WOTW: 11. Listen

The Word of the Week book quoted another book that I had finished reading a couple weeks ago, that was on my Bucket List. “We have two ears and one mouth and we should use them proportionally.” ~Susan Cain, who wrote Quiet. As a shy person who is very much introverted, I absolutely use my ears and mouth proportionally and should use my mouth a little more often to be more balanced. I far much prefer listening than talking and among my close friends, I am known to be a great listener. I find it so much easier to listen to others talk and when I do have to speak, especially in formal situations, I prefer to keep my words brief and to the point since it is uncomfortable for me to verbally express myself. I don’t quite understand why it is so much easier for me to write versus speak, but it is when my hands are doing the talking.

“Listen to the person standing in front of you.” In today’s super busy world, something as simple as listening with full attention often is not done. I know I am guilty of this, especially at work when I’m on conference or video calls. While the person or people may not be physically standing in front of me, my attention easily gets diverted by an incoming email or instant message that flashes on my screen. At some point, I’ll come to the realization that I haven’t heard a word that was said in the last several minutes. I am guilty of this even with the people closest to me, my boyfriend as an example. He can be quite the talker and there have been moments when he has been speaking for some time and my focus wanes with other thoughts in my head distracting me from his words and I find myself no longer listening to him. Whether I am at work or with someone I love, I have been guilty of not listening to the person in front of me and is something that I am regularly trying to improve upon. Some ways I try to do this is not opening email or the instant message window despite knowing it is flashing on the screen when I work, in attempts to force myself to stay focused on the meeting discussion that is going on. When I have found my mind drifting with my boyfriend, I have either stopped my wandering mind or even stopped him and told him that it was getting hard for me to keep my focus on our conversation asking if we can continue it later.

The next thing in the chapter I’d like to share, is this quote: “Listen to your self-talk. Do you have a “sad story” you keep repeating? What are you creating with it? Does realizing this inspire you to speak differently? Lose the story and…gain a life!” I’m going to share a story that I have repeated since I was a high school student that is the source of my negative self-talk that I am not enough, not good enough. Like most other children, my parents had high expectations of me and my schooling, wanting me to strive for excellence and to be the best by getting straight A’s. As I’ve said in previous posts, I never thought school was particularly easy, not being like other students or my siblings who seemed to understand things more quickly than I did. I knew I wasn’t stupid or dumb either though because if I studied, read the books, paid close attention in class and reviewed my notes and practiced, that I would get whatever was being taught and could get As. It came down to putting in a good amount of time and effort before I gained the knowledge needed. Having a lazy side and being prone to procrastination, I didn’t always employ good study habits to get the good grades either.

Now for the most part, I was an A and B student so I didn’t do too badly, but there were a few times I got C’s in math, science or my elective courses like graphic arts and yearbook. Math and sciences were very challenging for me and reflected in my grades. I was shocked that I got lower grades for graphic arts and yearbook though and remember being surprised when I saw those grades, knowing I wasn’t even close to slacking off in those classes and concluded that I was probably not a very good creative despite being very proud of the graphics I drew by hand myself and projects I created. My GPA was 3.375, which looking back, I don’t think was that terrible since I was able to get into college after all.

But I can tell you that I absolutely dreaded report card day because I knew I would be in for a long evening of lecturing from my parents, especially more so if I came home with a C. Even if I had all As and 1 or 2 Bs, I knew I was in for a grilling of why I didn’t do better in school, that they were disappointed in me because my grades were not good enough, saying how they wish they could could be like the neighbors’ parents, aunts, or family friends’ parents whose children all got straight As and were embarrassed that their own children were not as good, that I was not doing good enough in school. I don’t know how long the lectures were exactly, but they felt like forever as most things do when you are a child or teenager. They started during dinner, paused after dinner so that I could help with doing the dishes or cleaning the table up, then resumed in my parents’ bedroom where they would lay on the bed, have me stand at the doorway of their room as they continued the lecture. I remember after a decent amount of time, eventually shifting around from right foot to left foot and back and forth because my feet would begin to hurt from standing there. All the while nodding my head, saying “uh huh, yes” and that I would try to do better. On occasion they prompted me to sit at the foot at the bed so I would be more comfortable as they lectured me on the importance of getting straight As in school. They would sometimes go on until it was time for me to go to bed, basically repeating the same recurring themed message in many different ways, such as going into details of what all the other parents said about the kids that I knew and how my future was doomed to struggles and poverty if I couldn’t turn myself around to get straight As.

So one semester, I studied as hard as I possibly could, doing all the right things and putting in everything I had within, also wanting to see if I was capable of getting straight As for once and to avoid getting lectured. My hard work paid off and I did get straight As! I was ecstatic and for the first time ever, I was looking forward to bringing my report card home to show my parents. I was relieved to finally avoid a lecture and be given praise for achieving what they had wanted me to do for as long as I could remember. When I showed my parents and they saw all the A’s they were happy, but then my mom paused and said something like, wait, what is this? Is this an A-(minus)? Yes, I got all As but one A-. She said something like, an A- is not really an A though. That’s not good enough, it should be a real A, not an A minus which almost like getting a B. You should have tried harder so that you could have gotten real straight As. No, my straight As was not good enough because of that one little dash next to one A. All the effort I put in, giving it my all, was not good enough.

