Taming Your Inner Troll

My inner troll is such a pain.
Just like the ones on the internet or the old fashioned, under-the-bridge variety, my inner troll has a loud mouth and nothing nice to say about anything, ever, especially myself.

If there's something to complain about, my inner troll is the first to shout it out. If I'm experiencing something painful, my inner troll is sure to stick her finger in the wound to make it worse. If someone has a gorgeous Instagram account - all hand lettering and exotic trips and head stands - my inner troll delights in pointing out that I'm failing at life. It's the voice shouting impostor!

The troll can't help itself. Just as a bird is built to fly, a troll exists to instigate and inflame. The troll lives to start shit.

I can't banish my inner troll completely, but you bet I work hard to tame it by disengaging from it. Every day, I make a conscious effort not to feed the troll. 

I do this in a few ways:

• I call on my crew, The Good Enough Club, where we fight against our common enemy of perfection. We don't compare our messy real lives with other people's perfectly curated online ones (or when we catch ourselves doing it, we hug our dogs, offer up some self compassion, and sign off of social media for a minute). 

• I refuse to believe everything I think. Mindfulness helps me to see the difference between what's happening in reality and the stories I'm telling myself about what's happening. Those are usually two different things. 

• I experiment with not complaining. This one is hard. But when I couldn't speak for 5 days while at a silent meditation retreat, I quickly learned that I have the power to transform my experience by changing what I talk about and where I put my focus. I wrote about that (and my inner radio station WSUXS) in my latest blog.

We all have an inner troll. It's what we do about it is that matters. If we feed the troll with our attention and buy in to the stories it tells us, then it will shape and define our entire life. And we all deserve better than that, no matter what your troll tells you.
 

Speaking of unpleasant conversions, is this one familiar? 

“What do you do?”

“I work at an animal shelter.”

“I could never work at a shelter. I love animals too much.” 

“Please go away now.”