SDS 316: Make It About Yourself

Welcome back to the SuperDataScience podcast ladies and gentlemen, super excited to have you back here on the show. And today I would like to talk about something that I’ve been learning for myself for the past couple of months. It’s been greatly impacting my life and providing me lots of benefits. And my hope is that maybe you can also take away this and integrate into your life and get the same benefits as well.

So this is a topic I’ve been discussing with my psychologist for the past few months and probably comes at no surprise that I do have a psychologist because if you know me, I’m a curious person and I love to learn things including how my own brain or mind work. And that involves diving into psychology, understanding my emotions, my feelings and what’s going on. And you know, sometimes in life it just happens that things happen and you don’t know how to react or you don’t know why you reacted in certain way and there’s no way of figuring it out on your own. Or for me anyway, with my limited knowledge of how the mind works. And that’s why I love talking to psychologists.

Over the past couple of years I’ve moved on through several psychologists because like I love learning. And then once I’ve learned everything I need to learn from a person, I move on to the next one and I keep adding to my knowledge of how the mind works. So it’s a really cool experience. In fact, I highly recommend for everyone to have a psychologist if you have the opportunity to do so. A long time ago, many years ago, I was very opposed to it. I thought it was, you know, I didn’t understand it. I didn’t understand why it’s necessary, but I really enjoy these conversations. So, if you have the chance, highly recommend to have a psychologist.

And in fact, you, if you’re listening to the podcast a couple of episodes ago on episode called FiveMinuteFriday Contemplation, you heard from Mitja Žibert who is the company coach and he meets with every single person in our team at least once a month or maybe more frequently if there’s a need for that, where they’re able to talk through their personal, professional, anything, personal, professional life or anything, absolutely anything going on in the life so that they can… That he can help them out and guide them through these difficult situations that happen.

So that’s how much I believe in this psychology and emotional wellbeing that everybody in our team has access to a coach who can help guide them through these situations. Yeah, so that’s as a short detour into the world of Psychology. But what I was going to say is that this topic I’ve been discussing is about how to resolve conflict or how to assess situations when you’re getting triggered. So what I’ve learned over the past couple months is that you, or I definitely when I talk to other people, for instance, I get triggered by something. I feel upset, I feel sad, I don’t understand why a person is doing a certain thing. I get angry. That’s an emotion. And emotions, sometimes they come and we cannot do anything about it. They just come, they happen, and that’s that. But what we can do something about is whether or not we hold onto emotions. Do we let them linger or do we let them pass?

So imagine you throw a stone into a lake and then it causes ripples. Well those ripples happen and then they pass. And that’s how emotions should go through human mind, or through a human body. Like emotion happens and then you let it go. If on the other hand, I choose to hold onto emotion, I choose to be sad, upset, angry for a long time, that’s my choice. That’s something I have control over and I’m choosing to do that. So in that sense, first step is choose the happy lifestyle. Don’t hold onto these emotions, especially the bad ones. Let them, let them pass, let them go. But at the same time, it’s really hard often to make these choices. Sometimes you do get upset, sometimes you do get sad or angry and you don’t understand what’s going on and you feel you need to talk through this through with a person, especially if it’s in a professional relationship or even more so in a personal relationship, sometimes things trigger you and you just can’t let it go.

Well, you need to talk with the other person. So here’s the trick. The trick from what I’ve learned is that when I talk to another person is I need to make it about myself. I should not say to the other person, you’re doing this. You should stop saying it that way. You are triggering me like that. I don’t like this about you. Or just blaming the other person is never going to help because then they get defensive. And moreover you’re like putting yourself in the position of a victim that you’ve been victimized by this other person. Blaming the other person is never going to help. And all I do in that case is I put myself in a position of a victim that I’ve been victimized by the other person and now I need them to change.

What I’ve learned is that what I need to say is everything about me that “Hey, I feel like this, like the things that you did, I don’t want you to change, I don’t want you to take this as an attack, I don’t want you to think that I expect you, I have expectations about how you should behave or say things. But I just want you to know that what happened between us made me feel like this. And I’m trying to understand why and how I can improve on that.”

