What Random Rule Do You Have In Your Head That Holds You Back?

Hello everyone!

I hope that you're doing amazing wherever you are in the world.

My name is Boom Shukha and I welcome you to my channel.

As always,

I'm so grateful that you're listening,

Subscribing and commenting.

I really appreciate the support.

As you can see,

I'm back indoors again.

I don't think I'll be going back out again for a while.

It is cold outside and I don't think I want to do videos when I'm shivering through it.

In this one,

I want to speak to you about an interesting topic that I recently discovered while I was doing my journaling.

I realized that maybe I've spoken about this previously but I want to speak about it again because it's such an important topic.

It has something to do with maybe perfectionism partly but a lot to do with having high standards for ourselves.

This can apply to INFJs of course.

A lot of INFJs are like that but in general,

Anyone who has an extremely high standard for themselves or more specifically they're extremely harsh on themselves,

I think this video would apply to them.

For myself,

I've noticed that I do this thing to myself.

I like to torture myself in this manner and as soon as I noticed it,

I was like,

What am I doing?

Why am I being so basically violent against myself?

I'm not being kind to myself.

I'm being cruel to myself in this manner.

The idea is that I was sitting down and I was doing my goals for the day and checking things off and all that.

I love doing that.

It's my favorite thing to do.

I love doing things and then checking them off and being like,

Yes,

I feel accomplished.

One of my things on my to-do list that I've added recently was because I was not doing it enough and I really think it's important for me to read more.

So I put on my list,

You know,

Read 10 minutes a day.

That's it.

I don't need to read more than that.

If I read 10 minutes a day,

I'll be able to finish a book in two or three weeks or maybe even four weeks depending on how long the book is.

That's perfect.

That's all I need to do.

I don't need to go crazy about it because that's what I do.

I go crazy about it and then I don't actually.

.

.

I'll read for like an hour a day,

An hour one day and then not read for like another week.

That's not what I want.

I want to be a little bit more consistent with it.

I was like,

All right,

10 minutes a day is totally doable.

I can kind of do it in the middle of things.

I can take a little bit of a break.

I can do it while I'm eating.

Things like that.

Even though I like to not do anything else while I'm eating.

I can multitask with it.

I got an audiobook recently and I was reading it,

Listening to it.

I realized when I was checking off,

Did I read today?

Even though I had listened to the audiobook for 10 minutes,

I thought to myself,

But no,

I didn't actually read.

I didn't actually sit down and pick up a book or a Kindle or whatever and flip the pages and read.

I actually just listened to the book while I was walking around which is sometimes what I do.

I go for walks and I listen to books.

In my head,

I was like,

No,

That's not right.

You're cheating.

You're cheating.

Boom.

You can't do that.

You can't check off this thing for today.

Then I started thinking to myself,

Okay,

Who made up this rule that listening to an audiobook is not the same as reading a book?

Why does it have to be that I sit down and read a book?

Why can't it just be that I check off my item because I heard a book or listened to an audiobook for 10 minutes or more actually because it was a longer walk?

It was interesting to me in my head how I had to really reconcile this idea with myself and really be like I had to convince myself of the fact that yes,

You actually did read today even though it wasn't actually sitting down and reading a book.

You did listen to a book and you did garner those ideas and you did get those ideas into your head which is basically the idea of reading.

Yes,

You did read.

That kind of bought up for me the thought process that how many of these things am I doing every single day but I'm imagining that I don't do because I have this weird random convoluted rule in my head that precludes that item.

Basically I was like no,

I didn't read because I listened to the audiobook and this is just one idea that I had in my head and I had to be like no,

Boom,

You're wrong.

You actually did listen to an audiobook.

You did read.

Just because you listened to it doesn't mean it's not read.

So I was kind of thinking to myself,

Okay this is just one thing.

How many other things am I doing to myself,

Torturing myself or how many different things am I doing every day but I'm not actually putting it on my list or not actually congratulating myself for it or not feeling happy about doing it because I've made up this rule that oh no it has to be done this particular way and I did it that way so that means that I did not actually do it.

It's so odd because again another thing that I can share with you that I do as well is that I have a blog.

You might know about it the millionihepi.

Com.

It's linked in the description below if you want to check it out.

It's nothing special.

It's just my thoughts on on things and you know I sometimes on days when I have to write on that blog I will in my head think oh I didn't do any writing today.

I did do writing.

