Don't Beat Yourself Up!

byRaven9

897 followers

Updated 9 years ago

They say that 'we teach what we most need to learn' and I must admit I believe this to be true of myself. I have spent my whole life 'beating myself up' without even realizing it. My background is in Social Work and I spent years in the Mental Health field teaching others how to 'be good to themselves', yet I now see how I never truly followed my own advice.

I have always been a perfectionist, and with that comes a tendency to be unnecessarily hard on myself. Isn't it funny how we talk to ourselves in ways that we would never put up with others treating us. Those doubts and fears in our mind that we give attention too....

I have spent a lot of time on personal growth the last few years – mostly out of necessity, as life was seeming to crumble in front of my eyes. Now I understand that life really did need to change, so that I could re-build something way better. The process of this change has been the hardest thing I've ever done (even harder than owning property in a foreign country -lol ;) but the growth I've experienced has also been unmatched.

We are all at different places in our life journey, and with that comes different perspectives and opinions, however, we need to learn how to be gentler on ourselves. Start with treating yourself like you would want to be treated, and then this mentality naturally flows to being a kinder person to others. There are enough people in this world that will jump at the chance to cut you down, do not do this to yourself as well. We are all put on this earth to fulfill our soul's purpose and this is always an ongoing journey.

I have to say, I am sorry to my WA friends for not being more committed to posting on here. Life tends to get overwhelmingly busy and something always has to fall to the wayside, and often blog posts tend to be it.... That being said, the last few months I have returned to WA (again) and am currently almost done my first complete website. It has been a harsh learning curve, which was made much easier by the training on WA, and I strongly felt it was time to reconnect with the community which started my online journey.

Here's some quick updates – I first explored the working online thing in 2011 (hence the 'join date' on my profile), however, I was also working 12 hour days in the mental health field, so I never really fully committed to even learning the techniques, much less building websites.

I rejoined WA a few years later – at this point I had a young baby (my now 6 year old daughter), and again, was too busy to move forward... However, looking back, these were 'excuses' for the fact that I was never fully committed to learning, due partly to always having something else on the go.

During the last 10 years or so, we bought a house in Nicaragua, got married on the beach there, and made in unofficially our 2nd home, all while maintaining jobs and a mortgage in Canada. To fund our adventures we have bought, managed and eventually sold rice farm land in Nicaragua, worked various jobs in Canada and the latest escapade was exporting farm equipment to Nicaragua.

We have had some success with each endeavour, however, none of these things felt like the 'right' thing to be doing long term. Recently the ideas for an online business have been flowing, and I am back at WA to further the training I started and this time I have gotten farther than in the past – my website is almost complete.

I would have more 'excuses' than ever to not continue working online and to beat myself up over – I still do not have time – my daughter is now 6 years old, we homeschool her and now have an 18 month old son as well. Usually the only time I have to work is in the middle of the night when I should be sleeping – good thing I am a night owl. I still have the same (and more) stress in life that often used to cause me to say I had no energy left at the end of the day to do anything productive.

The difference is that I have grown as a person - that is one part of the learning curve which I did not expect while attempting to start my own business. I knew that I would have to learn how to make a website, how to market it and how to manage the books. What I didn't see coming is the personal and spiritual growth that came with it.

I now realize that when I started and quit so many times years ago, it had a lot to do with a lack of self confidence – lack of faith in my ideas, and fear around failure (and to a certain extent a fear of success).

Due to the many other life adventures that we had – and many other endeavours on the road to being self employed, I gained more of a trust in myself and in my decisions and truly learnt how to follow my heart.

This is not something that just happens, but it comes with time and quite often, failure. The wonderful thing is that with that harsh learning curve, you also learn a lot about yourself, and how to trust yourself and your decisions.

So, regardless of where you are on the WA journey, do not beat yourself up over your progress. Some individuals may have success quickly, however, many of us take years (literally) to make progress. I used to feel bad about being easily distracted by the next adventure, and feel like I was not committed to working online. Now I am coming to see this as being necessary to further my life experience – Things really do happen for a reason, and we can never force timing. When the time is right, things do tend to happen, and when we let go of the need to 'control' our lives so much, we usually find ourselves in a much better life flow.

If your heart feels like creating an online business is part of this purpose, then WA is THE place to be. From my experience, there is a very high quality of people in this community, and it is unique in the way that people are actually supportive of each other, not out to cut each other down. I believe this has to do with the entire tone of the WA site – this behavior would not be acceptable, therefore, it rarely happens. WA is a safe place to connect, learn and grow and I am very thankful to have found it. That being said – take a lesson from the others who support you in this community, and start being good to yourself as well.

Cut yourself a break if you aren't as far as you would like to be with your training or business. Life happens, and as long as you don't let your dream die, it will grow.

As a self proclaimed people pleaser, often the tendency to beat yourself up ties into the fact you are too worried about what others (and the 'world' for that matter) will say or think about you. I went through years and years of not trusting my heart and my own path because I was concerned with the opinions of others.

Remember, everyone has an opinion, which is just their thoughts, and in reality, a thought is just a figment of imagination. So, why continue to let someone else's imagination dictate your life.

A great affirmation to help overcome this that I recently heard is 'I am completely independent of the good and bad opinions of others'.

Just reminding yourself of this will help you to stop beating yourself up and grow your faith in your own capabilities and life path. In turn, your business will grow as you develop a better energy in life – but this all starts with personal growth and we can't grow while we continually cut ourselves down.