Welcome Guest Expert Summer Turner!

An experienced teacher and trainer, Summer Turner combines brain science, psychology, creativity and spirituality to help introverted businesswomen create meaningful success from inside their comfort zone. Visit her website to learn more about how Summer helps introverted womanpreneurs who want a life and business of Ease and Flow in spiritual, personal, and financial alignment. She can be contacted at summer@SuccessForIntrovertedWomen.com for more information.

Take it away Summer!

Think You’re Not Good Enough—Here’s Why

Ever get evaluated by a boss and you leave the room feeling gutted? Later, usually much later, after you’ve moved on, you look back with more objectivity and realize that your boss did say quite a few positive things – and the negative things weren’t really all that negative… and NOW you see that they were meant to help you improve.

If you’re now your own boss as an entrepreneur – especially if you’re an overthinking introvert – you might be plagued with negative self-talk when things happen that seem negative.

This in-the-moment perception of negativity is due to the brain’s “negativity bias” and the habitual stories lurking in our unconscious mind.

You can blame evolution for the “negativity bias.” Our brains are wired to experience heightened arousal to perceived threats, which in turn causes us to react with a fight or flight response. During that performance review, your brain sent you a threat alert, which made you hyper-aware of any statements that could be construed as negative.

This automatic reaction is meant to protect us, and it would if the threat were real, such as a stalking tiger. In our modern life, however, that same reactivity tends to trigger our “habitual stories” from our unconscious. They’re usually some variation of the “I’m not good enough” or “I’m not worthy” theme.

You may not be able to change your brain’s negative reaction, but you can go in and change your unconscious habitual stories.

How did those habitual stories get into your unconscious in the first place?

What happens is that when we’re children, we’re like deductive “sponges,” interpreting events and drawing conclusions about ourselves, even though we don’t have enough understanding to discern the truth and make an accurate interpretation. Because of the brain’s negativity bias, these childhood interpretations and conclusions tend to become negative stories in our unconscious.

When you told yourself a story and felt the feelings that go with it, neuron connections were made along a pathway in your brain, creating a groove. The more often events triggered that story, the deeper the groove of the brain pathway.

Eventually it’s easier for that pathway in the brain to get triggered than it is to go down any other pathway. In other words, the record needle automatically falls into that deep groove.

And that’s what I mean by “habitual”: It’s become a habit – an automatic response – to tell yourself one of your negative stories and feel those negative feelings every time something happens that could possibly be interpreted that way.

You don’t consider other possible interpretations, because 1) it’s not automatic to do so, 2) it’s not easy to counteract a habit, and 3) it feels like the truth, so it doesn’t even occur to us to consider a different story.

The good news is that once you realize that a negative story is just a record needle stuck in a groove, you can change it fairly easily. It takes a while, though, because the habitual pathway is “easier” since it’s already so well established; and it feels “natural,” which adds to the feeling that it’s “true.”

So, as with all habits, it takes about 28 days to establish a new habitual story. What you’ll be doing during that 28-day period is creating a new neuron pathway: a new, more truthful, empowering story.

You’ll find a Worksheet to help you change your story as part of the free 1-module mini-course I’m offering for a limited time, called The Tortoise Way™ to Make your Unique Contribution.

I hope you’ll all take advantage of Summer’s free mini-course, and please let me know how it helped you.