Sqoosh Your Inner Critic!

Limited Belief:

“I’m a loser who quits everything I start”

Playback Affirmation:

“Even though my quitting this project (or career path) makes me feel like a loser who quits all the time…I deeply and completely accept myself. And I am choosing to empower myself by letting go of roles and projects that limit me from expressing who I am and what I have to offer this World.”

***

The other day one of my best friends (who I met back in College) and I were discussing why it is that I had this habit of abandoning many diverse and seemingly random projects/careers…and yet the projects that I most resonated with were the ones I subconsciously kept blocking myself from taking action on. Here’s her exact words:

“I feel like you are always trying to force yourself into these roles that don’t quite explain who you are – and then that’s when you quit your projects.”

I think she may be onto something. So I’d like to spend some time exploring this observation she made…

I quit my Career as a Poet when was 16

My earliest memory of quitting a career was when my mom threw away poems that I wrote on napkins, paper placemats, scratch paper (whatever was writable, I wrote on!). I felt deeply unsupported by my parents and that they had rejected this fundamental part of me that needed to express myself through the written word. After that day I became a closet writer and hid my poetry from my parents. However, a few years later I secretly entered one of my poems in a local poetry contest. I happened to win the contest and was invited to give a poetry reading of it at the awards ceremony. My family was invited and even though they didn’t particularly support my writing endeavors, they attended the poetry reading because they liked the fact that their child won some kind of award. I remembered how confused and lost they looked about the whole situation-they were worried that taking a career in Writing would lead to a dead-end. As far as they were concerned, being a Writer didn’t lead to signs of approval and acknowledgments of “success” from relatives and friends (they weren’t confident that it was impressive, respectable, or honorable enough) and they were concerned that there wasn’t much stability and prosperity in it. Over the next few months after, I began to become obsessed with reading about high-powered executives of technology companies (a career that my parents believed to be suitably impressive, respectable, honorable, financially stable). Essentially, I gave in. And I withdrew from showing up for myself. I still wrote my poems, but I quit on my dreams of becoming a famous writer.

I quit my Computer Engineering degree at 20

When I went to college I majored in Electrical and Computer Engineering. At the time, I didn’t understand the concept of “do what you are good at”. I didn’t see majoring in anything else as an option. I understood the concept of “struggle and work hard. It will be worth it in the end.” I desperately sought the approval of my parents-and what they wanted for me was to be an Engineer. But after one too many F’s in Electrical Engineering, I decided to switch-down majors (in the Electrical Engineering culture, switching to any other major was considered failure) to Computer Science. Yes, I quit Electrical Engineering. If I had been at all smart about “doing what you are good at” I would’ve chosen the easier path of Computer Science-where writing computer programs were at least doing something that I was good at-Writing. Of course these were computer languages we’re talking about here, but nonetheless. But I quickly got bored and wanted to start my own business. I took a semester off and then started to think that a college degree isn’t that important if you go into business for yourself (what had Engineering School taught me other than “how to be extremely tolerant of suffering” anyway?). My friends talked me into finishing my last semester (and finally graduate after 5 1/2 years) but it wasn’t for the reasons they thought would persuade me to go back–being “employable”, something to “fall back on”, and that I worked so hard to get to the last semester, it would be “such a waste” to quit at the last lap of the race. I went back to finish my last semester because I believed that if I quit on College…I would always have the “I’m a quitter” belief hanging over my head and it would haunt me as a I pursued other endeavors in life. But then shortly after…

I quit my entire Engineering Career at 23

Throughout College I had three summer internships, taking the position of, you guessed it, “Technical Writer”. I didn’t mind editing the “Troubleshooting Manuals” and it was easy work for me. However, I disliked the Corporate Dot Com environment. Yes, all those years of being obsessed with the notion of “if I could just find the perfect position, the perfect company, the perfect project, the perfect advancement opportunity” had amounted to me learning that you just can’t live off of someone else’s dream for you). After I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, I decided to quit and walk away from my Engineering Career completely.

I quit my first business at 24

I had this idea to make “phone totes”, these miniature messenger bags that girls could take out on a night of dance clubbing. They held a cell phone and had a back pocket for I.D. and money. So I took a sewing class and started to create my invention. I then had a factory manufacture a few hundred of them. Back then I was a bit naive about business and thought that all you had to do is put up a website and the customers would come. Needless to say this business went under before it actually started! I quickly got bored (not to mention unmotivated) as this was not the right outlet for my creativity. I did manage to sell what amounted to $1000 worth of phone totes, but the interesting thing that I didn’t admit to myself back then (but I’m willing to see this pattern now) was that I was more interested in writing the marketing content for the website than in designing the actual phone totes themselves. Hmm…

I quit my career as a Hair Colorist at 26

Then there was the brief hairstyling stint. I decided that even though the PhoneTote biz didn’t quite pan out…I was onto something-that a more creative “artsy” career was still worth pursuing. I was finally warming up to the idea that I deserved to have a career where I could be my “creative” self. However I soon realized that work as a hair stylist wasn’t as enriching as I thought it was going to be. I’m a sensitive and nurturing personality and I didn’t have the proper, strong boundaries I needed to have in order to not get completely drained working with Clients. The reason I took a shot at Hair Styling was because I thought “getting a haircut or colored” was something that everyone needs every few months, and it just seemed to be a “practical career” for a creative artist. But more important than that, I wasn’t able to express myself in writing as much. I’m now seeing that a lot of this distorted belief I had about “artists” came from those first few experiences I had of my parents dishonoring writing as a “practical career”, simply because they didn’t understand its place in this world (and they themselves don’t express themselves through writing).

