“It’s not about you.”
That phrase rings true and is very helpful to remember when we are interacting with people or experiencing circumstances that are uncomfortable.
It’s a short reminder we can offer ourselves and others to fast-track calm and peace.
However, what isn’t talked about is the other side of the foundational concept.
In this episode, I dig into the flip side… the side where it is actually about you, 100% of the time… and share how we can utilize the flip side to improve and expand our wellbeing no matter what or who is happening around us.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
This transcript is auto-generated and may contain typos. Hi there. I'm Dr. Cari Wise, veterinarian, certified life coach and certified quantum human design specialist. If you're a veterinary professional looking to uplevel your life and your career, or maybe looking to go in an entirely new direction, then what I talk about here on the joyful D V M podcast is absolutely for you. Let's get started. Hello my friends. Welcome back to another episode of the joyful D V M podcast. Today I wanna spend a few minutes talking about a phrase that many of us have heard, a phrase that I actually hold near and dear to my heart, and one that I think that is we should all really work to remember, but we're not going to talk about just this phrase by itself. We're gonna talk about the other side of this phrase, which we never consider. The phrase I'm talking about is it's not about you. It's not about you. This is the phrase, this is the the sentence, the mantra that we can bring ourselves back to. Any time we're in a situation where we're interacting with another person who isn't behaving in a kind way, perhaps they're being defensive, perhaps they're flat out angry, perhaps they're expressing their emotion in any kind of way, frustration, sadness, grief, disappointment, whatever emotions they may be feeling, the way that they're interacting with you in those moments are always driven by the emotions. Remember, excuse me. Remember, action follows emotion. An emotion follows thought. You've often heard me talk about this as the think, feel, act cycle. And in talking about the think, feel, act cycle, it's important to remember exactly what it is. Every single one of us has thoughts. Those include our thoughts, opinions, beliefs, and conclusions. These are just the sentences, the bounce around in our minds. And those sentences create the emotions that we are experiencing. Even when we aren't aware exactly of what those sentences are, those emotions then drive our actions. And when we stack all of those things together, that creates our net emotional state. And our net emotional state then will drive our overall net actions. That includes our behaviors and our decisions. And so when we are interacting with other people, the way that we interact with them is a reflection of our emotional state. It's in a reflection of what is dominating our emotions in that moment. And so when we're interacting with clients who are frustrated or unhappy or grief stricken, however they're behaving, whatever words that they're choosing, whatever their body language and their tone and the words that they, they choose, all of that is simply a reflection of their emotion. And because you will never create their emotion, you're not responsible for their actions. This is why we say it's not about you, because it's not about you. If we think about a mindfulness model and their model, you are simply neutral. You're just a circumstance. The words that you spoke, the actions that you took, all of that is just neutral for anybody outside of you until they have a belief about it. And so when we are interacting with clients, they're having all kinds of thoughts, maybe about us, but also about their, their pets, about prices, about the 17 million other things going on in their lives. And together, all of those thoughts are creating the emotions that they're experiencing in that moment when they're interacting with you. And from that emotion, which you cannot predict and you cannot control, that is what then drives the way that they behave. My friends, it's never about you. So now that we understand that and you have a little bit more context about why people say it's not about you all the time, and it's not just to placate us, it is actually true. I want us to take a second to look at the other side of that same belief, because my friends, it's not about you, but at the same time, it's always about you 100% of the time. Now, what the heck do I mean by that? What I'm talking about is what's always about you is the way that you behave, the words that you choose, the decisions that you make, the tone of voice you use with a coworker or a client or your family and friends, the decisions that you make, your body language that's always about you. And it's really easy for us to forget this and to justify our actions and behaviors by blaming the actions and behaviors of other people around us. But my friends, it's never about them. When it comes to your behavior. This can be a little bit hard to hear because many of us spend time during our days feeling frustrated, lashing out, yelling, making snide comments, commiserating, gossiping, complaining, and things like that. Let's face it, our culture has taught us that that is an acceptable way to relieve stress. I don't think that it is. I think that the more that we actually allow ourselves to partake in those kinds of behaviors, we just simply keep stacking on the thought patterns that are creating the emotion that drives those behaviors in the first place. It does nothing to actually change our circumstances, but it has a huge contribution to decreasing our overall emotional wellbeing. So just like how the client behaves is never about you, the way you behave is always about you. And so we want to utilize the opportunity to just simply curiously explore the way that we behave as a way to understand the emotions that we're feeling, that are driving our experience. If we can understand the emotions that are underneath there, then we have the opportunity to explore the thought patterns that are creating them. And it's when we actually learn how to think intentionally for ourselves, moment by moment, something that I call leveraging the space. That's what makes all the difference in the world when it comes to changing your experience in your career and in your whole entire life. Now, I know, like I said, this can be a little bit hard to hear because we are very used to blaming other people for