Initially this blog post was to be about how I experience myself towards men because in my previous blog I walked how I experience myself towards women. However after my
Desteni I Process course buddy reviewed my previous post, she indicated that I only brushed some of the related points and suggested me to expand on those points in the following posts. So this writing will be expansion of the pattern of excessive self-criticism that is becoming more and more prevalent with increasing responsibility within my professional work. I have been in position of leading Slovenian promoter of
Spurt alternative currency for almost one year now and since some predictions about when the currency will become convertible did not fulfil yet, people are pressing on me and some even accusing me of lying and walking away due to disappointment. And I definitely do not want to be labeled as a liar and loose my integrity.
I perceive myself as a good person with a sensitive heart and I experience minor hart arrhythmia several times during a day. However I am successfully able to stop it by focusing on my breath and in case when I feel that my hearth is being weakened too much due to stress and worry, I take a brake, do exercise, go out in the nature and recuperate. However I currently live a quite stressless life style and spend most of the time alone in my room where I can rest and have a peaceful retreat whenever I want. Most of the communication that I do with other people is via Facebook and if someone tents to bully me too much, I am able to simply block them and the situation is solved. I am having hard time to imagine how to handle strong personal attacks face to face. And this is especially because I know that some people are in low state of awareness and can get so emotionally possessed that they are incapable of hearing and understanding what is being said to them. So in liv events people can even physically attack and even kill you.
Cool examples of people that are masters in handling live personal attacks are politicians, especially presidents. I admired previous US president Barack Obama how he was able to handle people with directing his words and keeping his cool and the new president Donald Trump is even greater example of immunity to deepest public mocking. He even participates in TV comedy shows that targets his strange hair, orange tan, the way he speaks, his small hand and every single mistake that anyone can find in order to target him. And despite all of that, he remains centred, relaxed and focused on achieving his goals. This is definitely a level of self-confidence that also I want to achieve since I want to improve the current world system which means that I plan to become a public personality and in limelight of all sorts of media that will question everything that I do.
Now if I look what made me to become so sensitive to criticism and why I am also criticising myself a lot, let me start with my early age. One of the factors was that I was the the oldest child and they are generally expected to become a responsible example for the rest of the younger brothers and sisters. Then there is a public education system that systematically suppresses self-expression, individuality and forces you to become obedient part of society that respects authority. However what created excessive self-criticism was the projected low self-esteem of my father that escalated especially after I finished the middle school and became employee of his family graphic business.
So the first problem was that my father did not treated me as unique being with own self-expression and did consider me mostly as the product that was shaped by his own image. This is a common mistake that parent make since they ofter consider their children as a better version of themselves and want them to experience what they lacked to experience and prevent them to experience all the bad thing that they experienced when they were a child. This then creates tyranny and suppression towards their children that can be in the same way transferred from generation to generation. My father wanted me to excel in order to show my achievements to others. An when others would praise me he would feel like they are praising him personally. So in his eyes there was no difference between me and him and whatever I have done it was like he did it. Consequently also every criticism that I received was felt by him like he himself is being criticised. Thus he wanted to make sure that I never do any mistake and criticised every mistake that I made violently.
Consequences of my mistakes got especially significant weight when I started to do design and pre-press work in our family graphic company. I was the one who did the typesetting, colour separation of logos and created films for the screen-printing department that was managed by my brother. He then collected the graphic films, prepared the screen for each colour and printed any object that was necessary to print in the screen-printing technique. The objects that he printed on were sometime very cheap like transfer paper or self-adhesive foil, however some times he printed directly to T-shirts, bags, umbrellas, lighters and other promotional products. Some of those objects were very expensive and if they were be printed with a mistake in the content of the print, it resulted in a quite high cost of damaged goods that our company was responsible for. Not only that the high valuable products were ruined but it also resulted in a lot of wasted time and anger by my brother since he had to do all the time-consuming process of preparing the screens and printing machines again.
Since I was the only employee who did the pre-press in our company among also other jobs like creating signs from self-adhesive foil, I was under a lot of pressure and was pressed to work as fast as possible. I had to type on the computer fast and it is hard to be accurate and not to do any mistake under such pressure. When I would do some typing mistake, my brother went to my father to file a complaint and my father would then come to me with anger and instructing me to type slow, pressing only one key at a time order to be sure not to make any typing mistake again. That confused me quite a lot since he somehow expected me to type slow and perform fast at the same time. Obviously when my brother came to him to criticise me, he felt like himself is being criticised and then he criticised me in order for he as me not to be criticised again.
So the problem in every business process is how to handle errors and mistakes that also result in high cost of created damage. When someone writes a book, there is usually someone that was responsible for proofreading and editing of the text before printing so that there would be no mistakes in the final printed book. I wanted to implement a similar protocol in our company but the problem was selecting or providing a person that would take such responsibility. Most of the time it was me that sent the final design to the clients in order for them to check the validity of design content. However it was discovered that clients in most cases did not notice the error because their eyes saw what their mind expected to see and not what was actually there. Our company never hired any professional proofreader so it was mostly I that made the effort to check if any error existed and from time to time I did miss some and the game of blame repeated over and over again.
