Episode 28 - Compassionate Curiosity
Episode 28 - Compassionate Curiosity
Welcome to the Seasons of Joy Podcast.
Over the last few weeks, I have been talking about self-awareness and the important role it plays in creating a life you love.
Choosing to create from compassionate curiosity and focusing only on what you can control.
Which is:
Yourself.
Your thoughts.
Your emotions.
Who you want to be and how you want to show up in the world.
What you put out into the world.
And ultimately your life experience.
As you become more self-aware, it is just as important to include self-acceptance.
This means not fighting against what is.
It can be easy to look at yourself and/or your life and feel frustrated, believing that it should be different than it is.
But the truth is, this holds you back from actually moving forward in your life.
Shaming, guilting or resisting where you are in your life’s journey will never take you where you want to go..
Byron Katie says something like this: every time you argue with reality you only lose 100% of the time.
We all do it at one time or another. But we can’t change the past. We have to move into acceptance if we ever want to create something different for ourselves.
Uncovering what you have been choosing to believe by default from a place of compassionate curiosity then taking responsibility for it, without shaming yourself or blaming others, and loving yourself through the process is what actually creates wanted change.
Creating powerful progress.
By bringing in a balance of self-awareness, self-accountability, and self-acceptance, I am going to call them three A’s, you are empowered to live with more intention.
This is true agency.
Choosing to create your own life experience when you decide you want to.
Now, too much of any one of these three A’s can be disempowering.
Too much self-awareness can lead to shame.
This leads us to believe that something is wrong with us.
We start looking for evidence of how terrible we are and then we beat ourselves up for it.
Too much self-acceptance leads us to blame other people because we believe that they are the reason for our problems.
We start looking for evidence that something is wrong with them.
However, taking self-accountability means we are taking responsibility for ourselves from a place of love.
It means being honest with ourselves.
Telling ourselves the whole truth.
The whole truth is, we are all humans who have human brains and we are all having this earthly experience.
It is full of contrasts and opposites which, if we allow it, will help us grow and become our best selves.
Striving for our divine potential.
It isn’t about perfection.
It is about progress by applying the 3 A’s - Awareness, Acceptance and Accountability.
So, I want to shift a bit now.
Everything I have been talking about - compassionate curiosity, awareness, acceptance, and accountability, doesn’t just apply to ourselves.
The work begins there but it doesn’t end there.
When we become more aware of ourselves, accepting of ourselves, and accountable for ourselves, it empowers us to do the same for others.
We can apply all of this to the relationships in our lives.
It is so easy to see what other people are doing wrong or how they should be different.
It is so easy to resist how other people are.
It is so easy to believe that they are the reason for our problems.
It is so easy to believe that our emotions are created by other people.
We create an idea or picture in our head of how someone else should behave like our husbands, our friends, or our bosses.
What our fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters should do.
Most of the time we don’t even realize that we are doing this.
We gather ideas of how people should be by observing the people around us, from our past, our families, the media, our teachers and friends, and our religious beliefs.
We take all of the information we have gathered and then we create in our minds instructions on how everyone should behave.
The problem with this is that when people don’t comply with our instructions we use that as a reason to be unhappy, frustrated, or angry.
We believe something is “wrong” with the other person or with our life because they are doing what we think they should not be doing.
We resist and push against the things outside of our control.
Many coaches call these sets of instructions we have for people manuals.
Most of the time these manuals are not small.
They are big and thick, full of how people should behave.
Think of the last appliance you purchased.
When you first bought it and had it installed, it came with an instruction manual.
This manual shows you how to operate the appliance.
It tells you how to clean and take care of it.
It tells you how to troubleshoot it.
But when it comes to the manuals we have for others, we don’t actually tell people about them.
We just believe that they should already know and understand what is in our manuals.
Even when we do share the information and we make requests of people, we allow their behavior to control our emotional lives.
We believe if they would behave differently then we could be happy.
But it is important to understand that we are all responsible for our own emotions.
When we try to delegate this to other people we create problems for ourselves and this can often create disconnection and distance in our relationships.
The best thing we can do is throw out the manuals that we have for others.
Just get rid of them!
Sometimes, I get push back from people when it comes to parenting or having employees.
It is true that we are responsible for them in some way but we can set expectations without having a manual.
When we have manuals, our emotions are tied to them.
For example, I can expect my teenager to come home before midnight and hold her accountable to that expectation. But if I choose to get frustrated or angry when she gets home late, I have a manual that says, my teenager should do what I expect of them. However, sometimes, our teenagers don’t do what we ask of them, right?
