What's your Method of Hiding? Part 3: Paralysis

If you’ve missed part 1 on perfectionism and part 2 on procrastination, feel free to head back to the previous two blog posts to read those.

But for now let’s talk about paralysis. Because it has a bit of a different edge to procrastination and perfectionism.

Paralysis may be showing up in your life as real avoidance of decision making and action. It may be showing up in your life as feeling overwhelmed and it may show up in your life by allowing other people to make decisions for you and give you direction.

This form of hiding is super hard because when we are paralysed, we don’t make decisions well and so often it’s a very early hurdle that comes before the faffing and fear of procrastination and the hard work of perfection. Either we run from decision-making altogether, or we have too many options and let people decide for us.

Maybe we feel scared to commit to decisions because we know there are so many unknown factors ahead of our decisions or actions and we really want to know how things are going to work out.

Paralysis in our work or life is often about needing to know the right step and if we don’t we go into freeze mode, bypassing our autonomy and usually letting things fall where they fall.

Of course, with indecision and fear and overwhelming options and opinions from others and society’s expectations, we become anxious. We’re afraid to do something wrong and what that might mean for us.

Paralysis isn’t just freezing though – it manifests into other states - feeling lost, confused, dizzy, tired, frustrated, angry, jealous, disappointed, dissatisfied, sad, lonely, or afraid of the future.

When we are in paralysis we sit back and let things happen, or we refuse to take action out of fear. We often blame other things to rationalise our paralysis.

I believe the underbelly of paralysis and indeed the antecdote to it is actually building healthy self-trust.

If paralysis is about fear of doing the wrong thing or being overwhelmed, it seems like we might need to look at what level of trust we really have in our own capacity to make choices, to try, to experiment and have our own backs. Sometimes paralysis can have us falsely believing that our inaction, our shinking and hiding is us keeping control. And paralysis only offers a false sense of control, because we only try to control what we don’t trust.

Glennon Doyle talks a lot about this in her book Untamed. She says: “We weren’t born distrusting and fearing ourselves. That was part of our taming. We were taught to believe that who we are in our natural state is bad and dangerous. They convinced us to be afraid of ourselves. So we do not honor our own bodies, curiosity, hunger, judgment, experience, or ambition. Instead, we lock away our true selves. Women who are best at this disappearing act earn the highest praise: She is so selfless. Can you imagine? The epitome of womanhood is to lose one’s self completely. That is the end goal of every patriarchal culture. Because a very effective way to control women is to convince women to control themselves.”

So if the cure for paralysis is self-trust, how do we do that, how do we cultivate that in a healthy and meaningful way so it’s not just another one of those words that we’re supposed to know what to do with but is actually a bit ambiguous in tangibility?

I feel like the core of self-trust is not actually about trusting yourself to know all the answers, or believing that you will always do the right things. That’s simply not possible or fair for us to expect of ourselves. That layers on all kinds of other stuff that can lead to shame.

The core of self trust for me is about having the conviction or focus that you will be kind and respectful to yourself regardless of the outcome of your efforts.

Self-trust is about believing in the integrity of yourself. When we look at examples of people who are self-trusting, we find that they are curious learners, willing to build their understanding of self and of opinions and experiences through action and seeing what works and what doesn’t for them. They have healthy interdependent relationships, not hyper in their dependency of others and their feedback. They speak with authority that comes from a deep place within but is not arrogant or dismissive.

Self-trust is about taking the posture of having your own back, being compassionate and not being self-punitive when you make mistakes. Because of course if we punish ourselves for making mistakes, our brains start to wire up to tell us we can’t be trusted.

