Negotiating with yourself

Negotiating with yourself

In my lasting transformation coaching course, my coach would always say that wisdom is already in your client, and your job as a coach is to help them find it and believe it when they see it.

Why will anyone know what to do and choose not to do it? It did not help that I was a pretty decisive person. So, I got riled up whenever I met someone who would not make decisions. How dare you waste your life and our time (as we sit here trying to inspire you)?

A few weeks into the course, I started to see how the six psychological needs affected people’s way of living. It made sense to me, especially when I combined that with studying why people procrastinate and how to resolve people’s fears.

I have concluded over the years that people are not mad — they always have a rationale for how they act (however absurd).

This brings me to the pivot point of today’s piece — should we continue to waste away because we have a reason?

I get the distinct privilege of meeting people who have experienced more trauma than I could ever imagine myself in. I often say if I have experienced as much trauma as all my clients, then I would be too insane to be a therapist. Yet, I have discovered that there are two types of clients — the one who has experienced chaos and is looking for harmony and the one who has experienced chaos and wants to convince you to join them in chaos.

Among those who want harmony though, you will find two subdivisions — those who want to do the work and those who want the work done for them. Unfortunately, healing is not a done-for-you service. When they realize they must do the work, they sit up straight or join the chaos-only bandwagon.

Now, among those willing to do the work, you will find two subdivisions again — those who can get themselves to do things and those who cannot.

Their inability to do things is not a conscious decision on many occasions. For some, the environment has taught them that people like them do not get anything done, trauma has just beaten them into a corner and they have learned helplessness and a fair few do not have the tools required to get themselves out.

This plays out sometimes as an inability to finish what they start, choose wise friends, leave toxic people and places or fight for themselves.

All these cycles will continue until you learn to negotiate with yourself.

Learning to negotiate

In the piece titled If You Must Thrive, I explained negotiation like this

“This is the crux of this piece. Negotiation is a constructive attempt at bringing the other party to see things from your point of view with the sole intention of reaching an agreement that will serve your purpose for beginning the negotiation.

It is not a negotiation if you have no power, nothing to offer or lose. A good negotiation is a win-win situation where both parties forego something while gaining something.

So, please do not continue reading if you will not forego anything for your relationships to work.

With relationships (familial and professional), a good negotiation addresses the problem, proffers a long-term solution/mid-term one and ensures the parties do not lose sight of the benefits of that relationship.”

This perception of negotiation is vital because your present self is about negotiating a compromise between your past and your future. In this position, you acknowledge what has passed, how it hurts and how to heal it without agreeing to carry it into your future.

This is a little tricky for us because memories never fade, yet an experience can successfully be a memory without being in the driver’s seat. That you experienced it does not mean you have to trade the rest of your life for it.

I always ask my clients their age and how long they want to live to establish one point — what is behind is many times shorter than what is in front. You can argue all you want if you are over fifty years of age reading this, but you know you have had years of intensive pain/joy that eliminated previous experiences.

If you want me to host a pity party, stop reading now. If you do want to heal, welcome to self-negotiation.

How to haggle with yourself

To negotiate effectively, you need irrefutable data that your emotions, education or experiences cannot talk you out of.

If your experience is the basis for your data, put it beside your local, national, continental or even global statistics.

Meditating about healing and trauma this week and I had to remind myself that if the UN says 1 in 3 girls are victims of abuse, it means 2 in 3 are not. Now, that is a significant way to deal with despair as a care provider because it tells me all hope is not lost in that area.

To efficiently eliminate your excuses:

Know the facts: what has it cost you to stay stuck at this phase of your life? Do not mince words regardless of how hard this gets because this is the foundation upon which you create your non-negotiables.

I have had clients lose great relationships because they never finish anything. For some, it is spending thousands on education because they keep changing schools and departments. I have read stories of people who never stay at one job. This is not necessarily a search for variety as much as a fear of commitment. For some, it is being relationally non-commital and using sex as a substitute.

