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Just recently I’ve received many e-mail from you and I’ve heard from you about your self-criticism. The e-mails were from PhD students, postdocs, and even the newly appointed staff. It looks like this issue is common for different levels and stages of the research career.
You’ve been sharing with me that it makes you feel bad when you start loathing yourself, it stops you in your tracks; some of you said it is paralysing you. It is clearly not good for your productivity, it is not good for you, it prevents you from making further progress.
If it is no good for you and it is no use to you, it would be actually useful … to let it go! And why do we keep doing it? It’s like any bad habit, it’s stuck to us, and it requires some effort to let go of a bad habit. The good news is that you CAN dissolve this bad habit and replace it with a better habit that will actually support you as well as help you make progress and become more productive.
The good thing is that you are already aware of this habit, since you wrote to me about it. You are aware that you have these self-criticising thoughts. Once you become aware, what you can also do is to catch yourself in the moment of doing it. And today I want to suggest to you what you can do INSTEAD of your usualy self-criticism.
I am particularly excited to talk about it today because during the past weekend I went to attend a summit called “I can do it!” which was led by Louise Hay and her publishing company, Hay House. She was on stage – she is 86 years old woman who radiates energy and love – and literally said: “Let go of all self-criticism”.
And today I am going to share with you, HOW to do it. I bought the book “Heart Thoughts” by Louise Hay, got it signed by Louise – it is so wonderfully illustrated – so I read it with pleasure every morning, and want to share some inspirations from this book with you.
Once you become aware of the self-criticism, and you also catch yourself in the moment of doing it, what you can say is: “No, thank you, you are no use to me” and let it go. Now start gently pondering on new thoughts that are better and more positive. I would like to share some of these thoughts with you. These can be as simple as “I accept and approve of myself”, “I am doing my best”. Another one is “I am wonderful and I am proud of myself”. You can up it to: “I love being me”. “I am willing to see only my magnificence”. “I am willing to see my good side” – because often we don’t. “I am willing to see the good things I do” – because often we don’t.
Some of these thoughts might sounds silly to you or not true. It is just because you are not used to them, you have not said anything like this to yourself in a very long time. How wonderful it would be if you can become your internal supporter and your internal cheer leader.
Of course if you decide to work with me privately and go through one of my coaching programs, this is what I will do FOR you, I will cheer for you, I will support you. And today I am sharing with you such a good way to create an internal supporter inside you. You spend most of your time with yourself, so imagine what difference it would make if you would be supporting and encouraging yourself rather than doing this self-criticism.
The thing is that these new thoughts will be as true or even truer than your old negative self-criticising thoughts. A PhD student – one of my private clients – shared with me that she has been stuck with her PhD and not doing as much as she thought she should; she thought she is taking SO much time to complete her PhD, she is disappointing herself and her parents. The last one turned out not to be true, because her parents never said anything like this, they’ve been supportive.
And also when we calculated how much she spent on her PhD – she worked on it part-time at first and then full-time – and when we converted it to full-time, it was only 2 years and 9 months. A lot of PhD students require longer than this, and submit towards the end of the fourth year (4 years is the usual University deadline for a PhD study here in the UK). So actually time-wise she was doing ok, and her self-criticising thoughts were not even true.
Listen to the new thoughts that I suggested today for you and start gently introducing them instead of those old negative self-criticising thoughts. And what is also going to happen – on top of you becoming more effective and increasing your productivity – you will be able to take someone else’s criticism and you will be able to look critically at your work in a much better way. Because now you know you accept yourself exactly as you are and when you hear criticism you can now say: “This is great! This is really useful, I am going to go now and apply it to make my work much better”.
Your Productivity for Scientists assignment for this week:
1) Become aware of your self-criticism, and catch yourself when you do it. This is probably going to be when you feel bad and when you have those self-criticising thoughts going round and round in your head: “I am not doing it well enough”, and “Yet again I failed”.
2) Say: “No thank you” to those thoughts and start introducing these new more gentle more supportive thoughts: “I love and accept myself exactly as I am”, “I approve of myself”, and “I am wonderful and proud of myself”.
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