When it comes to putting yourself first, we’ve got two parts to consider.

Coming first and going first.

Coming first (in your own mind) means choosing yourself.

It comes from a place inside us. We commit to meet our own needs as much as possible.

It is to prioritize yourself-your own goals, preferences, feelings, opportunities, options, and interests.

Coming first ensures you know your own path.

It requires self reflection and inner knowing to do that.

You must believe you know what’s best for yourself and that you’re worth it.

The key is to put whatever is best for you ahead of what others might prefer or choose for you.

It doesn’t mean you disregard others’ needs or wishes, just that you count yourself in and factor in what matters most to you right from the start.

If you have to choose between what matters to you and what matters to someone else, you would choose yourself as a default.

And only put others’ wishes ahead occasionally after careful consideration: how much it matters to them and how much they matter to you.

Going first is what follows committing to coming first in your own mind.

It means taking whatever matters to you on the inside and bringing it out to the forefront into reality.

You do this by stepping up with your actions, sense of what’s right, wrong, too little or too much, boundaries of time, space and capacity to work with others. You set limits. You set the pace. You set the direction. You put things in motion.

Going first gives you the best shot at achieving your desires.

It requires self determination and a willingness to risk rejection.

You must believe in yourself and the power of your vulnerability.

The key here is doing these things before others do them. To take the initiative.

Setting the tone, pace and direction instead of waiting for others to do so.

We should cover how all this relates to bullying.

Bullies count on their targets to step aside, to put themselves last and to follow along vs lead.

I’ll tell you what they don’t expect, is for you to know exactly what you want and to fearlessly go after it before they get the chance.

This is the main thing to keep in mind: when you go first before others, you get first dibs, and you make a good impression.

It shows you know your own mind (you’ve thought about what matters to you ahead of time), and you believe you deserve to be successful, because you don’t second guess yourself!

Bullies target people who doubt themselves.

To review: putting yourself first means you come first and you go first. To come first is a commitment to meeting your own needs instead of allowing others to decide for you, and go first is to act before others do.

Start out by noticing what you think, feel, believe and what you want to do about it. Then give yourself permission to do it now without overthinking beforehand or worrying afterwards.

Speak their language.

There’s a difference between bullying them back (fight) and showing them you speak their language (acceptance—you’ll mirror them, match them, be like them). The first is retaliation, which is weak and potentially dangerous. Speaking their language isn’t about becoming a bully, it’s showing the bully you know how to play their game and that you’ve got their number.

The first is resorting to their methods, which is just another way of going down their path (reacting). The second, speaking their language, is making yourself relatable to them (without stooping to their level) so that they get your message (response).

With a bully, you must show them your true self (the side of you who judges them as unworthy of your time, energy and attention), but you must also do it in a way that they can relate to. What does a bully relate to? What they recognize: Bullying.

As we’ve discussed before, the body sends out non-verbal signals that words don’t express. And body language experts often point out that our words may or may not  be honest, but the body never lies.

I want you to learn and practice the bully’s stance to get a sense of who they are and how they feel. I’d also like you to be able to use the bully stance in times when you need to communicate clearly with a bully.

Bully stance: Shoulders back. Chest out. Leaning in or moving slightly forward. Head straight (no tilting) with chin and jaw jutting out a bit. Nodding with wide open eyes looking straight at them.

Bullies are open and moving in, coming straight for you. Their voice volume is louder, and they end their statements with a drop tone.

They do this because they are looking for victims. Anyone who backs off, leans back, looks away, tries to be nice, fails their test, and the bully will see them as a target. Any tendency to protect yourself will smell like bully food to them.

The victim stance is a natural reaction, unless you’ve practiced the bully stance ahead of time.

When the bully charges forward toward you, it’s a test. The way to pass is to lean into it.

Body language is emotional. It comes from our emotions, and it generates emotions too. When you’re happy you smile, but when you smile you start to feel happier.

The reason I remind you of this is to make sure you practice the bully stance in a place you feel safe at first.

