In this chapter, I want to look at the impact of facing up to your hard-wired negative defaults, which I like to bundle together and call your ‘Blame/Complain settings’.

Within this unhappy basket, I also put the following, equally unhelpful habits: Judgment, expectation, criticism and assumption.

These are the negative mental reflexes that kick in whenever you’re under pressure. They are likely to be so deeply embedded in your thinking that you may even be unaware of their influence on the way you perceive the world.

 The particulars of these are likely to be unique to you, and will have been informed by the psychological cocktail of influences you’ve experienced. For most of us, these defaults are set in childhood, picked up by observing the reactions and behaviours of the adults around us. So if your parents or other significant adults in your life had strong negative tendencies, which you were drip-fed throughout childhood, it will colour your view of everything now.

The reason it’s so important to disrupt and challenge these these negative paradigms is that they are working against you. They sabotage your ability to take responsibility for your life and define it on your own terms.

Every time you blame, complain, judge, expect, criticize or assume, you’re giving away your personal power. In this voluntary act of self sabotage, you undermine your own control and agency in any given situation.

Let’s look at an example:

Sandra was a lady who came to see me because she couldn’t get a job. She had a fantastic CV, but she’d taken time out to have children, and had been made redundant from her job in marketing shortly after returning from maternity leave. It had really dented her confidence, so she became anxious and was hit by paralyzing waves of self doubt every time she had a job interview. Her head was filled with self criticism and she assumed she would be too old and ‘out of the loop’ to be appealing to an employer. She complained regularly to family and friends about being consigned to the scrap heap. She blamed her old employer for all of this. And although she had been treated badly, her vitriol towards her previous boss consumed a considerable amount of energy, even though she hadn’t worked there for a few years. 

Here are a few examples of the types of thing Sandra said when she came to see me: ‘People always take me for granted.’ ‘I’m my own worst enemy,’ ‘I’m terrible at selling myself in interviews.’ ‘Technology moves so fast that all my experience is out of date…’ ‘I’m too frumpy and mumsy now to work in media.’

With the words she was using in conversations with other people and the thoughts she allowed free rein inside her own mind, she was again and again self-limiting by engaging her blame-complain defaults. It didn’t matter that she wasn’t directly sharing these thoughts with her future employers. She may as well have been as she was priming herself for failure before she said a word to them. The energy she gave off was riven with self-doubt and negativity. Any potential employer would have picked up on this a mile off.

She blamed her ex employer for her lack of confidence, was critical both of potential employers and herself. She was pre-judging what everybody thought of her, assuming they wouldn’t be interested in what she had to offer.

Looked at from one point of view, this sort of pessimistic thinking might seem like a form of self-preservation: assume the worst and you won’t be disappointed. But it’s the opposite – a surefire way to stay stuck. It gives a certain amount of relief in the moment as it offloads blame, routing it away from you and projecting responsibility elsewhere; another person; a situation; bad luck; whatever. But it offers no satisfaction, either, as it casts you as a powerless victim. Sandra completed my course and began to practice the power statements. They felt alien to her at first, and she reported feeling self-conscious and false reciting them. But within a few weeks, she reported feeling more positive. The ones that were most helpful were ‘Happiness is not outside myself,’ and ‘The only variable I can control is myself.’

 She decided to stop writing herself off in her conversations, to consciously choose more hopeful, positive language when she talked about herself. She signed up for a course on social media to bring her skills up to date. She identified the friends and family members who were most likely to draw out her own negativity and she avoided them.

She built her confidence back up and two months later, landed a fantastic job. She still has to remind herself to use positive language: not to share her negative feelings about herself in company, but she’s made incredible progress. She’s far happier than she has been in years.

Let’s take a look at the times when your blame-complain thinking is most likely to kick in: 

 When you’re feeling under pressure Perhaps you’ve been asked to give a big presentation at work, or you have a job interview. The weight of other people’s expectations can trigger a sense of imposter syndrome and a terror of feeling exposed.

When you feel slighted Attaching disproportionate negative significance to something innocuous (say a friend not replying to a text message) can trigger a spiral of negative self-talk.

When you feel overwhelmed particularly if you suffer from low-level anxiety, being faced with a lot of stimulation at once, whether it’s a large group of people at a party or somebody else’s angry mood, can trigger overwhelm.

When you feel vulnerable

Situations where we’re physically or emotionally vulnerable (pregnancy and labour, illness, the end of a relationship, moving to a new town), can send your blame-complain settings into overdrive.

To identify your own patterns, you’ll need to take an honest look at the workings of your thought process. Here’s an exercise to help you:

Exercise 

Take a pen and paper and make a note of your own blame/ complain settings. To get you started, try answering the following questions: 

Who are you most likely to blame when things don’t go well for you? Yourself? Your parents? Your partner?

What negative patterns do you notice in your life and what significance do you attribute to these? Write a long list and review it.

