mind lines

26 Ways To Get The Hell Over Your Fear Of Making Mistakes

I’m not going to lie to you: making mistakes still freaks me out. There’s something about getting things wrong that causes me to break out into a cold sweat. Even if I’m at home playing music by myself, just the thought “What if I get it wrong?” induces enough panic to throw my concentration out, leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Does Making Mistakes Still Freak You Out Too?

Does Making Mistakes Still Freak You Out Too?

It’s easy enough to see where this paranoia comes from. I grew up with a mother who criticised my father for almost everything that he said and did, and this led to arguments that I found very frightening. Most of those arguments were about who was right and who was wrong in the previous argument, so I learned from a very young age that it was extremely important to be right all the time if you wanted to avoid degrading humiliation and terrifying conflict.

Add to that a religion where you burned in hell for all eternity for being a flawed human being, if you didn’t accept the correct saviour. Even as a young child I knew that there were other religions from the one I was being indoctrinated with, so there were other possibilities to choose from. Being wrong about my choice of religion/saviour/deity had eternal unpleasant consequences.

And then there was an education system where your social status bequeathed by the teachers in the form of grades and your position in the class hierarchy depended on me giving the answers that they liked. Get too many things wrong, and I would find myself condemned to the class full of dead-heads.

This kind of thing can leave a lasting impact. I’m still upset about being marked wrong in 5th grade for answering that π equalled 3.1415926535897, rather than the “correct” answer of 22/7.

When I look at the beliefs that I internalised about making mistakes and getting things wrong, they pretty much boil down to these two:

If I make mistakes, people won’t love me

If I get anything wrong, I will be punished

I’ve long since abandoned much of the perfectionistic family, cultural and religious belief systems that I grew up with, so I no longer consciously believe that making mistakes is a terrible thing to be avoided at all costs. But just try telling that to my hyper-vigilant limbic system.

So lets see what happens when I run these beliefs through the 26 “Mind lines” from L. Michael Hall and Bobby G. Bodenhamer’s book Mind Lines: Lines For Changing Minds to see if I can neutralise them with a little neuro-semantic magic.

The book makes a distinction between External Behaviour and Internal State. In these two beliefs, the external behaviour is “make mistakes” and “get anything wrong”, while the Internal State is “people not loving me” and “being punished”.

Bring on 26 Ways To Get The Hell Over Your Fear Of Making Mistakes: (more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

26 Ways To Chill The Fuck Out About What Other People Think

I used to get tremendously anxious about what other people thought of me. Hang on a second; used to? Who am I kidding? I’m still as neurotic as the next person. But I have been making some inroads into this particular phobia lately.

Do You Worry Too Much What Other People Think? Chill The Fuck Out!

Do You Worry Too Much What Other People Think? Chill The Fuck Out!

It helps is knowing where it comes from, and it’s partly an evolutionary thing: we evolved in tribes where individuals specialised in what they were good at, because that gave the tribe an evolutionary advantage over individuals living every-Neanderthal-for-themselves. Our ancestors were interdependent, and that meant they needed to get along with each other. Since the cook couldn’t hunt and the hunter couldn’t cook, rejection by the tribe meant certain death; so we learned to worry about what other people think of us.

Or I could just blame my mother. She used to say “Who cares what other people think?” But the way she hid her feelings, and her intolerance to criticism left me thinking that unconsciously she worried about what other people thought of her a great deal. I probably learned this habit by osmosis.

Regardless of where it comes from, while consideration for others is a good think, worrying too much what they think is something I’ve overdone in the past. If I were to describe my fear of what other people think in terms of a limiting belief, it would be something like:

Other people’s thoughts can hurt me.

Sounds pretty crazy on the face of it, but try telling that to my hyper-vigilant nervous system.

With that in mind, I decided to run this irrational belief through the 26 thought reframing patterns from L. Michael Hall and Bobby G. Bodenhamer’s book Mind Lines: Lines For Changing Minds to see if I could neutralise it with a little neuro-semantic magic.

This gives me 26 Ways To Chill The Fuck Out About What Other People Think: (more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago