062 One Thing and Your Week Will Be Totally Different

This is Dr. Torrey. Welcome to the Influence Every Day show, where we make every day better and we influence for good. I have a question.

How different will this week be if you pretend that everyone you meet is there to teach you something? How different will your week be? Now, this can be in any situation whatsoever. There might be something there to learn. So let's say you have an annoying colleague, they're annoying you, and it's occurring again and again. And today, though, you're wondering, what if they're there to teach me something, what might I learn? What might I learn about my own boundaries? What might I learn about how to speak up or how to initiate a difficult conversation? What might I learn about just being patient? If you're dealing with a rude customer or a rude patient or a rude client, what might that be there to teach you? Is there something about your own emotional control, your ability to manage your state? Maybe there's something there for you to learn. Maybe it's simply, I don't want to be that way and let me make sure that I'm not in that situation. Maybe it's how to make excuses for other people to come up with reasons that they might be responding not to you with rudeness, but they might be responding to something in their own context, in their own world, in their own situation that they're dealing with, and they're just not good at it. They're taking it out on others. And that's. Maybe that's the lesson. What if your child has a tantrum and it's like the middle of a grocery store or something? Is there something for you to learn there about maybe not worrying about other people judging you, or maybe there's how to anticipate that that's going to happen and manage it earlier. Maybe there's something else there about just staying regulated in chaos. Whatever it is, there may be a lesson there for you. What if your spouse or partner, they have some criticism of you and it occurs at the dinner table? Let's say, what is that there to teach you? Could it be that you have blind spots and they see them loud and clear? Could it be that you might have something to learn about your own defensiveness about things rather than looking forward and saying, wait a minute, maybe there's a thing here. Maybe I can adjust, maybe I can tweak? Can you evaluate negative criticism and see if it's actually true? That might be what you're there to learn. But this week, if you pretend that everyone you meet is there to teach you something, every encounter you have is there to teach you something. That passive aggressive email that comes through, well, hey, maybe. Maybe it's just to practice reading it with a neutral tone, to practice reading it with different tones and just say to yourself, maybe I read this wrong. And you know what? Maybe you didn't. But you still learned how to practice reading it with different tones, to practice reading it with some grace. Who knows in what state they were when they fired off that email. Now, maybe you keep getting triggered by the same thing over and over again. Maybe there's something there to learn and you realize, hey, wow, I got triggered by this before. I got triggered by that before. It's not the person, it's the pattern. Maybe I'm being invited to interrupt the pattern or to at least just recognize it and to adjust accordingly. Now, what about something mundane? You're in an Uber or a Lyft, a taxi, and let's say you have one that's talkative. Maybe they espouse some wisdom and you take a nugget that becomes your mantra, Something you write down, it's a writer downer, and you stick it on your desk. Maybe it's there. Maybe there's a lesson in how they say something. I was once in an Uber ride. I think I was in Cleveland at a speaking, at a conference. And before I got in, this guy had thousands and thousands of reviews, and they were all five stars. And so when I got into the car, I tried to see what he did differently. And all he did was ask me a couple questions. And I found myself talking. And then I finally said, hey, I want to know something. I looked at your reviews before I got in here, and I saw that you have thousands and thousands, all five stars, not one less than five stars. What do you do? Do you do something? Are you deliberate about something? What is it that you do? And you know what he said? He said, oh, all I do is just ask a couple questions and let them talk. And I think they really enjoy the ride because they like what they hear. They like what they hear. They hear themselves talking. That is brilliant. And that lesson, I've heard it a thousand times, but that time it hit home because I heard it from a guy who was wildly successful in a place I didn't expect to learn a lesson. It was a moment of deep insight. What if your week is like that? What if your next conversation was, what if your dinner table is like that tonight? What if your next meeting is like that? If you just pretend they're there to teach you something. If you have A micromanager. You know what, we can talk all we want about how awful that person is and oh, they're micromanaging and it's creating this culture and this and that. Maybe there's something to learn about your clarity of messaging. Maybe there's something to learn about giving a heads up, proactive communication to say this thing is happening and this is what we're doing, this is our approach. And you say it ahead of time. They don't need to come back and micromanage because they don't feel like they were left out. Maybe that's the lesson. Maybe a junior colleague is in a meeting and they say something that's incredibly obvious, like it's an idea that all of us knew. Okay, well, what's the lesson to learn there? Maybe there's something there where if you just listen with fresh ears, maybe. Maybe your lesson is to suspend your own expertise, put it off to the side for a moment and hear it with fresh ears. Maybe the lesson is to go up to them and rather than worry about the fact that it was an obvious comment, instead tell them about the experience of the past. You know, we've done that before. I want to ask you a question, since you brought it up. How would you do things different, differently? Because here's what we did in the past with this obvious thing you just said, here's what we did now. How would you approach it differently? Because these are the challenges we encountered. All of a sudden that changes the dynamic. A it tells them, that was pretty obvious. We've already tried that. But instead, now you're asking them to solve a problem. And guess what? They're coming with fresh eyes too. And maybe that's the lesson. If you hear a comment that rubs you the wrong way from someone, what's the lesson there? What if you just asked yourself, is this a mirror that I'm looking into? How does that change the rest of the week if a child asks you a simple but profound question? It's simple, it's profound. It makes you like, pause with shock. I remember my mom telling me this story. She said when she came home from work, I. And I was a latchkey kid, right? When she came home from work, I was, I had my feet on the wall. I was maybe five or six. I had my feet on the wall while I was laying on my back and I was throwing a ball up against the wall and catching it as it came back to me. So my mom came and she got down on the floor with her back on the floor and put her feet on the wall. And she asked me, what's up? And I asked her this question. I said, mom, you go to work to make money. But I was thinking, what if we didn't spend the money? Then you could be home with me all day. Now, of course, we know that the child doesn't understand that we have to go to work to make money so that we can pay the bills. And the bills are how we're able to even have a home and live in it and use all the. The kid doesn't know that. But what a profound lesson for the parent. Yeah, you're right. This is what I love. This is what's important to me. This is an important moment. What if I actually just change the moments I do have because of that simple lesson that a kid just said to me? I'm telling you, if you pretend that every person you meet for the next week is there to teach you something, and if you approach it with curiosity and humility and you know some presence to it, you will find it to be a profoundly different week. The world will open up in ways you can't even imagine. As you listen to this podcast, the world will open up in ways you can't even imagine. So go ahead, pretend the very next person you meet is there to teach you something. Are you ready to learn? I'll see you in the next episode.

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