What negative myths and ‘facts’ about yourself do you accept? These could be things like: ‘I’m disorganized.’ ‘I can’t handle confrontation,’ ‘I’ll always be an outsider.’ Be ruthless and honest and make a note of them all.

Finally answer this: What is it that you’re really good at that you wish you weren’t? It might be putting everyone else first, or being pessimistic.

It may be quite a shock to see all this written down. Many of my clients find that they haven’t been conscious of the fact they hold these negative opinions of themselves, even though these thoughts have been effectively ruling their lives up until now. But recognizing the dysfunctional features of your thought pattern is the first step on the path to resetting your thinking.

Do this now: Find a rubber band and put it on your wrist Once you’ve identified your blame complain defaults, the next challenge is to catch yourself blaming, complaining, criticising, assuming, expecting and judging. Your objective is to spot this thinking moment by moment and combat it. One way to do this is to create a physical trigger that will help you to mark these thoughts and remind you that they are harmful: Try pinging your rubber band, or flicking your hand hard enough to feel a bit of pain. Every time you catch yourself having a negative thought that plays into your blame-complain thinking, snap it. In doing this your body and your mind will be connected. You give your mind a telling-off and your body feels the physical side of the “ping”. It will help your resolve to break the habit, reinforcing the sense that this thinking is doing you damage and needs to be replaced with something positive that serves you better.

The link between your physical and emotional reactions is obvious. When you feel nervous, you sweat and your heart beats faster. When you’re happy, you smile and your eyes radiate. When you’re feeling low, your posture closes up, your shoulders slump and your gaze drops. So creating a physical anchor that helps you to ‘feel’ bad thinking when it takes hold has a deep resonance, tapping into the deep intercontectedness of your body and mind.

Not only have people gone on to use this tool and loved it because they catch themselves, but also, the discipline of noting all of their negative thoughts has enabled them to recognise the same negative thinking in other people around them. Clients tell me that they’ll find themselves thinking: “I used to be like that”, as they listen to a colleague, or family member blaming and complaining. After a few weeks of practicing the power statements and watching their blame-complain behaviour, they may realise that they’ve been hanging around the wrong people. No wonder they were feeling down with all the negativity around them.

Often, this part of the Let It Go process also enables clients to identify exactly where their blame/ complain settings started. It enables them to see with renewed clarity how blame/ complain modes operate within their family. Once you begin to recognise these patterns, you spot them everywhere.

Attuning yourself to blame/complain thinking will turn you into a subconscious detective. You’ll develop the ability to see through low level whingeing and negativity to the dysfunctional blame-complain system that underpins it, and you’ll feel yourself consciously moving away from it. After developing an awareness of blame/ complain thinking through their work with me, some clients have distanced themselves from friends that they have had for years, purely because they see the extent of their negativity clearly for the first time and recognise that being around a particular person has a draining.

Here are a couple everyday examples of common negative thoughts that can be triggered by the most seemingly insignificant catalyst:

1. The tumbleweed text Emma sends Sarah a text message asking her if she wants to go for a drink later that night. Sarah takes a while to respond. Emma thinks: ‘I wonder if she’s in a bad mood with me? Perhaps I’ve done something to offend her? Why is it that I’m the one to make the effort with friends?’ She blames herself and allows anxiety to fabricate a host of reasons why Sarah hasn’t responded. In reality, Sarah has just had a really busy, stressful day, and got stuck in a long meeting. It has nothing to do with Emma. HERE’S HOW TO STOP THAT THOUGHT: Remember… Life is not an emergency: It’s not a big deal. Let it go: you sometimes forget to respond to people too, reminding yourself of this will affirm a new sense of perspective. Where focus goes, energy flows: Stop thinking about it, it feeds your anxiety.

2: The thankless driver Mike is driving home. He’s stressed about work and keen to see his kids before they go to bed and the traffic is terrible. He reaches a bend in a road, the traffic is crawling along and there is another car waiting at a cross roads trying to edge out, but nobody is stopping to let it join the stream of traffic. Mike slows to a stop and lets the car out, but the driver doesn’t say thank you. No lights, no friendly hand gesture, nothing. Mike is suddenly and overwhelmingly furious. He swears under his breath. He is disgusted by the ungraciousness and thoughtlessness of the other driver. It triggers a series of dismissive assumptions about the driver in his head. He’s a selfish idiot who has no concern for other people. Not only that, he’s typical of drivers now: ‘It’s every man for himself on the road nowadays…’ he says to his wife later (he’s still angry about it by the time he makes it home half an hour later). HERE’S HOW TO STOP THAT THOUGHT: Remember… No-one can upset me without my permission, I refuse to give it: Why allow something totally insignificant to ruin your mood and your day? Does it matter?: Letting the other driver into the traffic has added a couple of seconds, if that, to your journey time. Who cares whether they said thanks or not? Let it go: Who’s to say what the other driver had going on in their head at that moment? Perhaps they’re on their way to hospital to see a sick relative, or they’ve just lost their job, or they had been waiting at the junction for five minutes getting increasingly stressed and they’re late for a job interview.

