When things go wrong in your life, what do you secretly whisper to yourself?

Most of us who see and know the value of “staying positive” keep our thoughts and feelings pretty upbeat when things seem to be working against us.

But I would suggest that, buried underneath all that positivity, are some things that we hope like heck aren’t true, but we’re afraid they really are.

And until we acknowledge them, lurking under there, taking up all kinds of hidden mental and emotional energy, they have a way of gumming up our progress and becoming a central part of our inner resistance.

Here’s an example:

One of the deep fears I grew up with was that anytime I didn’t get something, I had the sense that the real truth was that I didn’t deserve it.

So all through my life, I had a huge resistance to asking people for anything. Because I was terrified to find out (based on them saying no) that I was still undeserving. And while I might accept their explanations of why they couldn’t give it on the surface, a deeper part of me would assume they were making up those reasons just to be nice, thus reinforcing the terrible truth I had tried so hard to avoid.

But for years I never knew what the underlying fear really was. I just couldn’t seem to ask for anything. I would distract myself from making the phone call, I would procrastinate, I would eat, I would watch movies, I would wait until it was too late at night to call or too short notice and then let myself off the hook and not do it.

Does any of this sound familiar?

It’s a classic resistance pattern.

And I believe these deep fears, that we never quite say out loud to ourselves, are at the bottom of most of our procrastination, if not all. The longer we put off the action, the longer we can avoid facing the possibility that our terrible fear is true.

But how do we get underneath these patterns to what’s really driving them?

It’s not very easy for most of us to just sit down one afternoon and get the answers to these kinds of questions.

We need a process and sometimes, in this murky territory of our inner world, we need support.

And I’m getting ready to offer both!

In the next day or two I’ll be announcing a 5-week teleclass called “The Wisdom of Your Resistance” that will help you find and release the hidden causes of procrastination so you can make real progress toward your most meaningful goals and dreams.

And you can do this through creating deep friendship with your inner self, not battle, and receive the incredible wisdom and guidance that your resistance has been trying to share with you all along.

AND, I’m going to be making 3 scholarship spaces available, so 3 lucky people will be able to get moving on their dreams for FREE! I’ll be sharing all the details of how to enter to receive a spot when I launch the class.

If you want the announcement to come straight to your Inbox, just Sign-Up Here and you’ll be the first to hear about it.

Until then, I’d love to hear about your experiences with procrastination and the fears underneath it. What are you hoping like heck isn’t true? Tell us in the comments below.

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I’m writing from Portland, Oregon today, about as far away from my home in Nova Scotia as I can physically get in N. America. I’m here attending a Life Mission workshop with my teachers and fellow students from The Way of the Heart, and these weekends are always a great opportunity to take a look around my life and see if I’m doing what I really want to be doing and, if not, how can I do more of that.

Sometimes, looking at my life like this can bring up a moment or two of regret or remorse and this time it was a pretty deep one. So I’ve been reflecting on how any kind of evaluating that we do in our life can bring up moments of seeing something clearly, maybe for the first time, and wishing that it had been different. At these moments, it’s so very tempting to dive into hours of self-judgment, criticism, self-pity and just general moping and feeling crappy about it all. (Hours, heck, sometimes days or weeks!)

And I’ve come to see that how we handle these moments makes the most enormous difference to the quality of our lives and to our ability to learn from our mistakes.

These moments can be hard on us emotionally and they tend to bring up a bunch of old stuff relating to how our mistakes were handled by our parents and early caregivers. But it’s really, really worth learning a beautiful and empowering way of dealing with remorse and regret so we can approach our learning and growth in a gentle way. And that allows us to get excited about trying new things that we might make mistakes at.

My moment came in the Las Vegas airport, when I decided to download my email. I received a message from someone who had been expecting something from me and hadn’t received it, (as it turns out she actually did have it already but didn’t know it.) At that moment, I had a revealing look at a pattern in my life that was all about keeping me feeling “busy” and not allowing me to put my heart’s most important things first.

