It’s Okay For People To Be Wrong About You

I like it when people respect me and admire me.  Most of us do. We spend a lot of our time in social situations managing the way others feel and think about us. If you really believed that it was okay for people to be wrong about you,  how would that change your behavior?  This idea has radically changed my life, improving my relationships and allowing me to focus on what really matters.

People Pleasing is Exhausting

When one of my daughters was a toddler she had some health issues and cried almost constantly.  A lot of the day was spent in tantrums and tears.  We felt so badly for her.  We read lots of parenting books, tried lots of things and worked hard to find her the medical care she needed.

However, caring for a child who was so emotionally volatile was exhausting.  It was also humiliating to bring her out in public because I felt so judged.

People Will Judge

I remember the looks on people’s faces as they watched me with her in a store or when we were at church.  They stared.  They lifted their eyebrows.  They rolled their eyes.  They walked away.  They pretended to ignore me, but their faces told a different story.

Sometimes people made comments like, “Wow, she’s loud,” or “She’s a handful.”  It wasn’t uncommon to receive unsolicited parenting advice, “Have you tried just ignoring it?” or “She really needs some consequences and boundaries.”  Sometimes people we knew a bit better would say things like, “I used to think you just couldn’t handle your daughter, but now that we have a tough one I feel bad for judging you.”

We aren’t perfect parents, but we were trying earnestly and had tried A LOT of things.  I believe most people were just observing what they saw.  Because I felt awkward about the way my daughter was acting and I worried people would judge me, their comments felt a lot like judgement.

Occasionally some good soul would say something like, “I’ve totally been there.”  One time my daughter had a tantrum in the entry way of a large building.  She was large enough that it was difficult to lift her up and take her out.  I remember a woman who stopped and said, “You’re doing great.”  I loved that human being!  I had some wonderful friends and family who were supportive and loving during this difficult period.  I am still so grateful for this.

Feeling Misunderstood

One day though, I confided in a friend how discouraged I was feeling about how my daughter acted in public.  She said, “There is nothing wrong with your daughter—there is only something wrong with you!” I don’t think she meant to hurt my feelings, but it hit at the core of what I worried people were thinking.  “Because your child is acting so difficult, there is something wrong with you!”   I found myself not wanting to go out with my daughter in public.

Every time my daughter had a meltdown, I not only had the very real emotional, mental, and physical work of helping her, I also felt like I had to defend myself, my daughter’s situation, my actions and my parenting.  I didn’t want to be judged. Though MANY people were loving and compassionate, it was hard for most people to understand. I felt a lot of resentment that I was misunderstood.

Ditching Resentment for Confidence

I could see resentment was eating me away. It was eroding my relationships, my happiness and enjoyment socially. So I made a decision: it was okay if people judged me. Of course people didn’t understand!  How could they unless they had been through something similar?  People judge. There isn’t much we can do about it. It’s part of being human.

I decided to believe in myself. I knew I was doing my best, and it was okay if people thought I was a “bad mom.” It was so freeing!  

Once I let go of trying to prevent other people’s judgement, my life changed. I remember going to Michael’s with my daughter screaming the whole time and being able to genuinely return smiles for the rude looks I got. I remember just being able to listen to people’s comments of sympathy or concern and keep an open mind without feeling defensive when friends shared ideas about how to help her.  

With so much mental and emotional space cleared up from worrying about being judged and trying to defend myself, I was able to use the space to be more creative and have more energy to help my daughter and get in a healthier place myself.  Also, because I was less defensive I was able to actually accept some of the good ideas people offered. Some were helpful, others weren’t. But I was able to think of them as offerings of love instead of darts of judgment.

It’s Okay For People to Be Wrong About Me


I learned a powerful lesson through this experience.  The things that I notice in others are often reflections of how I feel about myself.  When I feel confident that I’m doing my best, I was able to be okay with other’s judgement of me because I didn’t believe it.  I realized they could think whatever they wanted and I could still sincerely know I was doing my best.  This was a tremendous relief.

Believe in Yourself

Who do you try to please?

Stop trying to convince them you are right or good, and start believing in yourself enough to let them be wrong about you.

