A Two-Step Process For Releasing The Opinions Of Others

Hello and welcome to the Wild Free Will podcast.

I am here with what I hope is a really practical episode about how to release the opinions of others.

And yeah,

I think this is going to be a good one.

And we're just going to dive right in.

So basically,

This is a two-step process.

Okay.

And step one begins with taking a second to think about the opinions that you are currently prioritizing and how that's kind of like showing up in your life.

So think about all the ways and all the areas of your life where you're kind of focusing or giving precedence to someone else's opinion.

Okay.

So take a second and try to bring up as many of those as you can.

So it might be like your boss at work,

Or it might be a friend,

Or it might be your partner.

It might be your parents and like the things that you,

You know,

That you think that they want from you or that they want you to do.

It might be like things that society tells you,

Like things that you should want or the paths that you should take.

So for example,

Maybe,

You know,

I need to go to university because that's the next step.

Like you go to high school,

You go to university,

Or I need to stay in my job because,

You know,

It's a really good job and it pays well,

And it's really secure and so on and so forth.

So take a second and think of every single opinion that you can come to mind.

If you want to,

You can pause this and you can actually like write them down and like really take a second and like sit with them and sit with that feeling that they're giving you and how they're kind of like all the things that they're bringing up for you and maybe,

Maybe you're feeling a little bit of pressure and you know that you need to like perform,

That you're not really able to fully be yourself,

Whatever.

Okay,

So pause this if you need to and then when you're done come back and we'll move on to step two.

So step two is to take every single one of those opinions,

Every single one,

Every last one,

And throw them out the window.

And like I know that right now you're probably wanting to like end the podcast or like switch to another one or whatever and because it sounds like really simple and it is really simple but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's easy and that's probably because of the story that you're telling yourself.

So in this case,

What might be holding you back from like really being able to release other people's opinions is the story that you're telling yourself about,

Like for example,

Why their opinion is more important or more valid than yours.

So perhaps like taking the example of university and actually I can speak to this because I think that if I had been honest with myself even all those years ago I probably wouldn't have gone to university.

But and I did actually have a moment of cold feet and when I spoke to my mom about it back then because I was 18 and so we you know at that time we speak to our parents and we kind of look to other people for guidance.

When I spoke to my mom about it she was like well if you don't go now you'll never go and like I hold no grudges against my mom for what she the advice that she gave me because I think I genuinely believe that she was doing the best that she could at the time and that that was like what she thought would be best for me.

So definitely like no shade there but looking back on it if I had taken more time to sit with that feeling and I don't think that it was fear necessarily like I don't think I was afraid of what I was moving towards but I think that I just realized that sorry I realized that it wasn't necessarily the right place for me and then if I'm really honest it took me eight years from that moment to finally get my degree and I'm glad that I did it it was like it opened up a ton of doors and like if I had done anything differently I wouldn't have the life that I have now.

I really believe that everything happens for a reason so I can't undo any piece of my story and still end up having this conversation with you.

Like I guess the like I guess the butterfly effect kind of idea like I just can't undo it so I'm glad that I went but I think that at the time when I was questioning it if I had had more faith in myself I would have been able to analyze that a little bit differently and maybe make a different choice and I don't know what that different choice would have been and I don't know where it would have led and obviously could have led me down like a much worse path in the same way that it could have led me down a much better path there's no way that we'll ever know but there I prioritized what was expected of me so you finish high school you are I'm like you know a white cisgender person I am of a certain like I hate saying class level but like I have a certain like economic stability I come from a family with a certain amount of economic stability and the natural path for someone in my position was to go to university and then when I asked for advice or when I kind of expressed doubts about it to those closest to me and it wasn't just my mom I talked to other people about it everyone was kind of saying no you really need to go so in that case I held the opinions of society or the pathway that was kind of set out for me and the opinions of those closest to me higher than my own and that's normal because I was 18 when I'm like in the situation that I'm talking about so it's really normal that at that time I was not fully I don't want to say actualized because I'm not fully actualized now and I don't believe that anybody is really fully actualized or very very very few people are I think in our world but I was definitely less so than I am now and I was certainly more confident in some ways but definitely less sure of what I wanted and what my path was at the time so it was normal that I was prioritizing the opinions of others especially people that I felt knew better than me but I think that when it comes to these situations we kind of want the process to be hard so we want to releasing the opinions of others like we want like a 12-step program for like releasing the opinions of others when actually it's just take in the information or don't but I mean you know you're probably going to hear opinions from people whoever those people might be in your lifetime so allow the opinions to come in and then filter them through your own system of inner knowing like does this ring true for me and this can be true about anything like political views or religious practices like you can take this much more like on a much more macro level but even when it comes to like your decisions like why are you deferring to other people or why are other people's opinions so important that you're prioritizing them or value valuing them or putting them on a pedestal above your own and this often comes from the fact that we don't really have a good foundation of self-worth,

