Read Nothing Changes Until You Do: A Guide to Self-Compassion and Getting Out of Your Own Way Online
Authors: Mike Robbins
Tags: #Self-Help, #General
This is also true when the difficult experience is something that someone close to us is going through. Talking to them about it and supporting them can be tricky for different reasons—the nature of our relationship, their personality, or what type of support they want or need (which we may or may not know specifically). However, the biggest factor has to do with us—our awareness, empathy, and willingness to engage. While of course we want to respect their process, too often we make erroneous assumptions about what will best support them or we avoid engaging with them because we’re not sure how to handle it (or because what they’re going through is something we can’t relate to).
When I was in seventh grade, my good friend Brian’s dad died. I don’t even know how old his dad was—but he wasn’t an old man, he wasn’t sick, he just had a heart attack and died one night. It was sad, scary, and confusing for me, especially at 13 years old, to think about someone’s parent dying. While it wasn’t the first time I’d experienced death, it was one of the first times a close friend of mine had lost a parent and it was hard for me to comprehend. I felt for Brian and his family, and couldn’t imagine what he was going through. It also scared me as I thought about my own parents dying and what that would be like—although I did everything I could not to “go there,” since at that age thinking of my mom or my dad dying was beyond terrifying.
Brian was out of school for a little while and when he came back, I didn’t really know what to say to him. I felt uncomfortable being around him because I assumed he was upset and grieving the loss of his father. However, not knowing what that felt like and not wanting to say the wrong thing, I mostly avoided him. The few times we did talk, I tried to keep the conversation light and talk about relatively positive and superficial things so as not to upset him.
About a week or so after Brian came back to school, he pulled me aside to talk.
He said, “Mike, you haven’t said anything about my dad or asked me how I’m doing since he died.”
“Wow, Brian,” I said. “I’m really sorry. I didn’t know what to say.”
He looked me square in the eyes and said, “Well, you could’ve just said that.”
While this conversation was difficult and uncomfortable, and I walked away from it feeling guilty and embarrassed, I’m so grateful that Brian had the awareness and the courage to say that to me—quite an important life lesson in seventh grade. His humbling feedback taught me that it’s more important to say something and to let people know we care, than it is to say the “right” thing. I’m grateful to have learned that at such a young age, although there are certain times and situations where I still have to remind myself about this.
Life can get messy and things happen that we’re not sure how to handle. We aren’t supposed to have it all figured out or know the “right” thing to say in every situation. The important thing to remember is that when we’re willing to be real about the tough stuff that happens, we give ourselves the opportunity to learn, heal, grow, and connect—all things that are fundamentally important to the journey of life.
I had a simple but powerful conversation with a cabdriver a few years back that had a profound impact on me. I was in Houston, Texas, on my way back to the airport to fly home after speaking at a conference. The driver and I began talking. He had a beautiful accent. Based on how he looked and sounded, I assumed he was from somewhere in Africa, but I couldn’t tell exactly where. It didn’t come up in what we were talking about, so I didn’t ask.
Right before we got to the airport, however, there was a pause in our conversation, so I inquired, “By the way, where are you from originally?”
“I’m from Ethiopia,” he said. He then proudly stated, “I’ve been here in the U.S. for twenty years. I’m an American citizen now; so are both of my boys and my wife.”
I’m not exactly sure what prompted me, but I then asked him, “What’s your perspective on American culture, given that you didn’t grow up here?”
At first he didn’t say anything, and I thought maybe I had offended him. We were just arriving at the airport. He pulled up to the curb, put the cab in park, turned around, and looked me right in the eye.
“Can I be honest with you?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said.
“Well,” he said, “I think most people in this culture act like
spoiled brats
.”
“Why do you say that?” I asked.
“Look, I’m from Ethiopia,” he said. “Every day here is a good day.”
I was taken aback by the simplicity, wisdom, and power of his statement. And, I was grateful for the reminder.