It seems to me that self-trust starts to erode more quickly as we move into adult life – but it’s been chipped away at long before that. We spend most of our childhood and adolescence learning about ourselves through the lens of other peoples praise or criticism, through school and academics and extra curriculars – creating a dependency on that feedback to help us move forward. You’re good at this, keep going. Youre not good, try harder or stop. So when we reach adulthood, no wonder we begin to freeze up when those built in places of feedback are removed and we have to take action on our own. We haven’t been taught to trust our OWN instincts, our OWN desires our OWN roadmap – it’s all been dependent on other people, hinged on their perceptions of us. So we meander or wander and often end up desperately fixated on approval or some semblance of validation from others in order to take action for ourselves.

We can move away from our people pleasing and paralysis by rebuilding our self-trust and deciding to at the very least to commit to being on our own side. Not to win, not to succeed, not to guarantee results with ourselves, but to have our own backs. To be loyal to our desires and dreams.

Often paralysis stems from being on the arguing side of our needs and desires, trying to convince ourselves that we can’t or don’t deserve them. Self trust requires us to be on our own side, rallying for ourselves like we would a really solid, trusting friend.

We won’t do it perfectly, this self-trust thing. We won’t ever not let ourselves down and shrink and play small, forgetting about ourselves; but we can keep making that commitment to be on our own side.

I hope, if you are stuck in paralysis right now, that you feel some comfort from this, knowing that you can walk yourself back to trust, to being on your own side, even when it’s hard.

What's your Method of Hiding? Part 1: Perfectionism

As I was preparing and planning for what I wanted to cover in this next season of 2022, I started thinking about some of the common things that are keeping us from building courage and being brave.

Through my work coaching women running businesses I’ve had a pretty good front row seat to all of the sneaky ways that I see fear showing up and keeping us from sharing our work, our ideas and our thoughts.

So I thought it would be a good time to dig into some of these common methods of hiding that maybe you can identify with. Some of them are pretty obvious, but today I want to start with one that I know all too well – it’s one of my most common methods of hiding that I use to protect me from vulnerability and it’s also a really sneaky one for women (I’ll explain in a bit) and that, my friends, is perfectionism.

I know are women listening to this podcast who have important messages to share but whose self-doubt and fear is keeping them quiet or hidden. I know there are women listening to this podcast who think maybe think that perfectionism doesn’t relate to them. 

I know that so many of us are caught up in the myth that we needs to be more something – more qualified, more prepared, more expert, more influential, more polished – than we are in order to share our ideas or work or to try and develop something that we really want to....

SO BEFORE WE TALK SPECIFICALLY ABOUT PERFECTIONISM AS A METHOD OF HIDING, LET’S GET INTO A LITTLE BIT OF BACKGROUND.

In historical patriarchal culture, down through the centuries: women have been excluded from political, public, and professional life. We have not (and continue to not be) considered in legislation/voting, policies, pay discrepancies, lack of legal protections, and the denial of women’s basic rights.

All of these external exclusions through the years has absolutely had internal effects in women. It has shaped how we think of ourselves and what we see as possible for our lives and work. It shaped our fears – fears of speaking up, of rocking the boat, of not pleasing others because often our livelihoods and safety actually did depend on us being small and quiet and keeping the status quo.

One of the mechanisms of actual protection for us has been hiding; whether we recognise it or not. We have hidden ourselves, our ideas, our talents for survival instincts. To avoid conflict, or criticism or any kind of emotional exposure that might cost us, we have hidden.

The result is we people-please, use language that is softer to avoid being singled out and essentially we have not felt fully free to take action in our own lives. The cost of doing this is really high.

So along with some of the more obvious ways we continue to hide in that hangover of exclusion and desire for safety, I want to also address some of the more evolved ways that we are hiding, the ones that don’t necessarily risk our physical safety any more, but that absolutely do risk our emotional safety.

I want to try to expose some of the ways that we might not realise we are hiding so we can start to think a little bit about how that is manifesting in our own lives so we can begin to come out of hiding and live a bit more freely and fully.

Perfectionism is the sneakiest of these – because on the surface, it actually shows up as productive. And productivity feels proactive. But often that acute sense of overcorrecting, overplanning, over editing, over attentive work is actually keeping us from letting our ideas or products or services out there into the wild to be seen, noticed and to breathe.

