Holding onto to anger or grudge is one way of engaging with people. This seems twisted, but this is the truth because holding grudges bring some kind of value for angry people. It’s time to drop your shit because grudge is a form of pain, and this kind has a physiological and psychological effect on a person. Not only does this grudge hurt the person you hold it against with, but it will also hurt you when you never stop being angry. You just end up breaking your own heart. People often wear their broken hearts like a badge of honor. But the thing is, you can always choose to not always be angry. Learn why anger is as powerful an emotion as love and how we can let go of it to reframe ourselves and be better.
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This episode is called Resolving to Drop Your Sh*t. It’s about the topic of self-forgiveness, the grudges that we hold and the advantages and disadvantages of holding them. I admit to some of my grudges and we go deep into this topic.
I am very happy to be talking about Resolving to Drop your Sh*t, how to drop your shit. I don’t remember exactly what inspired this show but it has shown up a lot in the last couple of weeks. First off, we do not have a coachee, mainly because I’m sick and tired of looking for coachees. I’ve realized that the only way I have people hearing about coachees is Facebook. There are close to 10,000 of you who are listening to this show per month. I get those 10,000 downloads per month, and if you want to be a coachee coached live on Tuff Love, we don’t have to know each other, you can contact us at Summer@KandellConsulting.com. Summer is my associate handling my stuff. If you want to be on the show coached live free by yours truly and getting a little tough love, please email her and she will take care of you.
This is more fun when I get to coach someone and I’m sick and tired of looking so let’s see what happens there. Second, I want to let you know that I have this weird statistic that says that Japan is 22.9% of my downloads per month. That is so cool. I am big in Japan and it’s pretty incredible. Also I want to say that the United Kingdom is 2.1%, Peru 0.7%, Netherlands 0.2%, France at 3.4%. Japan is kicking all your butts, so tell your friends and let’s get these numbers up for the international competition of who is listening to Tuff Love. If you want to be on the show, please email Summer@KandellConsulting.com and she will handle you to get your problems solved on Tuff Love.
Resolving to Drop Your Shit, I’ve been thinking a lot about this topic because this is the main job I do as a business consultant and as a life coach. I am educating people on how to drop that grudge, that pain, and more often than not that self-imposed dislike and anger towards oneself. A lot of what I do is help people reframe how to let go of that stuff, that block, that shield, that je ne sais quoi that stops you from feeling another person. It has a lot to do with the process of, “Why am I still angry with this person?” I was thinking about the world and how we are like the balls on a pool table or a bumper pool. We’re constantly knocking into each other. If you remember your high school biology, seeing those videos of all these molecules in this small little space bumping up and knocking against each other, or like a New York City subway or the London metro where there are so many people and we want our own personal space, then we knock up. It just feels uncomfortable to be so close and entwined with other human beings, and how intense that is for our systems. I was thinking about this narrow little window of how to engage with someone well.
Morgan and I got into a heated discussion about the topic of my coffee consumption. She loves me so deeply like no other person in my entire life. She doesn’t like that I drink coffee. I was still in my boxers and my T-shirt, went down to make myself a fine cup of coffee, and then her face skewed up. She said something and I was so mad that she yet again berated my coffee consumption. We’re talking for a couple of hours about this and it wasn’t about the coffee. It was about myself and my desire and women shutting me down about my desire and my mom and food. The point was we got through it and we talked about it. What sparked from that was this small little window of acceptable ways that I had for Morgan to talk to me about coffee and how we have this narrow thing of how to be touched extremely well. It’s like in Star Wars, that two-meter wide shaft that Luke Skywalker had to shoot the photon torpedo or whatever it was called or this narrow window of how well to be actually touched.
Grudges in our system hurt the person holding the grudge a lot more than it hurts the person you have the grudge with. Click To TweetMost of the ways we’re engaging with each other sucks when it comes down to it. It hits the B rating most of the time, sometimes it’s a B plus, mostly it’s a B minus or C, and how we put up with this narrow little window of being touched and seen and engaged with and kissed and acknowledge really well, and how we don’t educate each other on how to do it. We walk around with this annoying, unfortunate way that people are engaging with us and how little joy and how little perfection it is on how well we’re touching each other. What happens is that we build resentment, judgment and dissatisfaction. There’s something in the way that we don’t like how this is going. We start to create this chasm. We start to create this annoyance that we have on another person. Because of that, it’s very hard to be touched and seen and engaged with well. What happens is we get angry. How often do we process that anger? How often do we tell the truth in terms of what’s happening for us? We get mad and then, at the extreme or the not so extreme, we build grudges and we have anger.
