It’s amazing what my mind does in times when I have to persevere. I ran a marathon, and that clearly involved perseverance of the body, but the bigger challenge was keeping my mind in check. I don’t know where these berserk ideas came from but all of a sudden I heard myself suggesting I stop, telling myself my legs hurt, that it wasn’t actually normal for a human body to do what I was doing.
This voice, ladies and gentlemen, is known as a gremlin. It comes out of nowhere and sabotages perfectly healthy projects. It makes up stories about how the projects will end, it has us believing we’ve failed before we’ve even begun.
Strength comes from keeping going despite that voice. Noticing it, and then asking it to f**k off outside and let you get on with what you’re doing. It’s a hard mission, and I know everybody has such a voice though it might disguise itself in different ways; ‘you’re rubbish it this’ ‘it won’t work’ ‘you don’t have enough money’ although it doesn’t say ‘you’, it says ‘I’, disguising itself as the truth. Well I’m here to tell you the gremlin voices are not the truth, they are just negative perspectives that unfortunately worm their way in and disguise themselves as the norm.
You are not your gremlin, you are so much more.
A good book to help with this is ‘Taming your Gremlin’ by Rick Carson.
