- [Emma] On the other side of beating self-sabotage, really,
is just stepping into this space
of letting good things happen to you.
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I'm Emma Gannon.
I'm a writer, a novelist, a podcaster,
and I call myself a "multihyphenate"
'cause I do a few different things.
We say negative things to ourselves because we feel like,
if we say them first,
they won't hurt as much when someone else might say them.
So, if we say that we are bad at writing
or we'll never be successful in that area,
it's a way of really protecting ourselves
against any criticism or feedback.
Or, it could be that we are sort of triggered
from childhood memories of maybe a teacher saying
that we weren't very good at something.
It's a way of kind of getting there first.
And the sort of following thing that kind of carries on
from that negative self-talk is sometimes,
we can go and seek out confirmation that we are right
and that our negative self-talk has a point.
So, we might go looking for negative comments.
We might look through, I don't know,
tweets about maybe an article we wrote or look
at the comment section on websites,
which is never a good thing to do,
but we can go basically hunting out for proof
that our self-sabotage is correct when in fact
it's not helpful at all.
With quietening the voice of self-sabotaging your,
kind of own thoughts around your work,
number one is to talk to yourself as you would a friend.
So, write down what you would say to a friend if they
were having the exact same worrying thoughts as you.
I'm sure you would come up with so many different ways
of telling them advice or giving them practical tips
or even just listening and I think sometimes,
we have to practice that on ourselves
and be really compassionate and really kind of understand
that these thoughts aren't true,
but they're coming from a place of fear,
which is a real thing.
The second part of this lesson really is to imagine yourself
as your younger self.
So, someone who might be very young and being creative
for the first time,
or even your younger self from maybe five years ago
when he or she was just kind of still learning
and giving things a shot,
and this lesson really is about looking at yourself
through the eyes of being younger and being someone
that actually needs a lot of support
and if you imagine yourself as your younger self,
you wouldn't necessarily speak badly to them.
You wouldn't be negative about them trying.
You would just think that's amazing!
You gave it a go and you put yourself out there.
That's so cool!
The other thing you can do
to encourage more positive thoughts and actually kind
of practice saying more positive things about yourself,
to yourself, about your work is to go and ask friends
and family and people who you know think you're fantastic,
to basically tell you what they think of you
and actually write it down
so that you have something to refer to.
Sometimes, I actually find it useful to have a folder
in my emails called "Nice Things" or something like that,
and you actually drop in any positive praise,
positive feedback into there,
and if you're ever feeling negative about yourself,
you can kind of have a little look and remind yourself
of real positive feedback that you've had through your work.
So, this exercise is really about looking
from a different perspective at some of the thoughts
that you have maybe day-to-day and actually unpicking
where they might come from.
I'm going to, for this exercise,
just write down some of the kind of bigger,
more overwhelming thoughts I might have
before starting something, or maybe posting about it
or sending out someone.
Number one would be, everyone will think it's terrible.
First of all, I can look at that and think,
"Who is "everyone?"
It's pretty unlikely that absolutely everyone will think
what you are doing is terrible.
There is a market now for anything and everyone
and we can really see this playing through in something like
the podcast industry because there are so many out there
and there are so many very strange ones
that are quite niche topics that maybe won't resonate with,
like, the mainstream or kind of a mass crowd,
but there are definitely pockets of the internet
and communities that will talk about something
that maybe not everyone is interested in.
When you write down something like this,
it's kind of extremely unlikely that you won't find at least
a few people who will resonate with your work.
Another way to kind of look at these negative thoughts
and try and kind of turn them around is to imagine
that you are saying them to a younger version of yourself.
So, for example, one thing might be that the thing
that you've made or the idea that you have isn't good enough
when you are sort of,
I guess you're saying that the person isn't good enough.
If you were imagining your younger self saying that,
you would definitely try and build them up.
You would say, "You can do another draft.
You can make this better.
You are definitely worthy of this project.
You are good enough and the fact that you
are even trying means that you are already good enough.
The other thing that this exercise can sometimes do is,
when you write it down,
it can sound quite ridiculous in the nicest possible way
and sometimes, that can be really freeing
because you can write down a thought and actually,
you can look at it and you can think that is totally not
the case and it just sounds totally over the top.
And one thing that it reminds me of is a friend
of mine who had a book that came out a few years ago
and she said that she kept having dreams and thoughts
that basically the book was so, so terrible and so awful
that absolutely everyone at the publisher
would lose their jobs because of how awful this book was,
and it actually went on to be really
an incredible bestseller and it went so well and loads
of people loved it,
but even just that idea of someone thinking that can sort
of sound quite ridiculous out loud.
Everyone will shun me.
A really crucial part of this exercise
is reading it out loud and sometimes, you know,
it is even quite soothing to read out, like,
negative comments if someone has ever made them about you.
I personally find that quite fun to do.
You're kind of retraining yourself to think of things
in a different light and not taking them as seriously
because you are not giving them as much weight
because they don't deserve it.
So, with these three points,
I'm going to read them out and when I say them,
I think we'll agree that they kind of don't sound true.
So, number one, everyone will think it's terrible.
Number two, it's not good enough.
And three, everyone will shun me.
Try and say them in a way that makes them sound ridiculous,
because they are.
Don't give them any weight.
Try and kind of push against them.
And at the end of this exercise, really,
what you want to do is kind of rip up
what you've written down, put it to one side,
say that you're not going to think like that anymore,
and sort of totally kind of get that out of your head
'cause I think re-reading negative things
can sometimes make us believe they're true.
So, this exercise is really about getting them down,
getting them out, saying them out loud,
and then deciding that you're not going to do it anymore
and sort of drawing a line under it.
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So, that was really fun and I really recommend doing that
because now, they don't exist, any of those negative things.
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- [Announcer] Thanks for watching.
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