The Most Important Conversation
Good Evening, SHMOMs.
I hope this finds you well. I'm sending a warm welcome to the Moms who have just been added from our January/February group!
In this week's blog, I'd like to spend some time reflecting on something my mother used to say to me all the time as a child. I did not appreciate or even fully understand the magnitude of this thought until after the birth of our eldest child nine years ago.
She used to say, "The most important conversation you have is the one that you have with yourself."
This week, during a call with a one-on-one coaching client, our conversation focused on the topic of self-acceptance. I shared my mother's adage and the client asked what the saying meant.
What I shared with her is what I’m sharing today so that we might examine what those tiny voices inside of us are saying.
The conversations we are having with ourselves are the silent words that roam inside of us after something terrible or amazing has happened. When we make a mistake or maybe a bad decision, the conversation we are having with our self is either telling us how stupid we are for making the mistake or it is giving us grace and encouraging us to try again because we all make them.
For my mother, a person who experienced trauma from being put up for adoption at 13 months and then being raised by a mother who suffered from undiagnosed mental illness, the conversations she was having with herself through adulthood were far from great.
Many of the conversations we are having with ourselves are informed by what the people who helped raise us said to us about us. They are also informed by life experiences, our parents' values, and perhaps what we believed people thought about us when we were younger.
Many times the voice inside of our head is just plain rude. We would never say some of the things we say to ourselves to other people. On the other hand, that voice can be our biggest cheerleader helping us accomplish whatever we set our minds to.
The conversations we are having with ourselves are leading us down the road to self-acceptance and joy or they are keeping us imprisoned in our own jail cells of limiting belief.
What my mother was trying to teach me from a young age is that I control my own narrative. While parents play a big role in the shaping of our inner voices, we can and should harness our own power to change the narrative if those ideas no longer serve us. What I realized a few years after the picture above was taken at our eldest daughter's baby shower was the power I have to guide my inner voice. And, I'm sharing this reflection as a reminder that we all do.
We are our best thing.
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