text © 2019 Dana-Sofie Šlancarová, dana-sofie.com / photo © pixabay.com
“You wouldn’t believe what a mess it was! And there was no one to tidy the situation up but me… I hate doing that. I am so exhausted now. Why do I always have to be right and do all the stuff?”
A friend of mine is describing a situation he’s just gone through in his job. I’ve been listening to him carefully for the last couple of months but now something in me rings.
I’ve heard the same story at least four times during the previous year. Every time the same scenario: There is a project. He is either the head of it or the one who – because of his diligence – sooner or later becomes responsible for most of the project. And then something goes wrong (there is always something to go wrong). And this is the moment when my friend turns into Captain America, the Always-Right-Guy-Who-Can-Do-It-All, and starts to fight to get things right.
Fighting means sleeping about two hours a day for a couple of days (or weeks or months) to cover up for the missing parts, missing people, irresponsible people, idiots, morons, and assholes (as the time passes, the same people are given different names). By the time the project is over, my friend is totally exhausted and very close to both a nervous and physical breakdown. And this repeats over and over, project after project. Then howling on the phone that he’d never do that again – only to do the same thing in the month to come.
He is not only exhausted but also very unhappy at the end of each project – and to tell the truth, I myself am getting more and more pissed off as the time goes by and his story and his complaints are still the same, and no good advice seem to work.
What I can observe (during and after the end of each project), however, is a burning fire of righteousness inside him and the great feeling of how he saved the whole project and the whole world too, and especially the asses of a lot of people. And this is the point where it rings in my ear now.
Because this time I listen to him and I can hear something different than I used to hear. I no longer feel sympathy for him. Because now I sense and I know for sure he’s not the righteous Captain America with all the rest of the world just conspiring against him, but he is his own villain. The others aren’t the bad guys. He’s the one who causes the war, who wages the war, who ignites the battles. He’s the one who attracts the misfortunes and encounters with all the irresponsible stupid people put apparently in the wrong places.
He’s to blame for the whole situation. He and only he is responsible for all the bad that’s been happening in his life. No one else. How can that be?
Because it feels so fucking good to be the good guy! Aren’t we all watching all the Marvel and DC superhero stories applauding to the good guys who save the world (until it comes to Captain America: Civil War and we cannot decide whether we are more fond of Tony Stark or Captain America?!).
But the logic is simple: when there is a good guy, there has to be a bad guy, the villain: Ultron, Thanos, Joker or whomever. Nevertheless, it is not the bad guys who create themselves. It is the good guys that attract the bad guys so that their goodness can be displayed, seen by others and proven. It is the good guys who create the evil to prove themselves right.
It is my friend (and most probably even me in many cases!) who create all the misfortunes that appear in our lives to prove that we are the right, clever, good, caring, kind and wise guys. Why? Because it feels so fucking good to be the rightest, cleverest, best, kindest and wisest guy on the Earth and in the adjacent universe. Until… Until we are totally stressed out, exhausted, pissed off by everyone and everything, pissing off everyone and everything – and approaching permanent burnout syndrome.
I try to tell my friend but he doesn’t seem to get the point. I feel it’s time to change the subject, however, in my mind it goes and rolls on. Is there a cure to the Captain-America syndrome? Is there a way of not creating situations in our life that do not support us but exhaust us? Is there a way of not creating enemies in whatever project we are in but making life-long reliable friends and collaborators?
Yes. Yes, I believe there’s a way. The need to be always right and the best and Mr. Good Guy is just a mental belief, a mental habit that we’ve acquired during our childhood and developed and elaborated on further in our adolescence and adult life as well. And as such, it can be changed. Into beliefs that serve us and all of us more. Eg. into a belief that we can cooperate with anyone very well every time we do something together. That everyone is always doing their best. That if there is a challenge, it’s just a challenge we love to solve, not a problem to be abused to trample somebody in the ground. And if there are such beliefs in our heads, in our belief system, we cannot but attract this kind of positive situations and repeat no longer the I-Have-To-Do-It-All behavior that affects not only our relationships but our mental and physical health as well.
We are all good guys. All of us want to believe we fight on the right side of the barricade. But why fight? I prefer to collaborate… It feels fucking good to be the good guy but it feels even better to be the good guy who knows there are no bad guys and is able to elicit the best from everyone.
P.S.: Wondering how to change the good-guy limiting beliefs? Ask me about tapping (EFT)! A method that works fucking good!
Dana-Sofie Šlancarová is a translator, writer, teacher, and entrepreneur. Her passion is to write and teach about the beauty of women’s cycles, pragmatic aspects of menstruation, and the incredible benefits of cyclic time management®.
She is the founder of the Cyklická žena® (The Cyclic Woman) project and an author of several books on this topic, including Návod na ženy (A Manual to Women: Navigating the Modern Man Through the Unpredictable World of Women, still only in Czech) that she co-wrote with Erik Hutter.
(Many thanks for proofreading to Blaze Schwaller,
a coach and an artist who helps other artists to reach their dreams!)
(BIO)HACK YOUR LIMITING BELIEFS!
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