The No Complaining Project

[TRANSCRIPT]

Hi, welcome to the No Complaining Project podcast, where we talk about all things related to Going NoCo - NoCo for "no complaining" - in order to improve our relationships and to be kinder to others around us. And to generally just be more connected with folks in the world, you can always find more on this topic at my website, gonoco.com. That's G O N O C o.com and I'm Cianna Stewart. And I'm glad that you're here.

Today I want to tell you why I even latched on to complaining in the first place. I mean, out of all the possible things to choose to focus on in order to become a better and happier person, what was it about complaining that really took hold of me and made such a big difference?
First, a little bit about me. I don't know about you, but I'm someone who can very easily be distracted. I identify as a lifelong learner, and that usually means that I sign up for so many things that I can even lose track of all of the classes and books and things that I've signed up for. And when it came to self-improvement, it was definitely the same kind of thing where I was reading all these different suggestions on how to set goals, how to be more intentional, how to improve your life. And there were just so many that I would end up forgetting what it was that I had even planned to do. And then in the end I would end up not really doing much of anything. That was really, really frustrating for me.

And then add to that, that there's social media, there's everything interesting that streaming, plus I have piles of books just everywhere and every intention of reading them. And that's just a lot. It's so easy for me to forget what it is that I had planned to do. And I've actually had to create artificial systems to force me to check in and it usually involves somebody else who's far more organized and on it than I am, who actually helps me remember that this was what I intended to do.

But the thing about complaining is that it actually came up all the time. Like, every day, I would hear somebody complaining... multiple times a day... around the office at home with my friends, you know, even in comedy movies, television, all of the environment everywhere around me, it felt like people were complaining.

And once I started to pay attention to it, it really started to bother me. It coming up around me all the time, it started to feel like I was being reminded of my intentions without even really trying. I didn't even have to really seek it out. And that helped me to, I don't know, stay on task and to actually deepen my understanding and relationship and aversion to complaints.

And through all of this one particular kind became the most useful, and that's what I ended up calling "micro complaints." And this started by noticing other people and they would do things that were really not a big deal. And they were just part of normal conversation. But they all felt like complaints to me. Like sitting around at the office at lunchtime and we would order food and then people would be joking or complaining about the packaging of all of the deliveries.

I would go out somewhere with friends and then somebody would say, "Oh, this room is cold," and then they would not put on their jacket, or they would just basically not do anything about it. Or people complaining about how the news is so negative and it sets them on edge every morning, and it's really hard to take. And just being so aggravated by it, but then continuing to watch the news every morning and not turning it off. Or even just people complaining about the weather. Like, what are you supposed to do about that? You can't do anything.

So all of these are not major deals. They're really incidental, smaller things that were just happening in the moment. They're not life-changing, hugely emotionally wraught complaints. But they were daily and they do stack up. And they're the kind that you hear all the time.

And the kicker is in almost all of these situations - or in all of the situations that I was just describing - people were doing absolutely nothing to change the situation. They weren't fixing anything. And even beyond that, they weren't even expecting change. So saying these things was just really being negative for its own sake. And that just really started to grate on me.

It would actually make it hard for me to stay in conversations. Because one of the things I noticed is that often when a conversation would start from this place - would start with a negative comment or would start just griping about something - then others would often pile in and add their own thing, or it would just set the tenor for the room.

And that would just be the tone, at least for a while of the conversation. It would actually have to take a lot of extra work to put it into a positive or even neutral  - much less an excited and, you know, gratifying, nourishing - way of talking to each other, that would just take so much work and people generally wouldn't do it.

And so when these conversations would go on for awhile, I ended up just mostly having to drop out. And then I'll admit, it's not like I was being a saint in all of this. I would start to catch myself doing it. I would join in the conversation. "This is the way that the conversation is going. I'm going to be part of it. I want to be part of the group." Or also is just triggering my own bad behaviors that I was trying to change.

And so I would just join in and then I would hear myself joining in and then I really couldn't stand it, hearing my own voice saying these things would actually remind me of the pledge. Even hearing other people say these things and feeling my own negative reaction to it would remind me of my pledge to Go NoCo, would remind me that I wanted to be different, that I wanted to have different kinds of conversations, that I wanted to be more intentional in the way that I spoke, that I wanted to be more connected with others, as opposed to just knocking things down. It reminded me of how I wanted to be in the world and what kind of change I wanted to make inside of myself. And so micro complaints became like a kind of a gateway trigger. A little reminder of how I wanted to speak, how I wanted to relate. It reminded me of the fact that I could make choices about my speech, that I even had choices that complaining was a habit and that I wanted to break that habit. And even being around a lot of people who had that habit, sometimes I just couldn't. I had to separate myself from them and other times I would stay, but I would be very conscious of my own habitual responses and then learn how to manage that so that I could be more intentional in my speech. So ultimately, one of the reasons that complaining became the thing that triggered all of the other hugely impactful life changes for me is simply because they were so common.

And as soon as I started really hearing complaints and responding to them in this way and thinking of them as reminders during the day, then it really helped to keep me on task. And even my highly distractable self couldn't avoid paying attention to this. So it was really useful. And I guess in that way, one of my gratitudes is that people do complain all the time and it was useful for me to hear that.
But ultimately of course, I think it would be so much better if we didn't complain all the time. If we spent our time. Connected to each other, appreciating each other, being kind to each other and also making the kinds of changes that we want to see in the world instead of just complaining about them and doing nothing about it.

So that's it for today. I hope it was helpful. You can always find more at the website, gonoco.com. That's G O N O C O.com. And I hope that you pop on over there sometime and drop me a line and tell me wh...

