So long, Affirmations
I love Ted Lasso as much as you do, but sometimes “believe” isn’t enough.
If I attend another self-empowerment webinar that tells me I’m good enough just as I am, I’m going to scream.
I suppose it’s my fault for continuing to sign up for these sixty cliché-ridden minutes of regurgitated toxic positivity. But, honestly. There’s a better way.
Not that there’s anything untrue about the following statements:
Stop beating yourself up.
Eliminate negativity.
Learn to love yourself.
But if ridding demons was as easy as morning affirmations, these platitudes wouldn’t continue to bomb our social media pages and calendar invites. Self-development workshops and personal fulfillment seminars would go the way of the Disk Operating System. (I recently asked my twenty-something kids what DOS stands for. They had no idea, and I felt old. Old and wise.)
So what’s the something better?
It’s an approach to acknowledging and integrating all our experiences and emotions and decide what to keep and what to throw away.
It’s all about entering a meditative state and then writing from your subconscious, seeing things you never knew you knew about yourself emerge on the page. If you confuse it with magic, I’d understand. It’s allowing your handwritten pages (yes, you must write by hand) to tel you how you became the person staring back at you in the mirror.
As Daniel H. Pink has proven through his research , all of our experiences and emotions are worthy of exploration. He calls bullshit on the cliché “No regrets.” Check out his most recent, awesome work, “The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward.” They teach us about our strengths, our perseverance, our guts. By having the courage to look in the rearview mirror, we halt the looping narratives of our perceived shortcomings. By looking at our past, we disrupt the words and actions others have put upon us, often at a young age, borne of their own insecurities.
Are we gutsy? Hell, yes. Are we flawed? Hell, yes.
Are we ready to shed the false messages we never should have absorbed in the first place? Hell, yes.
And therein lies the challenge: Can we acknowledge our full self and live from knowledge of the full shebang?
We can. And you might want three things to get started:
An invitation to own our stories.
A guide who shows you how to write from emotion, not intellect.
A community supporting you as you take that first step in meeting yourself on the page.
Decades in high school English classrooms have taught me the recipe is that simple. My students, and oh do I miss them, showed me every day the power of ditching the “How to write” lessons from well-intentioned teachers and instead trusting that the experiences and emotions–the joys, the losses, the loves, the anger–are right there for the taking.
You don’t need a writing workshop where the leader and participants tell you where to pack in more detail or cut your adverbs. And now’s also not the time to dash out to a fancy stationery store to purchase a gold-leafed journal. Now’s the time to grab the cheapest pad of paper that you can scrounge up and let it flow.
I often get pushback when it comes to the writing part. “But can’t I just think about my authentic voice”
Nope. Sorry. Because seeing your full self on the page is where the magic takes place. The ink screams, “This is the full me. What happened to me in the summer after 5th grade did matter. Those words my father said are still lodged in me and need to be pulled apart, like taffy. The reason that I don’t feel good enough has its roots in October, 1987. Now that I see that on the page, I get to decide what to do about it.”
Affirmations? I’m sure they have their place. But there’s a better way, and it’s waiting for you on the page.
Meet Jen
I find nothing more rewarding than inspiring people to value their stories and the fullness of their journey.
