Episode 22 - Emotion Motion – the Good, the Bad, the Ugly
Nugget of wisdom from Santa Monica: Moses and the Ten Commandments – Why hearing a crowd chant your name is important.
It is a healing. It is validation. We need that. My friend hearing his name chanted - that's a good thing. It gives you that strength and that validation, that power that says "I exist. I am powerful. I am loved".
What is it about words? I always say words have vibration, words have power. There's so much energy associated with sound. The internal emotion logic works between two people. Two people are arguing and one person takes the emotional argument. The other person takes logical argument. We're working in a whole different system. We're working against imposter syndrome. We're working against everybody tells me whatever it is I want to hear, except for there's one person who says that hurtful comment. That's the only person (maybe I feel because I'm an imposter walking through the world because we all feel this way at some time where, you know, I don't belong. I'm not worthy. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not), so this is the only person who is telling me the truth and you start to become emotionally connected to the one person who tells you the truth. And it also can be because you are, you do feel like you're wearing this. It's like you're wearing a coat. This is your body. You're wearing it like a coat. And you’re you. You go through life sometimes worried that somebody is going to call you out on your BS. And so if somebody calls you out on anything, you feel like this is the one person who is being honest with me. This is why we are so emotionally attached to that ONE ugly comment.
Anecdote: this company called Despair: they do these demotivational motivational posters. There’s one for dysfunctional. The only thing in common between all of your unsatisfying relationships is you. So it's really hard to shuck that off or understand that.
More on criticism: (the unkind mean things people throw at you): …and then we have being a youth or being an unexperienced; un-fully formed kind of a person who's still trying to figure out who they are. And people love to tell you who you are. Why do they do that? Because they want you to be just like them. This concept takes you into a brand new completely other world of "the way I live is the best way to live. So you should live just like me, because then you living that way validates me".
Matt: …”and that's a lot of what I grew up in was, I lived this way, my parents lived a certain way and the people who they associated with lived basically the exact same way. And if you didn't kind of live that way, you were a little, either a little off, if it was only a little bit different or you were nuts, if it was completely different or they couldn't even fathom how you would, but by the same token, because you're their child and they are tutoring you and they are, providing a role model for you, if you choose not to live the same way they did, then you invalidate them too. So there's a jumble of all these emotions caught up inside of people”.
Fawn: Why do you think that that happens? Why do you think that people are so attached to you being like them as the only way to be? Why isn't it that they have a slate that says, you know what, you don't have to be like me, cause I want to be different; even if you are my child or my student. Why is that the common thread? Is it going back to when we were hunting and gathering, and you have to stick together. I mean, I don't understand where that thinking comes from.
Matt: It does. It has. It evolved from this, team-based kind of a feeling where, I'm on a team, we're all going forward. And this gets, I think, lost inside of a lot of emotions, but on some level, I think people like being validated. People like being told they're okay. And people like feeling like they're okay. In the best way of somebody telling you it's certainly the best, but the best way of feeling that way on a day-to-day basis is for other people to have seen you and emulated you. So if I'm a big fan of band “A” and all my friends discover that band through me and they're all big fans too, then I feel good for some reason; some esoteric reason.
Fawn: What if we approach everybody and notice their uniqueness and bring that up as a conversation starter or even throughout, within a longstanding relationship. And I come up to you and I say, wow, I really like the way you do A, B, and C. I really like how you think about A, B, and C? I wish I was like that. I tend to do this. So therefore I'm creating a situation where I acknowledge you much like Moses, I'm chanting you. So you feel validated, understood, heard and seen. And at the same time, I think in a kind of a depreciative of way, I'm saying, but I'm this way. In a way I'm kind of saying, I totally respect and admire what you're doing. I wish I could do that, but this is how I am. In a way I'm saying, I totally respect and admire what you're doing. I wish I could do that, but this is how I am. If we were to approach each other regularly in this way of acknowledging each other’s uniqueness or your way of being, that way you don't have to beat me over the head with your way of being, and you don't have to rain on my parade for being who I am.
Matt: This can work with friends and colleagues, but parents is another ball of wax; relatives, another ball of wax.
Fawn: Why can't it work with them?
Matt: There's too much emotion.
Matt gets emotional about raising their daughters and talks about what they’re going to be when they grow up.