[TRANSCRIPT]

Hi friends!  Glad  you found it here to the No Complaining Project's podcast. I'm Cianna Stewart, and I want to extend a very warm welcome to all the new listeners. I don't know if you're here because new year's just happened, or if you found me on Facebook or on Clubhouse or what, but no matter how you got here, thank you for listening! And for deciding to go NoCo, which is my shorthand for "no complaining."

I thought it would be good for all of us to review what we mean by complaining. Because it's different than the dictionary definition, but even more importantly, I found that the more we can keep this in mind, the more we can absorb it into our bones, the better - and even more importantly, easier - this whole process gets.

So I'm going to read to you the short chapter in  my book, on the definition and some of the particular ways of thinking about it, and then I'll chat about it as well. 

Oh, and, right! The book. I wrote a book. It's called, "No Complaints: How to Stop Sabotaging Your Own Joy." And if you want to get it, it's on my website, at gonoco.com, that's gonoco.com/bookstore. 

So this is chapter one, obviously, because this is the beginning. 

What is, and is not, complaining? The current dictionary definition of complain is to express grief, pain or discontent. This definition is inadequate. In daily language, we have a clear distinction between "filing a complaint" and "being a complainer" that isn't reflected here.
We all need to say what's wrong to get things changed to assert ourselves and our needs. But when we describe someone as "such a complainer," we've been something more than simply, "they express discontent." After years of listening to and analyzing the structure of complaints and their impact, I have a new working definition.

Complain: to express grief, pain, or discontent without contributing to resolving the issue. 

And this is a little sidebar from the - what's actually in the book, but it's really the second part of that that really matters. And it's the difference that makes a difference. Basically. So just to say that again, how we define "complain" here at the No Complaining Project is to express grief, pain, or discontent without contributing to resolving the issue.

The entire goal of this is to move from complaining to taking action. So it's all about that second part. All right. Back into the text. 

Complainers do not want to hear solutions. Even if the issue is something that could be addressed, they grumble to someone who can do nothing to help. Habitual complainer's repeat themselves without taking action. This is exhausting. 

Another aside. The motivation for a lot of the No Complaining Project was really about that exhaustion. I saw far too many people stop getting invited to events or, or feeling like people were turning away from them with not really knowing why. And I could see that it was because they were really complaining a lot and other people were tired of hearing it.

And yet that's not something that we are willing to tell people. So it really broke my heart. And a lot of the motivation for me to keep doing this work is actually because we have this very strange habit in our society of finding it easier to just reject people outright and to turn away from them and leave them isolated then to actually come forward and tell them what's really bothering us.

And what, you know, really is on our minds in an attempt to repair the relationship. We're more willing to cut ourselves off from the relationship than to actually repair the relationship because it's difficult or break some protocol or some kind of something like that. That is just ultimately so hard.

So,  that sentence there, that "habitual complainer's repeat themselves without taking action. And that is exhausting" is really  a lot of the reason why I do this. So now back to the text.

Using the proceeding definition, I distinguish problem solving from complaining because problem solving seeks to resolve the issue. Even if the words are the same, there's a fundamental difference between expressing discontent without intending to act and expressing a grievance directly to someone who can do something about it or who can help figure out what to do. 

So that's, that's problem solving. And that sounds like complaining. It's like the same words and everything, but it's not the same intention. And the goal is to actually try to solve the problem. And that's the thing that is what we really want everybody to be doing. I want people to solve problems. I want to fix the things that are wrong with the world. And so the more that we can orient ourselves towards that
the better I think that it's just going to be for all of us and back to the text.

I make another key distinction between complaining and venting. Sometimes an incident and its related emotions are so current and overwhelming they distract you from paying attention to a current conversation. It can be important to share what's on your mind so that you and the person you're with have a mutual understanding of what each is thinking. This is venting. Sometimes without this, it's difficult to be present. The key here though, is that this can happen only once. If you repeat the issue at another time or to another person that's complaining. 

And so what I'm describing here is those situations when something has really aggravated you and you know, your mind can't stop spinning on it. And you're trying to pay attention, or you're trying to have dinner or you're being in a meeting or, you know, even just keep driving or whatever, but there's something that's just so annoying to you that it's, you know, taking over your whole brain. Meanwhile, the person on the other side is talking to you and they think that you're listening because you're not saying anything, and you know, they're right there next to you. And very little of what they're saying is actually getting through. I think those are situations where we're doing a disservice to the person that we're with and we're not really being present. And the only way for us to have really good, healthy relationships and to be solid in the world is to be present with each other as often as possible, as completely as we are capable of.

And so, I think it's very important to share when something has completely overtaken your brain and is making it difficult for you to concentrate. So that to me is why I find it very important to have venting as an option as something that is actually allowed here. However, remember the distinction: that can happen only once. If you are saying something and especially if you start off, not really being overwhelmed by anything and then while you're talking about it, it starts to work you up and now you're starting to feel it again? That's when you know, you're actually complaining. If you're not feeling that state of overwhelm at the beginning, but you do feel it by the end, that's a sure sign of a complaint that you worked herself up into that feeling as opposed to it coming at you from the outside.

And now back to the text.

The intention of problem solving is to resolve the issue. The intention of venting is to have a shared reality, so you can connect. The intention of complaining. Well, that's covered in the rest of this book. And this podcast. And the website. So, so the big takeaway, the goal of taking on a no complaining practice, also known as Going NoCo is to move away from unhealthy complaining and toward resolving the issues in your world.

And the goal for me of doing this project is to try to solve as many problems as possible and to try to make everyone's relationships as strong and healthy and caring and connected as possible. 

So I hope this definition helps ...

Values list and questions here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/vaztmu1e13lvgfl/CoreValues.pdf?dl=0

[TRANSCRIPT OF MAIN EPISODE]

Hi, friends. Cianna Stewart here from the No Complaining Project. It’s Wednesday, January 13. And while this is not a politics podcast, I need to acknowledge that  it’s been quite a week here in the United States. A lot of us are feeling a lot of things. And that’s ok. In fact we were talking last night with some friends about how it’s totally normal right now to not feel ok because so much around us right now is not ok.

