Life rarely goes to plan for most of us. Whilst we’re planning happy families, great holidays, successful businesses, and great projects to propel us into wealth and fame, the devil might have other intentions to try and derail our little projects.
As John Lennon famously said “life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans”.
For some of us, the devil … or maybe the devil inside of us… or some of the beliefs or principles we’ve picked up along the way …. leads us into the same situations again and again, regularly thwarting our carefully laid plans for a happier life for ourselves and our loved ones. For some of us, feeling disappointed with ourselves, lost and empty inside, we struggle to convince others that we are living an authentic and meaningful life that satisfies our soul. Being “OK” on the outside, but being very much a bag of “NotOK” on the inside, we may think that were getting away with the charade but so often there is something visible to others that betrays our emptiness no matter how hard we try to cover it up.
Learning how to overcome self-doubt and to live life fully with authenticity and an open heart can be a huge challenge for the person unpossessed with natural confidence. Yet it is possible, with a determined approach, to rise above the solitude, loneliness and pains of youth that can lead us into trauma after trauma. Its courage and vulnerability that many believe go hand in hand to bring more success and joy into our lives.
So vulnerability and courage: let me share a simple example of what I am talking about, sharing the under-confidence and self-doubt that I still live with, having an element of courage to talk about the shame contained in it, and using bravery to dismantle its power over me.
Here goes. I wrote this in my journal whilst completing the first draft of this book;
“I was surprised when I shared the first few pages with Patti. I expected relief but instead I felt terribly anxious. I expected pride but there was fear instead. I thought I’d feel a sense of ease in my stomach but then I got a pain below my heart. It was though a heavy weight was pressing on my chest and it wouldn’t go away; it really hurt.”
I’ve learned to listen carefully when my emotions run high, and panic or anger sets in. I’ve managed to dodge a few bullets coming my way simply by listening to what’s going on inside me and not giving a knee jerk reaction. It’s a good skill to have. Patience can give great insights and in that space of a few seconds of time it’s possible to embrace feelings, hear them, and then decide which way to go. Fight or flight or just do nothing. This time I listened to my emotion of anxiety, felt the pain, and did nothing other than tune in.
“It felt like something was pushing me up against a wall. Threatening me with annihilation if I made my inner thoughts public.”
In the doing nothing time I tried hard to find out who or what it was and track down any memories that came from my past to help me. I have an internal checklist to examine if my emotions are valid or not; like an Inspector Clouseau checking the pockets of my inner child for unreasonable justifications for throwing a tantrum. Were echoes of bullying or accidents in my past affecting me so badly I couldn’t breathe? Was I remembering or reliving a bad school day? Was it old conflict with family, or time in the military? I took time to feel and negotiate around my thoughts to get a hold of what was going on.
“I knew it was shame. My shame of not being good enough was saying something like “This isn’t the right way, you’re not a writer, this isn’t the right time, this isn’t the right person you’re sharing with, it’ll end up a disaster, you’ll end up a fool, don’t do it!”
Shame is a huge thing to deal, particularly in men as we’re typically taught to be strong, not talk about feelings, be solution providers, hide any weakness we feel, and get on with life. So when I sat myself down and had a conversation with myself, I discovered that indeed it was my own, lifelong shame about not being good enough, of being a fraud, or an egotist, that was putting pressure on me to stay hidden, bullying me into not being seen in front of others; that no-one would give me credit for what I’d written and I would end up looking stupid. That the scared part of me absolutely refused to be willing to be shown up or exposed. My own nasty little demons wanted me to “shut the f**k up.”
However, whilst I still feel irrational fear at times, I’ve learned the advice in the phrase “nothing ventured, nothing gained” offered by many a wiser person than myself. I’ve learned that the more failure we go through, provided we can eventually learn from the mistakes, then the better we become at making good choices. .
I’ve also learned, and often talk about, the wisdom of developing and loving and gentle awareness of ourselves, of winding down the nasty critical voice from the parrot on our shoulder and instead finding a better positive and nurturing perspective or inner voices that will help us make better, more positive decisions, even if it involves risk. My conversation with my Inspector Clouseau may have been invisible to the naked eye or the person about to read my manuscipt, but those voices were battling furiously in my head. I sat, sweating, as my friend started to read the pages. The silence was relentless. Fear became pain and the pain became almost unbearable. The result was that it felt like the start of a heart attack.
“I wanted to say to Patti “You don’t have to read it, it’s fine. Give it back to me””.
I found it hard to separate the fact that this was just about someone reading words on paper, rather than my fear of it being an opportunity for someone I knew to pile more shame on me than I already had. My own horrible little demons were shouting at me to hide my work. Yet I knew that although my critical demons wanted to protect me, they were in fact being thieves of an opportunity for me to share something good with the world, if nothing else to improve my writings, and something that would at least push me along my own path of learning. It took bravery to share my most vulnerable inner thoughts with Patti .
We have to show up in order to learn how to get better, and that takes courage. As always, having recognised my irrational fear, looked at it in the eye, and sat with it a little longer, it passed. The demons were monsters in the dark that once upon a time might have protected me from humiliation, but now with a little bit of patience, I saw that they were obsolete, limiting, old beliefs, filled with the toxic rubbish that held me back from my journey of self-discovery. They had to be released so that new ways could come in. My writings might not have been earth shattering but my insides had become my outsides and I was one step closer to saying to the world “This is the real me, take it or leave it”.
The group M People express the difficult journey to wholeness so well in one of their great songs;
“You’ve got to search for the hero inside yourself
Search for the secrets you hide
Search for the hero inside yourself
Until you find the key to your life.”
Love is an Action 
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