Shifting: How to Handle Change with Grace

In modern life, most of us move at least once, if not several times during the course of our lives.  In previous generations it was more common to stay in the place we grew up and retire at the same company we started with.  Current studies show that the average time at a job in modern society is around 5 years.  Often job changes mean moving.  Learning to handle moving with grace can be a tremendous benefit to your happiness and your family’s well-being.

Time to Shift

During college, I spent some time living in Kenya.  I lived in a small slum outside of Nairobi and traveled each day by matatu (old VW buses repurposed as public transport for 15 people) to a rural school.  We spent our days teaching children hygiene. They used frayed branches as toothbrushes and had to wipe themselves with their hands after using the toilet if they didn’t bring their own toilet paper.  I’ll never forget the day I asked the children, “Where to germs come from?” They said, “Satan!”  My eyes got big, and I realized we had some basics to cover!  One of my favorite days was teaching the children how to dance the Virginia reel and kicking up red dirt as we twirled and laughed through it.  Their natural exuberance was contagious as was their curiosity.

Part way through my time there, there were some government misunderstandings, and skepticism about our work.  We were told we had to “shift.”  I had never heard of this before.  Our neighbors explained it meant, we had to move.  We had to stop working, and change apartments. I was heartbroken—I had come to love the children and I felt I had made some in-roads with teaching. Regardless, it was time to “shift.”

As I have moved many times since then—I have come to love the idea of “shifting.”  When we move, we literally do more than simply transport ourselves and our possessions from one place to another.  We change.  Just as a shift key on the keyboard changes a letter from lower-case to upper case, moving allows us to change who we are—to up level ourselves to something even better.

 

Change Will Be a Constant

We can all expect change.  We will have to move, people pass away, our health deteriorates, we lose jobs.  Even changes we want and choose can be hard; when we graduate from college and enter the work force, when we get married, when we have a baby, when we leave the work force, when our last child enters kindergarten, when we retire and the list goes on.  Change is a constant.

Don’t Resist

I find I often resist change because it is an ending—it means losing something I had, was, or wanted to be.  Even if it’s something I don’t like, knowing something is at the end brings with it some mourning. Part of letting something go, is acknowledging how much something or someone meant to you.  It’s recognizing how it’s been part of your life and imagining what life will be without it.

When we resist the emotions of disappointment, discouragement and sadness, they turn into resentment and anger.  It’s such a tremendous relief to accept a sadness.  Resistance requires a lot of mental and emotional space.  Letting it go, frees our brains and hearts to be open to how to adapt to the change and how to solve the problem.

Make Space for the Old

One way to give voice to our loss and sadness is to create rituals.  Rituals can help us acknowledge endings.  Our family has a little ritual at the end of each of our international postings.  Each child gets to list a few places that are most important to them—a favorite restaurant, school, church, a beach, a park etc.  We take a family drive and video all of our favorite and frequented places that have become part of our daily pattern in a place.  We enjoy talking about them as we drive and it’s a way of saying good-bye.   We try to do the same with people we love—plan a chance to say good-bye and acknowledge their presence in our lives.

Another way acknowledge pieces of our old lives in an on-going way is to hold “country nights.”  We include a holiday for each country we’ve lived in on our family calendar.  We celebrate our time in a particular place on the holiday for that country—we wear traditional clothing, eat local foods from that place and watch pictures from our time there.  Recently we celebrated “May Day” or “Lei Day”  for Hawaii.  We wore leis, ate Dole Whip and watched pictures from our time there.  It helps us continually bridge back to the past and commemorate our significant connections.

Don’t Indulge Sticky Sweetness

Grief is a clean emotion—it’s cathartic and healing.  Self-pity is an indulgent emotion.  There isn’t much positive that comes from it.  There is a fine line between mourning and becoming a victim.  I love the way CS Lewis describes this tricky space.  In “A Grief Observed,” a book he wrote after his wife died he says, “I almost prefer the moments of agony. These are at least clean and honest. But the bath of self-pity, the wallow, the loathsome sticky-sweet pleasure of indulging it–that disgusts me.”  We need the catharsis of processing our emotions and acknowledging them.  However, once that has been accomplished, continuing to “indulge” in the “sticky-sweet pleasure” of our self-pity becomes harmful.  It is when we cross this line that it’s time to channel our inner Elsa and “Let it go.”

