‘Helen will never get anywhere in life while she carries on being a perfectionist’.
This is a sentence I remember from my school report when I was about 10 years old a year or two before starting secondary school.
This is one of many labels I carried as a child; labels given to me by other people. Another was ‘worrier’ as in ‘Helen is such a worrier’.
This is me in the photo with my Mum on a holiday in Cornwall about that time. I look like I’m feeling pretty relaxed there (and I love how I must have thought it was cool to tie my trainer to my shoulder strap!)
I remember that I yearned for the holidays because I found school often gave me anxious feelings.
Notice the language of the labels I was given …
It’s as if they are part of my identity (‘Helen is a perfectionist worrier’) rather than feelings that I had sometimes, or an attitude to my work fueled by a want to do well and to make others proud.
When we are told we are something (or we are not) it can be a reason to excuse certain behaviour: If I was an anxious worrier than that’s just something I am and I’ll expect that of myself. I remember at University that I would work myself into such anxiety that I would be in fight or flight mode for key assessments; I once pretended to faint outside a classroom to avoid having to do a presentation. I’m not proud of this but I do have some compassion as I look back at that 18 year old who couldn’t face an assessment that she might have been fine at, but even if she wasn’t would have learned from.
As a coach, I often have people in their first coaching session where we are exploring what they want to focus on tell me ‘I want to be a confident person’… their belief is that they are not confident FULL STOP… and as such, they can get in their own way about stepping into activities or job opportunities through the thought ‘I am not confident enough to do that’.
How using the word ‘feeling’ can help free us from the label
How different might we be in approaching an activity or job opportunity if we instead tell ourselves ‘there are times when I am feeling confident and there are times when I am not YET’. Confidence is a feeling.. not part of our identity. In different situations we can feel confident and in others where we find it more difficult, we can explore why this is and look at ways to improve our feelings of confidence.
If you find that your feelings are getting in the way of you being who you might be or doing what you might do because you’ve assimilated them as part of your identity, start to look for ways to talk about how you are feeling instead. If you catch yourself saying, for example, ‘I’m an anxious person’, reflect on how this could be used as an excuse to avoid situations or to not show up at your best. Be more specific with how you describe yourself e.g. rather than ‘I am an anxious person’ say ‘in the situation where x and y, I can feel anxious’. This allows you to recognise that the feeling is transitory and that it could be possible to not feel anxious in that situation.
If you were labelled at school and the effects are still apparent today, there is time to change how you view yourself and to free yourself up to lead your life differently in the situations where that label means that you get in your own way.
What labels are you still holding on to that it might be time to let go of?
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