Stop Letting People Have Their Way With You
No one’s words, actions, or opinions should change the course of your day or your life.
You control outcomes, you decide the direction, and you control your life. No one else does.
Yesterday, my six-year-old son had a melt-down when his friend was over. After refusing to share any of the battery-operated vehicles we’ve purchased, he sat miserably at the plastic kids’ picnic table. Tired of the situation, I sent his friend home and my son to his room.
Yesterday, he began to learn about the struggles of life — the fact that you must learn for yourself that your decisions lead to your outcomes. Straight to the point: it’s your job to figure out the direction of your life. It’s your responsibility to accept that lessons must be learned every day. Being naïve or not wanting to believe things happen is not an excuse when you fail to be happy or safe.
Let your mind travel to being in line at Starbucks, the grocery store, or some other public place you frequent. Take a minute to really put yourself in this place, hear the sounds, smell the smells, and imagine where your mind is while standing in that line. Bring in the struggles of your real life with you for this exercise: your kids, your work woes, your outstanding bills, your marital conflicts…
Count to ten and feel yourself there – 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.
Now, realize that during that daydream of chaos, the person standing behind you is just too close. Without looking behind you, you know that person is just standing too close. It’s uncomfortable, you feel awkward and you step forward to create distance.
That feeling is gut instinct and for most of us, we only pay attention to it when we are consciously uncomfortable. What if you began to learn to feel gut instinct and intuition before that person entered your personal space?
From a law enforcement standpoint, we couldn’t do our jobs effectively without gut instinct. It’s one factor that separates a good cop from a great cop. With gut instinct comes perception. Perception, anticipation, and awareness need to all work in concert to awaken one to their surroundings.
Perception is simply your reality. If your perception is that Game Of Thrones is terrible, then you won’t watch it and you’ll always believe it. In an early article, I wrote how our moms made us soft by teaching us to be nice. Read It Here.
If it is ingrained in you that people are nice, your perception is that all people are nice. But all people are not nice. So what happens as we, the “nice” people of the world, travel through our daily existence searching for the rainbows, only smelling the flowers, and holding the doors for every person who refuses to thank us for the kindness?
Before you continue reading, understand I don’t want you to become paranoid, jaded, or resentful toward others. The lesson here is for you to identify your middle ground to become safer and more aware as you search for rainbows and Starbucks coffee. That’s it. I do not want you to become a cynical, angry person who thinks that evil is all around us, all the time.
To answer the previous question, what happens to nice people if they are too uncomfortable to consciously accept that those bad people exist? They become vulnerable. They look like easy targets. They’re more likely to become victims.
Bad guys are lazy. They don’t like to be challenged. They look for easy prey and don’t have the processing ability to formulate an organized plan. The type of “bad guy” I”m referring to here is a common street thug or drug addict driven simply by the primal desire to get their fix or get high. Calculated, smart, and angry criminals with bad intentions do exist, and I’ll address them in a separate post.
Basically, if you look vulnerable, if you look like you lack confidence, or if your head is low and buried in your phone, you look like a target. Start living your life with your head up — alert and aware.
As I explained to my son yesterday, you are the only person in your mind, and no one else knows exactly what you are thinking. Even better, no one else knows what your boundaries are. Simply put, if you’ve never been in a fist fight, no one needs to know that except for you. Present with confidence, become confident and become less of a target.
Take the time to learn to recognize gut instinct, put yourself in a safe spot and feel your gut tighten up. With the recognition of instinct, you can begin to work through it and consciously take an action or actions that remove you from a bad situation.
Next, consciously begin to spend more time being aware of the things that surround you. Pay attention to that strange vehicle driving slowly down your street. Pay attention to the two people hovering in the parking lot of the store you're about to walk out of. More importantly, pay attention to that which feels out of place.
Let’s consider a real-life example. The East Aurora movie theater shooter bought a ticket for the Batman release and sat in the front row of the movie for twenty minutes. He then got up and walked out the emergency exit to his vehicle where he geared up. We’ve all seen movies. We’ve all been in a movie theater. But have we all seen someone exit out of the emergency exit? Probably not, but if we did or we do in the future, it’s odd, it’s out of place, and my gut says that’s not normal. Your senses should kick in and you should pay attention once you witness something out of place.
If it’s odd, or out of place, if that person in line behind you is standing too close, I simply ask that you pay attention to it. I’m not asking you to go immediately into offensive or defensive mode based purely on biases or assumptions. Your goal is to recognize and attune to your gut instinct. Begin to trust that feeling and just be aware, not paranoid. That’s it.
If you learn nothing else from this post, consider these five takeaways:
No one is allowed to touch you without your consent.
No one has the power to affect your day unless you give them that power.
No one is allowed to take what belongs to you.
No one is allowed to hurt you or your family.
You decide the direction of your life.