Then the lecture I thought I had avoided began. I need to do better. I need to get straight As. I need to be like my cousins who get straight As. I tuned out, completely and utterly crushed and deflated, thinking back to how hard I had worked that semester, pushing and forcing myself to review over and over and over for so many more hours than I had before. None of it mattered, despite putting in every ounce of effort that I had within me, I still was not good enough. That was the exact moment that I believed if I put everything I had into trying to achieve something, that it would be futile. It didn’t matter anymore, I mentally gave up and I resolved that night to never waste my time and energy into anything again because I would be a disappointment regardless. I remember at the end of that shorter lecture that there was mentions of me doing a good job for getting As, but that was lost on me at that point because the fire I once had to give it my all to see the best I could achieve was permanently extinguished because that report card and my attempt to achieve my highest potential and goal of straight As was not enough to satisfy my parents. I took what was said that evening to heart, that I didn’t do good enough, didn’t meet their expectations. So I figured why try so hard if in the end, it still won’t be enough.

To this day, decades later, I cannot say that I have ever once tried to give anything my absolute all since I was that dejected teenager. By repeating that story my entire life, I have created the subpar mediocre life that I live now. Sure, I do put in a lot of effort and have worked very hard at work over the years and overall done well, always getting stellar performance reviews, but I honestly have never put in everything I had within me towards a single thing in my life. I will never know what life I could have lived if I cared to even try giving my all even half the time I was in college. The question is, of course, do I continue repeating this story and allowing it to prevent me from ever honestly trying my hardest?

I realize that allowing this one moment in my childhood to define my belief that I am not good enough is basically stupid. That I should have at some point realized for myself that I did get straight As that semester and that an A- is NOT a B as I ended up thinking it was. If it was a B, the teacher would have given me a B or B+ or a B-. I should not have let what my mom said to me lead me to believe that I am not good enough. In fact, I am positive she said all those things, with the best intentions in mind, to try to get me to continue striving for straight As, but it had the opposite effect. The fact of the matter is I did let it negatively impact me and continued to do so even though I know it is dumb and that I should not do it. I’ve held onto that broken feeling as a child not being able to let it go. I felt dismissed in that moment, that my achievement was rejected. In fact, I felt punished, having to endure yet another lecture, when I did what I was told to do so many, many times in the past, to put everything I had into studying. I let my mother’s words break me that day and I also purposefully have not tried to heal myself from it either.

Does telling this story publicly inspire me to speak differently? Yes and no. It is apparent to me that my initial reaction and continued mindset is wrong, but even with that awareness, it is not so simple from my perspective to get over it and change. It comes off as so silly that I let this define me and my life and I know I should let it go and move past it. That I should replace that self-talk with affirming statements that I AM good enough, but long standing habits are hard to break. I know my stubborn self well enough that it is not as straightforward as flipping a switch to cease allowing that moment to define me. I also am aware that if I can somehow get my mind to lose the story and all the sentiments it has created in me about myself all these years, that I can create a life and probably one that is so incredible that I can’t even dream half of it up.

But my negativity is deeply engrained and the little voice in my head is saying so many negative things: I am too old to change. Why should I bother even trying to change when my life is already mostly over? I am too tired to really do something this drastically different. It’s too late. What is the point? What can I really do anyway? It’s easier being lazy and just existing as I have been. I make good money, I live a decent life, I travel, this is not so bad. A lot of people would love to be in my position, so isn’t that good enough? If I don’t try then I won’t disappoint myself when I fail. And I won’t disappoint my parents. Why put myself through so much only to end up somewhere I’m not even sure I want to be? I can go on and on and on, but I won’t and instead will lead into the next quote in this chapter.

“Listen to your higher self and cut off your ego. How do you know “which one” is talking? The higher self is the voice that is always patiently encouraging…Hint: you might need to meditate and eliminate the noises to hear her.” Without a doubt my ego is saying all those negative things I just went over. It is talking so much and so loudly that I can’t hear my higher self. I need to find a way to cut off my ego so that I can quiet my mind, the negative thoughts and emotions and see if for once, I can hear the encouraging higher self voice instead.

I’ll end with this last quote: “Listen to your soul…it is whispering something to you…right now.” My soul, at this moment, is telling me I have to do a lot of meditation to block those ego based statements to hear what important messages my higher self has to say to me. It also called me to look at the picture that I had chosen for this post, something that I had preloaded before writing all of this, which is something I have never done before. For all my past blog posts, I always chose a picture for the post after I have drafted and finalized the entire post.

So to end this post, I’ll take a moment to describe the photo. It is an older photo, about 6 years ago, taken after my brother passed away. I carefully planned and prepared for this photo purposefully wearing the Monster Beats Solo headphones from my brother because I wanted a picture of me wearing one of my most prized possessions from him. When looking at this picture today, now, the first thought that came into my head was that I need to hear my brother’s voice, what he would say to me in this exact moment if he read this blog post. He was the one who was always urging me on, being my support, encouraging me to do better, be better, follow my dreams. He was my rock in my life because he always had the best advice for me. His wise guiding words are the real message that I need to follow and I hope to hear him speak to me in my head or in my dreams.