Mindset Monday - Stop the pity party

This is episode 201 of the Empowered Team podcast. Can you even believe it? 200 episodes. I never could have imagined getting here. But we want to celebrate with you by running a little contest so that you can win a really awesome, remarkable tablet. It's a thing that has really made such a huge difference in my work, especially working remotely so I can write on it and have all my notebooks in one place and go onto my computer and onto my phone and it's all right there. I love it, love it, love it. So for you to win a remarkable and support us in our journey on this podcast, do our contest. It's so easy, easy, easy. Just pick your favorite episode, share some episodes, and the more people you share with, the more entries you get to win a remarkable tablet. So don't wait. Find the link in the show notes and hopefully you win. Awesome. We'll have an extra surprise too. The zenith is back. The most amazing retreat that really dives in to getting you to your next level. Physically, mentally, spiritually. We have leased out a five acre oceanfront gorgeous spot in Sayulita, Mexico, and it is time for you to dive in and change your life. And I don't mean there's anything wrong with your life. I mean up level, expand. Make it what you really want. The Z nest is coming end of February this year. We'll tell you more. We just want you to know ahead of time, save the dates. Welcome to the Empowered Team podcast where we explore how to optimize your performance in career, sport and life. And now your host, executive coach and life strategist, Kari Schneider. Welcome. Welcome to the Empowered Team podcast and mindset. Monday. Today we are talking about the pity party. Stop the pity party. We've all had it, even when we don't recognize it. We've all been there, we've pitied ourselves. I like to call it poor meitis. So when I would see clients and they may have been dragging their butt into a physical appointment or into a coaching call and you can tell that they're feeling sorry for themselves and if it wasn't so bad, I'd kind of call them out a little bit and just make a little fun in order for them to be able to make fun of themselves. The pity party. The poor meitis. It's not fair. Why me? Those are all the things that we as humans naturally run into. Because why we're human. So why are we having this topic? It's because when things get tough, sometimes we fall into pity instead of getting tough. So this is Going to give you the tools, the three steps to stop the pity and promote your own personal power. So what is self pity anyway? So here's one of the definitions of self pity. It's an emotion in which one feels sick, sympathy, sorrow and pity towards the self in regards to one's own internal and external experiences of suffering. So self pity has also been defined as an emotion that's directed towards others with the goal of attracting attention, empathy or help. So it's not just the feeling of feeling sorry for yourself, it's also as humans, a tool to get attention from others because we have a reason for what we do with everything we do. So of course it ends up affecting other people. So I love this quote, it's by an author named John Gardner and the quote is self pity is easily the most destructive of the non pharmaceutical narcotics. It's addictive, gives momentary pleasure and separates the victim from reality. So I think of myself back many years ago, this is about 15 years ago, and I had, I was running a gym facility and I had a space that was about 6,000 square feet of open gym space, clinical space for athletic therapy, treatment room, I had all the, all the things there. And due to the circumstance of falling in love and meeting my husband and we wanted to be. We'd spent a year apart while he was in Europe and we got to a point where we just weren't willing to be apart anymore. So I had set up my manager in my physical training space in the gym and she was going to be running things. But I'd also subleased out the space with another business and they were doing some mixed martial arts, they were doing some personal training. And so they were going to occupy some of the space because it was such a large space, it had plenty of room to be shared. And so I rented this out. Now in the first few months it was working out wonderfully. He was paying his rent on time and you know, I still had some other people working for me there. So it was this great scenario of shared space and it was covering some of the losses of me not not being there and me being in a different part of the world. And I was running a lot of my things from there. But what happened in the second month and or next few months I should say was that then the rent wasn't being paid on time. Well, this was a bit of a problem. But you know, I knew this person and I knew that they would follow through or I thought. And we had after all a contractual agreement so it shouldn't be that much of an issue. And then later it turned into not paying it fully, so it wasn't being paid on time. But then he'd come up with some money, but it wouldn't be the full amount that we'd agreed upon and had a contract over. And so then I'd say, well, you know, you still owe this amount. And that would go further into subsequent months, meaning that then he simply just wasn't paying the full amount and wasn't paying what was owed. So I started charging interest on it and saying, hey, you know, if you're not going to pay this, then you're going to have to pay it back, but with some interest because I'm not your. I'm not lending you money here. We have an agreement. But one of the problems was that I was in. In Turkey and I wasn't in a space of being back in Canada to actually physically be there to deal with it. It was a lot of email communication and phone calls and, and things along those lines. But I had this paper trail of email communications and, and was collecting all of the information I had, the signed contracts, all of the things like that. And then eventually he wasn't paying at all. And we were about to come back from Turkey anyway, so I wasn't going to make a special trip back, but needed to address this immediately because he owed money. And I was on the hook for paying this to support the physical space that we were in. So I came back from Turkey to find, as you might guess, that the space had been. All of his things had been removed. He wasn't there any longer, he had left. And yet I was in the situation where I still needed