When I drop the manual, I keep the expectation of my teenager, but I don’t have to upset myself if or when they don’t follow it. This is a much more peaceful way to live.
When we can let go of the manuals we have for people, it allows us to show up with compassionate curiosity.
Just like the work you do with yourself, you can ask questions with curiosity in our relationships with others:
What could be going on for the other person?
Why does it make sense they did or said that thing?
What reasons could they have for showing up that way?
How do you want to feel?
What looks most like love for everyone in this story?
How would your life be different if you allowed people to be themselves?
Again, it isn’t about not having any expectations, it is about believing that someone should meet those expectations and when they don’t you hand your happiness over to someone else and suffer emotionally.
There is a big difference in pain and suffering.
It isn’t that you never will feel a negative emotion such as disappointment when an expectation isn’t meant.
Of course, you might.
You are human, not a robot.
You are meant to have and experience emotions.
Your body is designed to feel them.
It knows what to do with them.
Emotions, positive and negative, are part of the human experience.
However, resisting and pushing against how people are causes you to suffer.
When you allow others to be who they are, you will feel better.
This doesn’t mean you have to accept unacceptable behavior.
You may want to set up boundaries or to leave a relationship that is unhealthy or harmful.
But you don’t have to give the responsibility for your feelings to others.
When you take responsibility for yourself, you get to feel and experience what you want on your own terms, no matter what the other person chooses to say or do.
From that place, you can better access compassionate curiosity because you aren’t stuck in blaming others.
You can focus on who you want to be.
Love for everyone in the story, including yourself, is 100 % possible and it feels so much better.
When you can drop the manuals, we can invite the Savior into our story.
And He will meet us where we are and as we are in our story.
It doesn’t mean He will leave us that way.
He wants more for us.
He is the One that knows our potential perfectly.
He can help us go to places we didn’t know were possible.
Become more than we ever imagined.
He is the One who is perfectly compassionate and perfectly loving.
He will be our guide.
He will be our teacher.
What better course of study, in the classroom of life, on love and compassion than in our relationships with others?
They will stretch and refine us if we will let them.
But it begins with compassionate curiosity.
I have spent a lot of time discovering the manuals I have written for other people in my life.
There have been many.
I still have some but they are getting smaller.
One manual I have is for my husband.
It has definitely gotten smaller over the years.
I have thrown out many pages.
My husband loves sports.
I have mentioned that before.
He loves ALL sports.
I remember when we were first married he would turn on the TV right when we got home from church to catch the end of a game or something.
This was before DVR’s, which can I just say were the best invention and maybe saved our marriage.
I’m teasing but I say that because it was a real strain in our marriage.
I hated the sound of the crowd at a sporting event on TV.
I would hear it and just cringe.
I believed that my husband shouldn’t watch it right then.
We had just gotten home from church for heaven’s sake.
That isn’t what good Latter-day Saints did.
We were supposed to come home and continue feeling the Spirit.
We needed to do Sunday activities.
We needed to keep the Sabbath day holy.
So of course, I would feel frustrated and angry and then I would complain, get mad at him, or give him the silent treatment.
You can imagine that went over well.
It really invited the Spirit into our home.
That was the perfect Sunday activity and really fostered Sabbath day observance.
NOT.
I was not being compassionate or curious.
I was being judgemental.
The truth is he was an adult and he could watch sports if he wanted.
It really wasn’t my job to police him, scold him, or judge him.
None of those things helped me be who I wanted to be and I was blaming him for my frustration.
My behavior is what tainted my Sabbath day experience, not my husband watching sports.
Again, it wasn’t that I shouldn’t have made a request of him.
Of course, I could but I was showing up in a way that prevented me from communicating at my best.
It was my job to create my Sabbath experience.
It was my job to communicate and make a request.
My experience or my emotions were not his responsibility.
But I believed they were and so I was miserable.
Is there a relationship in your life that you are struggling with?
What does your manual look like for them?
What would it be like to let that person be themselves?
What would it be like to let them be themselves without it affecting your emotional health?
What if it isn’t the other person’s job to meet your needs or to help you feel good?
What if your happiness is your responsibility?
What is the upside to anger, resentment, hate or blame?
What is the downside to compassionate curiosity?
What would your life be like to make requests without it affecting your emotional well-being if they aren’t met?
These are powerful questions to ask yourself.
I invite you to consider them.
Thank you for listening.
Have a joyful week!!
Click on the link below to learn more about Seasons Coaching, Seasons of Joy Community Facebook Group as well as the An Awakening Retreat coming up in October.