If it is an addiction, how does it manifest — what does it cost you financially, sexually, emotionally, relationally and professionally? What would your life look like if you did not have this addiction? What would you still have right now if you had not lost it to the addiction? What parts of you would be more beautiful if the addiction did not exist?

If it is an abuse you are trying to recover from, you still need to know. If this did not happen, what would my dating and sex life look like? Now that I am here, what is my life like?

Whatever it is, you need to be able to see and name it. Our indecisiveness in naming the problem neither lets us know the depth of the damage nor does it let us confront it.

Three days before writing this piece, a friend and I were speaking when I noticed I was triggered by something that was said. I spent the next day tracing and naming problems and then identifying what would be required to fix what was broken. Soon, I am getting into a new healing program. Why? Because I saw a trigger and did not deny there was hurt there.

Confront your facts!

Categories it: everything cannot be dealt with (at least, not today).

It is vital to get a therapist halfway through stage one, or the things you discover might make you feel like your life is hopeless. Nothing triggers apathy like hopelessness.

Categorize your discovery:

1. Emergency: these are problems that can ruin you any moment from now. If your addiction to hardcore porn is beginning to make you crave things that are harmful to other people, such as date rapes and paedophilia, Or if you are permitting people to disrespect you to the point where self-harming is your outlet, that is an emergency.
2. Information: these tell you why you act the way you do and may not require any specific healing. An example can be remembering the first classmate who gave you marijuana — that is not a rabbit hole to run into (except you are chasing a distraction). These just let you decide how and with whom to be more picky.
3. Goals: these are everything that requires change but may not belong to the emergency list — your self-sabotaging habits, not knowing how to read the room, fighting to hold onto toxic people and jobs etc.
4. Wrongs: this is likely where the tears show up because you acknowledge every way you have been wronged. Mourn it! The ways your parents could have shown up, the way domestic violence you witnessed triggered you, the way early exposure to fame messed up your mind and identity, the way growing up too soon took away your childhood, the way the sexual assault made you feel small, the way no one believed your side of the story. Whatever it is, mourn it.

Choose your future: this is where you want to go (however hard it looks now). Choosing a future when we do not know how to get there looks crazy, but it is the only way to begin imagining a different possibility.

At first, you will struggle with it. To help yourself, do not just visualize it in your mind but find references to it — create a vision board, use images that remind you of your destination as your screensaver, listen to other people’s stories, and subscribe to social media conversations that make your destination attractive.

Staying in the war: think of this like a world war (at the beginning though — it gets easier with time) because it will be concurrent and consecutive across different aspects of your life.

You will feel like you sabotage yourself romantically, but when you sit down with your therapist, you will realize you sabotage yourself professionally as well. Those moments make it feel like you do not have anything under control.

Self-negotiation happens when you do everything it takes to heal your past even if it costs you more (time, finances, and relationships) today while refusing to sacrifice your future as an apology to that past.

I love 16-year-old Liza, but I will not make 36-year-old Liza pay for the crimes of the 16-year-old.

Choosing to stay (regardless of what it costs and how you feel every day) in this war of healing the past and reaching for the future is the negotiation.

Fighting yourself: it is easy to see all the ways people harm us and fight them. This time, I ask you to see all the times you alone stand in the way and fight it.

1. Fight yourself with the help of an expert, even if it means you have to sit in that room and feel like a fool for needing help.
2. Fight yourself with community — allow people rally around you who have strength where you are weak. Even if motivation is all they supply, it is more than you give yourself.
3. Fight yourself with accountability — let someone know the standards so they can hold you to it when you are not in the mood.
4. Strategically fight yourself — keep tools that hold you accountable in obnoxious places so they serve as deterrents when accountability partners are unavailable.

You cannot bully or shame yourself into changing. But, you can bring all facts and experiences together, giving you mental clarity on what to negotiate and why that negotiation must work.