IF THEY WOULD JUST DO WHAT WE WANT
Welcome to The Small Jar, a podcast where we explore how to intentionally design the life that you want in the space between motherhood and the empty nest. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins. Episode number 12.
Hello, friends. There must be something in the water or maybe it's been a full moon this week or something, but people are just crazy. I don't know if you've ever felt this way, but sometimes it just feels like it's so hard to move anything forward.
When it comes to our own personal goals, it feels like the main obstacles are typically time, motivation, or money. But when it comes to anything that involves other people, it can be a slog to get things done or to come to an agreement. Have you ever noticed people have strong opinions? I don't even mean political opinions or opinions about COVID vaccines or masking, although clearly people have a lot of opinions about that.
I mean, people just have strong opinions about everything. The way we do things, the way things should be done, how we should talk to them, how we should treat them. And of course we have opinions right back.
We know exactly how things should be done, how people should talk to us and treat us. Sometimes we're even taken off guard by other people's opinions. Like we're immediately confused as to how the other person could possibly not agree with us and the way we see things.
I'm making it sound nice here, but the way this actually shows up for us is that we get pissed off. We get really angry or frustrated. We argue, we vent, we complain to other people, we spin, we think about all of the ways the other person is wrong.
When was the last time this happened to you? I'm actually willing to bet it's been within the past 24 to 48 hours. Seriously, even if you're not an argumentative person, I'm willing to bet that at some point over the past 24 or 48 hours, you've gotten a bit angry or frustrated with someone. Even if it was just in passing, someone who honked their horn at you or was taking too long in line, someone who was rude to you.
We tend to think that that person did something to us, made us frustrated or angry or disappointed. We're annoyed. We blame them.
We're absolutely sure that it's their fault that we feel frustrated. And of course, when we share the stories with our girlfriends, they totally agree with us. They back us up.
Your husband is definitely being unreasonable. Your son is absolutely in trouble. I can't believe he's doing that.
Of course you're angry. I was joking with a girlfriend the other day that this is exactly why we love our girlfriends. We go out to lunch or dinner and we talk about other people in our lives and they 100% back us up, get on our team.
It's amazing to vent with someone who agrees with you. You get to feel justified. You know that you're right.
They don't argue back. It feels so nice for a brief moment for someone to validate your frustration that completely. But as much as we love our girlfriends for empathizing with us, it doesn't solve the actual problem, which is that someone else is doing it wrong, that they pissed us off.
They put us in a position where we don't feel good. But if you take a step back and really think about what's going on, if we break it down, what's really happening is that another person did something or said something. They took an action or they said some words.
That's all that happened. Sit with that for just a minute. Think about the last time someone said something that made you frustrated or angry.
Can you bring yourself back to that situation and see the person speaking and witness that they're just saying words? Just sit with it. What were the words exactly? Not rephrased for impact, no exaggeration. What exactly did the person say? Now try to drop your story about the words.
Just hear them without thinking about how the words impact you or inconvenience you, without thinking about how the person is wrong or that they should have told you sooner or not at all, or all of the bad things that could happen because of what the person is saying. I want to work through a few examples of this because I think you might identify with them even if they don't directly apply to the specific challenges you face with other people. Let's start with a situation involving work, but this could apply equally to volunteer or religious settings or any other environment where we have to work in teams.
Here's the scenario. A woman named Rose works for a company and she's responsible for planning an event for shareholders. Another team within the company has helped with similar events in the past, and so she decides to ask the team to help with a few specific parts of the event.
Rose reaches out to the team to ask for their help, but she doesn't get the response she was hoping for. Some members of the team are willing to help, but there are two people in particular who say, we don't think we should get involved. This event isn't our responsibility and we don't agree with its purpose.
We shouldn't spend our time or resources on this project. Rose is angry when she leaves the meeting. She feels she's been working incredibly hard to make this event successful and that the other team should be invested in its success as well.
She believes the other group should be more supportive. She meets with another of her team members to share the update and they only make each other angrier. They talk about how generally unsupportive these particular people are and all of the ways they're wrong.
They feel their plans are stalled because they can't get the support of this other team. If you've ever worked in a team environment, you can probably relate. You work hard on a project, you take it as far as you can, or you think of an idea that could really be better executed if you had some help.
And when you reach out, you get a, no thanks, I don't want to get involved. Or I don't really like that idea. Your mind immediately goes to why the other people are wrong, how they're selfish, small-minded, lazy, unprofessional, making your job more difficult, not as committed as you are, not deserving of the salaries they're bringing in.
So many judgments, all because they said, no thanks, we don't think we should get involved. Ultimately they said no. They might've given reasons, but translated what they said was no.
And Rose thinks they're selfish, unsupportive, and wrong. She feels angry. And then from this place of anger, she talks behind their backs.
She may try to get a supervisor involved to complain about this group and how unprofessional they are. She doesn't consider that they may have valid reasons for saying no. And she spends time focusing on her frustration with this other team, rather than just looking for other solutions.