The realization was actually so quick and went so deep that I didn’t even read the whole message. And I definitely didn’t have the space I needed, sitting in the airport food court, to process it fully. I finished my meal and tried to find a space somewhere away from the Muzak to just breathe.

It wasn’t until I was on the plane, with my face turned toward the window and nowhere else to go that I was finally able to just let myself feel the regret.

As it washed over me, I realized that I actually wanted it. I wanted to feel it so that I would want to change the pattern that created it. And I realized that I wanted to stay focused on the other people that my pattern was affecting, those I wanted to serve  fully, more than I wanted it to be about me.

And it was that caring that kept me out of the self-pity.

Oh, not entirely, mind you. I’ll admit to a short wallow. But I didn’t stay there. And before long, I started moving out of the remorse and into thinking constructively about what was actually creating the pattern and what I might want to do about it.

And I’ve noticed that this is what naturally happens when we manage to stay focused on what’s most important to us, instead of letting the feeling just take over completely.

So here are the steps that I use to deal with regret without getting stuck in it.

1) Breathe, slowly and fully (this can be harder than it sounds at the moment of remorse!)

2) Allow yourself to actually feel it, to whatever degree you can.

3) Have gentle compassion for yourself – be as kind as you can. (it feels icky enough without us making it feel worse!)

4) Notice that your regret means that you really do care about this.

5) Recognize and feel your caring about it.

6) Remember WHY you care about it.

7) Try to catch yourself in any self-criticism or judgment and remind yourself that what happened is simply about what you did and doesn’t change who you really ARE.

8 ) Remind yourself that you have the power to change this.

9) Allow yourself the space and time to process your regret.

10) Get constructive about changing things as soon as you’re ready. (This step is a great antidote to the icky feeling!)

11) Resist the urge to totally overcompensate for feeling badly about it by telling yourself you have to make some kind of huge impossible changes. Take small do-able steps to address or change what happened.

12) Congratulate yourself for how well you handled it and how you learned from it and how you’ll be OK with the next big “learning” moment.

I’m looking forward to finding a new way myself this weekend and I hope this might offer you a new way to handle your moments of regret.

I’d love to hear your comments about this below. How have you handled regret in the past? What helps you with it? What do you find gets in the way?

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1. The Curse of “You should know better”
2. The Aha Moment on Self-Judgment and Abundance
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First I have to say that this is on my Top 5 Most Hated Phrases list, so I”m not going to pull any punches about it.

It’s one of those phrases that we hear as children and by the time our parents have stopped saying it, we’ve usually internalized it and we take over saying it to ourselves.

I heard this phrase a lot growing up and, in hindsight, it created a dynamic in my life where
there was NO such thing as an enjoyable learning curve.

So, this is a phrase I try NEVER to use on myself or anyone else.

I had a major insight about this pattern a few years back when I was planning an event and feeling a little out of my depth with it.

All of a sudden it hit me that I didn’t feel any permission to use the event as a way to learn. I realized that I was expecting myself to fully know how to do it already!

But why should I already know it?

I looked at how crazy it was to be expecting myself to already know how to do something I had never done before.

I started hunting for where this pattern of expectation came from and it wasn’t long before I heard this phrase ringing in my ears -
“you should know better”.

Now, in all fairness, I know my parents didn’t use this phrase with the intention of creating all this expectation in me.

It’s usually used when a child is displaying a behaviour that they’ve already been told is not approved of.

But we hardly ever take something in fully the first time  – it usually takes repetition to really get it down pat. And the phrase is usually just an expression of the parent’s frustration in the moment with the behaviour itself – and not some statement about the child’s inadequate learning.

But what it created in me was a world where there was no such thing as learning something “in the right time”. Everything was always learned too late, because “I should already know better”.

So now that I’ve seen through this pattern in my world and where it came from, I’m really working on allowing myself the freedom and permission to not know things yet and to actually enjoy learning them!

What a concept!

And I’ve stopped using “you should know better” inside my own head as a way to torment myself for not being further along than I am right now.

