Since starting my business about a few weeks ago I have learned that my biggest enemy is or at least can be myself. Sure there are a lot of hoops to jump through when you're doing online marketing and networking, however the biggest challenge within it all so far has been to work with my own mind and specifically the emotional patterns I have developed throughout my life which have been rearing it's head.
To give you an example, just the other day someone gave me a "disapproving" comment on how I was promoting my business and I found myself in reaction to that comment wanting to just give up on everything that I was doing and stop pushing myself to establish and grow my business as I had been doing.
I then looked at this thinking pattern and this want to "give up" and realized that this was a reaction I often went into as a child whenever someone criticized me on what I was doing. My reaction was to deliberately sabotage myself by either messing up my own work or giving up on it completely. It may seem like a strange reaction - and granted, it is - but the "reasoning" behind that reaction was that I, through sabotaging myself, wanted to make the person feel guilty about making that comment.
I am aware that even this "reasoning" doesn't make the reaction pattern any less weird, lol, but it was essentially how I learned to "cope with" the fears that triggered in my mind in reaction to receiving any negative criticism. On a deeper level inside myself I was dealing with intense fears of "failing" and "rejection", which is what triggered when any person ever criticized me in any way.
The reaction of giving up and self-sabotage had just been my way of "dealing with" the fear by trying to make the criticism go away through emotionally manipulating the person, i.e. make them feel guilty about having made the comment in the first place.
It's these kind of patterns you develop as a child that stick with you throughout adulthood, with the only difference being that you don't even know why you do it anymore. Fortunately at this point I have developed an awareness of this particular pattern within myself so now it is more a matter of not allowing myself to lose myself in it when it comes up and rather bring myself back to common sense, which is to realize and understand that my reaction isn't about the person or the comment but about my own fear of failing and rejection on the deeper levels of myself.
This is how I assist and support myself to correct my pattern that I have lived throughout my life, of giving up on everything I start, and to be able to actually see this through.
Thanks for reading
Kim Amourette