Friday, July 29, 2005

Excuse Words

He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else...Benjamin Franklin

Excuse making is a bad habit & one best brought to heightened awareness & dealt with on a regular basis. Having a habit means that something lives on automatic pilot. Interactive self-hypnosis is a great way to deal with all sorts of habits, but today I'm going to focus on my own excuse catalog & share some of the ways I work with myself introspectively.

My patients are often surprised when I share my own life experiences with them. For some reason they think that I should be without issues or problems, in other words perfect. Sharing battles, lessons learned & strategies for building success works as a good rapport builder. As I mentioned in an early blog entry, we are both teachers & students at the same time.

The need or desire to be perfect is filled with potential for disaster. Much of my experience in excuse making came from the years when I thought that I needed to meet this unattainable position. Growing up in a critical household, along with others who deemed themselves flawless, set the stage for my own journey in this unfortunate direction.

As a young child, I can remember lying through my teeth to self-protect. I was well motivated by internal movies of what would happen to me if my imperfect authentic self was seen for who she was. And so, I became expert at deception & excuse-making. I would happily accept my successes, but find ways to hide my failures, no matter what their size. I clearly remember the fear that surrounded this hiding activity, how it added to my body tension, eventually causing a myraid of physical problems that even lead to hospitalization.

Here's some things that I know after years of working on my own introspection. Making excuses robbed me of self-authenticity. It allowed me to negate responsibility & blocked my path to success in so many areas of my life. I was not free to learn from my mistakes, perceived or real. I became locked in my excuses, instead of being involved in my creative thought processes that could have assisted me in solving the problems, therefore learning more about the world. Obviously, making excuses is a bad habit & one over which we want to have better control.

After awhile, I found that I believed many of the excuses I designed. I saw myself as incapable of doing many things, afraid to begin, so I could avoid failure. That seemed easier than failing & then having to hide it. When I was accused of procrastinating, I simply hid away, hoping that others would just forget about me.....leaving me alone. I'm sure this frequented scenario let to my issues with social anxiety that followed me into adulthood.

Heightened awareness has helped me, over the years, to uncover the fears underneath my excuses. I've asked my subconscious mind librarian to bring these to my attention. I remember placing these suggestions & then being bombarded with fear-awareness. I never realized how much fear I actually had already programmed.

You know the old saying, "be careful what you ask for"..... Part of me wished that I wouldn't see all that I was seeing, but I knew enough to understand that these were gifts from my own inner-self, for in order to diminish an emotion, or to change a mind program, one has to be able to see or own it. I now owned plenty! If fear were money, I was a rich person.

In any given day I have the opportunity to work with my fears, my excuses & my rationalizations. They are all in the same negative bank account. Each time one surfaces, I can transition it & then deposit it in a more favorable account, preferably one of creativity & success.

It's quite easy to transition an emotion or a behavior with interactive self-hypnosis. The first step is to be willing to see it & own it. The second step is to release it, either totally or in small segments. This is the most common way, especially if the fear or behavior is big, or has been around for awhile. Next, relax deeply & access the mind programming screen. If you tilt your closed eyes up about 20 degrees, it's sitting right there, just as if you were in a movie theater.

Image what you want on the screen as if you already had it. Energize it with positive & powerful emotion & there....you have transitioned a negative into a positive!

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I welcome the noticing of my fears, excuses & rationalizations. I systematically release & transition them in goal-orientated active images. I'm taking care of myself in new ways..... Elizabeth Bohorquez, RN, C.Ht

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