Hi guys! Welcome to episode 484 of the wildly successful lifestyle podcast! What’s going on? I hope you are spending a little time each day working on your mindset in some way. I know twice a week we do it together but the other days of the week need mindset work too. Maybe a 5-10 minute meditation or journaling, maybe just a 10 minute walk in nature. Something to help you be mindful for a little bit each day. It’s the law of compounding interest, it pays off big time.
How many of you guys have a thermostat somewhere in your house? All of you. I’ll just answer that for us. I have several different thermometers. The one that adjusts our heat and air, A couple food thermometers and we have human temperature thermometers that are digital. I remember growing up my parents would take our temperature with one that was basically a thin glass tube that was filled with mercury and it would rise or fall with our temperature. So if we had a fever it would rise and if we were feeling better it would lower.
So whatever the temperature of its environment the mercury would rise or fall with it, when conditions change it flows with it. Now unfortunately a lot of us operate like a thermometer…. Our self esteem rises and falls with the opinions of others.
Eric and I have been watching Ted Lasso and there’s a guy named Nate who is extremely affected by what others do or say about him. If it’s good he’s on cloud 9, but if it’s bad, he’s something different than cloud 9. They show him just kind of living off the highs of what people on social media were saying about him when it’s good but when they say negative things it just turns his world upside down, makes him miserable. And I have to say I can really relate. I’ve been there where when things are going good or someone has complemented my hair or outfit, I feel like I’m on cloud 9 but if I have a new hair color or cut and no one says anything I might think it must look terrible. I used to be really bad about it. I was basically operating like a thermometer. My mood would rise and fall depending on the temperature of the people around me. Meaning what other people thought about me meant a whole lot. Now. I was good at hiding it so people weren’t necessarily aware of it but it really affected me. And here’s the thing, not that people would even say mean things to me, I don’t generally invite that kind of attention, but if they simply didn’t complement me, I would create what they were thinking in my own head. And we know that isn’t good, not usually anyway. We are our own worst enemies when we try to mind read. We are our own worst enemies when we put weight at all into what other people think about us. Because we have no idea what their thinking and like Wayne Dyer always said what other people think about me is none of my business. I like that and I try to live by that. As I was thinking about this episode I thought back to how growing up we were trained very well to really care ONLY about what others thought. Everything from what I wore, how I wore my hair, what I talked about, who I spent time with, to how many hours I spent in religious service…we were constantly being measured and counseled and told how to be or act. Literally it didn’t matter who we WERE. It only mattered how we PRESENTED. As long as you presented according to their ideology, we were golden. Now not too many could actually live up to those rules without losing their mind or at the least sense of self. So in essence, We were taught to hide who we actually were so that we could be who they thought we should be. And how you presented better be what they wanted or you would get hauled into the back room for counsel. We were being conditioned to conform to someone else’s expectation irregardless of what we ourselves thought. We were taught that our worth depended on what other people thought. That’s a recipe for disaster on a personal level if you don’t eventually untrain that conditioning. It could cause you never to trust yourself, worse not even to think for yourself. Most of us know someone who is extremely insecure, they are often pretty miserable people because they have relinquished power over their own feelings. They have turned over to others the power to judge themselves. I think all of us to some level have been taught that we should conform in a way to what our society or culture expects in order to go along to get along. Do we have to conform to be an upstanding member of society? There’s something interesting about Mercury that I learned this week, so not only will it move with the environment but it also can remain separate from it. For instance, did you know mercury can’t be absorbed by a towel? I didn’t know that, not until recently. I watched an experiment where this person had a bowl full of mercury and they dropped several drops of red dye into the bowl, stirred it around with their hands, they had gloves on, so they stirred the red dye into the mercury and then they took a hand towel and that towel absorbed every bit of the red dye leaving the mercury completely unaffected. Minutes before The mercury had all this red dye mixed in but they were able to absorb all the red dye out of that liquid mercury, all the red dye was absorbed by that towel leaving the mercury completely unaffected. It was wild to watch.
The mercury and the red dye are separate elements even though you can mix them together. But when you put the towel in the bowl, it pulls all of the red dye out of the mercury completely.
We live in a world where the reality is other people live alongside of us. And we are glad that they do. And sometimes yeah, we are affected by others. I wish I could say I’m so strong that I’m not affected but that wouldn’t be true. We all are at one point or another affected by the conditions around us, but ultimately we do have the ability, every single one of us has the ability to stay true to who we are in spite of that. We have the ability to separate ourselves from the opinion of others. So as John Templeton says of course we want to be open enough to learn from others but make a commitment to stay in control about your feelings about yourself and your estimate of your worth. So remain in control of your own feelings even though there are other opinions swirling around you.
Eleanor Roosevelt said “Remember, no one can make you feel inferior without your consent”. Another quote I love is “whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man’s lap. What is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one’s self”. That’s the power we each have regardless of how you were conditioned, we all have been conditioned in some way which means we can be reconditioned. You as an adult can recondition if need be and that takes a lot of work, I know because I’m still reconditioning. It takes thought work. It takes awareness. It takes a commitment to yourself to be true to what you know in your heart is right irregardless if someone else disagrees. And look, we don’t have to do it alone, remember that.
When I was talking to Kevin my trainer about using the analogy of the red dye being completely absorbed by the towel leaving the mercury unaffected, he said “ok so the mercury is you, the red dye is the opinions of others…who or what is the towel? The question took me back a bit and as I thought about it, I looked at him and he smiled because he knew I knew what he was going to say… the towel is God taking the burden from us. And he said Exactly. That’s the most important part of the story. None of us can handle everything on our own, but some of us act like we have to but that is never true. I’m coming to know that and I hope you are too. Sometimes we just have to let the hard things be handled by our higher power, whatever you believe that to be.
My challenge to you this week is to consider the ways in which you have been taking on the weight of what other people think, you might ask yourself, hold on, What do I think? What feels right to me? Do you have your own back? Are you able to separate other people’s opinions from your own? It may feel heavy to do that especially if your conditioning is strong but when it feels too heavy, remember, you don’t have to carry that burden alone you can let some of that go to the Universe or God or whatever you believe to be your higher power. That is always available to every single one of us. Share this with 3 people who deserve to live true to who they are. I love you guys, I’ll talk to you in a few days!
