Let me be a bit personal this time. I will talk about trauma and how it doesn’t have to define you.
You might not know this about me, and it might not apply to you, but when I was a kid, I was bullied quite a lot in school; it was in my early years in school. I was bullied both physically and emotionally by the older kids.
I would’t describe myself as a very confident kid at the time. However, I was pretty clear on who I was or at least who I wanted to be.
If you have ever been bullied or know someone who has been bullied, you probably know how that experience, that trauma can stay with you for quite some time.
It can end up defining who you become.
Fast forward many years. I was working as a manager at IKEA, and I was overstressed, overworked, and quite frankly, being over-ambitious, always wanting to be recognized and praised (so that I could feel good about myself).
I wanted to be viewed as a good employee. And I ended up being burnt out.
I was working too much, too hard, and not taking a break, not listening to any of the signals coming from my body.
And I hit the wall.
Now, I decided I wasn’t going to allow that to define me and hold me back. So I worked hard to get back to work.
A few months later, I was back at IKEA and back to my old position. I did this despite the trauma that I had gone through. Despite the signals of fight and flight that my body was throwing at me. And because I learnt so much from that experience, and grew from that I was offered a promotion and joined the senior management team of the store.
Now, the reason why I’m sharing these two stories is because I want you to understand that it’s not what happens to you that necessarily defines you.
It’s how you HANDLE what happens to you.
It’s how you show up in the face of that, that actually defines you.
And here’s something that I’ve learned throughout my own personal experiences, and from the work I’ve done with clients:
If you focus on what you can control and if you bring self-leadership to the situation you are faced with, you are accessing both the tool and the mindset you can use when “overcoming” your trauma.
There is a popular concept that I teach when it comes to self-leadership.
It’s about the circle of influence. It basically tells you where your absolute control is, and what’s outside your control.
The principle I teach tells you that, any time you are focused on something other than what you can control, will be the time you feel anger, frustration, disappointment, anxiety, and fear.
You will feel all those negative emotions because you focus on an area you do not control. And it leads you to feel any of these negatively charged emotions.
However, when you take a step back and start focusing on the things you DO CONTROL…
It can be yourself; your actions; your words; your thoughts…
You get empowered to change what it is that you want to change.
If this is useful for you, I’d like to point you towards a tool that I have created and that I offer for free to help people reclaim their personal control.
It will help you get unstuck, stop procrastinating, and take charge in life using self-leadership to expand your life.
It’s a 3-part video series created for people like you and me, to help us take back our power and motivation to leave the trauma and old stories that no longer serve us.
Click here to access the FREE video course today.