I quit my second business at 27

I decided to go back to my desire to own a business, and my parents helped me open up a Coffee and Tea Shop. As anyone who has run a storefront knows, you have to wear about 20 different hats on a daily basis. My intention was to market the store like crazy. But making time for the marketing soon became daunting. Most of the time was taken up by administrative tasks and tamping out espresso (largely due to the fact that none of us could get around to agreeing upon a specific business plan). The marketing I did get around to was starting a blog for this business. And I enjoyed every bit of writing it! I even wrote a post inviting all our customers to a showing of “The Secret” at the Coffee Shop. It was shortly after watching “The Secret” that I returned to exploring my options as to what writing gigs I would be interested in taking on after we sold the Shop (as a family we decided it was all in our best interests to move on to other business endeavors and put the Shop on the market).

Currently, I am an assistant GM and Marketing Director at a Hotel

My parents’ main business is in managing shopping centers and other commercial properties. About a year ago they expanded their expertise into the area of hospitality management. When they did that, they invited my sister and I to join. At this time I had already started writing my first ebook but didn’t have income coming in after leaving the coffee shop business. So, the agreement my parents and I came to was that I would do some Internet marketing for a hotel they took on to manage, and the rest of my time I would devote to finishing and launching my ebook. Easier said than done! When we took over we didn’t realize to what extent and in how many departments the hotel was falling apart. Before I knew it, I wasn’t working as an Internet marketer 90% of the time, nor was I working on my ebook. I suddenly found myself in over-time, management-in-the-trenches mode. Now I was okay with this for a few months, but then I came to the awareness that I was further from my dreams of being an online infopreneur than I was before I took on this Hotel position.

One day I woke up, looked around, and asked “How did I get here?!” But once I was able to admit to myself that I allowed myself to get swept away by the “said” needs of The Hotel, the GM, the Big Boss of the management company (my parents)…I began to understand that this was just a pattern I kept falling into when I got fearful that I couldn’t have everything that I wanted (the Internet Marketing position, the successful ebook business, and simultaneously please my family). So, instead of honoring my own dream of success, I honored that of my family. After that confession, I began taking steps towards making what I did for the Hotel autonomous: I trained some of our hotel staff on how to make educated decisions without me (empowering employees), wrote up a few templates for meeting/guest room rental contracts that our sales agents could quickly draft (formerly something I would spend an hour on for each individual client), trained our Head Housekeeper on how to conduct her own Quality Assurance room inspections (without my daily hand-holding supervision), and did many other autonomizing tasks so that eventually I was essentially “replacing myself” as a Manager and could devote more time to the Internet marketing of the Hotel, and on my own infopreneurial ventures.

At this very moment, I can’t say that I’m exactly where I want to be as far as achieving all my career goals (eventually I’d like to leave the Hotel industry for good and be the successful writer I dream of becoming) but I know that I am on the verge of breaking my self-sabotaging pattern of denying myself the role of being me; a writer who needs to express herself through writing (starting This Blog is evidence of that).  

So to sum it up, what I’ve done is successfully quit on the things that weren’t the best outlets for expressing my true self so that I can now be aligned with a career that allows me to fully express myself creatively.  Steve Pavlina explains this in more detail in his podcast when he describes Creative Self-Expression as the most direct and efficient path towards success and financial prosperity.

Seeing all of these experiences in writing has caused me to realize that I did a lot of “negotiating my desires” and as a result, negotiated who I allowed myself to be. This habit created a self-sabotaging pattern where I consistently listened to that inner critic who told me “You are undeserving of having it all. You are not talented enough to have the things you want in life. Your family won’t accept, approve, or support you for choosing to pursue a writing career. That’s a nice daydream you have there, but that’s all it will ever be. Being yourself is dangerous and won’t guarantee financial prosperity.”

***

“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then give up. Don’t be a fool.” ~W.C. Fields

Ironically, it is the pattern that most holds you back that is the one that you are most resistant to letting go. Now you may believe that it’s the exact opposite, because how can that be when you really want to change a “bad” habit? This is the million dollar question, and we will definitely explore this concept in a later post.

What areas in your life have you negotiated your desires simply because you believed that you “can’t have it all” or must “sacrifice some things for other things”? Have you ever felt that you had to sacrifice your true self-expression in order for other people to be “comfortable around you” or because you believe that your own unique creative self-expression won’t support the quality of life that you desire? And by doing so, have limited who you have allowed yourself to be in front of others and even yourself?

If you’re not too shy, feel free to answer these questions by commenting on this Post!

You might also like these related posts...

• “The Artist’s Way” Book Review or “The Way to Freedom From Your Inner Critic”

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