So. Give yourself a break. Take a breath.

I’ve been thinking a lot about values. And about identity.

This ties in with what’s been happening around the country, and it also ties in with New Year’s Resolutions - can you believe that was less than 2 weeks ago?!?

How we approach goals and even which goals to choose depends on our values - or at least it should. Too often we set goals as if they happen in a vacuum, without taking a moment to think about what achieving them would say about who we are or want to be.

For example, let’s say you set a goal of climbing Mt. Everest. Or making 10x your current income. Or something else that would take a huge amount of work and focus and time. 

There’s no problem with setting this kind of goal - unless, say, you realize that your strongest identity is as a parent and your highest value is on quality time with your kids. Suddenly your goal is in conflict with your values and you probably need to rethink it.

Then again, somebody else could be a parent and this goal could be perfect. Say your highest value is on achievement and on being a role model for your kids about setting big goals and doing hard work. If that’s the case, then reaching the summit is a goal that’s totally in line with your values. No conflict there.

Your identity is formed around your values, whether or not you’ve ever taken the time to consciously identify them. It can be useful to think about your values to inform your goals, or at least you need to evaluate that your goals - and the person who you need to be in order to reach them - they’re not in conflict with your values.

Understanding your values will also help reinforce your “why” for whatever it is that you’re doing. (Actually, it will also help you understand why you are not doing something that otherwise seems good to do, like, why you’re actively resisting something.)

What kind of goals are we talking about? For example, my highest value is curiosity. My other important values are kindness, doing good in the world, being creative, being independent, being a maker and a doer.

So when I set my goals, I need to check that they don’t conflict with my values or I know (from experience) that they’ll fail. I’ll probably rebel or act out somehow and not complete my goal and then be at risk for getting down on myself for not achieving it even though I said that I want to. In those cases, I probably took on goals to please someone else without checking in to be sure that it’s something I really want (and that it’s in line with my values).

How I check is I ask myself: “If I am successful in this, what will change in my world? Who will I be?”

I also want to be sure to ask: “What will it take to achieve this goal? What impact will that process have on my life? Who do I need to be to do that process?”

If either of those “who will I be” questions is in conflict with my values, I’m in trouble. I need to step back and rethink my goals.

Taking the time to uncover your values is powerful. It can help get your entire life in alignment - and can reveal why something that is objectively good still doesn’t feel right to you. It can help clarify big life choices and help you make decisions about them.

For me, whenever I felt like my life was off-kilter or out of tune, I could think back and realize that at some point I started acting in ways that were in conflict with my values. Usually it wasn’t by a lot - or at least not at first. 

It’s like when I used to work in nonprofits and we would talk about agencies that were suffering from “mission creep.” You know what a mission is, right? Those mission statements that outline the goals and purposes of any nonprofit. These were places that started out with a really clear mission but then added a program that wasn’t 100% in line with what they did, because an opportunity came up or some funding or something. It was a close program, but it wasn’t exactly 100%. And then then they added another one that was close to that, and another and another - until they realized that they’d ended up devoting a lot of energy and resources to things that weren’t their core skill set or focused on their core clients, or otherwise were just pulling them away from their mission. 

I think about that a lot. I think it’s easy for many of us to just say yes to opportunities when they arise, or to be influenced by people around us, by what we’ve been told, to do things that are just a little out of character, or to do things just because we were invited to do them. And then we do that a little more, and a little more, and a little more, and eventually we find ourselves way over far away from where we started, doing things we never expected to do. When that happens, it’s on us to check in and see if that’s really who we are. It might be. These opportunities might actually reveal something that we care about that we never would have discovered if we followed our original path. Then again, we might find that we have turned into people we don’t recognize and never wanted to be, mostly a reflection of other people and other people’s desires, and not a reflection of who we are.

Knowing your core values can help keep you on course. They can also give you a through line if - like me - you’re someone who has an unconventional life path. My resume is peppered with all kinds of different jobs in different fields. But seen through the lens of my endless curiosity, my desire to make things and to help spread kindness and creativity, they make a lot more sense.

Once I figured out my core values, and to help me keep them in mind, I ended up playing around and turning them into personal taglines that I put on non-business business cards. Other uses for them (if you do them for yourself), you could use them on personal websites or dating profiles or just keep them as fun conversation starters when someone says, “tell me about yourself.”

For example, one of my go-to taglines is that I’m a promoter of curiosity and kindness. 

The other is that I’m super curious about nearly everything.

I’ve found that revisiting my values from time to time helps reinforce what I want to do in the world, who I want to surround myself with, and what I want to be remembered for after I’m gone. Often times, it means that I don’t actually change what I’m doing but I just understand better why I’m doing it, or it gives me a new way to think about it.

This New Year, reviewing my values helped me decide that I want to do more with the No Complaining Project because I’ve seen how it’s helped people and I’d like to help more.

And this week, holding my values in my mind is helping guide how I want to respond to what is going on in the world, specifically what’s going on in the US, how to talk about it, how to think about it. For me, I want to be sure that I stay curious and not shut down. I want to be kind, not cruel or divisive. And at the same time I want to do good in the world and I want to ta...

[TRANSCRIPT]

Hello, friends. It's the first week of 2021 and I thought I'd just take a moment to acknowledge the weirdness of trying to make resolutions given the strange world that we're in right now. Given that many of our resolutions hinge on planning, and the ability to plan is exactly what last year stripped away for so many of us, the vast majority of us, pretty much the whole world, and it’s still unclear if 2021 is going to be any more predictable, I thought I'd invite something a little bit different, something that can affect everything else in your world, and another kind of a resolution that I rarely hear about.