Self-trust and so self-doubt comes in and just like knocks us way off track and that's totally fine there is no right or wrong and it's it's it's happened to me and like even if I feel like in this moment I'm more calm and settled in my position it will happen again in the in the future that's just the nature of life you know we're constantly moving through these kinds of situations it's totally totally normal but we want things to be hard because we don't necessarily want to accept responsibility or at least accept our responsibility in the situation so we don't want to have to be the one that looks at these opinions and says no that's not right for me and then walks a different path so we want releasing the opinions to be this like really intricate process so that it kind of gets us off the hook for the fact that we haven't really one taken responsibility for the situation and two if we go even further back like if we go a step back we haven't fully decided that whatever we're wanting or our opinion is actually true so we're not firm in that choice we don't fully identify with whatever that decision is and so we're not taking steps towards making that a reality and I can give you a million examples of that like the university one is obviously one of them like I wasn't firm in my identity I wasn't sure what I wanted beyond what was being laid out before me and so it was easier and it really is that simple it was easier for me to take the path often traveled not the one less traveled by but the one most traveled by people it was easy for me easier for me to stick to the status quo and do what was expected of me than to break out and follow my own path because I didn't know what the hell that path was and even in business guys the amount of times I have followed someone else's really shitty advice and not because the advice is shitty that's not fair to say actually but because it wasn't the right advice for me it was just either really generic or it was advice that worked really well for those people in theory because even there I have like kind of a you know I sit there and question that because a lot of people give advice after they've done something looking back on how they would have liked to have done it and not how they actually did it but anyways but yeah I like think back to how many times in business I have just like valued like the opinions of so-called experts over my own and I've walked a path that ultimately led me to burnout because I wasn't really honoring myself because I was trying to make myself fit into a box it's countless times like literally since I started so I started studying business in 2016 and then I went into business for myself in 2018 and I've been doing this ever since and since then it's like a constant struggle like I still struggle with this where I like see other people and I've taken so many courses and stuff like that where it's been like okay if you do just xyz in abc order then you'll have success and that's never going to be true because it's not true for me but I value those opinions because I wasn't in a position where I could fully trust myself because the because the idea of building a business felt so unknown and scary and I was looking for a path already traveled absolutely because I thought it would be again easier and I think that that's kind of an underlying theme I didn't realize that this is where this was going but like sometimes when things are easier they are not necessarily right and I don't mean that things can't be easy like I think that I've switched the way that I've approaching my business and I'm doing something that feels much more holistic and is coming much more directly from my soul and I'm hoping to connect with people on a different way I'm no longer following like a paradigm that was handed to me which I spent many many years doing and that is actually easier in the sense that it's easier for me to do it it's easier for me to maintain but the path might be harder because it's not like for example blasting people with 7,

