If you don’t mind

I recently attended an assertiveness workshop, which my job paid for. After meeting me, it becomes clear pretty quickly that I’m not the most assertive person in the world. My boss brought it up early on and has been great in supporting me. The workshop was good but I can’t say I feel any more assertive than before. I now know to take a strong posture and what tone of voice to use, but you can’t always prepare for situations that require assertiveness. It’s easy to forget what you’re supposed to do in the heat of the moment.

According to the workshop co-ordinator, I’m a 4 out of 10 on the assertiveness scale but she said I could easily be a 5. Apparently you shouldn’t go higher than a 7 otherwise you’ll just become aggressive. God forbid!

Without going into too much detail, there was an issue in work today that called for me to be assertive. I haven’t quite missed the boat. I’m making plans to face it on Monday, to make my feelings clear and what I feel needs to be done. I only hope I can follow through. Unfortunately my family are good at saying they’ll do something and not actually do it. So it’s only natural that my negative voice kicks in and says ‘yeah right’ when I say I’m going to sit down with my boss on Monday and explain my concerns. Hopefully I can follow through. I’ll sit down on Sunday and make a list of the points I want to make and practice saying them clearly. My fear is sounding passive aggressive which I think has been one of the main hindrances to my being assertive.

I was also told at my workshop to basically not care what other people think. Ha! Try undoing almost 32 years of that habit in one workshop. Why do I care what people think of me? I ask myself that so much and yet I still go out of my way to try to please people and look for praise. It’s quite sad.

Why couldn’t this have happened before my counselling appointment last night? I actually ran out of stuff to talk about, now I could talk for hours on this subject alone. I’ll just have to save it until our next session on Thursday.

The missed deadline

I mentioned before that I’d set a deadline for the completion of the first draft of my story. Well, I procrastinated up until mid-August. I figured if I wrote a chapter a day from that point I’d make it to my deadline – 30th September. Today’s the day and I’m nowhere near finished it. So I’ve opted to extend it to the end of October. I can’t help but feel like a failure because I’m my own worst enemy. I truly believe I’ll finish it by the end of October, I just need to work on not beating myself up over it.

Motivation against depression: trusting your own judgement

I am the first to hold my hand up and say that trusting my own judgement is something I’m not good at. I always need a second opinion before doing something of significance: a task in work, buying a new car or something equally as expensive. It all comes back to self doubt, assuming that a decision you make by yourself is more than likely the wrong one. You fear making mistakes, mistakes that you can’t reverse.

The fact of the matter is is that it’s not just about trusting your own judgement, but trusting yourself as a whole. So how can we condition ourselves to trusting ourselves to do what we feel is right, even if it ends up being wrong?  According to Peter Shallard, “If you spend a lot of time regretting things you’ve done or decisions you’ve made, you don’t trust yourself.” And that’s the pinnacle of the problem, isn’t it? We live so much in the past, wishing we could change things that it influences how we behave in the here and now.

A lot of the time I regret going to college because I’m currently not working in the area of which I studied. I could easily look at it as a building block of my life, I did something I wanted to do. And at 29 years old, there’s nothing to suggest I won’t end up working in the field someday. But then that niggling voice in my head comes into play and reminds me of the other “bad” decisions I’ve made in my life and I start to doubt myself even more.

Many people have said this, but I’m going to quote one of my idols, Billie Joe Armstrong: “It’s better to regret the things you have done than to regret the things you haven’t”. I’m sure that doesn’t mean to say go out and do everything you can and see what’s successful and what’s not.

A big decision I have to make right now is the result of what I consider to be a bad decision on my part in August of last year. I bought a new car, you see, not because I needed one but simply because I wanted one. A beautiful 2007 Opel Corsa, which sadly I have had nothing but problems with since day one. Now that it’s broken down for the umpteenth time, I have to decide whether or not to get it fixed once again, or to cut my losses and get a new one. I have already sought advice, but in the end I know the decision will have to rest with me. On Tuesday I’ll be brining it to Opel to find out what the damage is this time. Once I know that it’ll be on me to decide whether to proceed with the potentially costly repairs, or to simply throw in the towel.

Needless to say I am worried. I fear either decision could go badly, especially as this is the fourth car I have had problems with (though this is the worst). I have no idea which way it’ll go, but hopefully whatever I choose will be what’s best for me.