(And this gets right to the heart of what Garrison Keillor was saying about too high expectations in the last post.)

So if I could send my fully understanding “now-brain” back into the body of my 5 year old self, this is what I would say to “you should know better” :

Actually, I shouldn’t know better. I haven’t totally learned this yet and I’m working on it and that’s OK with me. I’ll know more soon, thank you very much.

I would love to see the look on any parent’s face, hearing that come out of a 5 year old child!

But for now, if this freaked-out-expectation comes upon me while I’m learning something new, I take the opportunity to make it a teaching moment for my 5 year-old self and I let her know all about our new way to learn.

Has this phrase or expectation played out in your life? I’d love to hear about how you took it. And if you never heard this as a child, I would love to hear from you what’s it like to grow up without that!

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1. Learning From Remorse Without Having a Self Pity Festival
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Most of us who are doing any kind of personal development have come across the words ‘abundance’, ‘manifestation’ and ‘law of attraction’ and one time or another.

In fact, ever since the publication of The Secret, it’s been pretty hard to avoid these terms. And most of us would like to be receiving more and feeling more ease and flow around getting what we need and want in our life, including me.

So the moment I had a month ago in the ballroom of the Glengarry Hotel in Truro, Nova Scotia was rather a breakthrough for me in this area and hope it might be one for you too.

You see, I’ve been pretty hard on myself until just the last few years. And I always seemed to have the toughest time right after I’d completed something, whether it went well or not.

That was the moment when my self-judgment demons would pounce.

And I would begin to take apart whatever I’d just done. I truly believed that this was a constructive thing to do and that it would help me next time.

But, in fact, after I started to learn and experience real compassion for myself, I realized how tormenting this practice really was.

And then I saw that I was actually avoiding stepping out and doing more of what I wanted to just so I could avoid this terrible moment when I would tear it all down and feel like crap after it was done.

This tearing down never allowed me to feel like I’d succeeded and so I never had any success to build on for the next time. I was always starting at square one.

So what does this have to do with receiving?

Back to the Glengarry Hotel….

In the last while, I’ve finally started being compassionate enough that I now reward and recognize and encourage myself after I complete something instead of tearing it down. And in the Glengarry ballroom that day, I had spent 7 hours sharing and teaching with the students and members of our Way of the Heart community.

So when everyone had left, I was the last one to close up the room and I decided to just sit for a moment and “bask” in the blessings of the day. I reflected on all I had given and I recognized the good things I had done and all the energy I had put out to the community and what that meant to my heart and my path.

I closed my eyes and breathed….and then I felt something I had never felt before.

I felt the Universe ready to send energy BACK to me, like a great cosmic Thank You!

And suddenly I realized “Oh my gosh! That’s how giving and receiving really works!” I was astounded by this.

And so I took a moment and breathed and said YES to the energy that was coming back to me and I received it. Just like that.

And then, sitting there, I looked back over all the tearing down I had done after all the truly good things I had given and accomplished, and I suddenly saw that there had been energy waiting to come back after each of those things too.

So, right then and there, I claimed all the energy I had been unable to acknowledge or receive over the years.

Now, I’m not that great at sensing or seeing energy, so I can’t say that I know for sure how much of it flowed back to me that day. But what I do know for sure is that I’m receiving WAY more now than I was before then.

Since then, I’ve been receiving connections, new friends, opportunities, invitations, help and support, love and kindness from my husband, not to mention a lovely increase in cash flow!

Is it directly connected? I think it is.

And what I know now is that EVERY time I give freely, whether I think it was any good or not, something flows back to me in gratitude for what was given. That’s just the way it works.

But it was my self-judgment that never allowed me to be there to receive it. So I’m learning to take a moment now, after everything’s been given, to just breathe and receive.

Maybe I’ll just sit and do that now…..

What’s your experience with self-judgment? I’d love to hear your comments below.

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You might also like these:

1. Are you making it safe enough to succeed?
2. Learning From Remorse Without Having a Self Pity Festival