Dear Isabelle, Diane and Vocalist:
The current affirmations thread is very interesting. Have you all seen this month's edition of Classical Singer magazine? There's a very good article on the Victim Mentality. Affirmations help a person transform him/herself from a Victim to a Victor. I first became aware of affirmations from reading The Artist's Way. As I think Diane pointed out, affirmations are a form of self-hypnosis or auto-suggestion. The more you say something positive to yourself, the more you begin to see things from a less critical, less negative, and ultimately more realistic perspective.
I once got some interesting information about the Victim Mentality from a college counselor. He was giving a presentation to a group of music students on performance anxiety, and he gave them a list of the characteristics of Distorted Thinking, which I think was adapted from "Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy by David Burns (1980). I'm not completely sure of the citation; but that's what I have in the margin of the notes that I took during this presentation. In his practice, this counselor was accustomed to seeing students who had high levels of stress or anxiety, and who were exhibiting these types of thinking. He felt that these might also apply to performers.
Distorted Thinking--You FEEL the way you THINK:
1. All-or-nothing thinking: You look at things in absolute, black-and-white categories. 2. Overgeneralization: You view a negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat. 3. Mental filter: You dwell on the negatives and ignore the positives. 4. Discounting the positives: You insist that your accomplishments or positive qualities don't count. 5. Jumping to conclusions: You conclude things are bad without any definite evidence. (a) Mind reading: You assume that people are reacting negatively to you. (b) Fortune-telling: You predict that things will turn out badly. 6. Magnification or minimization: You blow things way out of proportion or you shrink their importance. 7. Emotional reasoning: You reason from how you feel "I feel like an idiot, so I must be one." 8. "Should" statements: You criticize yourself or other people with "shoulds," "shouldnt's," "musts," "oughts," and "have-to's." 9. Labeling: Instead of saying "I made a mistake," you tell yourself, "I'm a jerk," or "a loser." 10. Blame: You blame yourself for something you weren't entirely responsible for, or you blame other people and overlook ways that you contributed to a problem."
As this counselor was going down through the list, I could look around the room at students and faculty alike who were nodding vigorously throughout the presentation. It was obvious that a lot of us saw ourselves in many of these statements. I'm a 3, 5a, 6, and 8, myself. And after teaching for the last 7 years, I can tell you that I have consistently seen a lot of these in my students.
So how do you stop the negative thought from taking hold? Behavioral modification--noticing the negative thought patterns, inhibiting them, and replacing them with a different, more positive or productive thought. Thus the emphasis on affirmations!
Here are two that I used when working in a "difficult environment:"
"I am talented, original, and have something important to say." That one's adapted from a gem of a book titled "If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence, and Spirit," by Brenda Ueland. Since I was working in this difficult situation and feeling squelched, patronized, and generally unvalued, this affirmation helped me hold my head higher and be confident of my own potential and abilities.
The second one is a "guerrilla affirmation"--it doesn't follow the general positive, in-the-present formula that Diane mentioned. But it worked for me, again because this working situation was truly impossible. This affirmation was to be said in the mirror, before going to work in the morning:
"I've won. They haven't beat me, I've won."
I was given this affirmation by a dear friend and colleague who had been working successfully in this environment for 15 years, and hadn't let it strip her of her dignity. I initially resisted this affirmation, and felt pretty stupid doing it, but after awhile, I felt it gave me the conviction and confidence to get through some pretty tough days. The more you say it, the more you start to believe it. I only recommend this one in the most extreme and abusive of situations, though. There's enough competition and warfare in the world--save this one until all other options are exhausted!
Cheers!
Jana -- Jana Holzmeier Dept. of Music Nebraska Wesleyan University 5000 Saint Paul Ave. Lincoln, NE 68504 jjh@n... 402-465-2284 Visit the Music Department website at http://music.nebrwesleyan.edu/
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