Fawn: I don't think about what they’re going to be when they grow up. I always think they already are what they are. I don't wait for that. What are you going to be when you grow up? What are you going to be, you already ARE. They already ARE what they are going to be when they grow up. It's all there. And there's no one thing to be when you grow up. There are many ways in many careers to have and many different ways. I think we have to watch out for that because the day of “this is your career until you die” is gone. You have to always shift and grow and do other things and not one career path will be it for you, perhaps. I think it will be rare when someone has one career.
Question: Why does one bad comment ruin everything???????? How can we defend against it? Some people put walls up and are on the ready to take on any nay-sayer with a horrible comment. But that takes a lot of energy. Then again, so does being hurt, getting hurt when you are clearly caught off guard.
ANSWER: because we need to recognize that emotion trumps logic. We need to figure out a way where we can hold on to a very positive view of ourselves.
SOME TECHNIQUES TO WARD OFF THE BAD FEELINGS:
Fawn’s assignment: Fawn was given an assignment from a psychic to help her get over the hurt feelings. This prayer, where she had to fill in the blanks with the name of the person that she had been hurt by.
Lord, please help me to forgive ______________. Please help ____________ to forgive me.
Please help us to forgive each other. Please Lord. Thank you, Lord.
Matt: an easy, quick one is to call people out right away (but what if you just can’t think of that – like when you are caught off guard?)
Matt: then the other thing is, you own it, you're like, “Oh, okay, maybe they raise a good point, but you're trying as hard as you can, and it's hard to stay in your logical frame of mind.
Matt: remind myself that it's just their opinion. And just because it's their opinion, doesn't make it valid. It doesn't make it invalid either. We have to evaluate and look at it, but again, it's like. You're trying as hard as you can to not let it cross over into emotion. As soon as it crosses over into emotion, it becomes “how dare you?!” and you're never going to end up in a good place from an a “how dare you”, because either the other person is going to double down on their emotions or, and it can feel even worse, the other person is going to cave and say, “I'm sorry” and not be. And if somebody feels like they're being straight with you, you don't want to get rid of that. You don't want them to feel nervous about being straight with you, but when they strike you really close to home, you've got to figure out what to do with that. And honestly, it's a skill that you learn. And it's a skill!
Fawn recalls this advice: the way to turn it around is to ask them (the offender of the rude comment) to repeat word for word, what they said, Like you didn't hear it the first time. You say: “I'm sorry, could you repeat exactly what you just said again? I didn't quite hear you” and make them repeat it so they can hear what they said and if they don't realize it, then you say. “I believe you're on purpose, trying to bring me down or to hurt me and that's not going to work here”.
Matt: the overarching technique is what I've described so many times as the Popeye syndrome, which is “I am what I am”. So understanding who and what you are, understanding your strengths, understanding your limitations and owning them.
Now of course people always say, oh yes, but you want to attack your weaknesses and make them strengths and all the rest of it. And there are occasions where you can't and there are occasions when you can, and you do when you can and when you're interested and when you have that desire and you don't, when you can't and you play to your strengths. Understand who and what you are. Understand your strengths, understand your limitations and own them.
Note from Fawn: We really don't have frequent get-togethers and when we do, it's very emotionally charged, for example, it's a wedding, it's a birthday, it's Thanksgiving, it's Christmas, it's whatever holiday or a funeral. All the gatherings that we tend to have are very emotionally charged. Much like we don’t frequent at get-togethers we don’t frequent in conversations. So, because we don't practice because we don't build up our vocabulary, because we don't have a friend who likes to hit us where we're weak, we're not used to a communication. We're not used to tough conversations. We're not used to uncomfortableness. We tend to retreat. We don't have enough gatherings. We don't have enough conversation and we don’t know how to have the conversational back and forth and we don’t know how to handle criticism because we get caught off guard.
Another note from Fawn: When you go to bed and you go to sleep, you get a reset, unless you're still totally fuming over whatever happened that could go into years, right. Of deficit, years of deficit, over what somebody said or what somebody did. Much like brushing your teeth at the end of the day, we need to clear out all the nonsense and think about what really bothered us. And much like the emotional currency that we were talking about, we need to put the hammer down;to bring down the gavel after we ask yourselves how much more are we going to invest in this, and be aware of the fact that we’re spending so much money; emotional currency on whatever it was. Do we want to continue with that as a, as a leader of a nation; as a leader of our corporation, which is our life; our nation is our life. How much more are we going to invest in this one particular idiotic thing? Bring the gavel down and say zero! A clear mind at the end of the day is what we need.
