Step into Your Moxie. Alexia Vernon

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СКАЧАТЬ the Cop, as Cops are wont to do, polices your decision making and turns everything into a dichotomy. In other words, there are a maximum of two options in any situation — and they are at odds with each other.

       There are good people and bad people.

       There’s the right vocation; all others are my karmic mismatch.

       I can be a rock star, or I can be the roadie.

      When our Cop directs the show in our heads, she strives to make everything black-and-white. Sinful or sacred. As a result, we forget that most of life exists in the gray, too often underused, space between these extremes. So much discourse in the world right now is mean, one-sided, one-note, and judgmental. When we have a Cop in our heads, we inevitably are too.

      When I began my coaching business, I worked with a lot of twenty- and thirtysomethings who were in the throes of career transition. Many of my clients were habitually changing jobs, as my generation is inclined to do. In some cases, they switched jobs after only six months, or less. One woman, whom I’ll call Ruby, was one such client.

      I met Ruby at one of my facilitation workshops. At the time, she had a university leadership position, and she felt stymied by all the institutional bureaucracy. She wanted more substantive face time with students, and she sought tools for facilitating deeper transformation — and this is how she found herself in one of my workshops. When we began working together, she quickly decided she could never have what she wanted in the environment she was in, so she took the opportunity (and a financial step backward) to manage transformational programs for a holistic center in a rural community. Within less than a month in this new role, Ruby felt she had made a terrible mistake. She missed her friends, she missed her coworkers, and she missed living in a big city. And although she loved the vision and mission of her new employer, she felt even further away from her goal of facilitating transformation now that she was a manager and had little interaction with people, outside her small team. Ruby decided to take the first opportunity she could get back in her old city as a departmental administrator, and in doing so, also took her second demotion in less than a year.

      When you are a coach, your agenda is always supposed to be your client’s agenda, but I’ll be honest, I had my own agenda for Ruby, though I wasn’t experienced or brave enough to articulate it at the time. I wanted her to realize the role her Cop-like self-talk played in her somewhat manic job-hopping. Ruby, like so many other perfection-seeking women, kept telling herself there was a right job for her — and that everything else was dead wrong. As a result, the minute she didn’t feel cozy in a new opportunity, she bailed, for she interpreted her discomfort as a sign that she was fundamentally off purpose. Instead of living and learning through an experience that was happening for her, she interpreted the situation as happening to her. She also barely moved the needle when negotiating either of her offers — which, while shocking, given that she had taught negotiation workshops, makes sense. She was so mired in her Cop thinking, she had a hard time coming up with creative alternatives to money when her employers failed to concede more than a few thousand dollars on their offers.

      In addition to the voices of the Critic and Cop, there is a third, equally self-sabotaging voice. Unlike the Critic and Cop, this voice is usually pretty positive — she is a bit of a frenemy. This voice is the Cheerleader. The Cheerleader is, as the name suggests, extremely adept at cheering you on. She tells you:

       I’m cool with my client’s passive-aggressive emails.

       I can pull a second consecutive all-nighter to get that financial report done.

       It’s fine that I have a big presentation in an hour, my partner is out of town, and my kiddo’s school just called to ask me to come pick her up because she’s got a raging fever. I’ll figure it out. Always do.

      Now, in all fairness, the Cheerleader voice, in moderation, isn’t such a bad thing. In moments when we have to bulldoze through something uncomfortable and necessary — our first week at a new job, a negotiation, an illness (ours or somebody else’s), or telling a tantrum-prone kiddo to put her stickers away — we definitely want to empower this voice. However, when we go to her by default rather than by design, ultimately we are going to feel frustrated and tired. It’s going to make us feel like we are playing hopscotch on hot coals, and we are going to get sick, wear out, and step out of our moxie because we aren’t addressing the real issues in our lives. Usually, it means that while we appear almost clown-like, with a smile painted across our faces, inside — even if we are in denial about it to ourselves — we’re one trigger away from unraveling. And when we do, we often verbally flog the person or people closest to us.

      That’s why my grandma’s death jump-started such a scary, seemingly bottomless downward spiral for me. Yes, we were bonded at the hip (and ankle and ear — and everywhere in between). Yet in hindsight, I realize that her passing also killed off my Cheerleader voice. I couldn’t tell myself, Everything will be fine, because without my grandma in my life there was a ginormous chasm and nothing, especially me, felt like it would be fine again. Up until this point, my identity was also completely enmeshed in my academic achievement and artistic performance. That B+ started a chain reaction of tectonic movement. But just like a volcano that often erupts in the aftermath of a big quake, the lava (in my case my Cheerleader-like self-talk, which had been masking a lack of intrinsic worthiness), had been building for years.

      For each of these voices — and to be sure, many of us (yours truly included) are blessed with an ability to house a Critic, a Cop, and sometimes even a Cheerleader simultaneously — the solution is the same.

       We must develop the right, succinct messaging to talk back to ourselves in the voice of the Coach.

       Wait, what?!

      Yes, we’re inviting another voice into our mental menagerie. But before I unmask her, let me explain why she’s necessary.

      Many of us strive to hit the mute button on our self-talk. We erroneously believe that if we put a muzzle on our Critic, Cop, or Cheerleader we can force her into submission and reconnect with our real voice, with our moxie. But as we explored in the previous chapter, it’s not enough to pump ourselves up with affirmations or meditative and visualization practices designed to enhance our capacity for presence. Our Critics, Cops, and Cheerleaders are piping up in response to an underlying problem that must be addressed. And until it is, any and all efforts to quiet these voices — well, they will be as successful as telling ourselves, I’ll just have one scoop of ice cream. That might work if you are in an ice-cream store. But if you are at home, in less than five minutes, one scoop usually leads to an empty pint and a bloated belly. And so it is with our self-talk. When we say to ourselves, Stop it. Use your theater voice, our self-talk whispers turn into the finale of act 1 in The Phantom of the Opera (when the chandelier crashes to the floor).

      How Our Self-Talk Impacts Our Moxie

      Our communication with ourselves has a profound impact on how we feel, how we behave, and ultimately how we speak up in the world. In her book My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey, neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor (who at the pinnacle of her career had a stroke and worked for eight years to fully recover her physical functioning and thinking abilities), writes provocatively not only about her own harrowing experience but also about the direct relationship between our thoughts and our feelings. And by feelings I (and Dr. Jill) don’t just mean whether we are happy, sad, scared, angry, or bewildered but also how we physiologically feel in our bodies.

      As Dr. Jill explains, the moment we have a thought, a chemical is released in the brain. It travels throughout our body, and we have a corresponding physiological СКАЧАТЬ