Adding on, overcomplicating and endless polishing perfecting can really be avoidance. Instead of putting something out there that is good enough; maybe it’s a website that we think needs all the bells and whistles. Maybe it’s a product we are making that we think needs professional photography before we share about it. Maybe it’s a business idea we think we need 3 offerings within before we launch it to people.

We can build as we go, start somewhere and take a small leap that can propel you into action. Beginning is better than perfect. Perfect never comes so we need to start somewhere and keep having a learning attitude, an evolving attitude to whatever it is we are doing.

Brene Brown talks about perfectionism being a 20 ton shield we lug around trying to protect us when in fact it’s really preventing us from being seen.

Perfectionism is an guise we often use to guard ourselves from all angles – covering all of the bases extra extra carefully by busying ourselves over minutiae, spending endless time agonising over how things look or sound and trying to combat any potential criticism before it comes.

It also leads us into a vicious cycle of shame, because it is positioned as a noble quality, something to strive for when actually it’s not only impossible to achieve, but if we fixate on it and inevitably find that no matter how much effort we put in, we are met with any kind of criticism or judgement, we tell ourselves it’s because it wasn’t perfect enough – and so the cycle of shame starts to swirl around. “I could have done more, made it better etc”

When really, the logic of perfectionism is actually the thing that is faulty and not one single person who is out there, doing the work, sharing their ideas is actually immune from criticism or judgement – no matter what the level of perfectionism they think might protect them.

What we can do instead of hiding by way of perfectionism is try to do our best. What we can do is be proud of how we show up for ourselves and our idea, despite any flaws that might appear or any judgement that may follow.

What we can do is put down the armour of perfectionism and allow our ideas to be seen and heard so that we can learn about them and go through the unavoidable process of our ideas becoming, rather than hoping they come out perfect the first time out the gate.

When it comes down to it, trying and having a go is really self-supportive and offers you compassion and curiosity. Perfectionism is centred around others and what they think, how they might respond and really takes you out of the equation of the thing you are working on – which isn’t a supportive or sustainable way to approach things.

Within all of this, I want you to know that it’s so understandable that we want to hide in this way. Risking being seen or judged is so viscerally scary, and our body knows it. So if you’re listening to this and thinking “this is me” please don’t double down into shame – but let it be a call to freedom for you to know that perfect isn’t really going to protect you and that you are more resilient than you realise.

And ultimately know that your hiding is a huge loss for the rest of the world - that so many incredible ideas/thoughts/wisdom/talents are not being seen, not heard, not shared because we are hiding or fixated on perfection as a form of protection.

When amazing women hide their ideas, thoughts, creations then the world misses out on expressions of goodness, of insight, of beauty, of honesty, of empathy and innovation. And we need you – we need your imperfect thoughts, ideas and creations to be out there in the world so we can find them and so you can enjoy the fulfilment of creating something of your own that feels important and true.

MANAGING FEAR WHEN YOU'RE MAKING BRAVE MOVES

Today, I want to talk about what to do when we need to make a brave move and we are feeling the fear. 

The reason I talk about fear so much is that I think that we have such a limited and maybe even negative attachment to it. And when we have that kind of view of something, and it shows up in our emotions or in our body, our associations can really view how we respond. And there are good reasons for that.

The fight, flight, freeze or fawn instinct is innate. It’s what we have become used to as humans to survive in the world – in a context of danger, in primitive years, that instinct would have protected us from harm around us. But it has moved in more modern contexts, where physical danger isn’t as common for survival, into emotionally dangerous situations.

Where it used to be that people associated fear with more physical danger, people now list their biggest fears as combination of both the physical things – snakes, spiders, planes etc to public speaking, failure – things that absolutely won’t kill us but that we feel with the exact same amount of intensity.

