Episode Recap In this episode Briana gets vulnerable with a story about her personal life and her struggles overcoming her own self-doubt even when it looked like she was succeeding. It’s a powerful testament to discovering the value of one positive comment.
Tyler Phillips suggested the book Drawn to Life by Walt Stanchfield to me. I was most interested in learning drawing techniques by Disney masters but I noticed Walt started the book with the headline “Enthusiasm”. You see aside from teaching drawing he would teach “positive thinking nature”. Quoted from page 3, “Your mental and emotional processes are you.”
Make it a habit to mindfully be kind to yourself.
When you hate yourself it is hard to show love to others. When I was in the process of getting married I attended several personal counseling sessions to overcome my self identified anger problem.
My therapist indicated to me that this might not really be the problem. That I was in fact a good person with good qualities and I was only letting my emotions take me on “the low road”. This literally almost made me cry – I was so happy to hear that someone actually believed that about me. That I WAS good – not a bad person pretending to be good.
He said that I needed to start to pay attention to myself and notice my feelings, as they would arise inside of me. Not to judge them, but just notice how they made me feel, what body positions I would take when I would “become angry”.
I took this concept of not judging my feelings as they arose inside of me and instead of asking myself “why do you have to act selfish?” – I would say “this action causes me to feel selfish but I am a good person and I can choose a different path”. Just like Joel said. “I am a good person.”
It really doesn’t make sense to people when I was an honor roll student, I was a respected employee at a local restaurant, I was engaged to an awesome man… How could I have not known I was “good”?
There are some of you who know exactly what I’m talking about.
Those were all things that I was on the outside. On the inside I told myself was a student who took the most shortcuts as possible and only had good grades by luck or lazy teachers who didn’t actually want to grade my papers. Only the teachers who failed me knew the true me.
I never did get marriage counseling with my husband from Kaiser and my meetings with Joel were few. It certainly hasn’t happened over night but since that time I have feverishly sought knowledge on how to improve my self-talk. Around this past year 2015 I noticed a change in myself. I’m not sure when it happened. But I noticed that when I decide to pursue something now I don’t wonder if I can do but whether I want to. When I do pursue something and succeed I notice I give myself credit and I am confident to take on another task.
I may not know you, but I believe YOU ARE GOOD too.
Now that you know that I want to know – what will you accomplish next?
Resources in this Episode Episode 11 – From Graphic Design to Animation with Tyler Phillips
Drawn to Life