Ignoring Stuff Feels Shitty; Get Deliberate Instead

“Being deliberate is a tool that helps us access the higher parts of ourselves. Often we feel helpless. But we can take our power back by being deliberate about our choices in any situation.”

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If you read this blog regularly, then you know I experience social anxiety. One on one, like with clients, I’m great. I love it. But throw in a bunch of people I don’t know and I’ll feel like I’m being crushed from inside.

I know, I know. You’re thinking most everyone feels this way. But my experience is a little different. Most people have an emotion valve in their hippocampus that turns on and off. Anxiety may show up, but once you feel safe it goes away. Because I experienced years of trauma during childhood my brain doesn’t modulate emotion properly.

Like a river after a rainstorm, it floods easily with a mix of super uncomfortable emotions. (Now you know how I became an expert at helping people navigate difficult emotions!) That river is already flowing when I first wake up, but throw some human interaction into that mix and you better put on your rubber boots.

That said, I’m also stubborn as fuck. And I’ve made it this far in life by constantly challenging myself to step into fear, make friends with it, or at least learn a few new things while it kicks me around.

So I signed up for a month-long improv class.

If you aren’t familiar with improv, let me give you a glimpse: in my first class I was instructed to lumber around the room like an elephant, greeting the people I passed by looking in their eyes and swinging my long snout around. And it just got uglier from there. If you’re someone with trust and vulnerability issues, it’s like being thrown into a fire then told to dance and enjoy it.

I know! What the hell was I thinking?

But I actually made it through the second class, and I felt proud of myself. Unfortunately, then the teacher joined in on a conversation I was having with my friend and started projecting a bunch of his own stuff onto me with a pushy “I-know-how-to-fix-you” energy.

I know he meant well, but this flooded my inner river bank with emotions. There was anger, shame, frustration.

“See!” my inner child said. “This is what happens when we expose ourselves to people. They judge us. They hurt us. I’m never doing this again.”

And, try as I might, I could not talk that part of me into going back.

You see, the child aspect (and you have one—we all do) is not connected to the part of us that understands higher truths. For example, that higher part of me knows he’s just projecting onto me the same sort of militant approach he takes toward himself. And this experience was also the Universe/Spirit holding up a helpful mirror to show me the places where I could love myself more. And, perhaps, there was a jab of karma thrown in, since I used to be a first-class “fixer” myself.

But my child aspect could care less about all that stuff.

“He didn’t care about my feelings or my experiences,” she said. “I’m not going back.”

In the past, I would have wasted time feeling bad after something like this, ashamed that I wasn’t stronger, more resilient, more integrated. But now I just “get deliberate” and transform the whole shitty experience into useful compost that will help me grow even better things in my life (notice how I chose to throw the word “even” in there? That was deliberate too.)

Here’s a tool I created to help with this.

360 Degrees of Deliberation

1. Choose a situation you are struggling with. (The easiest way to choose is to just close your eyes and ask yourself: what is bothering me the most right now?)
2. Imagine yourself standing in the centre of your situation (it can help to close your eyes). You can also draw this on a piece of paper.
3. Identify the different components that are causing you discomfort. In my case, there were two:
   1. Allowing myself to be vulnerable in front of other people. (I was so flooded by emotions at one point during a basic exercise in the first class that I began laughing hysterically and could not stop. I’ve never experienced that before.)
   2. The hurt and rage I felt after the interaction with the teacher (because I had allowed myself to be vulnerable, and then felt judged).
4. Decide on goals and a deliberate course of action that will help you address each component that caused you discomfort. These should move you forward on your path of personal growth.
   1. Goal: Teach my child aspect to feel safer and more resilient in vulnerable situations in a more gentle way. As my partner, Joel, said: my signing up for this improv course was like taking calculus before I had mastered basic math. So where could I learn basic math?
      1. Action: Hire a professional who can hold that safe space for me the way this particular teacher could not. (Also continue placing myself in situations where I will need to interact with people I don’t know.)

1. Goal: Find out what triggered me, why I was so infuriated by the teacher’s opinions, and begin integrating it so it doesn’t happen again.
   1. Action: Use my fave tools to explore this: freewriting, meditative inquiry, emotional freedom technique and Byron Katie’s turnarounds, and keep going until I receive some insights.

Results:

Being deliberate allowed me to take this uncomfortable experience and turn it into a great opportunity to learn, grow and experience a bunch of beautiful “a-ha moments” that have already improved my life. (No, I’m not going to share them, but only because this post is too long already!).

Just as awesome, I was able to apply a few of these things immediately with my clients, and noticed that it helped them to feel safer with me, and to experience major breakthroughs faster.

With this approach, I feel like I’m getting way better at turning my own shit into compost that will help me grow fun new things. So yay me!

And that’s 360 Degrees of Deliberation. Use this to “get deliberate” about how you approach all the different choices and challenges in your life and let me know how it goes! :)

 

I wish you a fulfilling week of incremental improvement and progress over perfection, all inside a container of self love that makes the journey fun! <3

 

Rise and shine as your True Self,

Shawn

*This is part of my #coffeewisdom series: snapshots of my fave guidance that I receive for myself and clients, which I share on my Facebook page.