All Forums  TMSHelp  TMSHelp General Forum  Accepting your weaknesses diminishes TMS stress

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Screensize: 640 x 480 800 x 600 1024 x 768 1280 x 1024 UserName: Password: Format Mode: Basic  Help  Prompt  Format: Font Andale Mono Arial Arial Black Book Antiqua Century Gothic Comic Sans MS Courier New Georgia Impact Lucida Console Script MT Bold Stencil Tahoma Times New Roman Trebuchet MS Verdana   Size 1 2 3 4 5 6   Color Black Red Yellow Pink Green Orange Purple Blue Beige Brown Teal Navy Maroon LimeGreen Message: * HTML is OFF * Forum Code is ON Smilies [quote][i]Originally posted by armchairlinguist[/i] [br]One of the things that's helped me the most from the TMS material is the message that it's normal, healthy, and ok to have negative emotions. This helped me really integrate a lot of parts of me that I was trying to stuff away. One of the consequences is that I also feel okay about having weaknesses. For example, I've always been shy and I don't like to meet new people and make small talk with them. I get really nervous, even though I know there's not much reason to and it's counterproductive. It's been really great to be able to acknowledge that I feel that way, and that's not bad. That allows me to get to productive thinking about why I feel that way, and the reason is pretty simple: I just have a personality characteristic that I'm shy. That makes it easier to make productive negotiations with myself about when I think it's worth dealing with it and meeting new people, and when to just avoid a situation because it won't really have enough benefits for me to go through the angst. Similarly, I've recently realized that while I'm generally organized and good at tracking things, I tend to fall down on the details of tracking as long as everything is going okay. I find it really difficult to track daily spending, write down everything I do on a project, or keep a to-do list completely up to date. That's a weakness, and when I acknowledge it to myself, I feel like I can stop beating myself up for not being already perfect at it. It's not something I "should" be able to do, it's something I'm not that good at. And then I can decide to work on it as a challenge, without all the pressure that I SHOULD know how to do it. (There's that SHOULD.) That diminishes my self-created stress and makes the TMS demon less likely to rear its ugly head. Just hoping this perspective might help some other perfectionists out there. :-) -- Wherever you go, there you are. [/quote]   Check here to include your profile signature.