Are you creating standards that make you feel bad about yourself, about your personality, about your situation? Are you holding yourself accountable to standards that don’t even exist? I’d be willing to bet that you are.
Take my client, for example, she sets a goal every single month to bring in $30,000.00 in revenue. Every single month she brings in about $12,000 to $15,000 in revenue. I keep saying to her, “Why don’t we set a goal to bring in $15,000 because that is a stretch month for you?” And she keeps saying, “No, no, I can do $30,000. Whatever you put your mind on, you can get” blah blah blah!!
Well, this, my friend, is a structure for feeling like crap. It’s no surprise she feels like crap all the time. When you feel like crap, you don’t expand and you don’t get better. You’re not more effective. So when you hold yourself accountable to standards that make you feel bad, you actually diminish or create a worse result and experience for yourself in life.
If she would simply create a new standard for herself, and hit that new target every time, she’d feel amazing. And, when you feel amazing, you have more energy, more drive, more desire to go for it. Instead, my client picks an arbitrary target that she misses over and over… to ensure she feels like a loser.
Crazy.
Truth is, we do this in all areas of our lives.
So many people are holding themselves accountable to standards that don’t exist for their body. They’re making their body wrong. You may think “my body shouldn’t look like that, my butt is too big” blah blah blah! Well, in the end, The Drunk Monkey in your head is literally trying to protect you from you, and protect you from the circumstances in your life. That just shows you how safe your life is. Your life is so perfect, wonderful, delicious, easygoing, and effortless that your mind now is bored and is now spending its time trying to keep you safe from you.
It’s insanity. Start to call BS on the mind. Start to know that life is perfect and the only thing that makes it unperfect is your opinion. And I’d like you to just notice that you don’t even generate your own opinions. Your opinions just bubble up, blub, blub, blub, blub. Stop acting like they are the truth.
Author
Matthew Ferry