Hi guys! Welcome to Episode 542 of The Wildly Successful Lifestyle podcast! You are awesome for being here! Thank you for listening and sharing. The goal is to make the world a better place 10 minutes at a time, sometimes that’s all it takes! And We’re doing that together, you and me so thank you!
This last week I was talking to my big sister on the phone and she told me that she wasn’t feeling well and that she thought she had shingles again which to me didn’t make a lot of sense because you really very rare to get shingles twice, but she was convinced that she had shingles Which was making her miserable because if you’ve ever had shingles supposedly it’s the most miserable thing but as it turns out, she didn’t have shingles she must have gotten into fire ants or something like that and so immediately she felt much better knowing it wasn’t shingles and she and I both were celebrating the idea that she had gotten bitten by fire ants Instead of it being shingles. I laughed and sent her a text later and said look at us celebrating you getting bitten by fire ants perspective is a funny thing to which she laughed and said very true.
Our perception is what formulates our general idea about the world, about what’s going on at any given moment.
My sister’s perception that she had shingles was creating a very miserable situation that was almost unbearable for her. But as soon as she found out it was bites, not shingles, she felt a lot better pretty quickly. Her past experience with shingles caused her to slap a label fairly quickly on her current situation. The bites were in a similar location to the shingles, which added fuel to her labeling. And then all the fear and pain and misery she experienced the last time with shingles were being replayed in her mind so that now she was recreating those things with her language and labeling. Switching the diagnosis to fire ant bites changed her perspective immediately. Fire ants are annoying and can be painful but it’s temporary and a lot less loaded.
Our brains are designed to notice patterns. It kept our ancestors alive but it tends to cause us to wreak havoc on our day to day life. So my sister gets fire ant bites in the same location she had shingles years ago and her brain screams “shingles” due to pattern recognition and now she’s immediately worse off. Being aware of our pattern recognition helps us to step back and do a little deeper assessment of the situation.
My little sister Molly when she was younger, probably around 10. she, my dad and my brother-in-law got caught in a tornado while they were driving on the interstate and had to evacuate into a warehouse which I don’t know if that was safe, but they all were huddled into a bathroom in this warehouse and ended up being OK but Molly was traumatized. The tornado did not hit the building and things were fine But now every time there is a storm where there’s possible tornadoes Molly freaks out and watches five different news channels at once. she also calls everyone in the family and informs them of where they are in the pathway of the tornadoes getting everyone else worked up. Recently, She had my parents in the closet me in the half bath under my stairs and my big sister in her closet.
In her mind, every tornado situation is a crisis because that is what her brain tells her based on previous experience.
We do this in a lot of situations throughout the day. Maybe you’re in line at the grocery store and the cashier barely looks up and grunts a hellos, no smile nothing. Your brain trained by past experiences with friendly cashiers, labels this one as rude or having a bad attitude. So you respond curtly maybe even skip the thanks at the end. But what if they are exhausted from a double shift? Maybe they just got really bad news, maybe they are extra shy? Your pattern recognition pegged them as unfriendly and it shaped how you treated them, a little cooler, a little less patient when a little warmth might’ve flipped the whole vibe.
Maybe you move into a new area and the neighbor brings over cookies and waves every day, asking how your settling in but your brain burned by past “too friendly people” who turned out to be nosy or pushy or gossipy so you keep your distance, giving one word answers, maybe not even waving back at all. Your pattern recognition makes them out to be a possible threat so you keep them at arms length rather than being friendly back. We never know what’s going on in other peoples lives. We had a neighbor once who never waved, never said hello even when you would wave directly to them, We thought she was the worst person ever, come to find out, her son had killed himself in her bedroom and she is the one that found him and she has never been the same since. We would never have known that but another neighbor told us to explain why they seemed so rude.
Labels. Perceptions. Pattern recognitions. All are natural human tendencies for a brain left on auto pilot. Awareness allows you to recognize how the label is possibly making things worse or how the perception could be way off and how your prior experience could be the reason you are responding in the way you are.
The more aware you become, the more you see why the ideas we have about other people have more to do with us than the other person. Our worldview is a filter in which we see everything and everyone. Being aware of it allows us to take a step back and ask “is there another way I can look at this?” Or “Is it possible my worldview is skewing this?” Both of these questions allow for an awareness that there is more than one way to see anything.
My challenge to you today is to evaluate your worldview. Are there pattern recognitions you can notice for yourself? Is there anything you are labeling in a way that makes it seem worse? And could your perception be skewed by prior experience? We all do it. But like Wayne Dyer says “Change the way you look at things and the things you look at change.” Share this with 3 people who you label as awesome! I love you guys! I’ll talk to you in a few days!