the way that we behave, for feeling justified in sniping at somebody or talking about somebody behind their back. And what I want you to really understand is that every time you do that, or every time that I do that, because we're humans and we do do this, but that every single time that we do that, it's never about the people that we're talking about or behaving badly toward. It's simply about us. It's about the unchecked story, the unchecked narrative that's bouncing around within our own minds, creating emotions of discomfort, driving actions that then reflect that discomfort in a way to try to offset the whole entire experience and by complaining, by pointing fingers, by being ugly to other people that does nothing to make us feel better. And quite the opposite. It gives our power away. It keeps us believing that before we can feel confident and happy and secure and peaceful and accepted, that the circumstances around circumstances around us have to line up. It keeps us trying to change the way that we feel by controlling the actions and outcomes of other people, things that we will never control. And as long as we keep trying to feel better by working harder or being better, we will continue to fall short of actually creating that emotional wellbeing that we so much desire. The emotional wellbeing that we experience my friends, is never reliant on other people, and it's never reliant on outcomes of any kind. It's not reliant on your actions. You can't do it right enough to create wellbeing for yourself because wellbeing is the emotion that comes from your belief system, not from your long held actions and behaviors and outcomes and achievements. We as a culture have this backwards and we keep teaching each other over and over and over to chase achievements in external validation. In order to feel good about ourselves, our academic systems are created to perpetuate this really dangerous belief system. Now, not on purpose, don't get me wrong. Academic programs are set up so so that you teach, you know, they teach information, we learn information, and there has to be a way to evaluate that. And the way that they've traditionally been set up is that they award grades, and those grades then reflect your performance. If you've been in education for a long time, you've got a lot of a lot of academic experience under your belt, you've earned a lot of degrees, you've gotten really good at being a student. So what that means is you've gotten really good at taking actions to receive the external validation that you're looking for in order to allow yourself to believe that you're good enough. As soon as we take away that means of external validation, we start looking for that external validation in places that it was never meant to be. And in all those places that we're looking, it's requiring a variable is something that we will never control. As we start to realize that we can't do it right enough to guarantee that our patients will get better, that clients are friendly, that our coworkers are respectful, then we start to turn on ourselves. We start to believe that there's something wrong with us. And as that judgment and shame starts to stack up, we begin to become defensive. We become gun shy, we become insecure, and through those types of emotions, we start to then lose patience with people around us because we're actually losing patience with ourselves. Through that, we become really hyper judgmental, judging everybody else's actions become really critical of their performance. We also drop into a pattern of perfectionism because we're still underneath it all, believing that if we can be perfect, then we can feel good. And my friends, we've got it all backwards. We do not need to be perfect to be able to feel good. And quite honestly, perfection is something that we can't actually define. So it's also something we can never attain. Instead, all we have to do is just recognize that each and every one of us are simply doing the best that we can. Every human on this planet is doing the best that we can. And if we can approach each other with compassion, then there's no need for judgment at all. If we release judgment from our arsenal, how does the day change? Well, it certainly becomes a whole lot easier to navigate. And as we are able to anchor ourselves in compassion, we can watch those people around us who are interacting with us from their negative emotion, who perhaps are being disrespectful and angry and mean, and we can keep reminding ourselves it's not about me. Whatever they're going through is only about them, and we can watch how they behave without taking it personally, without making it mean anything about us. It doesn't have to ruin or even impact our days. And on the flip side of that, we also, through compassion, can recognize that when we behave in a way that we aren't proud of, when we snipe at somebody, when we gossip about somebody, when we point blame, when we become angry and we lose our cool, we can take a minute to be compassionate toward ourselves, allow ourselves to recognize that emotionally we're way more uncomfortable than we even realized, and that we're taking it out on the people around us, which actually isn't gonna make it better at all. Through that compassion, we can then become curious and we can start to investigate what are the patterns of belief through which I'm living my life? Because as we start to rewrite those patterns of belief, we can change not only the way we behave, but more importantly the way that we feel in advance. And that's the most important work that any of us will ever do. So the next time you interact with somebody who's completely losing their shit, I want you to remember, yes, it's not about you. And then at the same time, I want you to remind yourself that the way that you behave in your response is only about you. They can behave however they're gonna behave, but that does not mean that you have to meet them where they are in your engagement and interaction with them. On the other side, you can still show up as the kind, compassionate, curious, and understanding person that you are, no matter how anybody else interacts in this world. And when you put yourself in a place mentally through your intentional thinking, by leveraging the space to be able to create the emotion for yourself in any situation to show up as your highest version of you, your entire life experience will change for the better. So just something for you to consider this week as you go through. Have a wonderful week, and I'll see you soon. Bye for now.