often this self-calming was a result of an over-demanding position. It happens when you think that what you do is not enough, that someone can do more and better than you did. I put myself in such stress with these thoughts that one day I couldn’t finish any of the projects I was working on. I was afraid to fail.
The first step to confidence
To accept a problem is the first step to resolve it. You stop thinking of yourself as something to tolerate and a big failure in the world. You’re not. You are a person who needs a tiny push in the right direction.
So listen, here is your direction: you do your best to do what you need to do. Go on doing it. You don’t need bad things and hard feelings for yourself — let them go.
A message to a little you
Write yourself a letter. The format doesn’t matter: paper or an email — both would be fine. Imagine that you are a bigger brother to a small ‘you’. Remember any bad or hard situation you had in your childhood. What would you like to hear at that moment? Can you write yourself something that can help? Do it if you can or think for another moment and put down the first phrase you get in your mind.
When finished, read it out loud to a little ‘you’ inside yourself. Did you write any bad words, comparison, moralising? I bet you did not. I wrote to myself calming words and promises that everything is going to be okay, that I am too strong to give up. And you know what happened? I believed myself. I found this letter so truthful, it fits so much to my current statement that I almost cried while reading it. Yeah, I know that I wrote it a moment ago. The difference appeared in an addressee. I needed these words not less than younger me.
The big challenge for big changes
Don’t stop here, you have a good chance to finish this path a better person. Consider accepting a challenge for yourself. No need to do something. The task is to stop thinking bad of yourself. I used a rubber bracelet to control it. Each time I had critical thoughts about myself — I put it on the other hand. Another ‘bad girl’ thought? Take a bracelet and put it on the other arm. Once I counted that I changed arms for 38 times during a 10 min break — I wasn’t sure if I earned a break. After realising this stupidity I took several deep breaths and let go of the situation.
I do what I can and I do it the best way I can. I need a break. No worries, I will get to work soon. But now I’m having a break.
Bottomline
This is a very hard path, but you are worth it. Good thinking is like a fine road to drive: you can reach your destination anyway. But the better the road surface is, the faster you get there and the more likely it is for you to have a good mood.
