The Power of Caring Less: Shedding the Weight of External Validation

Ever felt crushed under the weight of what everyone else thinks?  I've discovered that shedding the burden of external opinions can be liberating in ways you never imagined. Join me on Unscripted Mind as we unpack our emotional backpacks, revealing how the art of caring less can lead to a more fulfilling life. We'll navigate through the fog of anxiety and depression that often clouds our path when we place too much stock in external validation. With personal stories and expert wisdom, this episode offers actionable steps to diminish the power others' views have over our happiness and self-worth. It's a candid exploration of self-discovery that equips you with the tools to tread lighter and find joy in the unpredictability of life.

As we round off our discussion, I leave you with a thought-provoking nudge from the wise Olin Miller: People are far less fixated on us than we suppose. I challenge you to select just one part of your life to care less about this coming week. Your stories fuel our conversations, so I'm eager for your feedback and suggestions for what topics we should tackle next. Let's embrace the beauty of spontaneity together, maintaining curiosity, and seizing each day with renewed passion. Thanks for listening, and remember, life's script is unwritten—let's enjoy the improvisation.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

Lao Tzu once said care about what other people think and you'll always be their prisoner. Today, on the unscripted mind, we're going to reveal how doing one simple thing can increase your joy, improve your relationships, improve your opinion of yourself, your motivations, your honesty, your self-esteem, maybe even your faith and spirituality. What's that one thing? Caring less. Welcome to the Unscripted Mind, where our goal is to give you fresh perspectives, practical insights and tools you can use to give you more choices, increase your awareness and have better control of your feelings, reactions and behaviors. My name is Jim Cunningham and I'm a licensed professional counselor, and today we're going to discuss the one thing you can do to improve virtually all aspects of your life. That one thing care less. We'll take a look at where a lot of these cares come from and some ways you can start implementing them. So the two words that will fix I guess I would say 90% of my clients are care less. Now, this might sound callous, counterintuitive. It's not. Stick with me for a little bit on this one. While it might be simple, it's also not easy. This is not to say that we shouldn't care at all. That's not what I'm saying. It's simply to say that we should care a little less about certain things. I'm not saying that we should ignore concerns about safety or justice or those types of things. I am saying if we were to simply care less about what others think, their emotions, their decisions, their reactions to us, we would be able to take so many rocks out of our metaphorical backpack and our load would be so much more light. So here's the problem when we start caring too much about the wrong things, we also start feeling anxious, we feel sad, we feel depressed, maybe having panic attacks. We might feel ashamed and even feelings of not being good enough can creep up, like I have to perform in order to be accepted. Anxiety and depression and feelings of not being good enough are predicated largely on what other people think of us and how they react to us as a metric for how we're doing in life. We use relationships to determine how we're doing. These include other people's reactions, their disdain, comments, praises, criticisms. We kind of use this as a barometer to make sure we're kind of going the right direction, not an outlier in some way.

Speaker 1: 2:43

Unfortunately, this is really a poor measure at best. I mean others' reactions to me often are clouded by the hundreds of variables that are affecting the other people, simple variables. These don't have to be big things, I mean, such as I don't know how that other person has slept last night. I don't know if they're hungry right now. I don't know if they've just had a fight with their wife. All I know is that moment in time when I got that reaction from them, but I don't know what was behind that and what was driving a lot of that. I think I can safely say that I'm not the only variable impacting them, though, and so a lot of times when we're using other people, is this litmus test. It's kind of like going and getting yourself a brand new suit and then going down to the circus and the fun house and looking at yourself in that distorted mirror to see how you look. It's a very bad reflection of who I am.

Speaker 1: 3:34

So, having said that, I think it's unfortunate, but the vast majority of opinions we have of ourselves I think we've learned from other people A lot of these negative beliefs that we have about ourselves. In some ways, we were kind of taught. I often ask clients the questions like who taught you that it was not okay to show emotions? Or how did you come to know that you weren't shy. How did you know certain things were impolite? They were from reactions from other people. Some of those can be very useful and we can use those. The problem is, we can't let those overwhelm us. A lot of the negative ideas that we were not born with, these weren't our original thoughts. They're based on other people's comments, reactions, emotions and behaviors, as I've said. So how do we actually know this? Well, I think that's simple.

Speaker 1: 4:22

I want you to imagine being back in middle school. As you're walking down the hall, you trip, fall flat of your face. Now that can be a horrific event for any middle schooler, especially if the halls are full of people. But now I want you to imagine the same scenario when you trip and you fall, but no one's around. No one saw you fall. This tells me the problem isn't that you fell, the problem is that it was public.

Speaker 1: 4:53

The ultimate irony in this scenario is that now I care more about what other people's reactions are to my mistake than the actual mistake itself. That's what begins to define me. It was their reactions that created the shame. Mistakes made in private tend to not generate those same kind of emotions, if any. It is that mistake that was seen that elevates the consequences. For many, that means shame and fear of abandonment. Michael Elkin, he is a licensed marriage and family therapist and he said shame is the experience of having our badness witnessed. Shame is one of the most painful experiences any of us can imagine.

