Are you lying to yourself?

The secret diary of Woody ... aged 50 years and 1 month

I've been doing a bit of an experiment over the last week.  I've reverted back to being 14 years old and have been keeping a diary in a bid to find out what I REALLY do with my time and how I feel about things.  I suppose these days the buzz word to use is 'journaling', in fact it seems to be a bit of thing right now to write down your inner thoughts and feelings to discover your true 'authentic' self.

Before you get too excited and settle down with your coffee thinking 'whoa, I wonder what juicy titbits she's going to reveal', it's all rather boring in comparison to my teenage one where "life wasn't fair", "my mum and dad never let me do anything" and "my plan as to how I was going to marry Simon le Bon".  Shout out to any fellow Duranies.  Hey, did you know that the word 'Duranie' is actually in the Urban Dictionary with a definition of "The name for the fan base of the British hotness that is Duran Duran.  Duranies will do anything for the band.  Duranies can be any age.  Duranies range from rabid fangirls to slight fans". I think I definitely fitted the 'rabid fangirl' category! 😆

Sorry I digress.  Right, here's what I've discovered over the last week:

1. Running and exercise feature quite heavily.  No sh*t Sherlock.  However, it did reveal how much I rely on physical health for my mental health.  I wrote about how good it makes me feel, how it sets me up for the day or calms me down in the evening.  It's a huge part of my life and is intrinsically linked with my love of being outdoors too and appreciating nature.  I knew it was important to me but wow, it's vital to my very existence and happiness.
2. Our new house is also a major subject.  We're about to move so again, no great surprise that I'm writing about it.  There's a slight feeling of panic in my words as I'm obviously concerned about everything being finished before we move in (which it won't be!).  Poor Mr Bob gets in the neck as I moan about 'oh he gets his new ****ing shed and ****ing greenhouse sorted, what about finishing the tiling in the en-suite'.
3. I lie to myself ... quite a lot.  Ok, here's the big revelation.  Turns out that I make excuses for not having done things and then I beat myself up about it.  On one day I wrote "I'm so annoyed with myself, I'm such an idiot".  It's true, I was annoyed with myself that day as I'd missed something at work that I should have spotted sooner.  It wasn't the end of the world though and I sorted it but the way I wrote about it, you'd have thought I'd single-handedly brought the company down.  I also lie to myself about why I've not done something, I make up excuses such as 'I was too tired', 'I had to do this instead', 'I didn't have time'.  B*****ks!!  I could have done any of those things by simply practising what I preach - "when you say 'yes' to one thing, you're saying 'no' to something else".  I can't, and you can't, do everything but let's at least do something rather than nothing.

But that's what we do, we speak to ourselves in such a negative way and lie to ourselves.  We don't meet our own high expectations.  We lie to protect ourselves from ... ourselves!!

I think it's time to pick up one of my favourite books again, it's the one I always turn to when I'm feeling a bit 'wobbly'.  It's called 'The Chimp Paradox' by Professor Steve Peters.  I'm very privileged in that I've had the pleasure of speaking to Prof Peters on many occasions when I worked at Sheffield University Medical School.  He's one of the most engaging people you could ever come across and I credit him as being the person who helped me smash all my running PB's when I was in my early 40's.  He made me realise that the only thing stopping me from becoming a better and faster runner was in fact, my own mind.  In his book he talks about the inner voice in our head, ie, our chimp, which is that nagging little voice that tells us we can't do something or how stupid we are or encourages us to do something that's bad for us.

We have to make friends with our 'chimp' and work with it in order to achieve what we want in life.  When I reach the point in races when I think I can't possibly give any more, that's the precise moment when I have to push through.  I'm not going to divulge any more, I'll let you read the book for yourself, but the fact is that we constantly tell ourselves that we can't do something and it's just a big fat dirty lie.

So here's your challenge for this week.  Keep a diary / journal, whatever you want to call it, be brutally honest and write down what you do and how you feel.  Don't think about what you want to write in any great detail, just write, and it doesn't matter how you write it, whether it's full sentences, bullet points or little doodles to show how you feel.  Don't look back at it until the end of the week and then read through and pick out the key trends.

1. What did you spend the majority of your time doing?
2. What made you happy?
3. What made you unhappy?
4. What excuses did you make to yourself?
5. What lies did you tell yourself?
6. What are you going to change going forwards?

It's actually quite an enlightening process because in amongst the most mundane of sentences and daily nonsense, there's some very clear messages that your mind is trying to tell you.

#2020