Hey, when you are BEING a knucklehead… does it mean you ARE a knucklehead?
Or you are just doing the only exercise most people do: jumping into conclusions.
Listen if you can recognize yourself in this story:
A lot of my clients find themselves in a trap…
For example, they make a mistake. They are frustrated. Or they are scared. Or they are angry. Or they are devastated. Even suicidal.
They say to themselves: Here I go again!…
…I am never going to get it right! I am never going to learn this… I better give up while I am ahead! I am stupid! I am a loser! and on and on and on I could go with the examples how people abuse themselves.
Other times someone compliments them, or they figure something out, or something minor succeeds, and their ego swells, and they feel that they are really good looking, a winner, well liked, smart, even maybe… gasp… brilliant.
Or someone else makes a mistake, and they decide that the other person is no good, isn’t worth investing their time into whatever they were going to do together.
Parents do this to their kids all the time. My parents did it to me too…
I was dyslexic and I was near sighted… And mildly autistic.
Reading was not my strong suit, in fact I didn’t really learn to read until I was about 9 years old, in third grade. I figured out a method: stabilized my head, blocked out the peripheral vision, and then, and only then, I could actually see the letters, the words, and read. But there needed to be no noise in the background, no movements, and I also needed to be calm. Alone, etc.
My parents called me stupid, talked to others about their stupid daughter… My teachers didn’t think I was stupid… or maybe they just didn’t say it, but my parents did.
Until this day, my knee jerk reaction, to look at everything, through smart/stupid.
I am not alone, right? Some years ago I had a health issue and I had to be operated on. I had no money, no insurance, so a doctor operated on me as a favor he owed to his friend who was my advertising client. I owned and operated a print magazine.
The surgery didn’t go too well. I came out of it with serious vertigo, and as it turned out later, a massive drop in my I.Q. I call it brain damage, though it was never diagnosed, because I vowed never to set foot in a doctor’s office again.
Some intellectual functions were untouched, but basic survival functions were seriously limited.
- I got lost in my own apartment. Occasionally still do.
- I could not figure out simple processes, what to do first, and what to do second.
- And I could not combine change to pay for the toll on the highway to save my life.
It was bad.
I could drive though. One day my truck broke down on the highway and luckily I brought one of my employees. Luckily because I probably wouldn’t have known what to do. He called AAA and a tow truck came to pick us up.
The tow truck driver, a good looking lad around 30 years old, was obviously retarded. Happy, talkative, but a simpleton.
I asked how he managed to be so happy.
He said: when he made mistakes as a child, his mother never called him names, simply said: ‘You just made an error in judgment.‘ So he never told himself that he was stupid, or he couldn’t, or any of the crap we tell ourselves… he grew up a happy man, useful in the world, fairly successful as well. Nowadays making a living is success in and of itself. Coupled with happiness: a big success.
You just made an error in judgment.
I found his story very inspiring. I remembered that I used to be smart, and I set out to come back to that.
So what is the point, you ask?
If and when you can tell apart who you are (an unlimited being in physical form) and who you are being in the moment (even if that moment is a long moment, lol) then you can easily return to who you really are, smart, powerful, generous, kind, loving… and won’t be trapped by your own judgment of you.
Do you have a story to tell? Please don’t hesitate to tell us in the comment form. We would all like to learn from your story.
Sophie
PS: 2023 Note:
as you will see from another article, I have come down from the dizzying height of ‘an unlimited being in physical form’ to who you are habitually being, given your capacities, abilities, and what you do.
But the gap is still there: you can be stupid in a moment, even if you are brilliant otherwise. Or be stupid in one area and exceptional in another. Or a liar in some interactions, and brutally honest or diligent, or whatever in others.
The other, newer article goes several layers below this one… really new knowledge.
If you want to look at where we look when we dig to find out what is the truth about you… we did that in eight sessions of the What’s the Truth About You workshop.
It didn’t go as deep as the article from today… but it went very deep.
What’s the truth about you