I’ve been speaking and writing about gratitude for many years, and I’m still amazed at how challenging it can be to focus on what I’m grateful for at times. We live in a culture that has an obsession with negativity, and it’s easy for us to get caught up in how “bad” things are, as well as in our own personal and insatiable desire for more, thinking that what we have and how things are in our own lives are never quite good enough. However, regardless of the specific circumstances of our lives, even and especially when they’re difficult, if we stop, pay attention, and look for it, there are always so many things we can be grateful for—if we choose to be. Gratitude is a practice, not a concept. And, like any other practice, the more genuine and consistent we are with it, the more valuable and beneficial it is.
Most of us, especially those of us on a path of personal growth and discovery, know that gratitude is important. We’ve heard about it, read about it, and been taught about it for years. In the mid-1990s, a wonderful book called
Simple Abundance
by Sarah Ban Breathnach came out. Sarah was a featured guest on
The Oprah Winfrey Show
, and Oprah talked about how Sarah’s suggestion to keep a daily gratitude journal—to write down five things each day that you’re grateful for—had a profound impact on her life. Oprah became a passionate advocate for the power of gratitude and since that time has continued to encourage millions of people around the world to keep their own gratitude journals.
Like so many other people, I took Oprah’s advice and started my own journal many years ago. I found it to be fun, inspiring, and empowering to look for, find, and write down things I was grateful for. When I started speaking, coaching, and writing, much of my work focused on gratitude and appreciation. The technique of the gratitude journal was something I often suggested to people. However, over time it became one of the many things that I “know” and even “teach,” but had stopped practicing consistently in my own life.
A few years back, as a New Year’s resolution, I recommitted myself to the practice of my gratitude journal. I bought a new, beautiful journal and decided I was going to start using it. It took me a little while to get back into the practice of writing in it consistently, but once I was in the swing of it, it was pretty easy. Later that year I had a few months where things were going really well in many important areas of my life. As I sat down to write in my gratitude journal one morning, I decided to look back at some of the things I’d written over the past few months. As I turned the pages, I realized that I hadn’t missed a day of writing in over three months. I was amazed. It was less about the consistency of my writing, and more about the consistency of my excitement to do this exercise and the benefits I got from it. Things were going so well in my life, and the positive turns seemed to be directly connected to my use of the gratitude journal. I said to Michelle, “I’m not sure if things are going so well because I’m writing in my gratitude journal every day, or I’m excited to write in my gratitude journal every day because things are going so well. I bet it’s a combination of both. At some level, I don’t really care—I’m just grateful for how things are going and for my journaling practice.”
The way gratitude works is that the more we focus on feeling grateful, the more we have to feel grateful for. And while many of us have experienced this personally, recent scientific studies have concluded that gratitude can have significantly positive effects on our health, our moods, our productivity, and our relationships.
In one specific study, conducted by Robert A. Emmons, Ph.D., at the University of California at Davis and Mike McCullough at the University of Miami, participants were given one of three tasks. Each week, they kept a short journal. One group was asked to write down five things they were grateful for that had occurred in the past week, another was asked to record five hassles from the previous week that displeased them, and the neutral group was asked to list five events or circumstances that affected them, but they weren’t told whether to focus on something positive or negative specifically.
Ten weeks later, the people in the gratitude group felt better about their lives as a whole, plus they reported fewer health complaints, and they exercised more.
Like many other things in life that we know are good for us (exercise, eating healthy, sleeping enough, drinking lots of water, telling the truth, and so on), it’s not the knowledge that will benefit us; it’s the practice. The amazing thing about gratitude is that there’s no “right” way to practice being grateful. Whether you choose to keep a journal, thank the people around you, use positive affirmations, ask other people what they’re grateful for (one of my favorites), focus on gratitude in your quiet time of prayer or meditation, or simply remind yourself to slow down and breathe—taking time to focus on what we’re grateful for is one of the easiest and most effective ways to empower ourselves, calm ourselves down, and remember what matters most in life.
As one of my mentors said to me years ago, “Gratitude and victimhood can’t coexist.”