I find the time I most want to indulge in the sticky-sweet pleasure of self-pity is a few week to a few months after we move.  It’s takes tremendous energy to start fresh somewhere, particularly when it is in an unfamiliar place, culture and in an unknown language.  Making friends takes time.  At first everything is new and fresh, and then the newness wears off and the difficulty sets in.  It’s when everything seems “hard” in our new home that my brain wants to whine and indulge in what we’ve left behind.   It’s beyond the feeling of loss of our last home—it’s all the drama my brain is offering me about creating the new life and how hard it is.  This is when it’s time to let go.  Staying in the self-pity keeps us spinning our wheels.  We just dig deep ruts instead of moving forward.

Create a Vision

One of the things I find has helped me keep from spinning my wheels, is to create a vision of what I want our life to look like in our new place.  I try to fill the void of the old with something new.  One of our favorite things to do is to make a bucket list for each place we live—places we want to go and things we want to do while we live there.  Often we even map out trips to nearby locations and when we will take them.

I love working out the details of the flow of our new home…who will share a room, which door will we come into, what will each child’s chores and family contributions will be.  I love to research opportunities for our family to contribute in our new community.  I feel like it’s easier to start new family patterns in a new place.  There aren’t the old patterns in place.  Everyone is shifting mindsets and starting new family plans pairs well with a move.

I love to dream big—I love to think about who I want to be in our new place. Some of the thoughts I have had include “I want to be an on-time person in this new place.”  “I want to be more balanced with self-care in my new home.” “I want to be deliberate with spending.” Shifting is a bonus new beginning.

It’s hard to create amazing things without have dreamt them up first.  Knowing what we are going helps us leave things behind more easily.  It also gives us a template and momentum to begin creating a new life.

Creating

Even if we have mourned and visualized a new future, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed with moving.  It’s a lot of work logistically and emotionally to start over.  Just the boxes and re-organization alone are overwhelming, not to mention meeting new friends, finding new places of worship, and stores to obtain what we need.  Often when we feel overwhelmed our natural inclination is to consume.  We eat more, we watch more Netflix, we indulge in anger or irritation.  We look at others and expect them to reach out to us—we want to consume their friendship. These things cause us to feel a temporary relief, but don’t address what we really crave which is happiness in our new life.  When we feel the urge to consume, we can create instead.  We can begin creating organization in our home, we can begin reaching out to others to invite them over to create new relationships, we can begin creating the person we want to be in our new home.  It is creating that will fulfill our deepest cravings for peace.

Edit Your Brain

Often our biggest enemies and intruders in creation are our own thoughts.  It’s common to say things to ourselves that we would never tell someone else.  “This will never work.”  “It will never be as good.”  “What was I thinking?” “Why did we do this?”  “I’ll never make friends as good as I had before.” “I hate it here.”  Ironically, these thoughts sabotage our ability to make our move a good experience.

Changing our thoughts can provide the momentum to create the new life we want. We can replace negative thoughts, with thoughts like “I got this.”  “I don’t know how this will all work out, but I know it will.”  “I have faith.”  “I’m excited to see how this all works out.”  “Hard is good.”  These types of thoughts give me so much more confidence and energy to do the work of creating something new. Sometimes that sticky sweetness of self-pity seems so tempting, but being willing to set it aside and to do something new is so much sweeter.

Shifting Into Action

It means introducing myself over and over again our first few months.  I try not to wait for others to reach out to me, I take the responsibility of seeking people out and getting to know them. We have people over to dinner.  We invite friends over for playdates. I plan the first few times I go anywhere that I will probably get lost and it will take a long time to figure out the navigation, parking etc.  It usually DOES take a long time, but I expected it so I’m not frustrated.  On particularly difficult days, I try to find humor in our situation and tell the events in the most dramatic way possible at family dinner or to a friend.  Laughing about it is almost like an escape valve that lets of the pressure.  There are always setbacks.  I try to plan on them—lots of them!   But the more I get out and begin creating the positive momentum the more courage I gain to keep creating.