I know you’ve heard lots of talk about mindfulness from me and I’m sure from many other people in a wide array of fields. One of the core principles of mindfulness this idea of the “beginner's mind” as a key to everything. Today I’ll highlight that the basic foundation of beginner's mind is the ability to experience a sense of wonder.

So in addition to whatever else you're thinking of for 2021, I suggest having "invite wonder" as one of your resolutions. Particularly in this year where so many things are going to be the same or will be disappointing or will be hard, wonder can be a great counterpoint. But this year, more than most, you'll have to seek it out, to consciously cultivate it.

It's very easy, especially in our modern society, to fall into feeling jaded, into comparing to expectations, into routines that actually strip you of wonder because you stop paying attention.  

Often people feel a sense of wonder at seeing a place of great natural beauty for the first time, or through travel, or through experiencing other things that are new and surprising. This is finding the novelty from outside of themselves and that's usually an easy shortcut to wonder. 

But since this year we're still going to be restricted in travel, and you're going to be surrounded by familiar things (often overly familiar things that you have been stuck with for months) how do you actually invite wonder? You’re going to have to cultivate your mindset. Wonder is available to you, if you shift how you’re perceiving the world.

I heard a story about a Zen master whose primary practice was to pour tea every morning. He would do it the same way, in the same order, every morning, for many years. One time a student asked if he ever wanted to learn something new. The master replied yes, of course - but only after he’d learned everything there was to learn about pouring tea.

Back to this world and your situation in 2021. I have a few suggestions and ideas, and then I'm going to read you something that keeps playing in my mind anytime that I feel like I'm short on wonder.

I suggest taking some time to watch sunsets or the dawn. If you’re someone who usually pulls out your phone or a camera to take a photo, leave those devices at home and just watch the light change. Imprint it on your memory.

You could put on headphones and then close your eyes and listen closely to a piece of music that makes your heart swell, something that you know really well, and just completely lose yourself inside of the music. 

You can look closely at a photograph or a painting, or some other piece of art seeking out something that you hadn't previously noticed. Seek to discover something about the process of making it or something else about the medium that is new for you. 

You can engage in something ephemeral or with an element of chance, like creating art with sand or found leaves, or looking at snowflakes through a microscope, or growing plants from seed, or learning to forage, or learning the songs of birds in your area, and then go listening for them in the wild. 

You could even simply read a familiar book aloud if you haven’t done that before.

You can engage in anything with a sense of wonder, because it really depends on your perspective on it, not on the thing itself.

A good reminder of wonder for me has always been the opening of Bill Bryson's book, "A Short History of Nearly Everything." I read it many years ago and it's been echoing in my mind ever since. 

So I’m going to read you an excerpt of it. I invite you to practice listening with an open mind, free of expectation, and even free of previous experience. It’s a little beginner's mind practice.

"Why atoms take this trouble is a bit of a puzzle. Being you is not a gratifying experience at the atomic level. For all their devoted attention, your atoms don’t actually care about you—indeed, don’t even know that you are there. They don’t even know that they are there. They are mindless particles, after all, and not even themselves alive. (It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.) Yet somehow for the period of your existence they will answer to a single rigid impulse: to keep you you."

"This is decidedly odd because the atoms that so liberally and congenially flock together to form living things on Earth are exactly the same atoms that decline to do it elsewhere. Whatever else it may be, at the level of chemistry life is fantastically mundane: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, a little calcium, a dash of sulphur, a light dusting of other very ordinary elements—nothing you wouldn’t find in any ordinary pharmacy—and that’s all you need. The only thing special about the atoms that make you is that they make you. That is, of course, the miracle of life."

"But the fact that you have atoms and that they assemble in such a willing manner is only part of what got you here. To be here now, alive in the twenty-first century and smart enough to know it, you also had to be the beneficiary of an extraordinary string of biological good fortune. Survival on Earth is a surprisingly tricky business. Of the billions and billions of species of living things that have existed since the dawn of time, most—99.99 percent, it has been suggested—are no longer around. Life on Earth, you see, is not only brief but dismayingly tenuous. It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.

"The average species on Earth lasts for only about four million years, so if you wish to be around for billions of years, you must be as fickle as the atoms that made you. You must be prepared to change everything about yourself—shape, size, colour, species affiliation, everything—and to do so repeatedly. That’s much easier said than done, because the process of change is random. To get from “protoplasmal primordial atomic globule” (as Gilbert and Sullivan put it) to sentient upright modern human has required you to mutate new traits over and over in a precisely timely manner for an exceedingly long while. So at various periods over the last 3.8 billion years you have abhorred oxygen and then doted on it, g...

[TRANSCRIPT]

Hey, everyone. Cianna Stewart here with the No Complaining podcast. I'm recording this on December 29th of 2020. We are finally getting close to the end of this year and I don't know about you, but for me it can't come soon enough. 

Of course, cause it's December 29th, we are actually rolling into New Year’s, and traditionally this has been a day for a lot of people to take up the No Complaining pledge and to try to corral how they speak and how they think and reshape things for the better.

And I just want to offer that this has been a year of so many restrictions and so much  disruption to whatever any of us had planned. And it's really hard right now to predict the future. Also there's enough struggle going on right now that it starts to feel a little unreasonable to talk about doing another restriction. And so, for the first time, I'm going to recommend that maybe the No Complaining pledge is not the right thing to do this year. And instead to think about things that will help to make you feel grounded, to feel expansive and to generally feel better.

Of course, I do think that taking the no complaining pledge ultimately does do all of those things, but I wanted to give you something that's a little bit more concrete and also more directly focused on helping you feel grounded and expansive and feeling better.  