to be paying as well. And so for a long time I had this mindset of how could he do this to me? I can't believe that he's done this. Why is this happening? I was really frustrated because I thought I did all the right things and this was someone I knew and had worked with in the past, so I thought I could trust them. So within all of this dialogue in my head was a lot of poor me, like, I can't believe this money loss. This is happening to me. And it starts with this bit of empathy and sadness. But then as it lingers on and the story continues and it's not resolved, then it's adding into not just empathy and sadness, but more of a belief of why has this happened to me? And so eventually I took a little bit of action, actually significant action, and enlisted a debt collector. And I thought I felt Better. I felt like I was enacting some personal power. I felt like I had done something that was going to make a difference and I had an expectation that it would work. And lo and behold, the debt collector, I guess did whatever debt collector due diligence is and reached out and followed up and talked to this person and then came back to me and said, well, you know, they claim that they don't really have to follow through on the. And I couldn't believe it that the debt collector had been subject to the charisma and the lies and he had been basically schmoozed into believing that this person really shouldn't have to pay the money back. And that's when my self pity took a big spike of gripping me because at that point I couldn't believe how unfair this whole situation was. They utilized the space, they ran their business out of the space, they made money from being in my space and they skipped out on what they owed. And I couldn't believe that this was a situation. And I complained about it and I didn't tell it to everyone, I didn't post it on social media, I didn't do things like that. But I was certainly carrying it around and feeling sorry for myself along the way. But what that did is it held me in this perpetual state of loss of power and it wasn't working for me at all. Now another scenario, and this was a little more. These are both very personal scenarios, but this one was a little more close to home from a family standpoint. I was a single mom for a number of years. And as being in being a single mom, I was in a situation where I didn't have any grandparents in the city that I lived in and my daughter's father wasn't in the same city that I lived in. So the only help that I had was a babysitter, if I hired a babysitter. And so this was really challenging when it came to my work and even any sort of social life. So I had very little of both. So whether it was hearing a friend talk about going out that would spike the pity party in me, whether it was hearing another parent, whether it was a dad or a mom, and they might say something like, oh, they, you know, they're a single parent. And then I was realized that no, they weren't really a single parent. They shared their child half time with the other parent in the city. And so my definition of single parenting was completely different from their definition of single parenting. And that would spike me into a whole chronic poor Meitis that would have me feeling like, you know, they couldn't possibly understand what I was going through. And it's completely not fair at all. And it's so hard. I have no help that they have and I have to figure it all out on my own. And this way of thinking simply perpetuated this destructive self pity. And I wasn't using it as a way to get attention, but it wasn't supporting my, it certainly wasn't supporting my personal power. It was having me be resentful, act like I had a chip on my shoulder and really separate myself from others, have me not be understood, really separate myself from reality. Now on the flip side though, I noticed if I look back at my pity history here, on the flip side, and you may recognize yourself in some of these examples, but when my husband and I would have some challenges in our relationship, I would become really grumpy, just this kind of pissy pants attitude around him. And when I look back, it was this self pity that was looking for attention. It was self pity that was trying to attract the help from him or the empathy from him and, and especially the attention from him. Because if I walked around being grumpy enough, maybe then he would see what I needed or maybe he then would see I needed help, or maybe he then would give me some of the attention or, or, or engagement that I was, or connection that I was desperately craving. And yet it was such a, such a lost cause, it was not working at all. And I couldn't even see that I was in this big spike of self pity. So overall, I share these stories, I share these examples because we all do it. It's within our design. If we have this suffering and this self pity, it's something that we're using either to manage what we're experiencing because we don't know how to feel, or managing what we're going through in whatever the circumstance is, or we're using this self pity to gain attention, the problem that comes in is that it can become habitual. So by succumbing to this circumstance that may or may not be unfair and acting like it's causing our problem or suffering, seeing simply diminishes our own personal power. So as soon as this personal empathy or this personal sorrow or suffering lingers on long enough to become a habit, then we're simply spiraling or staying in a cyclical this cycle that doesn't do ourselves or anyone else any sort of service. So here's our three steps to stop the pity and promote the personal power. So we're going to stop pity in its tracks, stop the poor meitis and really step into magnifying what we're capable of, really emphasizing what the possibility of our own personal power is. So number one is to notice. Notice is, number one, notice when empathy towards yourself lingers and becomes habitual instead of either processing, releasing, or choosing what to do next. So number one is notice. So in the, in the situation with the person who owed me rent, that situation went on for so long until it finally got to a point that I was losing sleep over it. The debt collector wasn't getting any results and I had a choice of what to do about it. And I was. So I was sick of my own personal pity. I was sick of going through what I was going through. So finally I realized that I wanted to actually make a choice. So noticing is number one. And the