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Bite-sized chunks of wisdom about self-leadership for you to chew on.
Two Tools to Improve Your Relationships with Yourself and Others
Episode 11
Podcast Opening over Theme Music:
Hello and welcome. This is Kate's Nuggets, the podcast where I share bite-size nuggets of wisdom about self-leadership. I am your host, Kate Arms. I invite you to listen lightly, let these ideas wash over you. Take what you take and let the rest go. You can always come back and listen again.
Kate Arms:
Today I want to talk about two things that help every relationship.
These are ways of thinking about people. This also matters tremendously in your relationship with yourself. There are many people who argue that unless you learn to have this kind of relationship with yourself, you cannot have this kind of relationship with other people.
I believe that having this kind of relationship with yourself is one of the hardest things that we ever do. The way that we learn how to have this kind of relationship with ourselves is complicated and often we learn to treat some other person in our lives this way. We see how we're treating them, we see how they respond, and it makes it easier for us to treat ourselves that way.
As an example, I learned how to treat my children this way because I realized that it was what they needed from me. Learning to treat them this way happened in tandem with me realizing that I did a better job of treating them this way if I treated myself this way. So I would get a little better at treating them this way and that would help me get better at treating myself that way, and it escalated.
So what am I talking about? I am talking about two attitudes, two qualities of attention to bring to relationships.
The first is what Carl Rogers called unconditional positive regard. Unconditional positive regard means that we see the good in people even when they are not displaying it themselves. We trust that it is there. We know that the potential exists.
We cultivate a basic acceptance and support of a person. As a person. Because they are a person, they have inherent worth, dignity, and capabilities regardless of what they say or do.
We believe that the person has within themselves vast resources for self-understanding, for altering their self-concept, their attitudes, and their self-directed behavior.
We believe that the culture we create has an impact on whether they can access those resources they have within themselves. This trust that they can handle all sorts of things, that they have these resources within them is part of what creates a kind of psychological safety.
Our actions that come because of believing they have the resources within themselves also are part of creating psychological safety.
Believing they can change is crucial.
In particular, it's crucial if they are behaving in ways that we don't like that we are asking them to change, that we want them to change.
One of the very common dynamics I see all around me is people saying, "That person will never change" and then trying to change them. If you believe that somebody doesn't have the resources within themselves to adapt to a world that has different expectations than the ones they are currently meeting, there is no way to achieve that change.
The second quality that it's important to cultivate is unconditional compassionate indifference to the actions that they take. It's a way of saying, "I'm good no matter what you do."
It's not saying, "I don't care what you do." It's saying, "I'm good with whatever you do."
And the indifference is, look, if what you need to do for you means that we don't have the kind of relationship that I want to have with you, I'm going to be okay.
I'm going to do me anyway.
This allows us to believe that people can change without forcing them to change. To treat people with full respect for their own inner agency, which makes them feel better about themselves and which makes them more likely to want to spend time with us. That doesn't mean they will.
It allows us to want things on people's behalf without pressuring them.
It allows us to hold healthy boundaries even if we anticipate that holding that boundary will risk the relationship. We'll be okay with whatever they do when we hold what is important to us so strongly. It allows us to be of service in ways that truly help because we can focus on what kind of support are they asking for.
Often when we see someone suffering and we have a loving impulse towards them, that loving impulse is the emotional motivation to do something for them to alleviate their suffering.
Often what we do is solve the problem it's easy for us to solve rather than finding out what is actually the problem that they are having and whether they want us to help them solve it.
Part of the challenge for lots of people about cultivating these two qualities is that they feel uncomfortable and unfamiliar.
If our parents didn't treat us with a combination of unconditional positive regard and unconditional compassionate indifference to action, we almost certainly have a definition of love that is not in line with these two qualities of interaction.
We typically have a definition of love that is what our parents did for us, at least as a functional understanding.
As we get more self-aware, more questioning of our inner thoughts and processes and our assumptions, most of us realize we were raised by emotionally immature adults, some more emotionally immature than others, and that this emotional immaturity was manifested through action in the forms of pressure to do things we didn't want to do, pressure to change who we were or at least perceived pressure to change who we were.