And the thing that I've found that can do that the most easily is to really engage in a gratitude practice. Now, I'm sure that many of you already have a practice in some way, but if it's not formalized, I would recommend making it more formal and more regular. And the twist that I'm going to put on it right now is to also make it more focused - and I'll go into that a little bit more in just a moment. 

Ultimately, for a formal and regular gratitude practice, I would recommend writing between one and three gratitudes a day. Writing down into a journal or a Google doc or pieces of paper that you put into the same jar, something that is special and consistent, something that if you ever wanted to go back to it, you could, but more than anything, it's something that will help to trigger you to go into that mental space when you take up the pen and the journal, or you open that doc, or you pull that, that jar out and you look at it. There’s something about the ritualizing of it that can help to get you into that head space. And so I'm also recommending that you write or type. 

I'm very fond of the physical act of writing. There is something about committing to words, the gratitude that you have in your head, which makes it much more of a commitment and helps you to get clarity on it because you actually have to write it down in some way. And typing is also great for many, many people. And it also reinforces that whatever it is that you're focusing on.

So there's a clarity that comes by forcing yourself to put it down into words.  And also, if you get into writing it with a pen or a pencil on paper, in a journal somewhere, there's something in the physical act of writing that helps to encode it more deeply into your mind and into your heart and your memory so that it has a more lasting effect. That said, sometimes it's easiest to make sure that you always have access to it. And for many of us, we live on our phones or on our computers. And so don't beat yourself up about the technique as much as find whichever way works for you and just do it consistently, find something that you can do easily and consistently. 

So I said to write down one to three gratitudes a day, and that range is really based on whether or not you're going to do a general gratitude practice or a focused gratitude practice.

I recommend using a "write down three things every day" approach when you're doing a much more general gratitude practice. It'll make you reach a little bit harder beyond the most obvious thing right in front of you, and that practice of pulling a little bit harder is actually very, very useful.

You can do that, you know, writing three things down in the morning as a way of setting your intentions for the day and getting you into that head space to start your day well. Or you can do it at the end of the day as a way to reflect back on what happened during the day and to help you ease into sleep. Either, either one is fine.

And I find that the start or end of the day is usually a more controlled time for many of us. But if you have to do it in the middle of the day, um, again, setting a time that works for you and finding a way for it to be consistent is the most important thing, is to make sure that it's something that you can maintain by building it in as a habit.

Now, if you want to supercharge it and go a little NoCo style on this, I suggest choosing a singular focus for your gratitude practice and to focus on what it is that you most complain about. So, whether it's you're complaining about your job or a spouse or a partner or your kids or the government or maybe your body, your health — whatever it is that you find yourself consistently complaining about, do a targeted gratitude practice, forcing yourself to write down one thing a day that you appreciate, and that you're grateful for about that specific thing. Now don't get snarky. Get real. And it's a way of expanding your attention beyond only the things that you are consistently complaining about. And sometimes it can simply be, you know, a much more surface thing at the beginning, especially if you're just at the beginning of doing this practice about your complaining target, but invite yourself to commit to doing this every day for 30 days, as a minimum. And if it still hasn't shifted, you can continue it after that. Ideally you actually do it all year long and get to the end of the year with an entire record of 365 things that you appreciate about whatever it is. Especially if it's something like your spouse or your kids or something that is really, really important to you, but is still something that's actually very frustrating to you at the same time.

So that would be my invitation for your supercharged approach to a non-resolution, a NoCo focused thing that isn't so restrictive. 

I hope that this helps you. And I hope that 2021 is a good year for all of you, for all of us. And I just want to say thank you very much for your attention over the amount of time that you've been here as part of our little NOCO family.

I am very, very grateful for you.

And I thank you for. Taking on this NoCo journey for yourself and for everyone in your life. And for inviting me in and allowing me to support you. Thank you very much. 

Happy New Year.

Make Peace With Your Mind by Mark Coleman

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the No Complaining Podcast where I'm going to try to help you move from feeling stuck and in a bad place to taking action and feeling more in control of your world. I'm going to give it a shot anyway. I'm Cianna Stewart, and I'm really grateful that you're here.

Several of you have written to me about, being really hard on yourself and complaining about yourself. A lot of stuff about dealing with the inner critic, about feeling really just horrible right now. And it's no surprise. I mean, the world is very, very stressful right now. And I'm going to talk today about how those two things are interrelated, and I'm gonna go a little bit into science of emotions and thoughts, and then how that relates to the inner critic. And I'm going to give you some tools that I hope will help you.

Let me start by saying that I can definitely relate to this feeling of being down and having your inner critic kind of having free rein right now. I've been definitely feeling my inner critic going into overdrive. I want to do that right by all of you. I also want to help fix whatever's going on in the world (which is a lot of things right now). And then feeling really frustrated and exhausted by everything all the time. And so then I feel like I'm not doing enough. And then my inner critic gets back down on me about not doing enough. And then we just go into a little spin. 

So that's kind of the place that I've been in, and it's actually included the push to try to continue to do this podcast. I'm very much aware of the gaps in my release schedule. And yet I still find that so many of you are listening and I'm really grateful for that and it shows me that there's something in here for you. And there's some way that this is I'm helpful to you, and that's really helpful to me. So thank you for listening and for continuing to gave me the feedback that there's something here. Doing this podcast is one of the things that I'm doing to counter that feeling of lack of productivity and lack of agency. And in a little bit, I'll go more into why that's important and how that particular thing helps. So thanks again. And now a little bit about the science. 

So, for anybody who knows me, you know that I read a lot all the time and I have just a love of science and I am always excited to learn new things. If you listen to anything even related, like even minorly related to, psychology, neuro-psychology, neurology - you'll know that there have been a lot of discoveries in the last few years, like the last 10 to 15 years, ever since the emergence of Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, fMRI, which gives a great insight into which parts of the brain are activated during certain activities. This kind of insight wasn't available before. And so a lot of the things that were taken as truth about the way that we experienced the world have been challenged. So these kinds of discoveries are really exciting. Some of them reinforce the things that we sensed or reveal more information about them. And some of them are really surprising. 

