Is Your Complaining Holding You Back? Try This Shift

What is conscious complaining? Well, conscious complaining is where you have a complaint about something and you completely commit yourself to that complaint.

Whether you do it on your own, writing in a journal or something like that, or drawing an image of it, or whether you do it in a conversation with somebody else, you give all of your energy to that complaining process and that complaining experience.

And what you do is you keep looking for more layers and depths in a complaint.

So why is this a good thing to do? Because what this does is it takes you away from unconscious complaining, which is basically blame.

And blame never, ever works.

It never gets the result unless you want to be in a culture of blame.

You know, if you have a circle of people where what you really like doing is sitting and complaining and blaming, and if that makes you happy, then conscious complaining is not for you.

Doing that does not make me happy.

It makes me very unhappy.

I much prefer conscious complaining, whether it's me doing it or somebody else.

Because the thing with that is when we keep going with it, we eventually get to the root of the issue of what's bugging us.

And the root of the issue that's bugging us is about us.

It's not about anyone or anything else.

So this is different from saying, oh, I'm having a problem with something.

That must be about me.

What's wrong with me? That means I have a problem with that.

Again, that can be a very dreary and depressing thing to do.

And also a bit self-punitive.

This way of doing it is much, much more fun.

With this way of doing it, you get more and more colourfully start blaming to begin with.

and giving it more and more voice, more and more range, more and more color, more and more description, more and more emotion, until you finally reach a point where you've burnt off all of that froth, and you've got right down to the bottom layer, which could be, actually, I need to stand up for myself better, or actually, I should have stepped in on behalf of that other person who I care about, or Actually, why on earth am I bothering about this? It's just a distraction from the fact I should be getting on with this thing over here.

Right at the bottom of these complaints, there's usually something of value to notice.

And getting there is a good idea, but forcing ourselves to get there by trying to force ourselves to change our attitude doesn't necessarily work.

In fact, I'd say it rarely works.

But giving full reign, or acting out is another term for our complaint, Conscious complaining can be a lot of fun and can reach the point where we experience a transformation.