Posturing like a bully might feel very strange to you especially if your default is to go into a self-protective position around the bully. It’s okay if it feels weird or even upsetting to stand like a bully at first. That’s just the nerves of doing something new.

Remember self-protective gestures may feel natural, but the bully is less likely to make you a target, if they recognize you as more like them.

Also, the majority of bullies are not a physical danger to you, however, if you have assessed they could be a real safety threat in that way, that they could go past bullying into violent assault, then you must factor that into what you feel comfortable doing in response to them.

Returning the bully stance back to the bully is a warning that you speak their language, it’s NOT an act of bullying. It’s a response to the situation they’ve initiated.

This is exactly why you should never initiate a bully stance yourself, or you will be perceived as the bully.

Just by practicing the bully’s stance, you will take on some of that body language as natural and automatic. This means you’ll express it at the right time without you having to think of it, and it will feel normal to you. Imagine doing it in response to the bully doing it first to you.

Have you ever heard the advice to just drop it or let it go?

I’ve talked about Dr Claire Weekes before. She was an important pioneering doctor in the field of anxiety recovery.

She said anyone could recover from disordered anxiety, excessive nervousness or panic attacks with four simple (but not always easy steps): Face, accept, float and let time pass.

It’s clear to me that these are the for anti-stress responses to flight fight freeze and fawn.

She described it in many ways such as mastering inactivity (doing nothing about the anxiety): not analyzing, not trying to avoid or remove it, but instead going with it by floating along above it.

Others define the concept of floating as letting go, surrendering, tolerance, melting.

What I want you to understand is not only what floating is, but also why it helps, what happens when you get it right and how holding on is working against you.

To start out I’m going to give you an analogy: Imagine a person is hanging from a cliff. They are grasping tightly for dear life. Their arms are shaking, their hands are going numb. The only thing they can think of is bracing or falling.

Now imagine the cliff this person is hanging onto is in their imagination only, or they’ve misperceived a phony threat for a real one. The cliff isn’t real. It feels real though.

It seems like they need to grasp tightly or they’ll fall to their doom, but when the cliff isn’t real, only in their imagination, they don’t need to continue holding on for dear life. IN fact bracing in frozen fear is what’s keeping their fear alive and keeping them stuck in it.

What happens if they let go of the imagined cliff? We know they won’t fall because there is nowhere to fall. So what happens if they release their grip, surrender, let go?

They FLOAT!

Think about it! With all that pressure released and all that bracing relaxed, they feel lighter than air.

All they have to do is let go symbolically or metaphorically, and they will see there was nowhere to fall and it was their own fears pulling down on them the entire time.

The more you want a thing, a certain outcome, a certain friendship, a certain person to stop bullying you, the more importance you’ll put on it. You’ll build up that thing to the point that it’s way up high on the edge of a cliff, and getting it requires you to dangle from that imagined cliff that.

You’ll be frozen, bracing, holding on for dear life, living by conditions you cannot control and by other people’s standards.

And here’s what’s worse: All the built up stress will cause you to fumble or even fail.

As soon as you let go of the importance you built up, as soon as you stop caring what the bully does, says, thinks, or feels, you’ll float above the stress and rise above the problem. You’ll be able to see the solution, and you’ll care more about yourself and your standards than a particular outcome. That’s when others will start to invest in you.

They way you’ll know they are investing in you is, ding ding ding! You guessed it: They will live up to YOU and YOUR expectations. They will follow your rules.

You will have influence to not only stop the bully food that you dish out, but the bully food others supply will dry up too.

Say to yourself, “My standards are more important than any outcome. My reality, my rules.” Then allow yourself to say something you truly think that’s different from others’ opinions, and watch how many of them insist they actually agree with you, changing their minds right there on the spot.

Remember Kelly telling you, “Let go of the importance, and the threat will be revealed as phony.” You’ll feel free to act like the bully doesn’t matter, and then you’ll see them fumble and fail.

I hope you have a wonderful week!