The process of change is messy and frustrating.  The process of mourning, letting go and creating new is not a neat step ladder process–it’s all mixed up at times.  Sometimes I experience all of them in the same day or the same hour!   No matter where I find myself in the process, when I view it all in the context of shifting to something new, something better it gives me hope and courage to keep trying.

Shift with Grace

What is a change in your life right now?

1.  Think of change as a chance to up-level yourself like the shift key on the keyboard.
2.  Envision the new, but make space for the old (rituals).
3.  Don’t get stuck in the sticky sweetness of self-pity.
4.  Start creating.

Mental Gardening: How to Grow Happiness Anywhere

They way we feel is the product of what we think.  Just as with physical gardening, we plant seeds in our minds constantly.  Sometimes we choose them, other times we don’t.  However, whether a seed flourishes depends entirely on how we care for it.  In other words the way we think about something that happens will affect how much it grows and impacts us much more than the fact that it happened.  A productive yield of happiness requires both planting and nourishing gratitude and abundance as well as weeding and pruning  dissatisfaction and lack.   As we do we’ll find we can grow happiness anywhere.

The Law of the Harvest

My Dad loved to garden, and he put all of his daughters to work planting, weeding and watering each summer.  Frankly, I thought it was hot and boring a lot of the time; I tried to avoid it whenever I could. One of the pay-offs of our hard work was the tender, rich acidic flavor of red home-grown tomatoes that we picked on summer nights and ate for dinner.

A garden’s yield is directly correlated to the effort put into it.  I remember one summer when we were fairy lazy about watering. Then, we went on a family vacation and returned to find the garden sparse and mostly dried up.  I remember my sister running into the house sobbing because it meant there would be no home-grown tomatoes that year.

The law of the harvest states that we will reap what we sow.  If we want the home-grown tomatoes, we have to plant them, water them, and weed them.

The Law of the Harvest in our Minds

Because I grew up spending Saturday mornings with my fingernails buried in the dirt weeding and watering our backyard garden plot, I find particular poignancy in this quote by Sarah Ban Breathnach about the gardens in our minds.

“Both abundance and lack exist simultaneously in our lives, as parallel realities. It is always our conscious choice which secret garden we will tend… when we choose not to focus on what is missing from our lives but are grateful for the abundance that’s present— love, health, family, friends, work, the joys of nature and personal pursuits that bring us pleasure— the wasteland of illusion falls away and we experience Heaven on earth.”

This quote hung on my refrigerator for a couple of years to remind me that the law of the harvest applies to my mind.  The thoughts I think are like seeds that germinate and grow into plants of feelings and actions and eventually yield the fruit of my overall happiness and relationships and contribution in the world.  I determine my yield by the thoughts I choose, and the paradigms I tend and cultivate.

I love the concept that at any time, there are two mental gardens existing at the same time.  In any situation, relationship or even with our own self-image, there is always abundance and there are always things lacking.  It’s easy to feel that our external situation is the cause of our lack. However, ANY situation has abundance and lack simultaneously.  The abundance we feel is directly correlated to how diligent we are in tending the abundant thoughts and allowing the gardens of lack to shrivel up and die.

 

Mental Gardening Around the World

My husband is a diplomat, which means our family gets to move frequently to various places around the world.  When we embarked on this lifestyle I was optimistic about the many ways we could serve and the blessings it would have for our family.  I love to travel, explore new places, try new foods, and experience how different cultures do things. I hoped to broaden my children’s minds.

Tending My Garden of Lack

The reality of life abroad however, brought many challenges.   I discovered that even the smallest daily tasks were harder than I had experienced in the United States.  The water wasn’t safe, so we had to use purified water to brush our teeth and get a drink. We had to bleach all of our veggies and fruits to kill bugs and bacteria.  Finding simple items was an epic challenge; there was no Target or Office Depot like I was used to. One day I remember spending over 7 hours driving around the city looking for paper clips and came home empty handed.   The difference in time zones made it difficult to call home, and our internet was slow and cut out frequently. I can remember sometimes having to call 6 or 7 times just to make it through a short conversation with a sister.   