Acknowledging the fact that imagined slights generally have none of the significance we attach to them can be really freeing. It’s a helpful reminder that our blame/ complain thinking endows us with a false sense of negative significance. In reality, the majority of the time, nobody is thinking about you, what you’ve done wrong, or your behavior at all. They have their own stuff going on and they’re caught up in that.

When you’re aware of the faulty nature of this type of thinking and you realize it’s happening, you’re more gentle on yourself and others. 

Many of us are good at blaming ourselves, but this isn’t the same thing as taking responsibility. It’s passive and retrospective and therefore totally pointless. In contrast, taking responsibility for your part in something that has happened (or in the case of patterns in your life, keeps happening), is active and empowering. A sense of responsibility helps you to take ownership of the things you can do to change yourself, by altering your attitude and resetting your blueprint.

Sometimes (not helped by our understanding of pop psychology), we can get the wrong end of the stick about our tendencies. We can self-limit by complaining that we always attract a certain type of person or relationship: ‘Men always cheat on me…’ we might say, or ‘I always end up with overbearing partners…’

But the truth is, we have the potential to attract all sorts of people into our lives, it’s just that we only let particular people in (those that we think we ‘deserve’ at a deep psychological level). These people may well treat us in a consistently disrespectful, negative and thoughtless way, but that’s because we’ve conditioned ourselves to expect that as a consequence of deep internal narratives that are likely to be the result of a bad experience in our formative years.

On the flipside, when you’re wise to blame/ complain tendencies and consciously seek to quiet them within yourself, choosing to privilege positive, self-bolstering thoughts that serve you better, you develop what the entrepreneur Warren Buffet calls a strong ‘inner scorecard’ - a personal value system that exists in spite of anything other people might think. This is a hallmark of integrity and liberates you from the tyranny of people-pleasing, and from the guilt-tinged ought-to and should’ves that so often lead us to act in ways that go against our instincts or deepest desires.

When we’re able to do this, the sky is the limit. Let me tell you a little story to demonstrate the power of a strong inner scorecard. There was a guy back in the 1970s who was learning the guitar and learning to sing. He was playing in bars in New York, New Jersey. He loved music, but his family thought it was just a hobby. He went from bar to bar and busking in the streets trying to get a record deal without any luck. One day he met his idol Bruce Springstein who said that his performance was ok, but in his opinion he should stick to his day job as he didn’t think he was going to make it.

If he had listened to his idol, we would never have heard of Jon Bon Jovi. If he had accepted his criticism, then he wouldn’t have gone on to be as successful as he is today. He had a strong inner scorecard, so he was able to listen to what his idol had to say, and disregard it, understanding it was just his opinion and not the truth. In contrast, somebody with low self esteem will take any criticism on board and internalise it. They may take criticism really badly in their romantic relationships too, feeling every negative comment doubly.

The following three Power Statements will help you to strengthen your inner resolve and develop a resilient sense of self worth: I’m not better than you, you’re not better than me. The opinions of other people are irrelevant. It’s what I think of myself that matters. 

No-one can upset me without my permission and I refuse to give it. 

The knock-on benefits of letting go your blame-complain defaults are really powerful. I’ve seen some incredible examples amongst my clients. One lady I saw was a mother of two primary school aged children. Mornings were a painful battle that culminated in her screaming at the kids, who weren’t listening to her, and often ended in tears. She felt like she was failing as a mother, but also that she had children who were unusually uncooperative and moody. But through completing my course, and practising the power statements, she found a new sense of calm. She changed the way she communicated with the children.

She dropped her voice instead of raising it, got down on their level, looked them in the eye and explained what she needed them to do. She felt calmer, and so did they are mornings became smoother and less stressful for everyone. ‘I don’t blame, complain, moan and bitch at them and about them any more. I was giving out so much negative energy,’ she said to me – ‘they were picking up on it and it was impacting on everybody’s mood. When you expect the worst, you get it.’

Another client came to me feeling stuck in his career, he kept being overlooked for promotions, and despite his experience and competence, felt side-lined and frustrated in his job. But when he began to think about his blame-complain settings, he realised that he was the voice of doom in the office. He’d never realised this before, but he’d earned a reputation as the person who would pour scorn on new plans, point out the problem with everything and put himself forward as the voice of ‘reason’ in group brainstorms. He was well liked, but known as a naysayer and a cynic.

It came as a real surprise to him when he finally recognised that his pessimism was colouring other people’s perception of them, and creating a negative overall impression. It was tough for him to retrain himself to curb these tendencies, but when he did, the pay-off was transformative. 

He was promoted within six months, and better than that, he felt significantly happier, both inside and outside of work, as a result of his new, more positive mindset.