That’s all you’ve got to say. You’re going to make it about yourself. And if the other person is understanding, the other person can see that you’re coming to this from a point of view that you want to improve the relationship and you want to improve yourself. They’ll help you out. They’ll say, “Hey, Oh, okay. I understand. Yeah, that’s, that’s no problem. I don’t have to do it that way.” Or “I understand why you could get hurt” or “this is actually what I meant when I said that”, or “This is why I did that.”

They’ll explain better their position because there’s always two truths to a story. So the best way to approach a situation is to say, “Hey, this is how I’m feeling. This is how it’s affecting me. I don’t want to feel like this. Let’s talk this through.” That’s something I’ve learned and it’s really been benefiting my life. I’ll give you an example. So I was cooking with a friend dinner a few days ago. And basically we take turns in cooking dinner and this time it was my turn. I was cooking, I don’t remember, some pasta, I think. Yeah, mushroom pasta, like vegan mushroom pasta. And she said, “Hey, can I help?” And I asked her, “Yeah, sure, you can wash the mushrooms and cut up the mushrooms.” And so she did that. But then slowly she was like, “Oh, you shouldn’t put salt in the water that way, or you should put the vegetables in this order, not in that order.”

So basically she’s a better cook than me. And she started telling me, helping me improve in her mind on how to cook and teaching me how, like, what’s the best way to approach this meal, this dish. And at the same time, for me, that started triggering me because when I cook, it’s for me, it’s like creating, it’s like creating a course. It’s like I’m writing a blog post. It’s like a very creative process. Like painting a picture. That’s what it is. That’s what it feels like. I like to do it my way, even if it’s not the ideal way, if it’s not textbook way, I like to experiment and create things. And so it started triggering me that she’s telling me how to do things instead of telling her that, “Hey, please stop. This is, you know, I don’t like how you’re telling me these things.”

What I did is I let her, I said, “Hey, okay, like you, you definitely know more. You can take over the process. You can be the head chef and I’ll help you out.” And so that’s what we did. And then afterwards, after the meal and then I like, I analyzed my emotions, I analyzed while we’re cooking. I thought to myself, “Why am I feeling this? What is going on in my head and how am I taking these things that she’s saying?” And obviously she was trying to help. On the other hand, I was taking it as an attack or I was taking it, basically I was taking it as somebody intruding my space of creativity.

And then, after the meal, we talked about it and I said, “Hey, look, what happened before, I felt like this, I felt that, I was trying to create and at the same time, your comments, while I understand where you’re coming from, you’re trying to help me, they were limiting my creativity. And I, I prefer to cook like this. Is that all right?” And she was like, “Yeah, oh, I totally understand. I didn’t realize I, you know, going over the line and telling you how you should do things, I thought I was just helping out and helping you learn. Of course, that’s not a problem. Next time when your cook, it’s totally in your control. You do it how you want. And when I cook, I’ll do it how I want.” And that’s it.

So when we had the conversation, it really cleared up the air. I wasn’t lingering on that feeling of being upset. I didn’t let that pull me down. And that conversation was very productive because I didn’t go in there saying, “Hey, you know, you made me feel like this. You did this wrong. You did that wrong.” No, I made about myself. I said, “Hey, this is how I felt and I don’t want to feel like that. And this is how I understood your words, your intentions and these were my intentions.” That’s it. So always make it about yourself. And that will open a very friendly dialogue with the other person.

So there we go. That’s my quick two 5 cents on the psychology. Hope you enjoyed that and hopefully you can maybe experiment with that in your life. Very often we have conflict situations or misunderstandings. And if you happen to have one of these in the coming weekend, I highly recommend pausing for a second and assessing your emotions. And then if you are going to have the conversation with the other person, which is very valuable, then make it about yourself and go into the conversation by starting and saying, “Hey, this is how I feel,” not “this is how you make me feel.” That’s a wrong phrasing. No, it should be “This is how I feel, how I felt. I don’t want to feel like this and this is how I understood things. Let’s talk this through.”

Try that out and see how it goes. On that note, thank you so much for being here. I hope you enjoyed this episode and I look forward to seeing you back here next time. Until then, happy analyzing.