… will never hurt me. Or so the saying goes. Loser.

Words do hurt us. Especially when we turn a verb into a noun.

But you cannot ‘be’ a verb. Imagine how liberating that is.

I first heard this idea from Van Tharp while I was on his Peak Performance Trading courses. Back then, I was baffled. I had lost money and I had made dumb decisions, so I was A Loser.

Before we go any further, here’s a question: do you think labelling yourself as A Loser would help you in any way? At all? Ever?

No.

You can be seeing your account balance heading south. You can be losing money on a trade or an investment. You can be losing money on Bitcoin. Or you can be losing money because it’s going up, and you’ve missed it.

You can also be losing clients, losing followers or losing a relationship.

These events can be happening, and they may or may require action. But none of them -no matter how intense your emotional response – mean that …

… You are a loser.

That is simply not possible, and it’s even not logical. You and your life are a process, not a thing.

But labels like this can be very persistent.

Left over learning from childhood tells us we should feel bad so that we become better. It tells us that if we’ve done something wrong, we must feel bad, and the worse we feel, the better.

We were taught that feeling awful meant that better was on its way. If you want a child to become good, and it’s not being good, you first make them feel worse by punishing them.

We don’t want wild, untrained, feral children, so let’s continue to teach them all they need to know.

We also don’t want to take this message into adulthood. That is way beyond any usefulness it may have had. Applying it to ourselves has no value (e.g. I don’t like how this project turned out, therefore I must feel bad). Internalising this punitive and insulting inner voice has no value. Nor does running commentaries of verbs turned into nouns.

It’s worse than useless, and we’ve already proved that it’s not even logical.

So let’s drop it.

Knowing that this is a great idea isn’t the same as being able to do it. To achieve that, we need to combine cognitive understanding and subconscious communication.

This is what we do in Rapid Resolution Therapy (RRT) (The Institute for Rapid Resolution Therapy, Inc.). It’s a complex and skilled process, but once it’s complete, these kinds of compulsive thoughts drop away effortlessly.

It took me a long time to get beyond thinking that our actions make us into nouns. RRT has a unique perspective on just about everything. And it gave me a new way of seeing what drives us to insult ourselves like this, and then it freed me from it.

Btw, this image is from the cult TV show ‘The Prisoner’ from 1967. The white balloon is called ‘Rover’ and its job is to prevent the population of a captive village escaping. It does this by suffocating potential escapees ….

#personaldevelopment #innerpeace