Very few parents are parenting their young children at the times in their lives when they have cultivated within themselves the ease of unconditional compassionate indifference to action in the context of something as stressful as knowing that they are going to have an enormous impact on and be judged by how well they help these children develop.
And when you feel that kind of pressure in a relationship, it can be very difficult to convey, let alone to maintain feeling, unconditional positive regard.
As parents, we want our children to make our home lives kind of easy.
Parenting is hard work. The more our kids do what we would like them to do, the less hard the work is.
It is tempting to push them into doing what we want to do and not what they want to do, and they can find it very hard to believe that we have unconditional positive regard for them if we're trying so hard to change them, change the way they act.
How do we practice these very difficult things?
There may be relationships where you already have these qualities in practice.
For most people, the definition of close friends, the functional definition of close friends is a group of people who have a mutually shared experience of unconditional positive regard for each other, see the good in each other, see the potential in each other, and trust each other to have the resources to take care of themselves and to become who they want to be with this compassionate indifference to action.
Yeah. It would be super fun to hang out on Friday night and if you have to go to practice, you go to practice. I'll be fine.
The people we've been friends with for a very, very long time, that we've stuck it out with and we've seen them go through good times and bad times, and we've seen them at their best and we've seen them at their worst.
The reason we're still friends with them tends to have at its core, at their best we like them a lot, at their worst, we know that they have the resources within themselves to change their behavior, to change the way they feel.
We trust that and we do what we can to help them have access to it. And we don't walk away or force them if they're struggling, we just hang out. That's what we mean when we say, "I'm here for you."
We find it really hard, many of us to practice this with ourselves.
Most of us are either not aware of what's going on inside ourselves or too aware of our shortcomings. If we are shaming ourselves for our shortcomings and giving ourselves a to-do list of things that we should do to do better and be better, we are not regarding ourselves with unconditional positive regard.
We are not seeing the good in ourselves. We are not giving ourselves basic acceptance and support regardless of what we say or do, and we probably are not believing that we have within ourselves the resources for altering our conduct and our behavior.
At the same time, we are not accepting whatever it is that we are doing. We want things on our own behalf and then we pressure ourselves to do them.
We are often not in service to ourselves in the ways that would be truly, truly valuable. We are often in service to ourselves in the ways that are easy for us. And often what we really need is for us to learn new skills in how we treat ourselves, one of which is treating ourselves with unconditional compassionate indifference to action.
We need to learn to be okay with ourselves no matter what it is that we do.
The wild thing is that being okay with ourselves no matter what it is that we do takes pressure off us. When we take the pressure off ourselves, we relax, we deactivate our threat assessment systems and our stress response systems.
We stop fighting or running away from the things that will actually help us become the people we want to be. We stop running away from the learning of the skills and we become more creative, more resourceful, and we stop being frozen and stuck and we find that we have energy to move forward towards our deepest goals.
Cognitively, it sounds like a paradox that by accepting ourselves as we are, we create the possibility of change in a way that is easy and natural and inevitable, and yet this has been the human condition forever. When we stop striving, we start being in action with energy that doesn't feel forced.
Now I said, it can be hard to practice this with ourselves, and yet if we don't make this change with ourselves, it can be impossible to make this change with the people that we care the most about, so I encourage people to always have a practice. One of the best practices for cultivating unconditional positive regard for yourself is the Buddhist practice known as loving-kindness or Metta practice
And it is very simple.
You relax and you say to yourself, using your inner mind's voice, or you could do this as a journaling exercise or as a speaking it aloud exercise, phrases of good wishes for yourself, "May I be happy, may I be healthy, may I be safe, may I live at ease." And you repeat them.
The repeating them demonstrates that you have these wishes for yourself, allows you to access the part of you that does in fact have these wishes for yourself and makes it a more habitual attitude that you have towards yourself. Now these phrases, "May I be happy, be healthy, be safe, live at ease" are phrases that you can offer those wishes to anybody, and that is the loving-kindness practice.
The formal loving-kindness practice is you offer it to yourself, you offer it to someone you feel neutral about, you offer it to someone who's been kind to you, you offer it to someone who is your enemy or your opponent or someone you disagree with. It can be weird to practice this with regard to neutral people, the people that you meet at the grocery store, the people that you pass on the street.
