Back in June, I shared about a success I had in gremlin voice management – that is, in discerning the voices of irrational fear that express themselves, generally, through messages laced with meanness or even downright cruelty. By managing the voices, I was able to navigate some feelings rotten enough that they would have sent me into a much nastier spiral even a year or two ago.
Naming gremlin voices is one of my standard suggestions to people, one that I make to just about everyone I coach and every group I facilitate. Naming them is what gives us space to discern the voices, which then empowers us to manage them.
Occasionally, I have found people who seemed to dig the concept but not follow through with the actual naming. This past Saturday, I witnessed first-hand one of the reasons: The gremlin voices themselves.
I had made the suggestion to someone close to me, someone who had heard this idea a time or 12 before but had never actually followed through. She was having a rough moment and we both knew it was her gremlins running roughshod over her. Without names, without distance, she was all but powerless to do anything about it.
So, we talked about naming. We got out notebooks. I read her the brief passage in The Artist’s Way at Work that originally inspired this idea four years ago, and then she sat there. Just looking at the blank page of her notebook.
“…I know there’s not actually a right or wrong…,” she said and, in that, I could hear the gremlin voice in her head, telling her she was going to do it wrong, that this would be yet another thing she did wrong.
Good info. Really, really helpful info.
Here’s what we did:
- She took a moment to notice that feeling of nervousness of doing it wrong. She located it in her chest, placed her hand there, breathed into it, and simply noticed it. “I’m noticing this feeling in my chest,” I suggested to her. “I’m noticing something in me feels nervous.” (This is straight-up Focusing language, friends.)
- I reminded her that she didn’t need to identify all the voices or come up with perfect names. All she needed was a starting point: One gremlin identified, or a first swings at names.
- I gave her a time limit, about 15 minutes while I made us meatloaf sandwiches and potato cakes from leftover mash.
Before I returned with the food, she came into the kitchen and shyly admitted to coming up with a name. “I looked it up – does that count?”
Yes. It all counts. Look up names and words. Use the name of your childhood tormentor or a villain from a movie. Make up a word.
She was spot-on when she’s said there’s not a right or wrong.
There’s only getting started.