This is the title of my new book. It’s available right now on Amazon and if you’d like to hear more about the content, I’ll share on this posting and on more in the future.
I’ve been listening to the questions women clients ask for many years and discovering patterns and similarities….and this book identifies 11 of the most commonly asked.
What’s Wrong With Me is the question most frequently asked. And it’s a little like an “umbrella question.” It opens the doors in the mind for OTHER/MORE bad questions…. and that’s what it is … it’s a bad question. The questions I’ve identified are the questions that, if you ask them, head you in the wrong direction. Bad questions have bad answers! Good questions have hard or challenging answers AND they head you in the direction of thinking clearly and making good decisions, and often, most important, asking for the help you likely need for problem solving and making changes.
So what’s so bad about the question? Simply that the answers are things like: I’m sick, crazy, stupid, self destructive, a failure — I can’t cope, I can’t do it, nothing makes a difference…perhaps obviously those answers only make you feel worse….the opposite of what you need when you are in a slump or overwhelmed, or just unable to get a handle on next steps.
If you change the question to WHAT is happening in my life that creates sad or angry feelings or depression or anxiety, you are more likely to identify situations, people, events that are difficult for you right NOW… and that’s the goal. Find the specific people, places, things, that you are struggling with and then begin to think about what you can DO. The more concrete and REALISTIC your question is, the more likely you are to get a handle on something you can do to make your situation even a LITTLE better.
The key is to identify negative thinking that makes an already difficult or painful situation even worse. For example, “I’m a failure” or “I never get it right” is an exaggeration of the truth. More likely, you have failed at a specific thing — a test, a promotion, or a relationship not turning out as you hoped. But a specific failure is far different from YOU being the failure. All of us have failures! Strip the failure of the negative thinking — it’s still THERE but it becomes more manageable.
The workbook format of the book takes you through steps for re-framing negative questions into questions that are realistic and problem solving oriented. You might want to try some of the suggestions I make just to see if they help. In the coming weeks, I’ll share some examples. Meanwhile remember there is nothing wrong with YOU. There is likely something hard, painful, challenging in a situation you are facing and if you can learn to quiet the negativity, you might find you think clearly enough to head in a problem solving direction.