Not always meeting others’ standards doesn’t mean having low standards or no standards at all. No! What you must do is create and live by your own standards.

We’ll look at what stops people from setting high standards, why standards raise your status and how to set them.

People value what they invest in, and to value yourself you must invest in high standards you set.

Setting high personal standards can be a challenge because it implies: personal commitment, belief, action, and facing the risk of failure.

Satisfaction in the present moment is important because you’ll always be in some new present moment. It will always be now, now in the future will be the present moment then.

Of course you have preferences and aspirations for better things—those things will stem from what works well right now.

What accepting satisfaction in the present does is close the gap between your current status and your goals. This automatically raises your status.

To do this ask yourself, what about this moment right now satisfies me? What would satisfy me right now that I could do differently? What else could I be doing right now that would be more satisfying.

Finding the smallest satisfaction, or ways your dreams are already in motion, connects you to your preferred path.

Give yourself permission to imagine and feel what it would be like to fully experience your preferred goals. What it would be like to meet your own standards.

Often people struggle with this even more than focusing on what satisfies them now. The initial step to know what you prefer is easier for many people than allowing themselves to feel what it would be like to succeed.

Why is this? Where’s the breakdown between knowing what we want and allowing ourselves to imagine having it?

It’s this: We know what we want, but we don’t know exactly how we’re going to get it, so it seems impossible. We don’t want to get attached to something we have no idea how to get.

Enjoy yourself and feel satisfied now, and you will bypass the thought you will only be happy when the bully buzzes off, or if your social life improves. You will collapse the difference between the perfect future and the imperfect now moment. It may feel silly like it’s just pretending, but the fact in the future moment you fantasize about is going to happen in that now moment, so you need to see it as possible now (NOT LATER).

Personal standards are about wanting the best for yourself and from yourself.

List what your standards are and begin achieving them NOW by stating them as a present attitude or behavior: Whatever is important to you, whatever you value, what you want to have, where you want to go, how you want to behave and be treated by others are key areas to focus on.

Accountability partners: Tell your adults what your standards are so they can remind you and check in with your progress.

Invest in yourself by keeping track of every satisfying WIN in your journal.

A win can be a success or something you’ve learned from a failure.

Remember, people resist setting high standards because they believe success lies in some imagined future, they struggle to be satisfied right now, and they don’t know how to get where they want to go. This is backward thinking. Your goals, dreams, wishes, successes start right this minute with high standards. Every moment of your life will occur in the present moment, and you will always have part of your story realized and part to be determined, but you can find satisfaction at every stage and go from there.

Set one new standard today. Write it as an attitude or behavior happening in the present moment. Be satisfied by working toward the standard regardless of whether you meet it or not. Share with a trusted adult your plans and progress. Track your wins in your journal.

It works! Start now.

Bully food behaviors don’t always lead to bullying, but they always limit friendship. Bully food is any behavior, thought, feeling, or belief that feeds into the cycle of bullying on your end.

The list is long, and it includes: worrying, fearing, trying to impress or please, be perfect, obey the bully, avoid them, it’s thinking things like I’m not good enough or I’m so pathetic I deserve this, and feeling anxiety, sadness, bewilderment, hopelessness, self-consciousness, or anger all because of the belief that somehow it’s you who must live up to others’ standards never the other way around.

Bullies sense this belief because it’s what generates all the bully food behaviors.

How do you turn it around? Simple, you break the habit of self-qualifying.

Self-qualifying is trying too hard to feel good enough. We don’t think we’ll measure up, so we over compensate. We over do it to make others think we’re good enough when we ourselves don’t.

It’s common to worry about living up to others’ standards when it seems crucially important to do so.

This is what makes people start self-qualifying. They believe they must win someone over by proving themselves, and whether it’s a potential friend or an intimidating bully, it’s easy to place excessive importance on pleasing them.

The irony is what pleases others the most is our commitment to our own standards, not theirs! Sure, people want us to go along with them, but that’s not what impresses them. And people want to be impressed.