One of the things that is not surprising, and that just got reinforced, is the idea that we are affected by other people's stress.

So we have these things called mirror neurons, and what they do is to help to keep us in resonance with other people. This is really important because we, as a species needed others for survival. We are basically pack animals. And so you need to know what the group is feeling and thinking in order to be able to stay aligned with them in order to be able to stay part of the group. So mirror neurons developed in us that... basically it's not really allowing you to feel what somebody else is feeling, but it kind of is. What they do is they evoke in you feelings that are in resonance with other people. Right now two big things are going on that are deeply affecting our ability to regulate ourselves. One of them is that many of us are on our own during this pandemic, that we actually don't have that many people around us who we can mirror off of and who can affect our moods. Because we are alone, a lot of people are self isolating or they're isolating with just a handful of other people or maybe just one other person, and those people that you are interacting with are generally very stressed out. Just about everybody right now is stressed out. We are exhausted. We are dealing with things that are uncertain and in general humans don't do very well with uncertainty. 

And so when we are falling into resonance with other people, We are falling into resonance with stress or depression or fear. And all of these things, then, they start to build up inside our own bodies. And so that's really, really hard. So it's like, not only are you taking on whatever you're experiencing, but there is a way in which you are taking on what other people are experiencing as well. Some people do this more than others. Some people are more empathic than others. Some people shield themselves off so that they don't experience that, and that actually has its own level of stress on your body. The blocking of other people's experience is actually very, taxing all by itself. So when you are feeling in resonance with others in general, they're not feeding you positive things that can lift you out of your experience.

This is one of the ways that we generally heal ourselves when we're not in pandemic times, when we're not on lockdown. You know, when we go to dinner parties, we have conversations, we laugh with other people. When we go dancing. We do sports. We do other things that are very much the things that heal us. Some of it is about shifting those feelings inside ourselves and then shifting other people's in response or hanging out around with people who are in a better place than we are. And then having ourselves shift because we are feeling their generally good mood, their confidence, their, hope. When we are around those kinds of people, then we feel better and it's just a natural kind of thing. But a lot of us don't have that right now. So we're, so we're very internally disregulated as one of the terms for it is just this feeling of like, "I don't know how to control what is going on inside of me, and I don't know how to get out of it." And it's that other people are also feeling that level of stress. And so you're kind of surrounded. You're in this little soup of depression and fear and anxiety. 

And I just want you to know that you're not alone and that other people are feeling it as well. And maybe that doesn't make you feel better, but there is a way that the inner critic has a special mean part of it that's, you know, "You are the only one," or, "You're the worst," or, "You know everybody else is doing better." And there's a way that the inner critic isolates you. And so you kind of need to start to counteract that by actually noticing that other people around you are stressed.

And there's a way that you might be taking that on and absorbing it as well. And so try to learn how to differentiate, like what is yours and what is other people's, and start to create a little bit of space there so that you can ease your own burden. Only work on yourself.

One of the other things that affects our self esteem and our inner critic and our general ways of beating ourselves up is whether or not we feel like we have agency, whether or not we feel like we have any level of control over what is happening around us. And right now the way the world is with what's going on everywhere, you know from the pandemic to politics, to climate, to everything that's happening right now, it's very easy to feel like you have no agency, that you feel very ...

Ep 6: Lessons from RBG

Hello and welcome to the No Complaining Project, the podcast that tries to help you move from feeling stuck to taking action away from complaining and feeling powerless and towards owning your life and your choices. I call this “Going NoCo” - “NoCo” for No Complaining.” And you can find more at my website. Go noco.com. I'm Cianna Stewart.

Welcome to the reboot of the podcast, a kind of season two, if you will. I'm going to be trying out a new format. Before, I was trying to make it really perfect. And perfect is the enemy of done, for sure. But I'm going to try this. Since I last recorded, I have moved and I'm still figuring everything out over here in my new setup. So things are gonna be changing a little bit shifting a little bit, and I hope that you'll just stick around for the ride and that it still stays useful.

Also, before, I was trying to ignore what was happening in the world. And ultimately I think that that wasn't actually useful in my mind, it was an effort to be more evergreen or to have every one of the episodes actually be useful forever. But ultimately it's not very useful for me, or it's not very realistic for me to ignore what's going on in the world. And that was, frankly, one of the things that was kind of getting in my way for recording something new. So this is a change. I'm going to know that you are listening to it in a particular time and I'm recording it in a particular time and the world doesn't stop, it just keeps rolling along. So, that's the big shift that's going to be happening in this season.

I also asked the folks on the mailing list for input on what they'd like to know about anything that I could possibly help them with. And I want to thank everyone for sending me those responses and I will definitely get to them. There were some definite themes coming out and I thought it was pretty fascinating. As well, I do have some ideas on what could potentially be useful to you. So I am putting those episodes together.

But first: I'm recording this on Saturday, September 19th. And last night, the great Ruth Bader Ginsburg died.

And it's really hard for me to think about anything else. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the Notorious RBG had some lessons for us here at the No Complaining Project. She was certainly someone who took action. She saw how women were discriminated against and she didn't just complain about it, she challenged it. Again and again and again. Sometimes losing and more often winning.

She also had personal struggles. You know, she was a young mother when she entered the overwhelmingly male dominated Harvard law school. Her husband got ill not long after that, so that she was caring for him as well as her daughter while she was still pursuing her work. She battled cancer herself multiple times. And then, you know, this is all not to mention that she was of course, swimming upstream against over a hundred years of discriminatory case law, both as a lawyer and then later as a judge. And through it all, she kept going. More than that, she kept doing. 

