72: Solving people problems.
Today I am sharing a powerful tool for relationships - or what I like to call "people problems." And it's not only relationships, this can be useful for pretty much any problem where something or someone is making you miserable.
Key Takeaways:
We believe that our life experiences are simply observations about what is true in the world.
Positive relationships require us to own our own stories and manage our own emotional life.
Trying to be accommodating is not being accommodating. It's being manipulative.
When a story is highly charged, separate out the facts.
The stories that we tell ourselves become our manifest destiny.
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Links
Sound editing is provided by Erik Hulslander at hearnoevilmedia.com
Schedule a coaching consultation at https://www.linsibrownson.com/get-started
Transcript
You are listening to Be Brilliant in Your Business, the podcast for small business owners to be focused, energized and in charge as you build the business you love.
Hey, Mavericks. How you guys doing? Today we're talking about separating out the facts from the stories that we tell ourselves; About our business, about our lives, about ourselves and other people.
We are just full of stories. That's a human thing that we do.
So this idea, this tool, of separating the facts from our stories is a really useful one. Especially when it comes to solving problems that we really don't feel like we're in charge of solving.
This is really helpful for a lot of problems really, but I've been using this more frequently lately with my clients, because they've been bringing me lots of relationship problems - or we'll call them people problems. And relationships are really powerful area, they are one of the most challenging things, I think, to do personal development work on. And it's been really fun to do this with clients because they actually laugh at me when I bring this up and ask them to separate the facts from the stories of their life. It always takes people by surprise, because we don't think think about the experiences that we have as being a story. We think that what we say is just truth. We always think that we're just making observations about how life is, or how people are, or what happened in the past, right?
But these are stories that we tell ourselves, and they will always become our Manifest Destiny.
So we'll always create the results of the stories that we choose to tell. And sometimes our most painful stories are most emotionally charged stories are around relationships. And because our stories seem so real, we really struggle to break free of them and to get a handle on our own situation. So then, we just keep repeating that same experience creating those same results.
I bet you can think of someone, or maybe you've been someone, who just keeps having the same relationship over and over again, but with different people? A lot of us did this when we were dating. And some of us do it now. Or we know good friends who have done this, and we can see it, but they can't see it, of course.
But the same thing comes up with our client relationships. It comes up with business partnerships or collaborative partnerships. It comes up with our employees. It comes with the siblings and with in-laws; all the people in our life. We have these challenging experiences because we're wired for connection, and we really believe - we've actually been taught - that other people's opinions, that their words, and their actions are what create our feelings. They cause us to feel or act a certain way.
We have lots of stories about who people are supposed to be, and how they're supposed to behave. And then they don't behave that way. Then we have more stories about what that means...about us and about them, right? Relationships are tough because they require us to really take ownership of our own stories and of our own feelings. When what we're inclined to do instead, is the opposite. What we know how to do is to project our stuff out onto other people, and then make those people responsible for managing our emotional life.
But like I said, it's a manifest destiny of the stories that we tell. As long as we put other people in charge of our feelings, then the only way that we can feel how we want to feel is by getting other people to behave how we want them to behave. And most of us don't have a great success rate with that.
So story versus fact can really help us unwind from the relationships that really wind us up.
So I'm going to give you a client example. And I do have permission to share this, but for the purpose of this example, we're going to change my client's name, and we're gonna call her Leah. So Leah came to me recently and she was having a problem with a client of hers. She said, "my client keeps undermining me. And I'm getting really frustrated, and I just don't know what to do about it." So I asked Leah to tell me the details of the situation. And she did.
But what Leah couldn't see that, of course, I could see from the other side of it, was that interwoven with all of the facts that transpired, were a lot of thoughts. So Leah was telling me about how her client had a rude tone, how her client was purposefully going behind her back, how her client had accused her of things that she didn't do. She was giving me all these examples of how her client was really mistreating her. And then Leah said that she has tried to be professional, and she's tried to be accommodating. But all of these things that the client has done, have now stacked up to a point where she just can't take it anymore. And she's just so frustrated.
