You’ve come to a pretty damning, repetitive conclusion about yourself.
Here is today’s Game and what’s going on.
Here is what I discovered today in our Dadly Daily Declaration reading from Chapter 8 of Stop Doing That Shit by Gary John Bishop. The title of this chapter is “You.”
Today’s chapter starts the explanation of the three saboteurs, with the first being you. There are lots of nuggets today, some of which we will separate into an action plan. Let’s dive in:
- The first saboteur we’re going to dive into is what you’ve concluded about yourself. This is called your “personal conclusion.”
- That’s right, you’ve come to a pretty damning, repetitive conclusion about yourself. There’s an all-consuming whisper going on in the abyss of your subconscious. It runs in the background of your thoughts, humming along, prodding and poking you, enticing you to work on yourself, but eventually returning you to the whisper. And it’s personal.
- Here’s how your personal conclusion came to be. During your formative years, you inadvertently captured a handful of “treasured” items in that magic little sponge—some you picked up in early childhood, others a little later—about who you are and how you see yourself, your capabilities, and, most significantly, your shortcomings. Especially those shortcomings, because conclusions are never positive.
- Let’s get something out the way. Don’t start by saying your personal conclusion is “I’m freaking awesome!” It’s just not. You might occasionally say that to yourself with a dimple in your cheek and an eyeball-piercing glint from those ever so well-polished teeth of yours. Hell, at some superfluous level you might even believe it, but the truth of it is, it’s the shellac of bullshit people tell themselves to “overcome” what’s underneath the surface. It’s a scheme to stomach life, to somehow put some My Little Pony glitter on the immovable density of your most ignored, tolerated, and to-be-improved self. It’s a criticism, an internal, repeating criticism of self. The flaw that people are referring to when they roll out the old “I’m not perfect” line to make themselves look good to others.
- You’ve become so fascinated by your own temporary solutions, so seduced by the mirage of the future, that you can’t see it’s an illusion.
- Rather, your conclusion is the Vaseline smear across your view of your day-to-day life, slightly blurring and obscuring everything you see and occasionally coming into view.
- Your personal conclusion is like a never-ending, never-changing internal guide. It keeps you pegged to the life you have, and it always comes back to mind, no matter how good life gets. It’s kinda like trying to hold a beach ball underwater. You can do it for a while, but eventually, up it comes.
- Of course, the conclusion about yourself is the negative, but you’re also out to make yourself and your life better, so . . . along comes a handy positive every now and again to help you handle it, to temporarily leave you with the feeling that you actually ARE okay, that you’re on track and that this WILL turn out for you, and sometimes the illusion that it HAS turned out after all! Then it comes back.
- That’s the seesaw of your life right there. That’s the range within which you exist, back and forth, up and down. Two steps forward, two steps back. And that’s how you are wired to live! Right there! Circumstances change, you remain the same.
- In many ways, your circumstances are nothing more than context that your conclusion gets to dance with. Everybody’s working on their circumstances. Is it any wonder the conclusion remains?
Consider this example of a common personal conclusion:
“A very common personal conclusion that some people have is this: “I’m a loser.” Now imagine your life with that permanently in the hazy background of your thoughts. Every time you’re pressed, stressed, or fail at something, up it rises. “I’m a loser, I just knew it, here we go again, what is wrong with me, why can’t I get anything right?”
It produces a stream of connected thoughts and emotions, all automatically. The kind of thoughts that bind to that fundamental conclusion. It grows arms and legs, the conversation swells—“I can’t do it,” “It’s too hard,” “It’s too much.” It’s not just a thought or a background noise. When it’s triggered, when it’s loud, you’re in the world of that thing. It controls you. Imagine a lifetime of that. Imagine the bone-crushing impact of that when you get fired or your partner leaves you or someone else gets that promotion or your best friend just announces that they’ve nailed that dream job testing organic suntan lotions in Tahiti while you toil away trying to sling thirty-bucks-a-month cell phone cards from the back of your crumbling car.
Now you can see why positive thinking or personal affirmations of “I am enough” or “I am successful” seem so fake, so fucking useless and weak, because deep down, at the very heart of you, there’s a gnawing pain. You are a loser, and no one can convince you any differently.
And guess what? Not everyone who has that kind of internal conclusion lives in a van down by the river! No! They’re lawyers and doctors and teachers and every kind of “successful” member of society you could imagine. Going about their lives with the conclusion that fundamentally, they are something less, something not quite up to par. Every morning they get out of bed, shuffle into the shower, get dressed, shove some coffee down their throat, and plunge into their usual day. When they get to work, it’s game on, pretending their conclusion isn’t there. Avoiding or manipulating people and situations that remind them of their own conclusion. They’re keeping it hidden from view, guarded, pushed out of mind, out of sight. That’s their struggle. The daily battle between their worst self and the limit of what they see as possible, a limit that has been pulled down, shrunk, and diminished over days and weeks and months and years. Is it any wonder we have become so resigned to the lives we have?