Speaker 1: 5:34

So let me walk you through an example. I want you to think back to a time before you knew certain things about yourself, maybe back in elementary school or even before, when everything was simple, everything was fun, everything was light, you could just kind of go about your day and you didn't worry about certain things. Now, do you remember the day that it all changed? Do you remember the day you first felt overwhelming shame? The day your eyes were open to not being good enough, the day there was nowhere to hide, the day the world got harder, more complicated and more threatening, the day you realized you had to be careful of what you said, how you said it, what you wore and how you acted. The day you had to become, in short, more vigilant. I would call that gut-wrenching awareness. You may have made mistakes before that time, but for some reason, on that day it stuck. You may have made mistakes before that time, but for some reason, on that day it stuck.

Speaker 1: 6:34

Now take a moment and go back to that day, or one like it. What do you feel when you put yourself back there? Where do you feel it physically? What do you think about yourself in light of that memory? Maybe you feel like you're not good enough, you didn't deserve love, that you're a bad person, that you can't show emotions, that you're not good enough, you didn't deserve love, that you're a bad person, that you can't show emotions, that you're not okay, you're weak, you can't trust yourself, you can't trust anyone. For many, this awareness of themselves feels so overwhelming. It's indistinguishable from themselves. It's not that they made a mistake, it's that all of a sudden they are a mistake.

Speaker 1: 7:14

I think this is why we start caring more. We have to, we have to hide and protect this newfound fragility, the vulnerability, the weakness. I know a lot of this might sound like hyperbole, but I see it play out in our client's lives every day. Often people tell me well, you know, that was such a little thing and it was like three decades ago. It shouldn't bother me at all. And yet it does. Our brains seem to do that magnificent job of keeping us safe and never letting us forget things that were a real threat or a perceived threat. Now I have to start caring more. I really don't have a choice.

Speaker 1: 7:50

I will say this that anyone can cause these things and these ideas to get into our heads. It can be a stranger mom, a teacher, a friend, a classroom full of laughing peers. It could have been a simple look of disappointment, a chuckle or even a non-reaction. There's a good chance. The person who taught you that, though, had no idea or intention of doing so. These negative self-beliefs get to the root of why people feel certain things and act certain ways.

Speaker 1: 8:19

Once we get these ideas from others, they're hard to shake. In fact, we usually do the opposite. We get this idea that I'm not good enough, and then we continue to look for and accumulate evidence that supports those beliefs. Every time I fail, see, I'm not good enough. After we've done this for years or decades, it becomes second nature and we start to believe all those lies. Now, not to get too simplistic, but the remedy to this is to start caring less. This doesn't mean we don't care at all. This means that we simply prioritize what we care about. It's a simple concept but certainly not easy, like I said, to implement. So how do we do that? What are the things you need to care less about? What would you love to let go of? What weight would you like to put down? I would encourage you to take some time list all of the things you believe about yourself. Then take a critical look at that list, evaluate it, scrutinize it. Ask yourself whose voices do these ideas sound like? When did I first start thinking this? Whose voices do these ideas sound like? When did I first start thinking this?

Speaker 1: 9:37

If you were to float back in time, what does each statement or phrase remind you of? If you get stuck on your list, ask someone you trust. What do they hear you say about yourself? You might be unaware. I'll give you an example.

Speaker 1: 9:49

When I first met my wife, I used to say this thing that I was lazy, I'm lazy, I'm lazy. And she called me on that. She's like you seem to say that a lot. After I thought about it a lot, I remembered that I got this idea from my mother wonderful lady, but she would often ask me to bring groceries in when she went to the store and I tried to get them all, usually in one load. So she would say well, quit being lazy. And, you know, make several trips because invariably the old paper bags would tend to rip and I dropped stuff everywhere.

Speaker 1: 10:26

But it goes to show how easy some small comment can just stick yeah, once you have your list, then you can start looking at it and considering what is in your scope of control and influence. What can you control in this whole world? Honestly, not much and, as I've said before, usually I can only control myself and I'm pretty bad at that. We certainly can't control other people and their thoughts, and if I can't control it, I can let those things go and focus on what I actually can control and influence. In short, it's about efficiency, using our energies and our gifts where they can be applied and eliminating the frustrations where they can't. That's called caring less. Finally, just realize what someone else thinks of you actually has no impact on you. What you may think of me does not determine or change who I am, unless I let it.

Speaker 1: 11:24

Once you decide to care less, you can take back all the power in these relationships and these emotions and these negative self-beliefs. You won't be at the mercy of opinions, reactions or those negative looks or comments. Can you imagine, if you can do this and if you're successful, how that might feel to take those rocks out of the backpack. How would caring less increase your joy, improve your relationships, your opinion of yourself, your motivations, your honesty, your self-esteem and maybe even your faith in spirituality motivations, your honesty, your self-esteem and maybe even your faith in spirituality.

Speaker 1: 11:58

I'll leave you with this quote from olin miller. You probably wouldn't worry about what other people think of you if you could know how seldom they actually do. Thanks for joining me and have an amazing day, and I challenge you to find one thing, maybe just one thing this week to care less about. If you found this episode helpful, please subscribe and leave a review. Also, if you have any questions or topics you'd like us to cover, feel free to reach out for that as well. Until next time, remember, life doesn't come with a script, so embrace the unexpected, cherish the unplanned, always stay curious and have an amazing day. We'll see you next time, thank you.