So based on this entire story, Leah's client was behaving pretty badly, right? She was causing Leah a lot of stress, a lot of negative emotion. And she was also dictating Leah's actions. Because, first, what Leah did was she reacted by trying to be accommodating and by trying to be professional. And if you guys have ever heard me talk about what it means to "try" to be something before, you know that "trying" is not doing!
She's trying to be accommodating, but what she's doing is thinking "My client sucks. Maybe if I act accommodating, I can get her to behave in a better way. Maybe I can get her to do the things that I want her to do so we can all get along and make this a good experience."
And I think if you've experienced this, and I'm sure that you have in some way, then you know the difference, right? You can feel it in your body when you're being accommodating, or when you're being professional, versus when you're trying to act accommodating or trying to act professional. Right? It's a very different feeling. And it wasn't working. So those were her first reactions to her clients behavior. And now her current actions, now she's decided that she has enough evidence, she has enough of a list to show that her client is undermining her...Now, the reaction she's having is that she wants to fight back in some way. She's trying to regain control, and that is why she's feeling so frustrated.
I'm breaking this down so that you can really see it, so that I can show it to you. But this is something that we all do, right? Leah wasn't being dramatic, Leah was just reacting in the normal way that people react when they don't recognize what's really going on underneath the surface. They don't recognize their own painful stories. And that's why coaching so helpful to step outside of that story and to get your power back and then decide what you want to do from a completely different energy. From a different place.
So I had asked Leah for the details. And what she gave me was mostly thoughts, and very few facts. So this is when I asked her to separate out the facts from the story.
And what I told her is that a fact is something that can be proven in a court of law. And this is when she laughed at me, because it sounds ridiculous. But it's so valuable. I told her to imagine that there was a video camera in the room with her recording the exact events that transpired that she was creating the story around. What specifically would we see on that video? If a group of people watch that same video? What would each one of them pull out and say, here's what happened. What did the client do? What did the client say? What did you say?
And it took us a few minutes for her to really separate out those facts, because she was really attached to the story and it really seemed like so many of her thoughts were facts, They seemed so true to her. So we kept talking through it, and pausing and looking at things, and really parsing out what was factual and then just knowing that the rest was all story, was all her thoughts.
And just the act of doing this, she began to really let it go. Her entire energy, her entire demeanor, shifted because she was removing the words that had created the emotional charge for her. And in doing that, then she started to notice that she was the one that created the emotional charge. Not the client, or the things that the client said or did.
And this was really powerful to recognize that the charge came from her, and also that she could release it so instantly. And once she did that, when she could separate those two, then she had the liberty to choose what came next. She could choose how she wanted to act instead of just reacting by believing that all of this was true, and that she had to act a certain way. Right?
So this is an example of how separating fact from story can really help you untangle your own painful thoughts. Because at this point, I'm not even saying that Leah isn't being undermined by her client. That's not the point. We're not trying to be right or wrong about the situation.
The point is for her to be in charge of her own thoughts, feelings and actions. Leah's story was putting her client in charge. And then she was reacting in ways that she didn't want to be. Specifically with this client, she was spending a lot of time and energy worrying about it. She was avoiding her client. She was avoiding taking charge of the situation at all. She was losing sleep over it, and then she wasn't able to show up for her business or for herself in the way that she wanted to. So Leah thought that her client kept undermining her, but she was actually undermining herself. Isn't that wild?
So, this week, I want you to look for this in your own life. Notice where you are really certain that something bad is happening to you. And then pause and give yourself a little bit of time to just separate out the facts from the story. I like to recommend that you actually write down your entire story, as raw and honest as you possibly can. Be completely compassionate, you're not judging or editing anything. Just write it out as it rings true for you, and then you can go back and look at it, and circle or highlight, or even just write out a list of only the facts and see what is different for you when you're able to separate out the facts from the story.
All right, you guys. I hope that this has been helpful. Use this in your relationships. You can use this in any problem, but I love this for relationship stuff. Have a fabulous week. If you want any more support or you want any help with this, please reach out. I am here for you anytime. I'll talk to you next week.
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