Trying too hard to meet everyone else’s expectations, hoping you’ll measure up, is bully food.

The belief you need to self-qualify produces every kind of bully food.

The importance you place on getting a friendship going, or getting a bully to leave you alone has got to be less than the importance of living by your own standards.

When you live by your standards, you don’t qualify to others, and you make them qualify to you.

Think to yourself I’m good enough as long as I meet my own standards. Look for the ways you may be trying too hard to meet others’ standards, and root them out. Your attempts to make them see you differently are manipulative. You might not be correctly guessing what they really want from you. Even if you are, it’s a losing game. You’ll never root out everything they could potentially criticize, but you can root out your need to measure up to their idea of perfect.

You can only live up to what the world wants if you include yourself, because the world includes you. It’s impossible to please everyone every time, but you can always satisfy yourself, which will please the ones who are important and disappoint the ones who aren’t.

Disappointing the bully is what will send them packing.

Stop qualifying to them and start validating yourself. This will fill you with confidence, and it will turn the tables on your dynamic with others. Instead of them screening you for how well you measure up, they’ll adjust to live up to what you expect.

Not only must you stop qualifying and compensating, but you must also start screening them. Watch them. Decide if they meet your standards, and let them know when they fall short. This is listening, noticing and sharing with friends. It’s observing, assessing and judging a bully. It’s saying, “I see you, and this is how I’m going to handle you.”

The voice is the running inner monologue  and/or stream of images you hear and see inside your mind. You might believe that voice is you, many people do. It’s actually just part of your mental processing. Your brain thinks to make sense of things, figure them out and solve problems. When thoughts become so automatic they appear to run beyond your conscious control, they turn into a thought stream that can seem alive.

What makes if clear that the voice is not you, and that’s it’s not alive, is that it’s not constant. In other words, your thoughts can stop and the voice can go silent, and what’s left? The listener! You! You’re still alive regardless of whether there’s a thought or not.

The key is to create enough distance between yourself the listener and the thoughts.

The more you identify with and as the voice, the more you see life as full of problems.

That’s right! You got it! The voice inside your head, as much as it interferes to solve problems, often uses fear to hold your attention just like the bully does.

Aha! Which means you must recognize when you’re feeding the bully pattern in your head and cut the bully food there too.

Which brings us to WHY to slow down or stop the voice each day and whenever you notice it getting louder, meaner, more aggressive.

What goes on inside you is reflected in your reality.

Change what’s going on inside and outside by spending more time, more focus without judgment.

Watch your awareness grow stronger, your senses sharper as your whole body starts to align with the consciousness that used to be hijacked by all those spinning thoughts.

Do this daily to make it your new automatic setting. Imagine how unstoppable you’ll be after you’ve kicked the habit of listening to the voice in your head and whenever it starts to be a bully. Get rid of that primary bully and every other will be easier afterward.

Have a wonderful week!

My favorite question to ask myself before I face something stressful is What would this be like if it was easy?

Questions like the one above are designed to make you stop listening to the voice in your head, and focus on your inner knowing or gut feeling instead?

Many experts in the world of helping others or self-help, encourage people to ask themselves questions that move focus away from the voice and into their inner  knowing.

The idea is to get to the bare minimum that needs to be done in order to move on, which is in keeping with bully food principles: Keep it simple, low effort, boring, and direct (or kind).

The best way to start practicing is to pick stressful overwhelming situations that aren’t to do with your bully at first. Find the easiest way to do your chores, the fastest way to do a boring HW assignment, the easy way to get to sleep quickly or ready in the morning. Whenever you face a new problem, apply the questions. You’ll get into the habit of thinking in terms of ease and rely on your inner knowing vs your mental chatter. Next time we’ll break down the voice inside your head in more detail.

Zoom in on one behavior to reverse in the name of relaxing your stress response

The key here is to take it easier than you have been.

Often times when we feel anxious or overwhelmed, we start to rush.

