“The Inevitable Nature of our Ridiculousness”

 

Spot the difference – two sides of me in Paris!

“There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.”
~ Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

I have been a bit poorly over the last couple of weeks.  Nothing remotely serious – a cold and a cough.  But don’t you find that when you have ‘only a cold’, you feel utterly rubbish?

Feeling under the weather can make us vulnerable to mind-tricks.  Negative messages seem like well-worn truths:  You’ll never amount to much; Who do you think you are, writing a blog for other people to read?

And so, even as I got better, I found it incredibly difficult to get back to the things I really like doing, such as writing Leaping Life posts.  Who’d want to read such rubbish anyway?

Happily, here I am, despite all these misgivings.  I managed to observe my negative self-talk and thus see it for what it really is – simply my ‘monkey mind’ playing the inner critic, with stories rather than facts, which I can choose to ignore.

“Thoughts are just thoughts, you do not need to believe them or react to them.”

~ Frances Coleman-Williams writing about Mindfulness

A quick google search throws up plenty of tips on how to silence one’s inner critic.  One of my favourites is not to take oneself too seriously.  To lighten up and go for it, whatever ‘it’ may be.  I don’t often manage to live like this – too often am I unable to loosen up.  But I am working on it, which is, of course, all we can ask of ourselves.

Check out the following short video about self-confidence highlighting beautifully the value of ‘taking ourselves lightly’.  Its premise is that we can’t be any more foolish than we already are, so why not just embrace this state of affairs and live life in whatever way we choose.

‘Failure is the acceptable norm’, we hear.  So let’s stop worrying about what we might do ‘wrong’ and go do it anyway! 🙂