Why you might not use your voice

One of the questions I was recently asked was this:

How do you stop caring so much what people think and just share your voice?

Such an important question when we’re stepping into a new chapter at midlife because this usually involves using our voice in a way we might not have done before.

There are several aspects to this question that I’d like to address to answer this question, and will do in future posts. Today, I thought I’d begin by addressing the topic of fear. Because if sharing what you truly have to say is important to you, and you’re not doing, it’s likely the answer is that you don’t feel safe to do so.

And then I remembered, I’ve written a whole book about this (!!) so I’m sharing part of Chapter Two to get the ball rolling on this conversation.

For background, in case you don’t know this about me, I spent 20 years experiencing panic attacks, anxiety, migraines and stress. I was diagnosed with agoraphobia (can’t go out) and claustrophobia (can’t stay in) - bad combo. I had months at a time where I couldn’t leave the house or go to work and then, in 2014, it all disappeared in a few weeks, while I wasn’t looking. My book, A Little Peace of Mind, is the story of what I learned about how that happened.

Meet Bob

Imagine there’s a board of directors in your head.

Clare’s well turned out, she’s a control freak, but you can tell she loves you and she’s the chairwoman of the board.

Mary is the pessimistic one. She’s always got a ‘yeah but’ and she’ll point out the downside of any plan you might have. Usually around ‘there’s not enough time’.

Stuart is the funny one and can see the humour in any situation.

Lynne’s the crazy one. Only she thinks it’s everyone else who’s crazy, so she spends most of her time alternating between shaking her head at everyone else’s crazy ideas and swearing.

Kirsty’s the buzzy one – you can hear the energy and passion in her voice. She’s the ‘go get ’em girl’ and the cheerleader at the table – she always says, ‘Yes, of course you can’ for any discussion you’ve brought to the table.

Silvio is the wise one. He doesn’t say a lot, but when he does, it’s usually profound.

And then you’ve got Bob. Bob is the homeless guy who shows up at the board meeting from time to time. He’s normally a bit drunk too, so he tends to rant. ‘What a load of nonsense! You’re too anxious to try that! Eat cotton wool! Why can’t you make more money? Then you could buy me more cotton wool! Why can everyone else do this thing you’re trying to do, and you make it look so hard? Perhaps you should eat more cotton wool,’ and similar crazy rantings.

Only some of the rants sound true to you. And you can’t kick him off the board, Clare’s his aunt. Thousands of NLP techniques have tried to tame him.

In fact, the more you try to get rid of him, the larger he appears and the louder he gets – it’s the superstrength beer he’s constantly drinking.

We’ve all got Bob. He shows up and rants.

He used to say to me: ‘You’re taking your daughter to Disneyland, are you mad? In fact, did you forget you ARE actually mad? You’ve had anxiety about leaving the HOUSE before and now you think you can go all the way to FRANCE on your own with her? What if you get a migraine? You’re going to scare the pants off her if you have a panic attack when it’s just the two of you! Who’s going to help you? Not enough cotton wool there to save you. And by the way, you need to get more, do more and be more – that’s definitely true.’ And so on.

The question is, how seriously do you take him?

I used to invite him in, offer him a cup of tea and a slice of cake, and say, ‘Right, Bob, you’re so loud I guess you must have some valid points. Can you give me some advice on what to do about my anxiety? Do you think I can take my daughter to Disneyland? Should I take this medication my doctor has prescribed, do you think?’ Then I would sit there nodding my head, noting down his advice and then putting the resulting urgent‐looking action plans in motion.

‘What job do you think I should do next, Bob?’ or ‘What do I need to do, to be a better parent?’ were my favourite questions to request input from him.

Now, through my years of personal development study, I’d come to understand that there were ‘thought gremlins’ that were ‘trying to sabotage me’ in my attempts to create a ‘successful’ life. On my personal development journey, I’d picked up a whole heap of techniques and strategies to overcome them, fight them or make them vanish altogether. But somehow Bob had slipped under the radar and it wasn’t until I realised the nature of him that I suddenly saw that a lot of the thinking I’d been taking as ‘real’ was just Bob with a VIP invite to my house.

Nothing we think is true.

And you are not your thinking.

Bob talks untrue nonsense but he’s very convincing. I’d realised that his cotton‐wool advice was probably a little suspect; however, I fell for every single one of his stories about ‘my anxiety’, whether I could travel and his opinion on whether or not I should take medication.

I had just never seen it before. And then I did.

Here’s the difference between Bob and the ‘evil thought gremlins’: Bob is harmless.

Any strategies you put in place to escort him firmly to the door just make him take a few sips of his beer and come back fighting and insisting that you listen to him. You can try drowning him by developing your own drinking problem, or attempting to bolt the door so he never gets back in, but all to no avail. And this why you won’t learn any Bob‐wrestling strategies in this book.

However, in the moment that you see the harmless, insecure nature of him, you can give him a key to let himself in whenever he feels like it. He shows up and gives you advice, but this time you recognise it as just Bob.

How?

Well, we each have this ingenious inbuilt system: you can feel him.

Here are just some of the feelings you get when you’re having tea with Bob:

• Anxious

• Scared

• Stupid

• Frustrated

• Uncertain

• Lonely

• Ashamed

• Frightened

• Pressured

• Urgent

• Like you must take action right now

If you have no idea about the nature of Bob (and quite often, even when you do, you think those feelings are you). You take your thinking in that moment as being truth; you accept it as fact. But now, when you start to get wise to the fact that not all of your thinking can be trusted, next time you start to feel any of those feelings, you might start to recognize that’s a clue that you might just be inviting Bob in for tea and that you might want to ignore yourself for a little while.

Here’s what makes the difference for me now. I now understand more about the nature of thought, what it is and where it comes from, and that Bob is free to turn up at my door, and he will, for as long as I’m alive. The difference is I no longer give Bob tea and think he has anything useful at all to add to my life.

More often than not these days, I simply recognise his presence, give him a nonchalant ‘Hi, Bob, thanks for that’ when he hands out advice and simply carry on as I am. He usually then plonks himself down in the corner and continues to mutter into his beer can for a while, and next time I think to look he’s usually let himself back out again.

When you experience anxious thinking, all that’s happening is that you’ve innocently fallen into the mistake of thinking Bob was sober this time around, or that there’s something you can and need to do to get rid of him. But he’s never sober and there’s no need to get rid of him.

And you don’t have to invite him to sit down for tea.

Do you know Bob too? Thoughts? Comments? Questions? Let me know below…