Lies, Damn Lies And The Things We Think About Ourselves!

Lies, damn lies and the things we think about ourselves ordered perfectly from bad to worse and here's why. The things you think about yourself have literally nothing to do with you. They have been created over time by other people. The usual but innocent suspects like parents, teachers and other children. We don't need to explore this further. It's just something to know. It helps to distance yourself from those unpleasant thoughts about yourself.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Calmcast,

A time to feel calm and think clearly.

I'm Claire Downham,

The Queen of Calm,

A Transformational Life Coach.

I was a burnt out headteacher who finally made the journey to calm after years of trying and I want to prevent you from having to do the same.

The Calmcast is a series of short explorations gently guiding you back to your natural state which is calm and clarity.

Just listen like you would listen to music with an open mind and curiosity.

There's nothing else to do.

Now let's relax into today's episode.

So today's exploration is around lies,

Damn lies and thoughts about ourselves.

The origins of that phrase when I first heard it was actually that it was lies,

Damn lies and statistics.

I don't know where it comes from.

Perhaps somebody can let me know where it actually comes from.

But actually what it's saying is that in ascending order of disbelief I suppose that we're going lies,

Damn lies and statistics but actually what I'm pointing to today is that we can use that phrase to consider the thoughts that we have about ourselves.

And you can see already that I am categorising them with lies and damn lies and in fact that they are on the severe end of both those things.

They are worse and more untrue really than lies and damn lies.

The thoughts about ourselves are probably the most untrue thing that whizzes around our heads on a day to day basis.

And I'm not one for poking around in the past or any of that stuff but it's worth just understanding a little bit about where those thoughts originally came from,

From what they are created in our own experience.

And they are created from the things that other people said or the things that we learnt from watching other people's behaviour or watching how the world seemed to work around us on a day to day basis from when we were very very small.

Now I used to spend a lot of time going into the past to try and find the source of that,

The root cause of it through counselling and other therapy and inner child work and all sorts of things.

Now that's not what I want to encourage you to do but there is something powerful in just knowing what that thought is made of,

What is its constituent part,

What is it actually formed out of and it is formed out of things that other people thought wrongly about you.

Other people's thoughts about you in the present moment are only their thoughts about you,

They are not real,

They reflect on the other person not on you.

And it's just about knowing that the thoughts that you have about yourself,

Especially those that are not particularly complementary or helpful were never ever anything to do with you.

They've just been picked up on as you've gone through life.

They've just been,

They seem to have become part of you,

They seem now that they are who you are,

They're part of who you are but really they are the remnants of other people's thinking about you.

And as I've just said,

Other people's thinking about you is to do with them.

Like now in the present if somebody thinks something about you,

That's to do with them,

That's to do with their perception of life,

That's to do with their thought in the moment,

That's to do with their state of mind,

It has absolutely nothing to do with you.

So if the thoughts,

Well not if,

But because the thoughts that you have about yourself are made of that same stuff,

They're made of other people's perception,

They're made of other people's state of mind at that time.

You know for example,

If innocently a parent angrily says something to you,

That's coming from their state of mind,

How they were feeling at that moment,

The thinking that they had at that moment and then what the product of that was,

What came out of their mouths and spoke to you.

And it's really easy to see how quickly we can pick up those things.

I have a child,

A young child who is sometimes in my life and his mum has said to him that he's out of control and we experienced him saying that right back at us as if it was true.

Why did you do that?

Because I'm out of control.

And in that moment it was really easy to see,

He said that as if it was true and we had to explain to him,

No you're not out of control,

You've just heard somebody else say that and that somebody else was not in a good state of mind,

They were not in a good place when they said that to you.

So what happens over time is that we we hear those things in our heads so much that we stop realising that they've come from elsewhere.

Sometimes in the moment if somebody said something rude to us we're just like oh you know actually.

And as an adult we might easily,

More easily dismiss that but younger children don't do that and so they start to think those thoughts about themselves and it just becomes something that seems to have been there forever.

But when we understand the nature of thought we can start to just change our relationship with that which passes through our heads,

Not just about ourselves but about everything in life because all of it has been learnt from other people's thinking,

From other people's state of mind,

From other people's feelings,

It's got nothing to do with us.

And something you have probably noticed about yourself is that despite this voice in your head that says you can't,

I pretty much guarantee there have been lots of times in life when you have done exactly what that voice is telling you you couldn't do.

And so that's really helpful because I think that helps us to see that our thinking knows nothing about our capabilities because the person who originally kind of planted that in there,

They didn't know anything about our capabilities either.

And that can be really helpful because if you start to get a bit curious about how many times you have done something despite the voice in your head saying you couldn't,

You can just bring some awareness to this and some interest and some,

Yeah,

Some real kind of inquisitiveness.

Can you think of all those times,

All those times when you did something despite the fact there was a voice saying you couldn't.

Our thinking knows nothing about what we're capable of,

Actually nothing at all.

It may not always seem that way but it is powerful when you start to see how much you do despite what's going on in your head.

So you might be wondering what there is to do about this and I'm going to tell you that very little is the answer.

I spent a long time trying to swap my not so good thinking about myself for some better thinking about myself through doing therapy and affirmations and journaling and all sorts of things that I did to try and swap out my thinking for some different better thinking and that became a lot of hard work and it made me just more self-conscious and more noticing of the bits about me that were off and the thinking about me that was off and what I have noticed more and more now is that where I see what thought is,

What it is a product of,

How it is so random and it appears in my head at random and I don't really control it,

I don't decide to put it there.

There's just something really powerful and just starting to have a different relationship with it.

You don't have to believe it,

You don't have to take it seriously,

You don't have to make it mean something about you because it isn't really about you anyway,

It never ever was and what I've noticed over time is that as I bring some awareness to this,

Those thoughts tend to just turn up less,

An awful lot less and then there's more calm,

More clarity and more ease.

So the invitation here is especially to think about those times when you just did something despite the fact there was something in your head saying you absolutely couldn't,

Just bring some awareness to that and see what comes up.

Thank you so much for listening.

There's nothing to do now but bring some awareness to how this is working out in your life.

Listen regularly to experience longer and longer periods of calm.

This has been The Calm Cast with Clare Downham,

Queen of Car.

Take care and keep listening.

Reviews

Thank you so much, I certainly needed this today.
🙏

🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟super helpful and incisive 🙏plus it also speaks on some of the concepts in the book on intrusive thoughts I am currently reading 📖✨💖✨thank you