It can also be the easiest place to practice because these are the people where if you do it wrong or it has a weird impact, it's not actually going to have much of an impact that you need to react to. It's hard to practice with loved ones. Our yearning for positive outcomes for our loved ones is what defines our love for them.
That is what love is. Love is wanting the best for people and being willing to put our bodies in action, in service of what is best for them. That is what love is. And when we love people, it can be very hard to be indifferent to their actions because we have to learn to live with unfulfilled yearning in ourselves.
Our yearning is our business.
It is not their business to stop us from yearning and make us less uncomfortable with the gap between what we want and what exists. That's our job.
It is also difficult to see the people in our closest relationships with unconditional positive regard when what they are choosing to do is stuff that causes us pain. The pain is our business. What we do with the pain is our business.
We need to handle it in psychologically healthy ways without making it their fault.
As soon as we make the way we feel somebody else's fault or somebody else's responsibility, we have ceased to regard them with indifference to what they do.
How do we practice compassionate indifference to the actions people take? Alfred Adler talked about the allocation of tasks. Each of us has tasks.
We have life tasks, work and relationships, taking care of ourselves. Those are our tasks, and each person has their own tasks. Each person is responsible for their own tasks and each person is responsible for the judgements that they make about the rest of the world. The judgements that they make about the rest of the world are part of the information that people are gathering with which to decide how to accomplish their own tasks.
When I see how my children are behaving and I judge that as pro-social behavior or anti-social behavior, rather than immediately thinking, "Oh, my children are misbehaving, I have to punish them," it serves us all if I say, "Oh, my yearning for my children is that they behave differently.
Because I believe that way of behaving will not serve their greater goals in the long run, because I believe that one of the goals that they have is good relationships with people, good connections with people and people generally liking them, people finding them easy to work with." Then I've identified what my task is.
My task is to own that this is what I yearn from for my children. Decide whether this is the moment that I'm going to tell my children this is what I yearn for for them or not. That's up to me. And then offer myself in service of their goals. Their goals are to have friends. They've told me, so I'm not making an assumption about that. So, I can see their behavior and I can say, "Hey, when you use that tone of voice with your friend, the look on his face made me think that it hurt his feelings.
How can I help you make him feel better? Would you like to make him feel better? I can offer myself in service, and then unconditional compassionate indifference to action is if they say, "No, I don't want to do anything about that." At least for now, I let it go. There will be more opportunities.
I trust that they have the resources within them to change how they behave, and I've given them a little bit of information that they might use to change.
That was my job. That's all I can do.
It's all it's worth me spending energy to do because I can't actually do anything more without starting to treat them in a way that makes it less likely they will have access to their own inner resources.
Many years ago, a friend of mine shared with me a three-sentence phrase that really helped me start cultivating this allocation of tasks. It goes like this:
I am enough. I do enough. What anybody else thinks of me is none of my business.
I'll repeat that:
I am enough. I do enough. What anybody else thinks of me is none of my business.
I found that very useful in dealing with my own disappointment when people's actions made me feel uncomfortable, put distance in the relationship or consisted of some kind of judgment that I didn't want to hold about myself.
The other side of that, of course, is when someone is doing things or not doing things. If I'm finding myself being impatient or trying to change it or wishing they weren't, I have to remind myself that whether they act, learn, or change or not is their business, not my business. Tom Henderson, an InterPlay teacher, used to say, "We have to respect people's inner authority and not take it personally when they exercise it."
There you have it. Two qualities of relationship to cultivate with yourself and with other people.
Unconditional positive regard and unconditional compassionate indifference to action, and a handful of ways to practice.
I would love to hear how this impacts your life.
Email me at Kate@signalfirecoaching.com and let me know. Or visit me on social media. I'm Signal Fire Kate on Twitter and Instagram and Kate Arm's Coach on Facebook. Let me know what you're seeing happening in your life as you practice these things. Thank you.
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Here's to Thriving! Catch you next time.
Kate's Nuggets is a Signal Fire Coaching production. The music is adapted under license from Heroic Age by Kevin McLeod.