We rush as we walk from place to place, we race through assignments and tasks, we get impatient in conversations with others, rapidly tapping our toes

This is part of the threat response of flight: we race to get away from danger back to our safe comfort zone.

In the wild, this is back to our herd or cave. In our modern world it’s getting back to what’s easy and familiar or known.

A way to unwind this frantic feeling and behavior is to do the opposite, just as we have talked about before.

Beliefs lead to feelings, and feelings lead to behaviors, and behaviors lead to outcomes that reinforce beliefs

If you change any of them: your behavior and feelings will be different, and eventually beliefs will change too if you repeat the process often enough.

We’ve also discussed how making changes causes anxiety/excitement at first because it’s new, not known and therefore potentially a threat.

However, knowing the first few times will feel weird, we can make huge shifts with repeated small changes.

So, I recommend you start with your actual speed.

Slow down! Pump your brakes! Easy does it!

It works the same with any behavior, so if you don’t notice yourself racing through things when you’re stressed, then you can oppositize any other behavior: the way you talk, volume or tone, the place you sit front of class or the back, dominant hand to less dominant hand,

Any opposite behavior will give your mind something other than its worries to focus on, and by being different, you’ll start to feel different. Your experiences and expectations will begin to change. Over time your beliefs will too.

Slowing down is a great place to start because slowness is calming and therefore you’ll be more calm.

What do bullies hate more than anything? Calmness. Slowness brings calmness.

Slowing down has two main functions: it calms you down, and it makes you appear and feel more confident.

Most people are zooming around, rushing from place to place. When you set yourself apart from others by behaving differently than most of them, you raise your confidence status.

Slowly walking into a busy place stands out. You are confident enough to be a little different, and you are calm enough to take it easy. SLOW

Only a person who feels at ease with themself and others would ever think to behave independently much less take the perceived risk.

But taking things more slowly is a huge advantage. It may appear bold, but it’s actually a simple way to sooth and reverse anxiousness.

Be willing to take up some space and time for yourself by slowing yourself down a little. Paying attention to small automatic behaviors will get you into the habit of noticing other important details of how you and others behave.

Consider these areas to slow down: How fast you talk, how fast you walk, how fast you eat, how fast you reply, how fast you get ready in the morning (this might require you to wake up a little earlier), how fast you work on class or homework, how fast you consume media or use your devices or electronics.

By slowing down, you’re probably going to get to the moderate speed most others are already using, so don’t worry about being weirdly slow or anything, even though it might feel weird to change you behaviors as I mentioned earlier.

The most relaxed person is the most powerful person.

This episode is about two paths: yours and theirs. When you react, you’re going down their path. When you respond, you are walking them down yours.

Stop reacting to them! It’s obvious you don’t want to go down their path anymore, but you do it out of the habit of reacting to them, and that’s only one of many problems your reactions cause:

Weak

Low value

Bully food

Your reality isn’t clear

You have no standards

You will betray yourself

The best strategy to stop your reactions is to default to blank face/say nothing. If you can interrupt your own emotional eruptions with blankness and silence, then you can begin to turn them around so you can consciously choose.

Then next step is to respond.

How to respond instead? First what does it mean to respond exactly?

It’s when you take information from the moment and use it to further your purpose.

To do this you have to be present to the moment and crystal clear on your purpose.

You also have to be hungry and brave enough to follow through.

That’s it.

Now let’s make a plan:

1-Blank face + say nothing. Practice this in response to everything. Good things AND bad things. You want blankness and silence to be your default with the bully. Don’t worry, you’ll always be able to add onto them.

2-Get clear on your standards and purpose. Make a list of your personal standards for how others will/will not treat you. Create a purpose regarding the bully.

3-Practice presence. Meditations, flow activities, listening.

4-Connect what happens around you to your purpose: Once you know what your purpose is, you can connect it to the bully’s behaviors.

