Oh? You don’t have a screw up that lives inside of you somewhere? Well, that’s a really great thing you’ve got going there, I hope you feel grateful.  For those of us who do have at least a teeny tiny part of a screw up living inside of us somewhere, this post is about how to look at that part in a different way. Dare I say, even make friends with him/her?

Here’s what I’ve figured out for myself as well as for many people who I have coached with over the years, that part of you that you don’t like listening to the most, those characteristics that flop themselves out into the world when you least expect them, the behaviors that seem to cause you to strut down the path away from your heart’s desire….well all of those pieces may actually be glistening gold underneath all the soot and silt.  Sometimes these things actually came from the naturally good part of us that likes to win, but for whatever reason we choose to ignore the messages, as they come forward and so they get stomped on and tossed aside only to rise again and again and again until we finally will listen to them.

How does this show up in your life?  You could find yourself in a situation where no matter how you looked at it, everything seemed to point towards you failing (which is not necessarily a bad thing in itself, but that’s for another post!).  Maybe you found yourself having to move out of your home because it was being foreclosed or a job that you had half-halfheartedly taken a couple of years ago was downsizing sweeping you along with it.  In SOME cases (not all) but in some cases, if you are willing to get quiet and honest with yourself, you might hear a faint voice, or notice that you had a “knowing” about your home or job that you are now willing to pay attention to.  Maybe that part of you that you would call a “screw-up” had been trying to tell you from the very beginning of purchasing the home that you didn’t want to buy it. But you let yourself get talked into it because “everyone” who you respected was telling you that it was the right time to buy and that you “should” do it.  Or maybe you accepted that job a couple of years ago when the economy was really tanking and “everyone” around you was saying to take whatever job you could get and be happy but you had an inner knowing from the minute you walked in the door that this job had “yuck” written all over it.

That part of you who you judge to be a screw-up today may actually have been your hero from yesterday….only nobody wants to listen to someone yelling at them (which is what that part of us tends to end up doing in some form or fashion after a long time of not being heard by us).

Make friends with that part of yourself or at least acknowledge that you are paying attention to what it is trying to tell you and that you will take its advice into consideration when making future decisions.  Denying that still small voice inside of us is like pushing an important part of our make-up aside that will somehow make itself heard, seen and known one way or another. Might as well meet it head on and see what it has to say.  Who knows, there may be gold deep down inside of you.

What have you been saying to yourself that you need to listen to right now?