The thing about grudges is that grudges in our system hurt the person holding the grudge a lot more than it hurts the person you have the grudge with. We’ve talked about this on some level, I’m sure you’ve engaged with this in some, but I don’t know if we acknowledge it because we love our grudges. We revel. We hold onto our grudges and wear them like that comfortable sweatshirt that you wear after a night at the pub or a plant medicine journey. You come home from work and you had a bad day at work with your boss which you have a disagreement and grudge with. You feel annoyed, so you go to the closet and find those comfy sweats. That’s how we wear our grudges because they slip on and feel good because they’re something comfortable. Grudges cost. There’s an indelible physiological and psychological effect when you hold on to pain.
I have four grudges with four different people that I am deliberately holding on to. In writing for the show, since Tuff Love is about truth and honesty, I had to do some work of what’s the advantage that I hold on to these four people in my life. When I think about the 20,000, 30,000, 50,000 people I’ve engaged with in my life and some pretty intense situations throughout my OneTaste years and all that, that’s pretty good to have four grudges. That’s a pretty good batting percentage, four out of 50,000. That would get me into the Major Leagues if I was playing ball with that percentage, but it’s not. It’s just me and my own little world. I was thinking about what the advantage was.
What I got to was that there are still unresolved stuff with those four people. There’s still something that wants to be seen inside of me or learned. There’s some way I want to engage with them in the future and get something. It’s not clear but there’s still some reason I’m holding on to that grudge. Maybe it’s so I’ll never do the thing I did with them again, namely get into a business partnership with someone I didn’t know well or a powerful woman that I felt I needed to hide from. There’s still some piece of me to hold on to that grudge. At the same time, I’ve done a lot of work, a lot of energy and a lot of therapy to figure out to knock out those grudges with those other 49,996 people when it comes down to it. The point is that there’s something inside of me that does want to learn from the grudges.
If you’re holding on to a grudge and you want to work it out with that person, these steps are pretty standard but let’s go over them. The first is to look inside of what’s the benefit of holding onto the grudge. What is it inside of you that wants to be touched by this grudge? What is it that you’re holding on? What’s the value? When I coach people, this is the hardest part when I come into it. I say, “What’s the advantage of holding onto this anger? What do you get from it?” They’re like, “Nothing. There’s nothing. It’s detrimental. I don’t want to.” I’m like, “There must be something.” They’re like, “It’s their fault. They won’t apologize. They did this. They did that.” I’m like, “That’s true and what is it inside of you that wants to hold onto it?” Sometimes, someone will break our heart.
We’ve all had our hearts broken probably in the world at least once and maybe you’re still holding onto that broken heart. Maybe that’s the way you feel connected with that person. Maybe that’s what you need in order to remain to have connection. Anger can be as intimate as the love feeling. It’s a strong emotion. Sadness can be as a strong emotion. Maybe that’s the way you perceive you’ll be able to hold onto that person if you continue to be engaged with them through your anger or sadness or that broken heart. That’s totally fine. Start to look at the cost. What’s the cost of holding on to that piece and what are you getting out of it? That’s the first thing.
The second thing is your responsibility. How did you co-create this situation? I’m coaching a man now who engaged in a situation with a woman. She broke up with him and started seeing another guy. He’s unwilling to look at his side of the street. My coaching with him is I tell him some tough love and then he disappears for about three weeks and he pops up. I tell him the same thing and he’ll probably disappear for another three weeks. This might be a six-month text conversation on this one piece of him seeing the responsibility. Responsibility isn’t an “or”. It’s not like, “I’m taking 38% of the responsibility and she’s responsible for 62%.” It’s, “I can hold 100% and she can hold 100%.”
Look at your responsibility of how you created this disruption in your relationship. Where did you see it? I see that with the four people I have grudges with. I’ve done a lot of work to see how I co-created this, how I didn’t step up or how I didn’t communicate or how I didn’t say the thing I needed to say. I do see the depths of how I did this. If you’re unwilling to look at your side of the street of your responsibility, the chances of you moving through your shit is nil. Even if you think you’ve dropped your shit and you haven’t looked at the full responsibility of how you co-created that situation, it’ll come back in spades. That’s a piece you want to look at. How did I create that situation? Then look at the fear of may be it happening again. This is a big piece of why we don’t drop stuff. We hold it as a reminder to know that I won’t put myself in that situation. I did a show called It’s A Life lesson, Not A Life Sentence, which I keep using in a lot of my coaching sessions because it’s true. It’s like, “I hold onto this fear because I want to make sure that it doesn’t happen.” This happens a lot in love and in relationship. We’re so afraid of doing the bad deeds we did. That’s another reason we don’t drop it.
