Spam Filter for Your Brain - Episode 7
Hey, I've got a question for you. This question could change your whole life. It's a powerful question that I have used in so many areas of my life. Every time something feels a little bit sticky or a little bit uncomfortable or a little bit like I might have screwed something up, this is the question that I keep coming back to and always brings me back to my true authenticity, my true mission, and my true sense of self. And that question is, what if nothing's gone wrong? Here we are so taught to beat ourselves up, to belittle ourselves, to question our own judgment, to defer to authority, to defer to anyone who is slightly more privileged than us. Be that men within a patriarchal society. It's a whole load of white, CIs, heteronormative hierarchies at play that defer to power within our decision-making capacity of what we should know about ourselves and about our own lives. And what I want you to keep bringing to invite you to keep bringing it home, too.
Every time something feels just a little bit icky, bring yourself back to that question. What if nothing's gone wrong here? What if it could be possible that things were unfolding just as they should, or just as they can, with the information that you knew in that moment, with the person that you are, with the situation that's in front of you, with the knowledge that you had? There is no situation where you should know more information, or you should have done things differently, or you should have behaved or responded or reacted in a different way because you didn't. It's probably in your interest to assume that most of the time you're trying your best with the things that you know. And what becomes even more liberating is when we start to look at other people around us like that as well. What if the people around us who we think I don't know are just being dicks? What if they're just trying their best too? Once we step down from our defensive position of needing to be right to ourselves more than anyone else, but also to other people, we have the potential and the possibility that maybe everyone's just trying their best. And I can tell you, my life got so much better when I stopped needing to be right. It's so liberating. It frees up so much more of my time when I have the potential inkling that someone else might have information that's just as valid as mine, an opinion that's just as valid as mine.
Have read something, heard something, thought something which is equally important, valid destroys my argument and turns me upside down. Being willing to change is one of the most important characteristics for you to be able to grow into someone who is constantly comfortable with yourself. So when you look at yourself with the possibility of change, you look at other people with the possibility of change. Suddenly everything stopped being so stuck and painful and stagnant thing. We're quite prone to looking at ourselves as being these full, rounded, wonderful human beings, whereas someone else is like they're just an angry person or they're just boring or they're just stressed all the time, or really high maintenance. It's like everybody else is in these static life states, but we're the ones who are fully evolved, thinking, rounded humans. But maybe everyone's just a whole load of mess and we're all trying our best and that's okay. So that's my little nugget for this week is leaving you with the possibility that what if everything's just okay and we're all trying our best to get by.
I hope that serves you. Please do drop me a little message with anything that that has been useful for or why you want to argue with me. Always welcome for that too. And I hope it's been useful. Have a beautiful week and don't forget to take some time out for some self care.
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