I hope you can hear this because my phone had a bit of an accident today, so I hope it’s working. Thumbs up if it is. Today I want to talk about whether or not you are responsible for your feelings. Now we grow up and we hear, Oh, that person has made me feel so bad. Or someone did something and now I feel so bad. Or, oh they told me they love me so now I feel great. And we have this external kind of… Something external happens and we go that same causing this feeling. So therefore if someone loves me, I feel good. If someone is grumpy with me I feel bad. If someone has let me down I feel bad. If someone X,I,Y if someone I Y and that’s not true people. And I think I first learnt it many years ago and I was like well, I kind of agree, kind of disagree because you know that person really makes me feel like shit so no.
And then when the penny finally like really dropped that nobody, nothing could actually make me feel anything was 100% my responsibility stuff really shifted for me. So now when things happen… I am not perfect you know, I will confess I’m not perfect. I’m nearly perfect. No I’m not perfect at all. But now when things happen, you can kind of do this little, what am I thinking? How am I feeling? What am I thinking? How am I feeling? What am I thinking? How am I feeling? It kind of jumble in your brain a little bit to do with the work by Byron Katie, which I’ve gone through before, and you know that whatever is happening externally is not actually responsible for your feelings. It’s all on you.
Give you great example. The relationships that we have with ex’s, especially when you are a parent, sometimes it can be a lot of frustration. There can be a lot of, they didn’t do this, I didn’t do this, this person is like this, winge, winge, winge ,mud, mud, mud. I feel like… I feel terrible because they’ve done X or they have not paid this or they have not organized this, dah, dah, dah. And the truth is, no you are actually still just choosing to feel that way. So I know in my relationship with Eledy’s father and her stepmother. I feel great about them. I choose to feel great about anything that does or doesn’t happen because it’s only going to affect me. My relationship with my family, my relationships with my friends or relationships with ex’s.
I’m really… I’m actually going back now and reprocessing how I’ve thought about people and situations in the past and owning how I feel about it because that’s how I feel about it. Not because of anything they did or didn’t do or anything they said or didn’t say, or how they treated you or the present they didn’t buy or the invitation you didn’t get. Although you know how many of us are still hanging on to so-and-so doesn’t like me because they had a dinner party and I didn’t get invited. You just taking [inaudible 00:03:37] to the dinner party? I had one of those parties when I was a kid. I think I was seven and like one person came. Like it’s depressing. You know what? I cannot even remember those people’s names anymore. So I felt bad at the time, but I felt bad at the time.
When something exciting happens, you can choose to feel great. You can choose to feel any way you want to feel regardless of a situation. The worst thing in the world can happen for you? You can get fired and you can choose to go, great opportunity for me to do something else. You can choose to go, there a pack of you know what’s and I hope bad things happen to them. You can be angry. You can choose to get really, really depressed and go home and eat a tub of ice cream. But you get to choose that okay. Hi Charlie, what are you choosing? You’re choosing to say, hello. I’m hungry. Say Hello Charlie. I choose to love Charlie. Anyway, that’s a whole other story.
And why I wanted to bring this up today is a couple of things. My phone got smashed today at the gym you know. I posted about it and I don’t know who smashed it, but I think it got stood on. It was in my jacket by the water cooler? I could choose to be really upset about it. I could choose to be really angry. I could choose to march in there tomorrow and go, someone stood on my phone.I choose to go, you know what? possibly should not have left my jacket down there by the water cooler. That was maybe a silly idea. And it’s a phone. You know, I haven’t let it worry me. I’ve put sticky tape where it’s broken. Hopefully there’s a new Iphone out in a couple of weeks and I can get a new one. So I’m choosing to be kind of excited about it. So I want you to look at what feelings you are hanging on to with some people in some situations in your life at the moment where you could choose to feel something different.
If something at work happened to you, and you are choosing to be a bit resentful about it, and you could choose to be… Really Charlie, sorry. And you could choose to just go… You can choose to think of it a different way. You could choose to take a high road you know. In a lot of situations, you can choose to take a high road and it is often the better road. And I am not talking… Sometimes when you say to people take the high road, or take the high ground or anything like that, they think of it in terms of like a snob factor. You are better than someone kind of feeling. That is not what I mean at all. I mean by taking the high road, I mean just taking the standard, you know what? I am not going to drop to being angry or resentful or narky or upset about this.
I am just going to stand in my strength really. Take the road that is going to… I think the high road is taking the road that is going to make you feel good. Taking the high ground is the road that you walk along and sit with your feelings that make you feel great. No one wants to feel bad. Like given a choice, when you wake up in the morning, you can wake up and choose, okay, I feel really, really sad that’s it. You can wake up and choose again, not talking about depression. You can wake up and choose to go, Hmm, that’s not such a great day, but I’m going to make the best of it. And it is just a flip of a switch. And again, it has got nothing to do with what other people are doing or saying to you.
Other people are not responsible for how you feel at any point of your life. When we are a baby, we have complete control of our feelings you know, complete control. If we were hungry, we cried, if we were tired, we cried. If we were upset, we would leave emotional bags. And then when we are children, we get taught a little bit to lessen our feelings and dampen our feelings and quieten them down. And not be so vocal about them or so emotive, ironically do not be so emotive about your emotions. Funny. And then teenagers again. The silent, silent, we all just excuse our other silent teenager. Well, maybe that is just how they are feeling. Like that is again, they are responsible for that. We can not… We do not need to try and pull them out of it. We need to give them tools to help them deal with stuff that they are responsible for how they feeling.
That is what I want to talk about today. You are responsible for how you feel. So tomorrow if something good happens, choose how you going to feel. If something great happens, choose how are you going to feel. If something really fricking awful happens, choose how you feel. That is what I am trying to do at the moment. I try and do it every day. But I am really working on it at the moment. So I would like… Work on it with me, let me know how you are going and I will see you tomorrow.