And that's really what I want to think about today and how we can turn to the life of Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a source of inspiration for all of us. I mean, we can't all be RBG I'd offer that she was actually a singular human and no one will ever truly be like her, but the lesson from her and from her model, Thurgood Marshall, as well as so many others who have worked so hard in pursuit of something, is that you have to identify that something, whatever it is, something that makes the struggle worth it for you. For some it's fighting a particular form of injustice in the world. For others, it's raising a family or a garden. Still others live to create beauty or explore the cosmos or learn everything they can about ancient Mesopotamia. (And yeah, I put that in just because Mesopotamia is really fun to say.)

I mean, it's not like the honorable justice Ginsburg didn't experience hardship. She did. And she felt it. She just didn't let it stop her. And she didn't focus on that. She focused on what she had to do. She focused on her something, her sense of purpose.

So what is your greater purpose? What will make it worth it to fight through the internal and external obstacles in your way? What will make your today worth it? 

My greater purpose is to promote curiosity in service of creating a kinder and more just world. So even though I'm distressed, even though the past few months have been leaving me feeling exhausted, I thought about RBG this morning and I revisited my purpose today, and I recorded this episode for you. 

I would love to hear from you about how I can help you and what you think of this new format. Send an email to [email protected]. That's the letter “c” at gonoco.com. Or visit the No Complaining Project website, GoNoCo.com. 

Until next time: Be well, find your purpose, and Go NoCo.

————

Recorded and edited by Cianna Stewart

Music by Daniel Berkman

[TRANSCRIPT]

It's time for me to make it clear what all this is all about.

[MUSIC]

Hello! I’m Cianna Stewart, founder of the No Complaining Project. I define complaining as expressing grief, pain, or discontent without contributing to solving the problem. Many of us complain as an unconscious habit, and it’s hurting us and the people around us in more ways than we realize. My goal is to share tools and information to support you in changing your life and improving your relationships by shifting from complaining to taking action. Quitting complaining seems simple, but it goes deep, and once you stop, you’ll never want to start again. I hope you’ll join me in Going NoCo - NoCo for No Complaining. Your world will look different if you do.

[MUSIC]

Last weekend, when I was planning out this episode, it was Memorial Day weekend and I was looking around me at all of the States that were starting to open up, and the conversations that were happening on Facebook with people getting so frustrated that so many people were outside not wearing masks. And there were all these people angry, looking at photographs of parties and people gathering.

And this was overlapping with approaching a hundred thousand deaths in the United States from COVID-19 Looking at how people were talking about everything and how I was feeling at the time and the conversations that were happening online, I decided to focus the episode on judgment and blame, and to talk about how judgment is fueled by emotions. Sometimes it's masking those emotions. It's an easier thing to feel judgment of another person than it is to actually deal with, in this case, with the fear that most people were experiencing around this pandemic and still are experiencing. A very real fear, especially as we were climbing in our numbers. Still don't have a control on this thing. And yet, there are so many people who seem to be taking it so casually. And it's easier to feel judgment. It's more comfortable. But we can't address that judgment and you can't feel peace if you don't actually deal with the underlying emotions.

So that was my plan for this episode.

And then Chris Cooper, a birder in New York city was threatened by a white woman who decided to use her whiteness as a weapon against him. And that was the next thing that everybody was talking about in social media and everywhere.

And the conversation on judgment was still relevant, but with a slightly different focus. Now adding on the fact that the judgment that is the most fierce is one that points back to some kind of failing in yourself.

There are so many people judging that white woman, Amy Cooper, who haven't dealt with their own racism, their own ways of judging and taking advantage of their privilege when did they feel threatened. Again, we're still riding a fear.   She was feeling afraid because she has stereotypes about black men that she will not acknowledge, buried in her mind. But she clearly leveraged it when she made that call and threatened him with her whiteness.

And then, and then this week kept going. Trump and Twitter got into a battle because Twitter decided to fact check him. And Facebook said that it wouldn't fact check the president

And a democratic state representative learned that a Republican colleague had tested positive for COVID-19 and the other Republicans kept it silent. And when he flew into a rage and recorded himself. And, and again, listening to that recording, I could, you know, obviously he's really, really angry. And you can also hear so much fear. And this feeling of feeling betrayed. Having done so much work, thinking of these people as his colleagues and then being betrayed by them, and having his life and so many other people's lives, put in jeopardy for partisan reasons.

And then there was more. And then... Still this week, our short week. Longest short week. Then George Floyd was killed by a cop kneeling on his neck for nine minutes while he was pleading for his life.

And, and then that anger just turns into rage. And there is so much fear. And there's so much betrayal. A new level of betrayal.

And so now it feels like the thing that I need to share with you here is that the true goal of doing all of this work is to move from complaining to taking action. To taking responsibility. Not just wringing hands and wondering why this is happening and feeling despair and giving up. It's actually to start getting out there. To get educated and teaching. To support people who are doing the work. To protest. To vote. To give money. To do what you can to make the world better.

I'm devoted to doing what I can to making this world more kind and more just. That's what the no complaining project is about. It's that complaining isn't enough. It's that you have to do something. You have to take action. You have to take responsibility. You have to own your part in everything. To recognize and to, to be an active agent in your own life, and to do what you can to shape the world into what you want it to be.

It's not time for complaining. It's time for action.

[MUSIC]

Thank you for choosing the podcast for the No Complaining Project.

It was written, recorded, and edited by me, Cianna Stewart.

All our music is by the multi-talented Daniel Berkman. Find him on Bandcamp.

The transcript is in the show notes, and you can find more tips and links to my book at GoNoCo.com. That’s G-O-N-O-C-O.com. 

Thank you for giving the gift of No Complaining to yourself and to the people around you. 

Until next time, Go NoCo!