Have the Courage to Be Vulnerable
Given the focus of my work, especially in the past five years since the release of my book
Be Yourself, Everyone Else Is Already Taken
, which is all about authenticity and vulnerability, I’m constantly in situations where I’m talking about, encouraging, and seeing the positive impact of vulnerability.
Because of my baseball background, I’m sometimes invited to speak to athletes, specifically baseball players. A few years ago, I got invited down to spring training to speak to a group of minor league players for one of the Major League Baseball organizations. This was a big deal for me and I was excited to have an opportunity to speak to these guys, given that I had stood in their shoes in my early 20s. I could relate specifically to what they were going through—spring training is an exciting but stressful time, where lots of evaluation takes place and decisions are made. A number of those guys would be released (i.e., cut) by the end of spring training, so how they performed over the next few weeks would have a big impact on not only their season but also their future baseball careers (or lack thereof).
I spoke to them that morning about how they could effectively deal with the pressure of spring training and how they could handle the mental and emotional ups and downs of playing baseball in a healthy and productive way. My talk went well and seemed to resonate with the guys. After I spoke, a number of them came up to talk to me. In addition to their comments and questions about my speech, a bunch of them wanted to tell me about something that happened a few days earlier. Because I heard about it passionately from a number of different guys (and got a few different versions of the same story), I wanted to find out more about what went down, so I asked my friend and former Stanford teammate AJ, who was running the whole minor league system for this organization at the time, what had happened.
AJ told me that he had asked his coaches to introduce themselves to the players at their first all-camp meeting the week before in a unique way. Instead of them giving their résumés, he wanted each of them to tell a personal story about a meaningful moment they’d had when they were players themselves. He said it was amazing and that one of his coaches, named Alan, blew everyone away with his story.
Alan got up and said, “I played for ten years in Triple-A’s, without a single day in the major leagues.”
No one plays in AAA (which is the highest level of the minor leagues) for ten years. If you get that high up and hang around for a while, you either make it up to the big leagues, or you walk away from the game. It’s very uncommon and actually quite difficult to spend that much time at that level of the minors. Alan went on to say:
I played for a number of different organizations, but couldn’t break through and make it. Toward the end of that tenth season in Triple-A’s, I finally made peace with the fact that I wasn’t going to make it. I was disappointed, of course, but because I’d given it everything I had, and it just didn’t seem like it was meant to be, I was actually okay with it.
Once I made my decision, I called my dad because we’d been talking about my career in the recent weeks. I said to him, “Dad, I’ve decided I’m going to retire. I’m not going to quit right now because the season’s not over, but when it ends, I’m going to stop playing. Would you do me a favor, Dad? Can you come see me play one last time? That would really mean a lot to me.”
When my dad got there, I was fired up. I really wanted to play well. He was going to be in town for five nights. The first night he was in town, I came up to bat in the second inning, hit a ground ball to second base, and grounded out. When I got back in the dugout, my manager walked over to me, tapped me on the shoulder, and told me to sit down.
He took me out of the game, and in the second inning. Now that only happens if you don’t hustle, do something stupid, or get hurt. But I wasn’t hurt, I did hustle on that play—I always hustled—and I hadn’t done anything stupid to warrant him taking me out of the game that early.
I didn’t understand. And I was mad. I didn’t say anything to my manager because I didn’t want to be disrespectful. But, how could he show me up like that, and in front of my father? Anyway, I just sat there at the end of the bench about as far away from the manager as I could.
Then, I heard someone at the other end of the bench say, “Can we tell him?” The next thing I knew, my manager walked all the way down to the end of the bench and got right in my face.
He said, “Do you want to know why I took you out of the game?”
“Yes sir,” I said. “I didn’t appreciate that; you showed me up in front of my father.”
“Well,” my manager said, “I took you out of the game because you just got called up to the major leagues.”
The next thing I knew, I looked up and all twenty-five guys on my team had gathered around me in the dugout to give me hugs and high fives. Those guys were so excited for me because they all knew how long I’d waited, how hard I’d worked, and how much it meant to me. The celebration went on so long in the dugout, they actually had to stop the game.