Have you ever tried to convince yourself you shouldn’t be upset, while still feeling completely resentful underneath? This week, I answer a Coaching Hotline question from a listener who feels frustrated that people attend her events less often than she attends theirs. I explore why resentment often comes from treating your assumptions about other people’s expectations as facts, why you can’t coach yourself around a circumstance that is actually a thought, and how getting clear on what is really happening is the first step to changing the way you feel.
Welcome to Unf*ck Your Brain, I’m your host, Kara Loewentheil, Master Certified Coach and Founder of the School of New Feminist Thought. I’m here to help you turn down your anxiety, turn up your confidence and create a life on your own terms, one that you’re truly excited to live. Let’s go.
Welcome to this week’s coaching hotline episode where I answer real questions from real listeners and coach you from afar. If you want to submit your question for consideration, go to unfuckyourbrain.com/coachinghotline, all one word, or text your email to +1 (347) 997-1784 and when you get prompted for the code word, it’s coaching hotline, all one word. Let’s get into this week’s questions.
So here’s the question, and I think a lot of you, you won’t necessarily relate to the exact particulars of this, but you will really relate to the emotional underpinnings. “I host concerts at my home for traveling musicians. I invite about 100 people and usually get 30 or 40 to attend. I am used to the numbers and don’t stress about that. What I keep getting mad about is people who expect me to come to all their events and never come to mine. I know objectively where to go here, but it’s so hard to do emotionally. How can I ladder here to a place where I still invite all the people, but don’t get mad at that small subset? “
So number one, I’m just going to call this listener and all of you out on this because I see this all the time. We say, I know objectively or intellectually X, but it’s so hard Y, right? It’s like emotionally hard. It doesn’t do you a service to think about it this way because you set up this conflict in your mind between your thoughts and your emotions as if they’re not related to each other, as if you’re supposed to like rationally convince yourself out of your emotions.
It makes it apples and oranges, so you can’t figure out how to resolve it. That’s not what’s happening. What this means is that you just still believe your thoughts that they shouldn’t do this. Do you see how much simpler that is? When you tell yourself, well, I know intellectually where to go, but it’s so hard emotionally to get there, you don’t know how to resolve that. How do we fix that problem? You have no idea. I have no idea. No one knows what to do about that.
When you reframe what’s happening as, I intellectually understand it’s a thought, but I still really believe the thought that they shouldn’t do this. Now at least we understand the situation. We understand that the problem is that you have a thought that is causing a negative emotion and right now you really believe it. That’s a clear articulation of your problem and now you know how to resolve it, which may just mean acknowledging that before you even do anything about it, or may mean working to shift the thought, but it just doesn’t serve you at all to tell yourself, I know intellectually or I know objectively, but like emotionally, I can’t get there.
That’s just not a helpful framing. And I see that all the time and I’ve been guilty of saying it myself in my own coaching sometimes when I’m getting coached, but it’s not a helpful setup. So, here’s the problem. One problem I think that’s going on here is that you’re prejudging what the outcome should be. You think the action should be invite everyone, don’t get mad. Maybe that is the outcome. Maybe the outcome is not invite those people. I don’t know yet. I just don’t want you to be in this situation. Focusing on the action line.
We can focus on the action line in an intentional model if we know exactly what action we want to take and why that’s what we want to do. But in this case, like if we know the action is go to the gym and we’ve decided for reasons we like that that’s what we want to do, right? And then we’re just trying to like reverse engineer it. But in this situation, we don’t know. What this action line should look like. What we know is that you think it’s a problem.
First of all, we don’t know what other people expect, right? You have the thought, other people expect me to come to their events and they never come to mine. Now, whenever we have an absolute thought like that, I would bet that if we dug into the circumstance, it would not be true that there’s a whole bunch of people who You know, 100% expect you to come to theirs and who never come to yours.
I suspect the truth would be somewhere more in the middle. Like some people have invited you to go to theirs and they’ve also come to yours sometimes or they haven’t come to yours, but also they don’t really care. Like we don’t know. We don’t know what the circumstances here at all, other than I invite 100 people, 30 or 40 come. That’s really the only circumstance. We have no idea how you know that people expect you to come to all their events. I don’t know that from this. Is it that they invite you? Well, you’re inviting lots of people who don’t come. Maybe they don’t expect you to come.
Okay. If a certain person has said to you explicitly, I expect you to come to all my events, and then they’ve never come to one of your events, that might be a circumstance, right? So you’re not clear on their circumstance at all and then you’re trying to coach yourself to be fine with a circumstance that’s actually a thought. You see what I’m saying? You think the circumstance is, there are people who expect me to come to all their events and never come to mine.
That’s not a circumstance. It’s way too vague. It involves other people’s expectations and without any basis, we don’t know what that means. So it’s not a circumstance. That’s actually your thought. Your thought is these people expect me to come to all their events and they never come to mine.
And it’s like you want to coach yourself to be OK with that circumstance, but that’s not a circumstance. That’s actually your thought. You might have multiple thoughts, so you may have another thought about why that’s a problem. I could have that thought. Somebody could say to me, I expect you to come to all my events and then never come to mine. Then that might be a circumstance, and then I still might just be like, Whatever, that’s fine. That’s their thought.
So there’s sort of two levels of coaching here. Yes, you can coach yourself about your thoughts about why it’s a problem if other people don’t come to your events and they invite you to theirs or however you know, they quote unquote expect you to. But really you have to start with understanding what the actual circumstance is. You don’t know what the circumstance is yet and that’s why you can’t do a thought ladder. You have to get really clear.
People expect me to come to all their events and never come to mine is a thought. Not a circumstance. Okay. So you’ve got to back your model up, get really clear on what the circumstance actually is, and then look at that thought and then you can also start looking at the thoughts about why that’s a problem, even if that were a true circumstance.