No, you aren't the only one to have a bad day. It helps to know we are all in it together says Life Coach Carole Ann Rice
You're down to the very last squeeze from the toothpaste tube and just as you run the brush under the tap the paste drops off and swishes down the plug hole. Just my luck, you sigh through your morning breath.
Your company is putting together an in-house video of its happy sales team.
You're all buoyed up and joshing each other about their X Factor potential. All your colleagues made it on screen but your bit ended up on the cutting room floor. Story of my life, you moan.
You're at a party and everyone seems like an extra from a Tim Burton movie and you have about as much in common with them as a Saville Row tailor at a nudist's colony. You inwardly groan - is it only me who thinks this is about as much fun as a steel wool sandwich?
It's that AITOO (Am I The Only One?) moment; a sort of psychic sneeze that makes you think you're the unique human amongst the 7.4 billion of us on the planet who has this sort of luck/feeling or problem with tax return forms. Potential clients’ phone me and tell me they have problems speaking up in meetings, have an urge to people please at their own cost and don't know what to do with the rest of their lives.
“Have you ever heard that before? Am I the only one with a confidence problem? Can you possibly help me?” as though they have revealed they had been born without a belly button or had some tropical disease last seen in a mummy's tomb instead of the common cry from the heart of the masses.
When you get that we all feel lonely, confused, fed up and clueless some of the time and most of the rest of the time we're faking it our existence does feel a little less isolated and more inclusive.
Everyone may have had such an experience or be touched by it, but we feel our pain is unique to us and therefore isolating and perhaps even, somehow, shameful
It's laughing at the “Sod's Law” moments and not taking them personally, it's seeing that were all beautiful messes; even the perfectionists (who are hiding their shame of mess with perfectionism) and if you're feeling it or living it chances are a very large proportion of us is or has too.
Dare to be vulnerable (it's a strength not a weakness), get that nothing is set in stone, no one has all the answers or has got it right and give yourselves heaps of compassion. You're not the only one.
Do you have a problem with that? Join the club.
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