Help Parents: Five Tips on Taming the Inner Tyrant

By Elyse Jacobs for EzineArticles

Are you a victim of your own inner urgency? Do you feel compelled to do more, and more, and more. Is what you do never enough? 

That aspect of yourself that judges you, not by realistic expectations but, from old guidelines you might not be aware of, needs deleting or reprogramming. Ancient history and old myths can be updated to benefit who you have become and where you'd like to go.

As a parent, these stories from childhood, told to yourself to better understand your world, can be deadly. Not only will it kill your joy but you are likely to impose the similar expectations on your child.
What you did to keep yourself safe as a child, to defend and protect yourself, now only serves to contain your dreams and limit your enjoyment of the good that you do right now.


Tips to help parents: 

Tip #1: Awareness: Feeling compelled to judge your chosen efforts and find them lacking? It may be ancient history pushing against modern choice. Stay present and witness yourself pushing beyond realistic expectations. Simply observe yourself without changing behavior. 

Tip #2: Exaggerate your Inner Tyrant's voice. Some days you have to enhance rather than contain your Inner Tyrant. Listen to what it's saying and exaggerate its advice, suggestions and criticism.
After weeks of ongoing fog in San Francisco, I found myself reluctant to use my usual tools of inner peace.

My friend Coach Dayton suggested I use my puppets to work out the struggle. I used a witch puppet as my Inner Tyrant. As I exaggerated her words and gestures, my daughter's visiting cat playfully nudged the puppet. A spontaneous interaction began. Soon both puppet and cat were rolling around my studio. And I was laughing out loud for the first time all day.

Tip #3: Talk back: Question your inner urgency. What have you actually committed to do? Are you judging yourself by standards not your own? Speak up! Remind yourself of all you have actually accomplished.

Tip #4: Reconfirm your goals. Reconfirm what you'd like to accomplish. This could be daily, weekly or a timeline of your choice. You will evaluate your progress only by the goals you establish. If you feel yourself pushing to complete goals that are not current, push back. Remind yourself what you chose to accomplish.

Tip #5: Celebrate your accomplishments. Check in with yourself regularly. Celebrate those goals you've completed. Acknowledge in some fashion each and every goal met, no matter how small. How you celebrate is up to your. Telling a friend or partner, writing about it in a journal, giving yourself some time off to read. Anything can become a celebration. Simply allow yourself to feel the self-appreciation of a task completed.


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