Confessions of a Confident Man. Not

Yesterday I was out running and was painfully aware of how my fitness had waned. The final stimulus to going running yesterday had been getting on the scales and finding I was 5kg heavier than I had been this time last year. On Friday I was giving a presentation to 60 people I'd never met and I was terrified. I run thru' most interactions I have in life worrying that I appeared stupid or arrogant or withdrawn. I'm conscious that my face is really starting to show my age as it sags and creases. In my work I am constantly questioning and criticising my output, questioning its overall value. I question whether my friends just put up with me rather than value me. Any word of criticism becomes the focus of my attention and centre of my existence for a significant amount of time. and I hate that and sometimes I even hate me.

I did have a moment of clarity when talking to a friend recently when she recognised that she didn't love herself as she loved other people. My suggestion, coming from nowhere, was that she consider herself in the third person as someone she wanted to look after; how would she look after that person, knowing what she did about her. The view others have of us, not what we think they might say but actually do think, is much more positive and encouraging. Our personal and critical perspective of ourselves is quite simply wrong and unnecessarily harsh.

Reviewing that first paragraph from a more rational and third person view can give a very different perspective. I am 47 and managing to run 5km cross in under 30mins is actually pretty impressive. Yes I am 86kg but 2 years ago I was 96kg and actually I have probably put on 2kg in the last month, which in itself isn't a major issue. I do get stressed giving presentations, but who doesn't and actually I did give a good presentation. The majority of my interactions don't leave people thinking I am stupid or arrogant or withdrawn and if they do they can always talk to me about it. Yes I am aging, who isn't, but actually people often don't believe I am as old as nature has made me. As a surgeon it is sensible to constantly question and comparison with others is ridiculous when I consider what I actually do.

The internal debate I have is real. But what it is important is that everyone has those voices of discussion and that simply listening to the negative is foolish and probably self obsessing. When friends complain to you that they are fat, stupid, ugly, going to fail, unfit...how do you encourage them? Perhaps if we view ourselves in the third person, as normal, sensible, rational, loving friends do then we would have a very different existence?