noticing I found that because I was losing sleep, I was seeing all of these other effects from this pity. I was having this if, and I was thinking it was because of him, but the realization that it was that I needed to deal with this myself. So number two is discovering the belief that's behind the pity. So discover what you believe that's causing this self pity. So it might look something like they don't understand me or they don't understand this situation that I'm in. They don't understand what I'm dealing with. So it's something along the. Along the lines of separation from others. They don't get whatever I'm experiencing or they don't get me. It's the separation from others. That's one of the beliefs that typically come with self pity. Another one is why is this happening? Questioning whatever the circumstance is, especially if we believe that we did all the right things, so it should have been a good outcome. So when we believe that something's happened and it shouldn't have happened the way it did, or if it's not just a thing, if it's a person behaving a way that they shouldn't behave in a way that they currently are. So we believe something should be different than it currently is. And another one is, is this is so hard. So it's this belief that something should have been easier than it currently is, that it's so hard and it wasn't supposed to be this hard. And a last one that's really common in self pity is that it's not fair. It's always coming back to something should be different than it is so that it's not fair. So that's number two discussion, discovering the belief behind the pity. And number three, to stop the pity and promote your personal power is deciding what to believe. You can decide what to believe. And my life changed significantly when I decided that, okay, this guy may or may not pay me back, but I'm going to decide what I'm going to do about it or not do about it. I'm going to decide the action or. Or inaction that I'm going to take so that I'm not going to lose sleep about this anymore and keep suffering around it. And so choosing what to do, I decided that it didn't matter whether he paid me back or not. I was going to release it and live my life fully and move on with my business. And that's what I did. And it was a huge relief. And the answer is I didn't get the money back from him. And I pursued it for quite a long time, but the pursuit of it caused me more of a cost than the money that he owed me. And so ultimately I ended up just letting it go. And it was. It was brutal for a long time before I decided that. But once I decided that, it was a huge release, a huge relief as well. So other things to decide. I also decided as a single mom that other people may not understand what I'm going through and that's okay. And they have their own challenges too, and I can be there for them and their challenges. So deciding that made a huge difference for me as well. And being grumpy with my husband, I decided that it was more miserable for me and him if I'm showing up in a way that I don't want to be in my life if I don't want to. I don't want to show up as someone who's not my best self. And that's what made a big shift for me. And I might need some things, I might need some help, but acting a certain way in order to draw attention wasn't serving me and it wasn't serving my relationship. So I decided what to believe. And that's what brought the personal power back in those particular examples that I gave. So here are some examples that really help not only myself, but my clients in what to believe. They're doing the best they can. So can I. That belief right there assumes that they're doing what they can right now. And it's assuming that we've got more to give or more a greater way that we can show up. Another one is this too shall pass. Things are tough. All a lot of things are tough that come our way and this too shall pass assumes that anything that we're going through is going to pass just as the good things pass too. Another one is this is happening for me. I love this. This is something that is foundational in some of the work that Tony Robbins teaches. And it's that whatever is happening, it's all happening for me. Not to me, it's happening for me. So this is happening for me is a very powerful one. Another one is that I have a choice in this and this is what I choose. So we decide. We decide how we show up in our lives and what it's going to mean in our lives. And so it's up to us to decide. And that action, actually deciding is what brings our personal power back. Having the choice and recognizing that we have choice versus staying in the self pity of believing that we're a victim and that's where it changes is really stepping into the choice. So the three steps are really about noticing, discovering the belief. So noticing when it's lingering into a habit, this self pity or this something that might be magnificent as empathizing with yourself, that's very powerful. But when it lingers on and on and on and turns into this self pity, that's habitual and that's not working. So noticing when that happens, discovering the belief that's behind that happening, this pity of yourself, that's ongoing and then deciding, taking action and deciding what am I going to believe? What's going to work better in this situation. So those are the three steps to really stop the pity and promote the personal power. And I'd like to leave you with this. There's a beautiful quote by Joyce Meyer and it's this that you can be pitiful or you can be powerful, but you can't be both at the same time. Again, that's you can be pitiful or you can be powerful, but you can't be both at the same time. So on that note, I choose to step into my own personal power and I know that you do too, being part of our empowered team. So keep stepping into that personal power. Let this serve you in a way that keeps empowering yourself and others and have a wonderful rest of your week. Hold up, hold up. Wait a minute. Go to the show notes, grab the link. Enter yourself into our contest to win a remarkable to celebrate our 200th episode, help us reach 100,000 downloads. That means we've helped helped 100,000 people in some way by sharing mindset tips, health tips, exercise performance. You name it. We want to make a difference for others and you can help us. So share away and tell us what you want to hear more of in our contest. We can't wait to hear what you think. And thank you so much for being with us on this journey so far.