Episode 056: Confessions of a Day with my Monger
Sometimes despite our best intentions our Mongers camp out in our heads. Today I had a case of the Monger Mondays...listen to how I regrouped and found my Biggest Fan again.
+ Read the Transcript
Hey all, so glad to be here. It is a Monday, and I have a definite case of the Mondays. I have had the goal of doing this podcast most of the day. I was supposed to do it earlier last week and ended up getting sick. It's just been a hectic, unfortunate couple of days. So today, I just found myself totally beaten down. I took a nap, I have done many things to procrastinate, and now my allergies are driving me crazy. There is just a lot of stuff that's working against me.
I've been thinking about what I was gonna talk about on this podcast. I wanted to talk about feelings and feeling your feelings, and I wasn't feeling that topic. (HA!) So I decided to save that for another day.
I wanted to share my process of what happens when my Monger takes over, which has happened today. Even I, who practice this stuff all the time, I teach on this stuff, I believe in this stuff. Now and then, my Monger just takes over. So I wanted to share what that's like and to give you, hopefully, some comfort in that you are not alone in this process. That our Monger's can just, they're wily, and they can get in there, and they can take a foothold on our process. So it's really important not to let that happen.
I confess today; there will be a lot of true confessions on this podcast. I have let that happen. My Monger has taken up residence in my brain. She's got in there yesterday and camped out, and by this afternoon, I had this whole story of what a terrible person I was. I didn't even realize how much she had taken up space until I talked to my husband. I was like, "Oh, I'm just really struggling today. I'm having a hard time motivating, and I just don't feel like doing anything. I'm just kind of blah!" "What is the point? We are all going to die. What's the point?"
That tends to be my overly dramatic statement when I get attacked by the Monger. It is great awareness for me to know, "Okay, whoa, the first step you are overly dramatic, so something else is going on, okay. So let's start paying attention."
I just started saying to my husband, "All I keep thinking about is how I'm a terrible daughter, I'm a terrible wife, and I'm just a terrible friend. I'm a terrible business owner, and I'm not helping anybody." I just started listing off these terrible things I was saying in my head; I was listening to today, I believed all these things. When we start saying that stuff out loud, it is humbling, shocking, and crazy-making that that's the stuff we say to ourselves, and we believe it!
When I said out loud to my husband, he was like, "What? You are a great wife, and you're a loving daughter. How could you possibly? NO, none of that is true. Come on, stop with that!" He hugged me and went on about his day, but the thing that was jarring was, wow, not only was I saying them to myself, but I believed that of myself. So then I was like, "Okay, stop, let's challenge, let's channel in that biggest fan. Let's bring in my biggest fan and let her do some chatting around here."
That is always the moment whenever I say, "Okay, that's enough." I need to hear from my biggest fan, and the first thing my biggest fan says is, "Oh baby doll, it'll be okay." She always just calmly says, "It'll be okay. We will get through this, stop, stop, stop!" Because my monger push, push, push, push, push, push, pushes, all the time. And this constantly has me in this go, go, go, go, go, go, go. My biggest fan feels like a giant exhale. It's just like, "Okay, let's take a chill pill here, we got this, let's relax, let's check in here.
That's the recognition for me, that's the teaching point for me, to recognize, it is a choice for me to listen to my Monger. It's a choice, and a lot of times, what happens is, although I know it's a choice, I'm not actively making that choice because I'm not aware that the Monger is chatting. That's the glitch we run into, is that the Monger, because it is so comfortable, because it is, comfortable is totally the wrong word because it's not comfortable, but it's something, we are so used to it.
When it's chiming there in our heads, it doesn't stand out to us as anything unusual. It doesn't stand out to me that, "Of course, yes, you are right, I am a terrible daughter. Yes, you are right. I am a terrible wife, I should be doing all these things that I'm not doing, and I'm just a terrible person."
Although when I said that out loud to you right now, it's just like, "Eww!" But in my head, I'm just like, "You're right, you're right, you're right." And so that's the work of these inner critics and the Monger, is to recognize, "Wait a minute, why am I listening to this? Why am I allowing that voice to run the show here?" And so it's not only the idea of channeling the biggest fan and all that great stuff that I firmly believe in, but it is that very first step of recognizing, "Wait a minute, I am being attacked by my monger here." That's the hardest part.
That's the place where we can get stuck, like I just confessed; it has been almost 24 hours of hammering here. It used to be; it would be a week of hammering before I would even recognize, "Whoa! What's going on here?" So that's where we need to start doing the work, and that's why all these, you know, I get annoyed by all these motivational sayings and all these wonderful, feel good and feel better because it's not that easy.
The inner critic is such a part of us, and for so many of us that are struggling with this monger work, it is comfortable. It's something we are used to; it's something we think we deserve. It's something we think motivates us. On a Monday, it is so natural for me to wake up and have a monger hammering me because I, in my brain, somewhere thinks that that's motivating.
When I go off duty, so to speak, and go through the motions in my life, that's when the monger chimes in. When am I not actively saying, "Okay, where's the biggest fan? I need the biggest fan today. I know today is going to be a Monger day, so we need to get our defenses up; we need to step in there." So that idea of doing preventative, kind of, "Let's get in the biggest fan, and let's build her up."
For years I did this work about mongers, and I didn't talk about the biggest fan because I was just talking about mongers and identifying mongers, and what are your mongers. Then I got to the idea of, "Wait a minute, we don't have the opposite; we don't know what the opposite is." Because I'm just so used to hearing my Monger, I didn't even know there was a biggest fan. When I started tapping into that biggest fan, that is that exhale of, "Oh, baby doll, oh! Back up the bus here; let's relax a little bit."
When I started chiming into her voice, that's when I had a counter to the Monger, so I could get past that point of recognizing, "Okay, I'm getting attacked by the Monger. Whoa!" And then I could be like, "What's the opposite of that? What's the comfort that I can bring myself because this Monger is uncomfortable right now."
That's my insight to my confession of the day, of my process in dealing with the Monger, going through that process. I hope that you found that helpful to recognize you are not alone. So it is, kind of, we've talked about this before, I know, but it bears repeating. It is the process of recognizing, "Oh my gosh, this constant hammering of myself is not helping me. This is a choice that I'm making, and there is another thought I could be having right now."
There is another more comforting thought that comes from the biggest fan. That is bringing in the biggest fan and saying, "Come on, girlfriend, let's do this differently."
+ Weekly Ritual Challenge
One thing that has really helped me reduce anxiety is adding regular ritual practices to my daily life, so each week, I am going to be sharing a ritual with you and challenge you to complete it.
This week's ritual: Enjoy a Meal With All Your Senses
Eating is an easy way to get into your body. Too often eating is something we do while multi-tasking. This week pick one meal or one food a day and eat it with all your senses. Take the time with this meal to enjoy it fully.