The last thing is to look at your personal inventory of what’s happening for you and why you keep this in your arsenal. Maybe there’s something you want to learn. I held a grudge against my dad for maybe eleven or twelve years. That shit fueled my whole OneTaste experience. Part of the reason OneTaste was successful or my part in co-creating OneTaste was I held a grudge against my dad. It fueled me because that fucker wasn’t going to win. He was not going to win. I was going to win regardless. That created the chasm between him and I. Then about my 40th birthday, I was just like, “It’s time to drop this feeling. It’s time to drop this pain. It’s not serving me any well.”
Resolving to drop your shit is a practice like anything else. It’s not like you can will this away. You can’t will away your bad feelings. You have to do the work to figure out what’s the underpinnings, what’s the underneath it all for you to get from point A to Point B. Sometimes most people aren’t willing to do it. You can take a quick inventory in your mind of people you feel disconnected with and feel this chasm between you and them and you can start to do the simple exercise of, “What am I doing? What’s my advantage? What’s the value to hold this piece?” and start to do the work.
Drop Your Shit: If you’re unwilling to look at your side of the street of your responsibility, the chances of you moving through your shit is nil.
It’s easier to do this with another person than it is with the next type of unwillingness to drop your shit because that is with yourself. We are our biggest critic and the hardest person to drop your shit with is with oneself. If you learn the lessons of why you’re so mad with someone else, start to look at yourself. We are our own worst critics. We will not drop the past in terms of who we are and what we did. A lot of this work I’ve been doing recently is this sentinel I keep for my good behavior, this way that I self-flagellate, this way that I self-sabotage as a fear of doing things again. When we are not willing to take the burden of self-flagellation and beating ourselves up, it limits our life. It keeps us small. I was coaching two people and they were in a very dynamic relationship. They’re jammering for an hour and fifteen minutes about all the stuff.
I was listening mostly in my couple’s therapy and I wrote down the word forgiveness on my piece of paper. I circled it and then I waited. For the last 30 minutes of the call, I basically kept re-introducing this concept of forgiveness. I said, “You have to forgive each other, but mostly you have to forgive yourself.” The thing they kept saying was, “We tried so hard but we kept hurting ourselves and hurting each other.” I said to them, “Did you do the best you could with the tools and the awareness and the skills you had at hand?” They were both like, “Yeah.” I said, “Why won’t you forgive yourself?” If there’s some part of you that’s hurting or smarting or beating yourself up around a relationship or where you didn’t behave well or where you didn’t take care of yourself, maybe it’s time just to investigate with the concept of forgiveness.
I’ve got some comments about show 088 with Om Rupani where he talked about the patriarchy and the chasm between men and women. I didn’t agree with much of what Om said during that show, but I did agree with his view of how men and women can engage with in the future. There has to be forgiveness. There has to be forgiveness for the sins of the past. There has to be forgiveness of the miscues and hurt. Without it, we’re going to stay stuck in this disruption of our lives. How can you look at what you did and know that what you did was the best possible optimal thing you could have done in the moment? Even if you look at your life and think about, “I miscued that. I wasn’t up to here. I was an asshole here,” maybe that was still the best you could do with what you had at hand.
If you’re in that state where you’re not willing to forgive yourself, maybe it’s time to start and build a practice of self-forgiveness. Click To TweetI made a mistake with one of my business clients. I forgot to submit this bonus, this small little number and I was beating myself up. Then I was like, “You did the best you could. Just forgive, apologize, make amends, fix it and then go from there.” If you’re in that state where you’re not willing to forgive yourself, maybe it’s time to start and build a practice of self-forgiveness. Look at that action or person, you can look at yourself in the mirror, you can write it in your journal, you can talk to your therapist, you can talk about it in your men’s group, and start to say to yourself, “I want to forgive this part of myself.” Draw your attention of your past and enable yourself to forgive because without forgiveness we stay stuck. With staying stuck, that’s where we limit ourselves. That’s where we create our own self-limiting beliefs to not have the life exactly the way we want it.
There’s no reason not to forgive yourself. Think about the worst thing you’ve done in your life. If you can’t forgive yourself, then go to a priest. Do the work because you can and you should. You owe it to yourself to live the rest of your life in the most optimal way possible. The first step often is to start with your own self-forgiveness. That is this show’s rant. I don’t have time to talk to all 10,000 of you. I will talk to you once a week if you email Summer@KandellConsulting.com and be a coachee on Tuff Love. We’ll be back with a cool guest star, a woman named Jamie Thompson who I met in Boulder. You might have noticed we have our Six Conversations being distributed every Friday on Tuff Love. If you feel so inclined and have any thoughts, you can always email me at Robert@KandellConsulting.com. If you are from Japan, make sure you translate it because I don’t speak Japanese. I’d love to hear from you if you have any thoughts about the show. I thank you very much. Take care.
Thank you so much for joining me on Tuff Love. If you’re interested in being a coachee on Tuff Love, please email Summer@KandellConsulting.com. Go forth. Enjoy your day.
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