Stop Calling Yourself Stupid

I enjoyed reading an article a few days ago by Alden Tan titled ‘Why Nobody Can Ever Call You Stupid.’ In it he says ‘I shed the label of stupid with a life of hard work and passion’.

We are not all born with an abundance of intelligence. And some of us will always be a bit lacking in common sense. There are those who are academic, and others that aren’t. There are those who can make a decision with the blink of an eye, others who have to sit and think things through. We are all different. That’s the beauty of humanity.

Why do we put so much pressure on ourselves? Worse still, when we don’t come up to our own standards at time, why do we so readily put ourselves down?

How many of you get an  A+  or a gold medal reward for your ability at beating yourself up.

A little lad who I’m close to has the habit of saying ‘I’m stupid’ each time he makes a mistake. The problem is he really believes it. Despite the fact that he is top of his class in academic terms, and is a talented sportsman as well, he will more often be putting himself down, than praising himself.

This is awful. Right? But how many of you reading this constantly have a  negative self-judgment?  Each time you call yourself stupid, ugly, not good enough, etc., you are taking positive energy away from yourself.

I’d also at this point like to remind you, that experience means we learn from our mistakes. Nobody gets good at anything before making mistakes. You have to ask yourself what lessons can you learn from your mistake? At first you may think that you can’t learn anything, but I encourage you to sit down and spend some real time evaluating the lessons you can learn. It’s only by doing this that you ensure that you don’t make the same mistakes again. You really don’t want to do it again, do you?

It’s not a bad thing setting ourselves high standards. It’s good that we want to be the best we can at everything we do. We judge our own performance. We judge ourselves according to our own expectations. BUT it’s not good to use our results as evidence of our own shortcomings.

In other words, no matter what we do accomplish, we dwell on the areas where our results failed to meet our expectations, and we use those failures as evidence that we are lacking in some capacity, or inadequate in some way.

It’s bad enough when another person makes a negative judgments about us, but worse when it’s us holding these opinions about ourselves.

If you do this to yourself, well its time you began to defend yourself. Look if someone else was calling you bad names, you know calling you ugly, stupid, rubbish, you would defend yourself, right. Then why aren’t you doing this for yourself when its you calling yourself names.

As a fitness instructor, I hear people saying:

I Hate My Body!

I Hate My Legs!

I Hate My Butt!

I Hate My Thighs!

I Hate My Spare Tyre

As a Personal Development Coach, I hear people saying:

I Hate My Life

I Hate My Job

I Hate My Mind

I Hate My Failures

I Had my lack of Prospects

Do you accept that you are a master at putting yourself down. We wouldn’t treat our worst enemy as badly as we treat ourselves at times.

So it’s time not only for you to start defending yourself, but go a step further and cancel out all your negative judgments about yourself.

I’m not about to send you off for therapy, neither am I about to sell you some life coaching. In fact the method you can utilise is so much simpler.

Take your index finger and press it to your thumb like you were squashing a fly or maybe little orb between those fingers. Now, each time you make a negative judgment about others or yourself, press those fingers together and squash out that negativity. Immediately replace the negative judgment with a positive statement. The more you do this the easier it will be to not make negative judgments at all. The more your practice the easier it gets. So practice, practice, practice.

Don’t forget notice yourself when you are putting yourself down, then follow this technique. It works, and you will use it, reminding yourself that you are brilliant.

The next time you have a negative judgment about yourself or someone else just STOP. Don’t negatively judge yourself for having a negative judgment, just recognize it, squash it out and replace it with something positive.

Now celebrate your victories as you are being much kinder to yourself

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