Spam Filter for Your Brain Episode 23
I normally try to make sure that I record all of my podcasts at home I'm in a nice, quiet environment, but there are some ridiculous squawking birds around me today and so I thought I would try recording outside and see if any of them pick up and transport you somewhere else. I hope it is enjoyable.
Today I wanted to talk a little bit about the power of radical responsibility.
If you have any sounds stuck in or unable to move forward towards your dreams or towards anything else in your life: work or with personal goals, relationship goals. Or maybe things just feel a little bit like you're trudging through the mud. Maybe you feel like you're doing everything right, but you're not getting the results that you want or need, or you just can't seem to make things shift. It's super frustrating and I wanted to share with you one of the only tricks that I have found to be a surefire way of getting me unstuck and moving me forward.
And this is the concept of radical responsibility. For me, radical responsibility looks like reining myself in whenever I begin to notice that I am looking toward other people or wanting them to change. When I start outsourcing my emotions to other people, I'm left kind of hoping that their values or their priorities just happen to align with mine. And of course, that's rarely the case.
You've probably had things like this before, and if you've not, then I promise it's not as easy as it sounds, but making it everyone else's fault can be really tempting because it means that we can just sit back and wait for life to improve. And actually, what happens when we're sitting back and we're waiting and we're kind of stuck in this place of hoping that they're going to do the thing that we were wanting them to. How often can you think of when you were just waiting around for someone else to say exactly the right words or do exactly the right thing, or behave in the way that you were magically hoping that they would? How many times that actually happened?
Normally, more often than not, for me personally, when I'm waiting for someone else to change, what I'm actually doing is running over my head how wrong they are, how wronged I am, how this situation really needs to be sorted out, specifically by them, how terrible it is for me. And I'm just taking myself further and further into the quicksand.
I think when we are waiting for that other person to make any kind of changes to make us feel okay, it's an incredibly disempowering place to be. I think about how often I hear the phrase "oh they just need to sort it out" as if other people are going to stop their own personal mission, or they're busy themselves or blaming other people themselves, to make sure that they were were doing well for you, that things were alined to your path. Everyone's got their own narrative going on and everyone is mostly their own main characters. So it's quite unlikely that they're going to stop what they're doing to check out what you were magically do or say or need from you.
And all the while that we're doing this, we're neutralizing our incapacity for change. So the most simple way that I have found out through all of my brainstorms and when I'm stuck in these kind of positions, is to ask myself the simple question of "whose story am I in?". Iy gets to the nub of the narrative quicker than anything else that I've found. Am I making this about them? What they said, what they did, or they need to do, how they should do things better? Or am I able to step back and pause and think about what my role was? Or what I could have said differently, or how I could be the agent for change here, how I could be the change that I want to see? That sounds a little bit familiar.
We quite often believe that it's easier to blame someone else and to kind of make them the villain in the story and ask to be the one who has been wronged or them to be the one who has wronged us. I just think of how many times I have heard people say "They just need to apologise" or "I'm just waiting for them to make the first move." But it just leaves our lives in the hands of people that we've already established are not 100% in alignment with how we think that things should have panned out. So it seems like a very strange choice of person to put in control of whether we're going to allow ourselves happiness or not.
So whenever I'm feeling like that, it is all one wrong or I'm feeling hurt, or I just feel like something needs to shift. The quickest way I have found to get things moving again is to get to this question "whose story in?". And I always find that this question brings me closer back to being the driver of my own life. The driver for my own destiny. I'm frankly not waiting for other people to pull their finger out.
So I think this question is useful for you, and I hope that you've had some of the wild bird chorus in the background.
Hopefully I'll see you next week.
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