000 posts on instagram per day in order to like get more um vis visualizations to get more followers to get more clients that kind of thing so we're not necessarily following like the best business practices which would be quote-unquote easier because the path is already laid out for you there are many things that say like okay if you post at this time on this day it's like it's going to work um I would beg to differ but yeah it's just really interesting though like in doing things my own way it's actually become more easeful more full of ease for me to show up because I'm just speaking from my heart and I'm sharing things that feel real to me so gone off on a tangent there but yes we want things to be hard and we don't allow them to be easy but at the same time we kind of take the cop-out path that's already been traveled by because we're afraid to believe in ourselves enough to do things the way that we want to do them and to do the hard things to do the scary things you know to leave the job to leave the relationship to change our minds to you know put ourselves out there when it's scary and all of these things we kind of we kind of hesitate to do that and so much of this comes from that like okay again a lack of self-belief and also not really owning what you're doing as part of who you are or at least maybe that's not even the best way to say it but not really identifying with what you're doing so and again going back to the business thing because this is the area where it shows up for me absolutely the most um is like for me it took a really long time for me to own the fact that I am a coach or I am a coach sorry I hate that but I work as a coach like that's what I do and that's that's the energy that I bring to the table it took me such a long time to fully own that because I didn't necessarily want to be clumped in with the coaching industry still don't if I'm totally honest but it is what I do that's the work that I do and so there's no point in denying it and like for years I was afraid to tell people that and so I wasn't really identifying with the with that identity I wasn't sorry not identifying with the identity I wasn't embodying the identity of somebody who had already made that decision to just go and do it I wasn't fully embodying the energy of being a coach and going after what I wanted I wasn't fully embodying self-belief and running my business the way I wanted to I was too busy deferring to like the programs courses and advice of other people who may or may not know better than me because we don't really know right because all we're seeing of people is what they're showing us we're not seeing like the behind the scenes we're not seeing the work and the preparation so we're just kind of seeing what they're putting out there right and like that too about like even university like just not owning what I really wanted and not not being willing to sit in the unknown and taking the path that was already laid out for me already pre-decided instead of deciding on my own what I really wanted so I know that this sounds like bullshit because I'm not I've oversimplified it and I don't know if that's actually 100% true I don't know if I actually have oversimplified it I think it really is that simple that we just think about what other people are telling us and then we do what the fuck we want to do because yeah there's always going to be advice there's always going to be people who know better and there is a time and place to take that but at the same time no one ever will ever ever ever know your path better than you no one is ever going to know what's true for you what's right for you where you ultimately want to go besides you and so like in a similar way you could ask well what the hell is the point of working with you Alessia like why would I work with a coach then and and and I think that's so funny I think it depends on the coach I think it depends on the situation and why you're looking for support so if you're looking for somebody to give you the answers and I have been there so many times it's almost embarrassing to say and I'm not even talking about a long time ago I mean we're talking like 2021 and then I kind of released that because I made a vow to myself to stop buying courses but yeah like 2021 I was still like in the midst of like trying to follow somebody else's path and trying to do what was like being told to me and like taking the kind of quote-unquote the easy way out following this prescribed path so like I'm still working on this like and I'm but I've learned that following what other people are doing is never going to get me where I want to go and it's always something that ends up leading to such negative feelings within me like feelings of burnout that's probably the number one reason why I've ended up burning out is because I've compared myself to what other people are doing and because I followed somebody else's path 100% and it always leads to even more self-doubt because if I'm following this path that has been laid out for me and has been explained and kind of clarified and it's not working then what the hell is wrong with me and the answer is nothing there is not anything wrong with you except for the fact that you're not doing what you're meant to be doing or how you're meant to be doing it you're not following your own truth it really is that simple and it's because you need to build up this this foundation of self-belief and that's something that you can work on with a coach because a coach will typically guide you back to yourself and that's certainly how I run my business so I don't give advice I sometimes give suggestions yes but it's not about advice it's about asking questions and getting you to the root of who you are because no two people are the same not me and my clients even if we're aligned not you and anyone else so I could tell you the way that I did it and it will probably work for a little bit and then ultimately not really work out that well unless it is also part of your unique path so unless the things I share were already something that you were inherently drawn to or that you were already working towards etc etc so what you would do with a coach instead is you would focus on asking the hard questions and actually answering them because how many times do we try to figure out like why we don't believe in ourselves or figure out why we're prioritizing the opinions of others and we start by asking ourselves the question but we don't sit still long enough to get the answer so that is another thing that you would work on in a coaching container so there is value in these things obviously all of these modalities even the courses I would not undo a single course that I've taken because it's led me to where I am and I had to take all of those detours in order to realize that none of that shit works for me not a single piece of it I have to do it my own way because I'm stubborn and you know that's the way I've always been and if I had looked back even to the way that I behaved as a child I would have probably known this but I was too busy believing that other people were ahead of me and knew better than me and you know again that their opinions were more important than mine so and I certainly did not believe in myself enough 100% but self-belief is something that gets built up over time and honestly is a topic for another podcast because we're already like way over what I like to the length I like the podcast to be but anyways just to recap how to release the opinions of others take everyone else's opinion and throw it right out the window and start to foster a relationship with yourself where you learn to at least recognize the signs of you wanting to do things differently and then build up a relationship with your intuition and build up a sense of self-belief which is a topic for another time but I hope that this episode was useful for you and there was a little bit of waffling on my part so sorry for that but I hope that you found the stories at least interesting and I think one of the big messages too that I want to get across here is that I am on the path with you I am walking this path with you I don't know better than you I'm not farther along than you I do not have things figured out we're all still constantly constantly constantly figuring things out and so yeah if that's something that resonates with you I would love to walk that path with you you're welcome to reach out but I just really hope that you take something away from this I really hope that you sit there and you look at what other people think and you ask yourself why am I prioritizing this why am I putting this ahead of what I think and like what do I really want what do I need I say these questions constantly on the podcast because they are the foundation of everything you need to be asking yourself these questions it's like the single best thing that you can possibly do get to know yourself get intimate with yourself spend time asking yourself questions and if you need support to get deeper ask for help read a book take the course if the course is what you think is right for you work with a coach work with a therapist find whatever modality works for you and and run with it you know and if you don't need a modality at all fuck them all perfect fuck them all and do it on your own and whatever works but whatever you do trust yourself above anyone else ever always including me especially me trust yourself above every single thing because you have all of the answers I hope you love this podcast episode if you do please rate and subscribe and I otherwise I will see you on the next episode.