[MUSIC]

I don’t know… It’s just… It’s like I just see all these people doing all these things and then I just can’t do anything and… What’s wrong with me?

[MUSIC]

Hello! I’m Cianna Stewart, founder of the No Complaining Project.

I define complaining as expressing grief, pain, or discontent without contributing to solving the problem. Many of us complain as an unconscious habit, and it’s hurting us and the people around us in more ways that we realize.

My goal is to share tools and information to support you in changing your life and improving your relationships by shifting from complaining to taking action.

Quitting complaining seems simple, but it goes deep, and once you stop, you’ll never want to start again.

I hope you’ll join me in Going NoCo - NoCo for No Complaining. Your world will look different if you do.

[MUSIC]

Today I want to talk with you about comparisonitis.

When I was deep in the process of breaking down the root causes and different forms of complaining, I suddenly realized that nearly all complaints arose from comparing reality to something else. That led me to become more curious about the impact of making comparisons. Some are harmful, and some are useful. I’m going to be covering different angles on this topic multiple times over the course of this podcast. For today, though, I’m going to focus on one particular aspect that’s very present as we’re all trying to navigate the new social constructs brought about by this pandemic.

[BREAK]

We’re all stuck at home, separated from each other. And since we don’t have in-person gatherings, the primary way that many of us are trying to stay connected with our friends is through social media. To be clear: I am a fan of social media. I have been using Twitter since 2007 and got on Facebook the moment it expanded beyond colleges. I tend to sign up and at least try out just about every platform when it emerges. As an early Internet user, I evangelized its power to connect us all regardless of geography. I completely embrace technology and marvel at how much it’s expanded my world. I’m talking with you through a podcast. All this is amazing!

At the same time, I am also aware of the pitfalls, of all the cracks that are showing in our attempts at human interactions mediated by screens and electrons.

When we are connecting with each other in brief snippets online, we curate what we show to the world. Others are doing this, too, but we don’t think about that. Instead, we form our impression of another person’s entire life and state of mind through what they’re posting. And what we see others doing is affecting how we feel about ourselves. I think about all those early posts where people bragged that they were going to use all this free time to finally write that novel or learn a new language or go back that instrument they used to play. My feeds are still filled with photos from people who are proud of their latest handmade loaf of bread or the vegetables growing in their garden. Everyone is sharing videos that are creative, funny, inspiring, heartfelt.

And yet, when I talk with people one-on-one, I hear a different story. Early in this pandemic they were confused, scared, anxious. Some people got bored. Some got lonely. Some people lost work and others became essential. More recently, people are stressed, exhausted, angry, and, if anything, more anxious than before about how long all this is going to last.

The disconnect between the public presentation and private confessions is stark.

Yes, I know that some people have been willing to share their stories in public. And I also know that not everyone is having a hard time. But the vast majority of people are struggling in some way, and that number is growing.

Before I continue, you should know that I’m of the opinion that we are going to be dealing with this particular virus for a long time, at least for many more months, if not years. In addition to the devastating human toll, we are going to be feeling economic and social consequences that will extend beyond that future horizon when we have a vaccine and have this disease under control.

I say this because I think we all need to figure out a way to keep ourselves mentally and emotionally healthy through all this, a way to make this actually sustainable.

And we are not going to do well if we keep getting stuck in comparisons.

[BREAK]

I’m sure you’ve heard the saying, “Don’t compare your insides to someone else’s outsides.” That blew my mind when I first heard it. It reminds you that when you compare yourself to someone else, it’s totally imbalanced, that you are always carrying what goes on in your mind, all your insecurities and mistakes, your unfinished projects, your failed intentions. And when you look at others, you see only what they choose to present to you, whether that’s in real life or online. You see only what they’ve selected to reveal, the completed projects, the triumphs they want to share, the memorable moments. So it’s never fair.

This is especially true when you’re comparing yourself to someone you consider “better” than you are. Or, in this current situation, someone who’s “doing shelter in place better” than you are. You’re sitting there scrolling through Facebook or Instagram or Tik Tok and you see all these creative videos and people really showing up for others, and you’re distinctly aware that you’re once again sitting there in your PJs because you have nowhere to go, and you have no creative thoughts because you’re stressed about how you’re going to pay your bills, or you’re afraid for your own health, or you’re feeling a weird combination of guilty and grateful to have work when so many others have lost their job.

These comparisons will make you judge yourself harshly. Your inner critic will start to have a hay day. It starts pointing out all your flaws and weaknesses, challenging your self-worth. No matter where this voice comes from and whether or not it’s right, it feels horrible and, left unchecked, can send you into a spiral of insecurity and self-hatred.

In normal times, when we go about our days, we encounter all kinds of people and  situations that (at least hopefully) give us the sense that we’re included. We get little reassurances of belonging through brief interactions like smiles when we greet someone, get invited to an event, or even just getting casually asked to give our opinion about something. These days most of those things are gone. Smiles are covered by masks. There are no events to attend. And when you have to make an appointment for every interaction, then nothing feels truly casual.

It’s really hard to stay centered and calm when you have so little positive feedback, when the only voice commenting on how you’re doing each day is that little bully that lives inside your head. It’s easy to become unmoored, at risk of doubting whether anyone wants us around. You compare yourself to all those successful, creative people online and find yourself lacking.

You might think that you should just stop making comparisons, but it’s not that easy. Our brains automatically catalog and rank things out in the world. It’s how we make sense of the incredibly vast amount of information that comes at us every day. To survive, we have to be able to sort through friend or foe, food or poison, worth the effort or not. You’re never going to stop doing that.

So instead, we need to focus on how to manage our stress, live with the inner critic and to use comparisons in a healthy way.

[BREAK]

For me, my comparisonitis gets triggered when I see people accomplishing things that I think I should be doing. Every post just reminds me of some half-started project or a course that I stopped taking...