Can you relate? In almost every team environment in which I've worked, this basic dynamic emerges. We expect others to be more helpful and they're not. Parents associations, government councils, church groups, coworkers.
If only these other people would just do what we expect them to do, what we nicely ask them to do, life would be so much easier and less frustrating. Right? But the problem isn't that these other people don't do the right thing. The problem is that we expect them to do what we think is the right thing.
How much energy have you wasted on trying to get other people to follow your manual for them? It's exhausting, right? When I'm talking to clients about these types of challenges, they'll often come back with an argument that sounds something like, but it's not fair if I just let them get away with doing nothing. As a coach, I'm not in a position to argue with my clients about what's fair or unfair or what other people are really supposed to be doing. But what I do work with my clients to help them see is that when we blame our frustration on what other people do or don't do, we're always going to be at the mercy of what people do.
And as much as I wish this weren't the case, we have absolutely no control over what people do or how they show up. The reason we feel frustrated is because we observe what these people do when we think they're wrong and a bunch of other related judgments about who they are and why they're making our lives more difficult. So then we feel frustrated.
We waste our time complaining about them and potentially also undermining them. And guess what? In the process, we can often show up in a way that's wrong, meaning we're not supportive. We're selfish.
We're unprofessional and not a team player. So what's the alternative? Just turn the other cheek and let them get away with it? No, I get that it's difficult to be happy when you ask someone for help and support and you get a hard no. But here's the invitation.
When you feel yourself getting frustrated, just stop. Take a pause. Recognize that the reason you feel frustrated is because you anticipated a different outcome and things didn't turn out how you expected.
You anticipated a, yes, we'd love to help. And instead you got a, no thanks, not my project. So you're disappointed and maybe also frustrated for a moment.
Okay. Without needing to be happy about the fact that the other team isn't on board, Rose could take a breath and review her options. So it's a no from team A. Is there another team she could ask? Is this piece of the project important enough that it has to get done? Or could she let go of it? Could this piece of the project be designed in some way to make it more manageable? Is it important enough to approach a supervisor, not to undermine the other team, but simply to brainstorm how to proceed? Notice how it's almost impossible to take this constructive action when we're caught up in frustration and anger, because we feel so justified in our belief that the other people are wrong, selfish, lazy, unprofessional.
Rather than taking action from frustration and anger, can we take action from a feeling of curiosity and determination? One door closed, so what? What other doors are available to you? This simple mindset shift becomes possible when you're able to recognize that it's not the other people who are making you frustrated. It's simply your belief that they're wrong and they're making your life difficult as a result. Why give up your power to other people and what they do? Understand that we interpret the actions of others and we design our own emotional life and response.
Once we start to notice our own power, that this power exists in the curation of an intentional mindset, we can begin to curate our emotional responses in a way that serves us. This takes practice, but the first step is separating out what other people say and do from our own interpretation of those actions and words. I want to share another example that relates to our relationship with our children.
So here goes. Tom is a junior in high school and he says to his mother, I'm not going to college. So Tom's mother hears this and she thinks, absolutely not.
You have no choice. You're going to college. She's angry, furious even.
In her anger, she thinks about everything Tom's done to prepare for college up to this point, this next logical step in his life, and she's panicked that he's going to throw it all away. Her mind runs through a long list of fears and worst case scenarios that might happen if he doesn't go to college. In that moment, in her anger, she doesn't consider that there might be something going on with Tom that would make him say something like this.
Maybe he's stressed or afraid. Maybe he just needs his mom to hear him. Maybe he's just wanting to see how she would react.
But mom doesn't consider any of these reasons as she spins with anger and frustration. She immediately reacts and she disagrees with him. And this is what we do, right? We hear someone say words, we disagree, and we think about how they're wrong and we get angry.
We become offensive, meaning we go on the offense to try to fix the problem that we perceive. In this scenario, the mom wants to change Tom's mind. She argues because she can already see all of the reasons why it's a huge problem that Tom would even consider not going to college.
I don't know if you've ever experienced something like this with your child, maybe not about going to college, but about something else that they want to do or don't want to do. And you immediately go on the attack, tell them that they're wrong, argue with them. But I want to invite you to observe that in this example, as with the example with Rose and the other team, Tom said words and mom got angry.
In between the words and the anger, there's mom's interpretation of those words. She processes what Tom is saying as a huge problem. She's thinking he's wrong.
This is a problem and something really bad is going to happen if I don't fix this. As parents, let's have a little grace with ourselves. If this has been you in any situation, I get it.
I've been there too, because we've spent our children's entire lives protecting them, nurturing them and encouraging them, wanting the best for them. And the minute we perceive that what they want for themselves doesn't align with what we think is best for them, it's a problem. It's a huge problem and we want to fix it and change their minds, put them back on the right path.
Except have you noticed that it doesn't work as they get older? When they were little, we got to have our way. In retrospect, those were the days. We didn't have big life-impacting disagreements.
