This is an archived blog from when I ran Conscious Public Relations Inc. from 2008-2018. Excuse the potential outdated-ness!
Thank you to my coach, and to Twitter.
I had the most amazing call again yesterday with my coach about a reaction that I had to a Twitter message. Someone was criticizing the company I worked for because of its rules. I started to feel my hands and feet sweat as if I were on the spot and was being attacked; it took me a while to calm my mind and respond in a diplomatic manner.
This, in under 140 characters. Oh, the lessons we can learn from Twitter!
In my coaching call I discovered that this person on Twitter – or even the message itself – was a stand-in for my parents and teachers of my childhood. Much of my feelings of “okayness” stem from making the authority figures in my life happy. If they are happy, I am relieved and therefore happy. In my world, bad feelings are not a good thing. And when there is a threat to that sense of stability I feel, there is fear.
I realized I was making myself feel bad even though I had done nothing wrong. Even the company I am working for had done nothing wrong. This person just wanted the outer world to bend and flex for his/her own sense of okayness and communicated that.
Punishment feels like a bad word to me because it’s always been connoted with bad behaviour and a bad consequence. But punishment CAN be something righteous, but only if a wrong has been done. And so I had self-punished without having done anything wrong. A-ha moment in 3, 2, 1…
Do you ever punish yourself even when you have done nothing wrong?