But this adrenaline filled emotion that comes with fight, flight, freeze or fawn doesn’t actually help us make decisions more clearly at all and so as the world has evolved from those responses being necessary to survival we need to adopt some new skills and tools to help us with the new fear triggers that come up for us. The ones that are highly conflated with potential fulfilment.

So we’ll notice that fear shows up loud and protective when we are moving towards something that is very precious to us. A dream we are moving in on, a piece of work we are excited about trying out, a deeply felt desire that we really long to pursue, a cause we believe we can maybe have an impact in.

It’s often these things that we feel most vulnerable about because they are often the things that really reflect our true desires. They come from a really true and aligned place in our body and soul and so to put them out there into the world where they can be criticised or judged feels as terrifying to us as if we are confronted with a sabre toothed tiger.

So we can see that fear triggers our inner protector or our inner guard and as long as we don’t venture to near the door of our desires then it stays at bay. But when we decide to edge out of our comfort zone, contemplate change or stretch ourselves a bit bigger, the guard or protector shows up and it can be pretty hysterical.

One of the misconceptions of moving towards our truest selves or our most honest, aligned desires that I think is important for us to know is that it will feel good or exciting when we’re on the right track when actually we are more likely to feel the discomfort or vulnerability of being honest and aligned.

And so we can expect that if we’re going to make some bold or brave moves in our lives or businesses or ideas, that we shouldn’t hold out for a sense of confidence. It’s likely not going to show up in the way you think it is. If you are waiting to feel confident about doing something brave before you do it – you might be waiting forever. Because the inner protector or inner guard is built within you to show up.

So we need to adopt some tools and skills to teach our brain that it is ready to evolve past the freeze, flight, flight and fawn.

The good news is that adopting some of these tools actually isn’t all that hard. So even the act of acknowledging that the fear showing up, being irrational and persistent and catastrophising can be enough for us to sooth its hysteria.

And there are a few other techniques I want you to feel free to check out as well.

+ GET CURIOUS

The miracle drug for treating fear. Curiosity simply wants to discover what is true. What about this situation that is bringing up fear could you get curious about? Ask yourself why this particular situation is making you feel fearful – dig deep and bring the questions further. Curiosity suffocates fear because they are different states of being and you can’t be in two states at one time. Curiosity can energise us, make us more playful and less intense about the situation. Be curious about what is causing you to stall, hide or be fearful about this next move. Even just the act of thinking with curiosity could loosen things up for you.

+ RECONNECT WITH YOUR DESIRE TO SERVE

When fear or scarcity shows up in your personal life, work or creative life – bring yourself back to why you wanted to do the thing you want to do – who you think will benefit from it, enjoy it and get something out of it, or who is it going to positively impact? Even if that person is you or your family – because you are doing something you enjoy you’ll be a more contented mother or partner. Focusing on those people or the bigger intent or purpose of your idea can bring you out of your fear and into action.

+ ANALYZE TRUTH, POSSIBILITY, PROBABILITY

Often we fear a really non-specific outcome. Get specific about the outcome you are worried about. Go into it and analyse if there is any truth to it. What evidence do you have that it is going to happen? You may find you can actually rationalise yourself out of that non specific fear. Is this fear a possibility? What do I know to be true about this thing I want to do and my capability to do it? Write out the truth about those things. Arm yourself with evidence in your favour.

+ FOLLOW THE FEAR TO THE END 

Probably not the most popular advice, but it really works. Play it out – play your fear realised out. What would actually happen if x or y failed. What are the implications. And then what. Often fear paralyses us by THREATENING the worse case scenario, without us thinking about what we would do if it was realised and when we do we actually can surprise ourselves with how resilient our thinking is about what we would do. We’d ultimately be OK. We would survive our fears. We would find a road through.

These are just a few tools that have hugely helped me when I’ve been feeling the fear about my next brave move. I hope they bring you some comfort and support so we can have more of your brilliant ideas out here in the world with us.