- You lose sight of when you started doing this shit and why you started doing it, and you get so wrapped up in its drama and significance that you actually believe it to the bones of your being. Again, it’s not as if you are going around in life constantly in that dialogue with yourself. It’s more that your life is systematically organized around what you have concluded.
- What would people really think of you if they knew how you saw yourself? Therefore, you live your life in that constant state of overcoming, of pretending and posting pictures on Instagram of the person you want to be, or at least the person you want other people to see you as. Some of you are in so deep, so lost in the Matrix, that you can’t bring yourself to look at what I’m saying. You’re already dismissing it without any real introspection or writing it off because you can’t seem to work this out for yourself.
- Try on the idea that your life—how you look, how you speak, where you live, how you live—is all to project a certain image of yourself while at the same time hiding another version of yourself from public view—the one you really believe to be true.
- Are you hard at work keeping your shit together to keep your life at a certain level or to get to a new one? For what purpose? Why is your success so important to you? What are you trying to overcome? I’d argue it’s the way you try to deal with, to somehow handle or wriggle free from, the weight of your personal conclusion, which is constantly burrowing away inside you.
- What have you concluded about yourself? That’s what you need to consider here. And the only way to do it is with a thorough examination of your own experience of being alive.
Here’s the action plan for you today:
Right now, get straight with yourself. Take a look behind all the BS, all the hope, all the wants, needs, and plans for the future. Forget the past, forget the reasons, justifications, and excuses—what is the underlying dilemma you face with yourself? This isn’t about money or your lifelong obsession with becoming a hand model (specializing in thumbs). Dig deeper. Take a long, hard look at those times in your life when you’re most struggling, most tested.
What is it that comes up for you?
Do you avoid parties or social settings and say it’s because you don’t like them? Or is it really because you are driven by the discomfort and pressure that arises from the conclusion “I don’t fit in” or “I’m different” or “I’m not enough”? The fear of being revealed can do that to a person.
Did you choose your job because it was the right job for you? Or are you there because “I’m not smart enough” has locked you into a predictable career and life path?
Is your love life nonexistent because you’re too busy with work, haven’t met that special someone/anyone/seriously-I’ll-take-anything-that-has-a-pulse-and-can-talk, or because you have an underlying conclusion about not being attractive enough or “not wanted” or “not lovable?” Is your current relationship on the rocks because it’s not a good fit or because your conclusions have been running all over it and you’re continually picking that person to death to confirm your own subconscious reality?
What are the automatic, reactionary thoughts you have when you suffer setbacks in life? What popped into your head when you got fired from that job or passed over for that promotion?
What was on your mind when you broke up with your last girlfriend or boyfriend or when you let that someone down or spent that money you knew you should have saved or ate that bag of fries when you should have opted for the salad?
Again, set aside all the surface stuff. What do you say to yourself about you in those situations?
Once this is absolutely clear for you, you have the first critical piece of this important jigsaw in place. One of the reasons you self-sabotage is inextricably linked to this piece.
Take out a sheet of paper and write across the top: PERSONAL CONCLUSION
“I’M _______________________.”
Go ahead, write it in here. Use a pencil if you’re too embarrassed to ink your innermost secret about yourself on a sheet of paper.
Be crystal clear about what you have concluded about yourself.
(The author says to keep this personal conclusion safe because we will get back to examining it.)
Those gems lead us to today’s Dadly Daily Declaration:
Your conclusion about yourself always begins with an “I.” It’s stuff like this: “I’m not smart enough.” “I’m a loser.” “I’m different.” “I don’t matter.” “I’m incapable.” “I’m not loved.” Or even all the way down the hole to “I’m worthless.”
The question you need to answer is “What have I concluded about myself?” This is the fundamental experience of yourself, the inherent design that you continually try to overcome and yet somehow always end up with again. Your particular conclusion. It’s the thing you say to yourself when no one is looking, when there’s nothing to prove, no one to impress. Just you and your thoughts. It’s about you. No one else, nothing outside of you or some circumstance you’re dealing with. You. And for you, when all is said and done, it’s the truth of truths when you are pressed by life and no one can tell you any differently.
Think about that persistent, pressing experience you have of yourself in this life. Connect the dots here.
