Have you ever noticed how the way you talk about yourself and others in a situation determines how it turns out? Like if you’re at a supermarket and the checkout guy is obviously having a bad day, you walk up and say hello, and he brushes you off.
If you mutter, “Jerk!” under your breath as you pull out your payment, how do you feel? Don’t know about you, but I feel bad! I feel a little hurt or offended by the original grumpiness, and then on top of it, I feel kind of bad for thinking such a mean thing about a guy I don’t even know.
Same goes for dealing with people that mean more to us than the guy we may never see again at the store. When we tell ourselves things like, “My kid is so frustrating!” and “I really wish my husband wasn’t so stubborn!” we’re using negative labels that Mary Sheedy Kurcinka says, in her book Raising Your Spirited Child, “activate a battle stations mode of thinking.” Not only do they not give the other person the option of being a whole individual with good and bad parts all combined, they reduce our enthusiasm and strengths to a two-dimensional world of absolutes.
When we do this, we take away one of our biggest assets in a challenge: confidence. (This is not something most of us special needs parents can afford to lose!) We lose confidence in the other person’s ability to handle whatever the situation is. And in ourselves since we’ve convinced ourselves that it can’t possibly be different… so why try?
This subject hits home for me as a mom with very spirited kids! Check out my new video, below, for some ideas about how to drop the labels and speak the truth to ourselves in challenging situations.
What do you do when you find yourself talking really negative? Do you have any tricks to snap yourself out of it?
-Laurie