Also a quick reminder about my leadership accelerator programme.

It’s beginning again in September and I am starting to rally together the women who want to be part of this next group. Over 30 women have been through this 8 month business and leadership development programme with me.

Women running their own businesses, women running teams, solo entrepreneurs and freelancers. If you are a female business owner and you want to develop stronger business skills, healthier boundaries, deeper self-trust and have a locked down support system full of wisdom – this is the programme for you.

You can send me a message hello@melwiggins.com to get an info pack or check the show notes for the link to grab it.

SHE LOVES HERSELF

I have an almost six year old daughter and she is every bit the typical six year old little girl. She loves singing and dancing and performing for us. There is a lot of ‘mummy watch!’ going on in our living room.

She loves to sit with me when I’m doing my make up and try things on and give herself a wee bit of blusher or lipstick. And I let her, because I know that right now in her little mind, all she is doing is mimicking her mum and trying things out. She doesn’t yet have the loaded views of beauty and societal beauty norms that I have where I am trying to cover certain parts of my face up or improve my looks – she is literally just playing.

And I so badly want things to stay in that playful place for her.

And it’s funny because every so often I am really triggered by my six year olds freedom around herself. Her full acceptance of her body, her face, her personality, her skills.

She moves through the world so unphased, so free. When she receives a compliment she doesn’t batt it away, she welcomes it “I know I am” she says.

It’s almost audacious that you would think otherwise to her.

She expresses her needs when she’s hungry or tired. She asks for what she wants. She refuses to do the things she doesn’t want to do. She wants you to see her and asks that you do. She hopes for your attention.

It’s so wild to me how far removed we become from this version of ourselves as we grow up and become women.

We don’t know how to say what we need. We are scared to. We are afraid to ask for what we want, in case we seem pushy or needy. We do things we don’t want to do because we don’t want to let people down or because we know it will make others happy with us and keep us in the good books.

We step out of the camera lens, we offer to take the picture instead. We share other peoples ideas instead of our own. We recoil at attention even though deep down we want to be seen and known. It’s almost as though as the years roll on we transform from these liberated little girls and become smaller and smaller versions of ourselves.

Sometimes I even find myself (and I consider myself to be a strong feminist with a good nose for bullshit) I find myself cringing that she could be so content with herself, almost wanting to make sure she doesn’t get carried away with it. I have to stop myself from curbing her self-acceptance in a weird way.

At six years old, my daughter really and truly loves herself. I wonder how many can say the same at 36.

I’ve been in enough rooms and conversations to know that ‘she loves herself’ usually isn’t the kind of comment you want to welcome. Because what we’ve heard it said about is usually someone who isn’t playing small.

Usually we say it about someone who shows confidence in themselves, or who shows up for themselves, or who navigates or moves in the world with some sort of self assurance and that rattles us.

So the words that we use to diminish her are: she loves herself.

And I think to myself. What do we really want her to do instead? Hate herself? Ignore herself? Numb herself out to her body and her desires?

I guess when women spend their lives hating themselves, thinking that they are broken or fat or ugly or not gifted, capitalism and patriarchy wins. It wins because we step away from our gifts, not wanting to be seen.

It wins because we spend our time and money trying to fix ourselves, our bodies, our skin and lining the pockets of the already wealthy.

What would it look like if we reframed ‘She loves herself’ and came around that idea in celebration.

What would it look like if we gave other women permission to be as audaciously loving towards themselves as my six year old is? What would it mean if we started using ‘she loves herself’ as something to aim for rather than a phrase to take someone down a peg.

What would it mean for you to decide to love yourself some more. To not swat away compliments. To not fixate on your appearance. To not justify your presence or point out your flaws.

What would it mean for you to stand tall in your giftings, to take up some more space in family conversations or in the workplace. What would it mean for you to be in the picture, to ask for some space, to share your ideas and be seen.

What would it look like for you to reclaim, in your own way, she loves herself.