5-Get over yourself so you don’t half-ass it:

When the bully reacts to you, as they most certainly will, you’ll know you’re leading them. Your purpose is now the plan for you both because you responded and showed them your reality is strongest. This is why you need to do some reflection exercises ahead of time, because it’s going to feel weird at first to be stronger than them, to get your way instead or them getting theirs and to fully commit to yourself.

Respond to the following sentence starters (as many times as you like) in your journal

Leading the bully down my path makes me feel ____________ because…

I see it as possible to lead the bully my way because…

I see it as impossible to lead the bully my way because…

Leading the bully is easy because…

Leading the bully is difficult because…

You see, leading the bully on your path and purpose is up to you. Remember you have a stronger reality to theirs in some way or they wouldn’t have ever bothered with you. They tested you to see what you’re made of and you reacted to them, which meant you went down their path for a while. That’s fine. You can always change directions and get back on track toward your purpose.

6-Act! Keep the momentum up and make THEM react.

7-AIM TO NOT REACT AGAIN or go down the bully’s path again! They’ll test you. They’ll try to hit the ball back at you. Be ready for their moves.

Overcompensation: Anyone’s impulse to a large painful problem is to solve it as quickly as possible. When we are convinced by our stress and anxiety we solve problems through our fear response.

It makes sense we want to go to extremes and even overcompensate to resolve our problems, but it’s a mistake to do so using the threat response if the problem isn’t an actual grizzly bear.

I’m not ask for you to stop trying to beat your bully. NO NEVER! The whole podcast is about beating your bully. I’m asking you to start using the opposite of FFFF to get results.

The reversal of fight is accept and respond:

Just by listening to this podcast, you show willingness to accept and respond vs deny and pass the buck. Accept whatever comes up as information you can work with. If you bury your head in the sand, you deprive yourself of info and options.

The reversal of flight is show up and face it:

Facing is walking toward them (instead of being chased). It’s moving slowly and or in your own way rather than

The reversal of freeze is let go:

Melt, go with the flow, let go to float (not fall) is how to reverse the freeze response. Being bullied hurts, so it makes sense we would freeze up to brace against more pain. Stop caring.

The reversal of fawn is be yourself at all costs:

Stand up for you first! Be willing to be a foe. Give people a challenge. Make them invest in you too. Separate fantasy from reality. If they are on a pedestal in your mind, take them down. Be a friend/equal not their biggest fan or victim.

Work these anti-stress responses into your NEW personality. Here are the steps for that:

1- Accept your personality is not fixed, it can and should change to fit your goals, needs, hopes and dreams.

2- Recognize the FFFF responses you typically go into, and concentrate on adding the opposite anti-stress responses you’ll need to reverse them one-by-one.

3- Start with visualization: Visualization is like a sneak preview of coming attractions for the conscious part of your mind. But did you know your subconscious mind and body believe your imagination is as real as reality. Therefore visualizing is the way to begin believing the new you into being. You have to believe it to see it, not the other way around.

The key to this is to imagine what you wish you could do, or what you wish you would have done. What you’re too afraid to do. What you wouldn’t dare. What the fearless you would do. Who you’d be if there were no consequences. Even if you never go to the lengths you go to in these imaginary scenarios, your subconscious mind will believe you have gone to those lengths, and you will start to see yourself differently from the inside out.

It could be tricky for these images to hold your attention first because they will challenge your current sense of self.

Expect to feel unpleasant emotions about seeing yourself differently, more positively. When the emotions come up, write them down like this: A feeling or fear came up when I imagined walking up to the bully instead of I was scared when I imagined walking up to the bully. It’s much easier and natural to let go of a passing feeling. It’s much harder to let go of that same feeling if you see it as a part of who you are.

Free your mind up by teaching it to believe you can be the version of yourself you want to be. I know from personal experience I only became cool and unbullied when I imagined being carefree. I got so hooked on the idea of not caring and the feeling of freedom, that I carried it out in real life. That’s when the jerks moved on and good friends emerged.

Visualize everyday. Give yourself permission to be inspired by what you’ve imagined. If you’re excited, you’ll be much more motivated to make it happen.