I can remember growing up and hearing statements like “they are too big for their boots’ ‘they are cocky’ ‘they need knocking down a peg or 2’ when people were confident and shared details of what they had achieved well. Yes I know there is always balance in things but now it makes me sad to think about how often we try and stop people from celebrating their wins and saying how they feel they are good at things.
A big thing I do in my coaching with EMDR is to actually try and encourage people to blow their own trumpet and here are the reasons why I think this leads to growth.
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It’s not really all that often that other people will do this for us.
I don’t know, maybe it is just me but I do think we are bad at complimenting others and telling others what we think they are good at. Yes I think people would benefit from having a cheer leader but not all of us are lucky enough to have this. So maybe if we start doing it for ourselves, other people will follow and start doing it for themselves too.
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There is a natural bias towards negativity so we need to blow our own trumpet to balance this out a little.
We are as human beings always fighting for survival. By default this makes us have a natural, negative bias towards negative things and danger. It’s because these things can actually become threatening to us that we focus on them so that we can stop them from happening and keep on surviving.
This can translate into us as humans just always noticing the negatives. We notice what we don’t do well, what we have failed at and what has caused us some distress. Sounds all a bit gloomy to me. So we need to find a way to get some light relief from this and focus more on the positivity.
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What we focus on grows stronger.
If we start measuring things then we will notice that they will become bigger. It’s our brain’s attentional bias, we notice more of what we are focusing on. Have you ever had the experience of thinking of buying a new car and suddenly noticing that whenever you are out driving you notice the model of car you are interested in everywhere? Yes? That’s the attentional bias.
So if we are blowing our own trumpets and focusing on what we are good at, perhaps this too will start to grow bigger and bigger and get better and better? It sounds better to me then focusing on the negative and just letting that get bigger.
So give it a go. Look back over your day, your week and celebrate those little wins, focus on what has gone well, what have you achieved? What have you been really good at? I think this will feel positive even though it might be hard at first but do it and let me know how it goes.
