Sharon was quiet and appeared timid, and her mother referred to her as an "average student."
When Sharon began preparing for an assessment, she showed no real confidence in any area of the test. She did not talk much, but I sensed that she was anxious about the whole project.
In fact, she seemed to define herself as "anxious."
In the course of our work together, I introduced Sharon to the idea that her fearful, anxious feelings might not be “who she was.” Those feelings were simply the way she had learned to respond to certain situations in her life.
She began to see that she might be able to unlearn the ineffective fearful response, and learn a new response in its place.
The recognition seemed to shake something free in Sharon. She performed at a higher level on the assessment than she or anyone else expected. And a year later, her mom let me know that Sharon’s grades overall had risen by ten percentage points and that she was on a whole new trajectory as a student.
The lesson here is, you don't have to define yourself by how you feel. You can SEPARATE YOUR FEELINGS FROM YOUR SELF!
For adults, too, it can be an important learning: our negative, self-limiting feelings are not “who we are!”
Instead of being an “anxious person” or an “angry person,” we may simply be feeling anxious or angry. Those feelings don’t have to define us! We can choose to separate from them, and be whoever we want to be!
