Step into Your Moxie. Alexia Vernon

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       CHAPTER 2

       CRITICS, COPS, AND CHEERLEADERS…OH MY!

       People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing — that’s why we recommend it daily.

      —ZIG ZIGLAR

      Two weeks before my sixteenth birthday, my grandma passed away from pneumonia. The year proceeding her death was one of the darkest periods of my life. I got my first B+ in a math class, due to missing several weeks of school while I sat bedside with my grandma hoping, in vain, that she would come off her respirator prior to her death. Integrating the reality that I may not be as Andrea Zuckerman 90210 smart as I’d been led to believe with the reality that I would have to live the majority of my life without one of my favorite humans, was a bullet train ride into depression for me. And as a theater student, I went big. I plotted what I could do with a bottle of over-the-counter pain pills I had in a medicine cabinet, went on a long drive (because I was too physically and emotionally depleted to consider running away from home), and was prescribed a series of antidepressants (and even a mood stabilizer) — none of which could pull me out of my funk.

      Before this episode, I might have been typecast in the role of Sally Sunshinepants. (Don’t bother looking up that reference. It’s not a thing, but it should be.) Sure, I could slide into teen-girl angst from time to time, but overall I defaulted to seeing the positive in most people, places, and things — even while I trudged through some objectively awful experiences. But something happened after my grandma’s death. I stopped working so hard to manage the voices in my head. Instead, when life gave me lemons — in small, mundane ways like getting a mosquito bite, not getting the parking spot I wanted, or being left at prom by my date (okay, that wasn’t quite so mundane. I think my freak-out was pretty justified in that instance) — I ate the lemon and then ruminated on why it was so dang sour going down. In other words, I chose to speak to myself in a way that set me up to feel miserable.

      The Orchestra in the Head

      At any given moment, most of us are strolling around with one of three voices prattling on in our heads. None of them is really us, and none of them is setting us up for inner or outer communication success. While the presence of self-talk, and the impact it has on how you think, feel, and behave is likely not a new concept for you, if these voices still exist for you and, more important, if you are struggling to manage them, well, then, we need to address them. In this chapter, we’ll jam on how to talk back to them — since they play such a profound role in how we show up and speak up.

      The first voice that might be hanging out in your noggin is the voice of the Critic. She’s an unapologetic mean girl. She’s also not very creative. She sets you up to perpetually feel like you are an impostor in your own life and gives you unwanted immunity against your own greatness.

      She says things like:

       You’re not smart enough.

       You’re not pretty enough.

       You’re not experienced enough.

       You don’t smile enough.

       You don’t have a big enough network.

       You’re not skinny enough.

       You’re not curvy enough.

       You’re not hairless enough.

      Okay, maybe that last one is just my Critic speaking.

      When the Critic in your head holds the mic, you never believe you are enough. You doubt your decisions and the choices you have before you. And, above all, you feel as if in every moment the world is seeing you as a contestant on a reality TV show the minute she lands in the bottom two — and everyone watching, including the contestant, knows she’s about to lose and be voted off. When you let (because it is always a choice) a chatty Critic run the show, you live in your head, disassociate from your body and spirit, and often censor your outer voice — believing that nobody wants to hear what you have to say.

      I lead a mastermind group for female entrepreneurs and changemakers who want to use speaking to spread their ideas, grow their businesses, and make a positive impact on the world. The participating women all have the opportunity to film speaker reels and receive photographs of themselves onstage speaking.

      I see these women’s Critics show up big-time during this process. Whether a woman is in her late twenties, nearing her golden years, or somewhere in between, the feedback she provides my team when reviewing her materials is rarely related to her speaking content — or even to her performance. What we hear in spades are comments like:

       My roots are showing.

       My face looks like a drawing on an Etch A Sketch. Can the elevens between my eyes be Photoshopped?

       Why didn’t you tell me a wrap dress makes me look like a ruptured pork sausage?

      Now, these women are doing significant work in the world, in many cases not only changing but literally saving people’s lives. Many are active in women’s empowerment, and yet when they view themselves speaking, what they consistently see are their blemishes rather than their beauty marks.

      Unfortunately, the Critic is not the only voice that likes to eat up our mental and emotional bandwidth and compromise our communication СКАЧАТЬ