Driving was challenging.  Many of the streets were not marked, and not knowing the language made it difficult to ask for directions. There were times I spent hours lost and driving around with a crying baby in the car.  Traffic was oppressive–one time it took me over 3 hours of white knuckled driving to get my children to school.  They struggled with bilingual schools; they felt overwhelmed in an environment where they understood nothing.  There were no libraries, and the pollution was so bad it often prohibited going to the few rusty parks nearby. Medical care was not always optimal, and sometimes it was in a foreign language.

On difficult days, I would compare my experience there with the idealized life in America I imagined…the mini-van, the cul-de-sac, walking to elementary school, clean water, and the list goes on.  When I compared my life abroad to this, things seemed difficult and unfair. Without even realizing it, I began to tend my mental garden of scarcity. The more I noticed how much harder life was, the more I collected evidence of the challenges in my life and my resentment about our lifestyle grew.  My garden of scarcity grew and began to take over some of the real estate in my garden of abundance.

My husband and I accepted a posting in Hawaii–I did finally get a little home with a yard on a cul-de-sac.  We could brush our teeth in clean water, shop at Target and my kids could speak English in school. I could communicate easier with my extended family.  I had all the things I had dreamed about in an American life. My ideal of life on a cul-de-sac—while wonderful had just as many challenges as my life abroad.  They were just different. We lived in a small home, abundant with bugs! We had no A/C and it was oppressively hot. The schools were not as stimulating as our previous experience and everything was SO expensive.  My children still struggled, but with different things. I still felt discouraged and frustrated. And, I found I missed many of the wonderful things about our ex-pat life.

Tending Abundance

I realized it didn’t matter where I was–there would always be lack as well as abundance.  I was focusing on where I was, trying to get to the right place–thinking that the abundant garden was an actual physical place or situation–I realized it wasn’t.  The abundant garden is in our minds. We get the abundant garden by the positive thoughts we plant and nourish by intentionally focusing on. Lack will always be present as well.  But we dry out that garden as we give it less attention.  

With this shift in my understanding of abundance, I began to see my life in a new way.  The challenges didn’t evaporate, they stayed the same, but I began to notice the abundance in my life and focus on that.  I could walk to the beach! My children could go slip-and-sliding in the backyard and we could be outside year round! There were breathtaking hikes just minutes away.  We made some wonderful friends and we had lots of family come and visit. Hawaii became my garden of Eden…not because of where or what it was, but how I thought about it.

Similarly as we’ve moved abroad again, I have found a life full of abundance in our ex-pat life as well.  The difficult things of living outside of the US are still part of our life. There is still traffic, food and sanitation issues, and language barriers.  None of that has changed. At times I get frustrated by them, but I’m learning to prune those thoughts and not allow them to overtake my garden of all the abundant things I do love about our life.  When those thought arise, I just allow them to pass through, but don’t let them take root. I try to think of the inconveniences as part of the package deal that comes with so many benefits for our family.

I spend a lot more time noticing the amazing education my children are getting, nurturing relationships with other ex-pat women who have lived all over the world, and relishing our family outings on Saturdays to ruins, natural wonders and historical treasures.  I try to stop and notice things; the other day I saw a man riding a bicycle stacked high with cardboard boxes several times taller than himself riding through a developed intersection full of cars. I thought about how fascinating this life is–and how amazing it is to have a car to drive.

This mental gardening has helped my emotional garden of abundance to grow and has helped to prune back my garden of lack. It has indeed caused “the wasteland of illusion to fall away, and allow me to experience Heaven on Earth.” (Or at least moments of it. 😉

Tend Your Garden of Abundance

What area of your life do you want to improve?  

When you think about that area, what is in your emotional garden of lack?  What about your garden of abundance?  Tend the garden you want to grow.  Nourish the thoughts of abundance by thinking of them often, talking about them, writing them down.  Acknowledging the lack is fine, but dwelling on it will diminish the sense of abundance.