“I am always at a loss as to how much to
believe the stories I tell myself!” said Washington Irving. How true! While we
may not be great story tellers like our ancestors of the yore, we are adept at
telling stories to ourselves – and negative ones at that. There is a constant
chatter in our minds and if you step back and analyze these thoughts, you can
see a familiar pattern. Most of it would be repeating things that you need to
do (doing nothing about it and increasing your tension!), and a lot of it would
be some “scripts” that you are playing out repeatedly. It could be some
perceived injustice done to you in the past or how the world is unfair to you
or how you were denied opportunities to grow and the list is endless.
Unfortunately, by repeating the same thing over and over again, we perpetuate
these stories thereby making them more and more real. This is a self-fulfilling
prophesy.
Cheri Huber said “That voice inside your
head is not the voice of God. It sounds like it thinks it is!”. The worst
critic you will ever encounter is the one who lives inside your mind. The way
you talk to yourself has a profound impact on your emotional state and the
resultant behaviour. For example, when you make a mistake, consider the tone of
voice you use when you talk to yourself. We never say “Great, it has been a
good learning experience!” Instead, it invariably would be “You, stupid idiot,
you really screwed up this time” or “You will never learn” or words to that
effect! Most of it would be critical or angry or sarcastic or even resigned. This
is one of the primary reasons for low self-esteem, globalizing local events
leading to depression etc.
In corporate life, it is next to
impossible to avoid people who come up and say “Why does this always keep
happening to me?” or “People only hurt me” etc time and again. There is lot of
self talk going on in their minds and by repeating them time and again, it
impacts their behaviour and the way people perceive them. Hence it is important
that such negative self talk and scripts are avoided and rephrased so that we
do not manifest circumstances that would fulfill our script!
I am sure all of you have seen “The Lion King”. It is a brilliant movie.
The lion cub “Simba” leaves the forest and lives with a meerkat and warthog –
Timon and Pumbaa. It lives a carefree life of “hakuna matata” meaning “no
worries”. It starts to think and behave like other animals with which it is
associated forgetting its true nature. Then Rafiki, the wise monkey adviser to
Simba’s father tricks him saying that his father is alive and takes him to a
pond. Simba sees his father’s apparition in the sky which tells him that Simba
was born to rule and that he must take his pride of place among the lions. This
changes Simba and he later claims the kingdom which is rightfully his.
Do we see parallels between
this story and our life – at least I see a lot of truth in this narration. We
do not rightfully understand who we are, nor the world around us – primarily
because we are constantly running the “wrong scripts”. All we have to do then
is to rewrite the faulty script just as Simba did. Is that possible – yes it
is. Is it easy – maybe not? But remember that "One of the greatest of all
principles is that men can do what they think they can do!"
How
and when do we get our “Rafiki”, the wise one?
