Some failures can be hard to get over.
It could be something we didn’t accomplish as we’d hoped, like meeting a deadline, or something we only perceived as a failure in our head, like showing up ten minutes late to our kid’s piano recital.
Either way, it’s much easier to internalize those feelings, adding more fuel to the fire that’s the negative voice in your head.
What’s yours? Your mom? Dad? Grandma? Your fifth grade teacher that said you just didn’t have what it takes?
Like most of us, you’ve been hearing its nonstop taunts and chatter and it-will-never-work’s and I-told-you-so’s for a long, long while.
The most common advice is to not listen to that voice.
But if you’ve been thinking about a pink zebra from the age of 3 till you’re 35, and one day I tell you pink zebras are bad, expose them for what they really are—true-sounding lies—and that you need to stop thinking about them forever, would you be able to stop?
If I told you to a few more times, you might believe me. You might even stop a pink zebra on its tracks and turn away.
But not for long. Because that pink zebra has 32 years on you.
What you CAN do, is replace the pink zebra. With, say, a blue dolphin.
When examining an old voice or belief, telling yourself not to listen to it sounds great intellectually. It’s just a matter of willpower, of trying harder, of wanting it bad enough.
Then human nature steps in. Before long, old voices take over. Then old habits take over.
An alternative is not asking yourself to do the near impossible (although impossible is relative, and you might make some useful progress), but replacing the old with the new.
It’s hard to stop thinking about pink zebras. It leaves a void your brain feels compelled to fill. Instead, if you replaced them with blue dolphins, your brain still gets to chatter, but about something that’s way, way better for you.
But replacement doesn’t work if it’s a one-time thing, just like eating better to lose weight is not a one-time thing.
In the early stages of making a change, creating a new habit or building a new mental soundtrack, it’s more about quantity than quality.
To drown out the old voice, you need to increase the frequency of the new one.
Over and over again.
Then over and over again some more.
You need a pod of dolphins for every pink zebra.
Maybe that means acknowledging your victories and keeping them in sight so you remember you earned them.
Or reading books that lift you up and reinforce your resolve to expose the lies you’ve come to believe about yourself, your strengths, your limits.
Or surrounding yourself with real people whose love and support counter your self-sabotaging thoughts.
Or practicing more gratitude; heaven knows we could all do more of this.
You may never totally get rid of the pink zebra, but you can put it to pasture, place it further away so it’s not as loud. Mostly, if slowly but frequently, you’re shifting your focus to the blue dolphin.
The stronger, braver, truer you. Growing. And moving forward.
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