We might have disagreed with them about whether or not they were going to eat their vegetables or how quickly they were putting their shoes on. Although I remember being frustrated in those days about these relatively smaller problems. But it was easier not to extrapolate into the future how this problem would only get worse.
The boys took forever to take responsibility for putting their shoes on when they were little, but I don't think I ever said to myself, I hope his wife knows how to tie his shoes. As my friends would always tell me when my boys were really young, small children, small problems. Now with young adult and adult children, everything seems bigger.
The implications of the choices seem bigger because we're sending them out in the world and they've got to do all of this without us on their own. And damn it, we've worked really hard to send them off in the world to be successful. So if they don't agree with us about how to do that, if we don't perceive that they're listening to us and what we want for them and agreeing with us, because by the way, what we want for them is the best.
And why wouldn't they want the best for themselves? It's not for us. It's for them. We want them to be successful.
I heard a comedian recently joke that if you were applying for a job to be a parent and you were to ask the interviewer what you would get out of the job, since there was no pay, the comedian said, well, first you'd be judged for asking the question, but second, you'd get love for 13 years, 10 to 13 years. And then they would hate you for 10 to 35 years. Of course, none of us want a challenging relationship with our children, but it seems inevitable that the teen years are fraught with intense worry, stress and frustration for us as parents, because as much as we feel intense love and pride for our children, it seems there are an equal number of times when we're just out of our mind with worry and stress.
We just want them to be safe, to listen to us, to do what we say. So let's go back to this example. Tom says to his mom, I'm not going to college.
She says, oh, no, you didn't say that. And that is not an option. She's angry.
She proceeds to tell him all of the reasons he's wrong and that it's a problem. But here's what's crazy. In this immediate moment, Tom is still in high school.
None of the problems mom is envisioning are happening in this moment. But mom's mind is already on the worst case scenario. In her mind, he's already not going to college.
It's already happening. And whatever pain she's anticipating would come to him and to her if he chooses not to go to college. It's all happening in that moment for mom.
So guess who's creating the pain? All Tom has done is said some words. He said words that included, I may not go to college. And because of what mom made that mean, she went on the attack.
As with the previous example, I'm not saying that mom should just let Tom not go to college. But notice that when she reacts to his words with anger because she believes he's wrong, and it's a problem that he would even consider this path, she's bringing all of the pain of an imagined future into the present. And in that moment for mom, because she thinks Tom's the problem, the only way for her to fix the problem is to change his mind.
Her son's reaching out to her with a statement, and she has no idea where he's coming from or why he would say this. He's never mentioned it before. In fact, he's always talked about going to college.
They used to be on the same page about it. So he's coming to her with a statement that is out of left field. So it's no wonder she's surprised.
But when she goes on the offensive to try to change his mind without even understanding why he's saying what he's saying, mom's creating the pain for herself and potentially also for Tom. We do this so often with our children in so many different ways, particularly as they become young adults. Because what does it mean to be a good parent anyway? For each of us, it might be a little different, but I imagine for all of us, it includes some flavor of it's my responsibility to make this child a responsible, successful adult, someone who can support themselves.
And by the way, they should be happy and they should have friends and they shouldn't be lonely. It's kind of funny that what we want for our children, we may not even have for ourselves. We want our kids to be happy all the time and successful all the time.
But can we say that about ourselves? It's such a mind trip to realize how much pressure we put on our kids to be better than even we can be. It's not even possible to be happy all the time and successful all of the time. So one of the things I work with with my clients and I practice in my own life is that the moment I feel myself becoming frustrated and I get the urge to want to fix something, argue against something, I stop.
I invite my clients to stop and separate out the words and the actions from the story they've developed in their head about why it's such a problem. And sometimes you're going to decide it is a problem, that you do need to take steps to help or to change some circumstances. But before we can take constructive and productive action, we need to clean up our frustration and belief that it's someone else's responsibility to change so we can feel better.
Because as much as we can become justified in our belief that we're right, that the other team is selfish and that our children should go to college, and that it's a huge problem that anyone is different than we think they should be, as long as we think they are the reason we feel the way we do, we are completely powerless to feel better unless they change. If ultimately the event is not as successful because the team didn't help, or if Tom doesn't go to college, we get to feel disappointed about that, if it happens. But right now, in this moment, nothing has gone wrong other than we create pain for ourselves by holding on so tight to our belief that the other person is wrong.
In your life, is there someone who you believe is the reason you're so unhappy or worried or frustrated? A husband or ex-husband? A boss? Your child? Your mother? Our relationships with others give us an opportunity to explore how to take ownership of our emotional life in a way that's no longer dependent on others being different than they are. Because as much as I wish it weren't the case, we can't change other people, but we have the power to curate our own emotional life despite what other people do. If you're interested in learning how, I invite you to schedule a free call with me.
Until next time, friends. Thanks for listening to The Small Jar Podcast. Please visit us at www.thesmalljar.com, follow us on Facebook and Instagram at smalljarcoach, and subscribe to this podcast.
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