The reason why relationships and working conditions in our company did not improve was because my father was not honestly interested in quality. All he wanted was to be praised and his most powerful tool was a surprise tactic. He wanted to feel good by making others feel good when he would present a product that others would be excited by. So when someone would place an order he wanted to deliver the product as fast as possible and with as less complications as possible for his own sake of immediate emotional gratification. That is why he did not supported my initiative to communicate with a client during the production process and was especially not fun of clients taking the responsibility to proofread the content before the printing. What my father basically wanted is just to take the order and as soon as possible to visit the client, ring the door bell and make clients extremely excited about the finished product so he could feel good.
Eventually my father even started with his own spin-off project of original Gutenberg wooden printing press reconstruction where he would be able to be in the eyes of the public even more often and receive live compliments at cultural and historical events. Lack of his focus to management of our company business eventually lead to my decision to leave the job and establish my own business. And even now, many years after that event, I am still occasionally doing some long-distance work form my father where he is showing that he still did not learn the lesson. He still rather keeps communication with clients to minimum with hopes to surprise them as much as possible. However many times clients are far from being satisfied with him since many expect close collaboration and being asked if something about their order information is not clear enough. My father rather risks creating a big disappointment of his clients instead of making sure that none of the mistakes are made due to misunderstanding and wrong expectations.
Soon after I left our family company my brother convinced my father to take over the business which he did. Now he is also in the position of doing the pre-press job so he has the opportunity to experience the taste of his own medicine. Now he has no one to complain to for any design mistakes that he makes however we do not communicate much and I did not ask him what process he has implemented to prevent the mistakes and creation of costly damage. And I also after becoming freelance designer had to pay attention that the final product is correct. I made sure that clients reviewed the final drafts and that by signing they took full responsibility for any material cost that could manifest in the process of design reproduction. Eventually I transitioned to focus only on professional photography where there is no danger of creating a mistake in the content. I simply captured the picture of the reality as it manifested in the moment. However when I decided to do also the wedding photography, I was again challenged a lot because there were important moments in the ceremony that I was not allowed to miss and also the processing of the photos had to be very different that in documentary photography.
The question here is how much I was responsible for the mistakes that I made in my life. Because as I already became aware of in my previous posts, I played an energetic emotional polarity game with my father, similar like my father and my mother did. I wonder how many times I subconsciously made a deliberate typing mistake in order to retaliate for emotional abuse of my father and how in such cases have equally gave priority to experience emotional energy of self-pity instead of removing all energy addictions and actually creating a sustainable solution for the production problems in our company. And how much I enjoyed to be the only one who did the design and pre-press work in our company in order for only our family members to be in the key production positions instead of expanding and allowing also for other people to become employees and support the production for the mutual benefit of all workers and clients equally.
So one thing that I see as important is to remove all energy addictions and to actually perform based on the principles of what is best for all. And then to also understand that mistakes will happen from time to time since one is able in every moment to have control only about limited things in this existence. So forgiveness and especially self-forgiveness are necessary to be applied as often as possible. A fine example of such forgiveness has been demonstrated in the short
Public Statement video by Dave Schmidt where he apologised for his assumptions and stepping over the limit. And I also want to develop more humility and ability to repent and to feel real shame for all actions where I acted based on self-interest and was directed by energy of the mind instead of principle of what is best for all. Because I also in quite large extend copied the pattern of my father where I wanted the attention from other people. The difference is only that I did not use physical products in oder to impress others but used high and very advanced knowledge and information to achieve the same result.
I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to blame my father for being addicted to good feelings of being praised. I realised that I also developed similar pattern and thus I have no right to judge him. I commit myself to when and as I think about my father with thoughts like: “He is such an emotional manipulator and I am so much better than him!” to stop and breathe. I then rather focus on my own weaknesses and make sure that I remove them as many as possible.
I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to try to punish my father by playing the game of self-victimisation, self-pity and giving up on myself. I realise that staying in such polarity role is only sabotaging myself since it limits my potentials and prevents my self-expression. I commit myself to when and as I interact with my father and my thought go like: “You are welcome to demand from me anything that you want but I will show you how much you have hurt me and how much I still suffer!“ to stop and breathe. I then communicate with him without any resentment, create mutual agreement and work for him equally as for any other being.
I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to blame my father for not providing a system of proofreading while I was working for him. I realise that even when I have worked as a freelancer I did not collaborate with any professional proofreader and have made my clients responsible for any costs that might occur by reproduction of design with error. I commit myself to when and as I look at how my father managed our business and my mind goes: “He was so irresponsible for not providing a professional proofreading system!“ to stop and breathe. I then rather focus on my current work and make sure to provide a better system for my clients in order to prevent as many mistakes as possible.
I forgive myself that I have accepted and allow myself to fear presenting myself in the public due to danger of being criticised. I realise that this fear does not originate in others behaving irresponsible but is result of my addiction to self-victimisation and projecting blame towards others. I commit myself to when and as someone criticises me and my mind goes: “Oh now, this world is so unjust and I am such a poor innocent victim!“ to stop and breathe. I then listen to words of criticism and admit that I was wrong if some mistake that I make has been exposed or I stand my ground and defend my integrity if I recognise the criticism as nothing but lies.
I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to fear admitting that I made a mistake and to fear apologising myself. I realise that we all constantly learn by trial end error and that making mistakes is part of being alive. I commit myself that to when and as I make a mistake and my mind produces thoughts like: “Quickly hide what you have done and save face in order for your track record not to have any black spots!” to stop and breathe. I rather apologise for my mistakes, learn from them and not allow others to continue bullying me by repeatedly reminding me about all the mistakes that I made in the past.