I wrote for my blog but because it wasn't the story that I was writing in my head I'm thinking oh right I didn't write fiction today so that means I didn't write at all even though I did write right right right and so the thing is that again this is another way that I in my head play games with myself and tell myself oh right no I didn't do any writing today even though I might have written a thousand word blog post but no I didn't write a story or fiction so therefore I didn't do any writing and this is one of the ways that you know high achievers or people who are just extremely harsh on themselves we kind of put ourselves down we're kind of playing a game against ourselves and we're kind of um we're not on our own side right we're always kind of looking for ways to be like oh are you trying to cheat are you trying to are you trying to do something where you're you've done more you're telling yourself you've done more than you actually have and so we kind of like do this to ourselves and as I've said in a video previously where I said you know are you on your side or not this is another way that we're not on our side we're not taking our own side we're not letting ourselves hop off the hook because if you kind of think about it this way and I'm going to do a video on this you know if you look at your friend and you know she just listened to the audiobook and she's like oh yeah I read today I listened to an audiobook would you think to yourself no you didn't you cheated you cheater how dare you you know you're supposed to sit and read a book not actually listen to a book and things like that you know you'd be like cool great awesome huh what was the book about I think you would do that hopefully you would do that but in general as I said we are extremely mostly extremely harsh on ourselves harsher on ourselves than on other people um and then we kind of make up these rules and if we don't follow these rules to a t like it has to be exactly done that way for example if you have this idea in your head that oh I need to sit down at a desk and I need to read my book with absolute peace and quiet and I need to read it from cover to cover otherwise I haven't read it all then I am not going to say that I read right like if you have this particular rule in your head it has to be followed exactly to a t and if you don't follow it even in one little way it means that you didn't actually follow the whole and you didn't actually do the entire thing right and so this way because we kind of push ourselves down we berate ourselves we torture ourselves we we tell ourselves we didn't do what we're supposed to be doing and we don't allow ourselves to feel victorious or in a celebratory mood because we did what we did where we what we're supposed to do yeah we don't actually we're like no but you didn't do it that way and you're supposed to do maybe kind of make up these stupid rules my sister right now is doing NaNoWriMo if you don't know what that means it's the national novel writing month so you write a novel of a 50 000 word novel by writing 1667 words every single day right and so of course my sister's doing it because you know it's a good motivation for her to finish a novel and you know she likes it she likes writing every single day so it adds to her her joy of writing but again it's interesting because again she's very much uh she's very harsh on herself much more so than me much more critical of herself than me and so she you know she she has this random rule in her head that she has to write every single day or it doesn't count the whole NaNoWriMo doesn't count if she doesn't write every single day it doesn't matter if she gets to the goal which is 50 000 words at the end of the month if she didn't write every single day it means the whole NaNoWriMo thing was a complete sham and so some days she will end up writing 3 000 words in the day because it's a holiday it's a day off and she has a time and of course she works full time so some other days she'll end up writing thousand words all in all that averages out to 1667 and she ends up she did end up writing 50 000 but in her head you know she's like well i didn't really write every single day and you know like some days i wrote less and i don't know if i really did a good job and i don't know where the story is going so maybe this NaNoWriMo was complete fail well not really right the whole point of NaNoWriMo if you're wondering is that you finish a novel because it kind of motivates you or makes you realize that yeah i can't finish a novel and that kind of motivates you to write even more the point isn't to write a perfect novel the point isn't to write every single day the point is to finish a novel in 30 days and so she did and but instead of celebrating and allowing herself that peace of mind or that that joy of accomplishes and accomplishing something amazing she berated herself she's like well you know i could have done this i could have done this better i didn't do that and in general this is what we do right we make up these rules in our head and if we don't follow them to a complete complete perfection then we're like well i didn't do anything at all and then what happens is that it's a very good demotivator because then you're like well i didn't really do that so i guess i should just give up on the whole thing right and that's how people just give up on things very quickly because they're like well i should have written every single day but i didn't so let me just give up on the whole thing right i did not i'm not actually doing it properly whereas what you should really be doing saying okay cool i maybe i missed a couple of days maybe i missed a week that's okay you know i can restart now now is the time that i can be like all right i'm beginning my goal process now and the last week was a little bit of a difficult week so that's okay and now i'm going to re-begin the whole process but no what people do is that they just completely give up on the whole thing they're like well i'm no good i'm a terrible person i'm never going to accomplish anything i don't know what i'm doing myself i should just give up on the whole situation i'm a terrible human being i don't want to know why i'm alive and all that stuff you know what i'm saying so you kind of like instead of being like all right cool yeah i did what i could i did the best i could and actually i did it because my random rule in my head is false and so i did finish it and so great awesome good for me let me just keep on going instead of celebrating ourselves or congratulating ourselves instead of being on our side we're not all right and we're against ourselves in a way so i wanted to share this with you because it was a revelation for me at least i was like oh my gosh really is this what i'm doing to myself wow and so i wanted to share this with you so you can kind of realize that perhaps you are torturing yourself in these random mundane ways as well and maybe it's actually not just mundane it's actually in bigger things as well that you're torturing yourself maybe in your relationship with people or maybe in your job or things that really matter to you so i hope this makes sense if you have questions about this let me know of course and i shall do a follow-up video again thank you so much for being on my channel and i shall see you the next time around bye for now