How to let go of how others feel

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“I don’t know how to make him happy. “I don't want her to cry.” “I need to make sure she understands.” “I don’t want them to feel disappointed.” “I want them to feel like I care.” What do each of these thoughts have in common? They have you trying to control how someone else feels, which is actually something that is never in your control. In today’s podcast I talk about why you should stop trying to make other people feel a certain way and why it's OK to let people feel any emotions (even the icky ones).

Topics in this episode:

• It’s not your job to make someone else happy or to save someone from a negative emotion

• Each person is responsible for their own emotion

• All emotions are useful, even the icky ones

• The impact of taking responsibility for your own emotions

• The perspective that shifted they way I viewed others emotions

• A simple evaluation tool to help you control what you can actually control and let go of how other people feel

Show Notes & References:

• Start letting go of how others feel and begin to feel confident and in full control of you by scheduling a free breakthrough call, click here to get the process started: www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/book

• Want ongoing support as a working mom? Sign up for the free 19-day audio series: How to be a present and connected mom. Each day you will receive an email with a downloadable audio of 5 minutes or less that will teach you a tool or strategy for being more present and in the moment. Click here to sign up and receive the first audio: https://www.ambitiousandbalanced.com/be-present-optin

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Transcript

Intro

I don't know how to make him happy.

I don't know how to get her to stop melting down. 

I need to make sure she understands. 

I don't want them to feel disappointed. 

I want them to feel like I care. 

What do you notice about these very common thoughts they all have?

You are trying to control how someone else feels, which is never something that's actually in your control.

In today's podcast, I talk about why you should stop trying to make people feel a certain way and why it's okay to let people feel any and all emotions. 

At the end, I'll offer an exercise to help you gain awareness over when you are trying to control other people's emotions and what you can do about it.

If you've ever struggled with people pleasing then this podcast was written especially for you.

Welcome to the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms Podcast, the place for women who want to balance their ambitious career goals with their life as a mom. If you're looking to feel more confident, decisive, and productive at both work and home, then this is the place for you. I'm your host, Rebecca Olson. Let's get to it.

Hello, working moms. I'm really looking forward to being with you here today. I've spent the last week celebrating my daughter's 9th birthday. And I don't know about you, but as a mom, my kids birthdays feel sort of like a really big deal. 

They're a big deal for me because it's a time that I reflect on how much bigger my kids are getting and how much time is just flying by, and I have lots of big feelings about that. 

But it also feels like a big deal for my kids. 

I want to do right by them. 

I want them to feel celebrated. 

I want them to feel special. 

And we actually don't do big birthdays in our family every year. We've decided that big birthdays are saved for when they turn five and then ten, and then probably like, 13 and 16, and those in between birthdays, we just try to keep a little bit more low key. 

So in this case, my daughter just invited a few friends, and we went to the city pool, and we had a swim party, and then one of those friends spent the night, and that was it. 

Birthday traditions.

But we also started this really fun tradition this year, and it actually started with my son's birthday, who turned six back in May. And here's how it went. 

I'm just so excited about it, I love it. Please steal this. It's been, like, the best little celebration tradition that we've started now. 

So I go to the dollar store, and I bought my daughter, like, maybe 10-12 little toys and things that I thought my daughter would like, along with some balloons. And then I hide all those little toys around the house. 

I don't even wrap them. I just hide them and then we write down a clue on a little piece of paper that we stuff inside of the balloon before we blow it up. Then we put the balloons all over the floor, we end up hanging some balloons as well. And we have a bunch of banners that we string across the living room and the hallways and things like that. 

So when she literally opens the door, what she sees is all of these banners and then all these balloons on the floor and kind of hanging around. And so what she has to do is she has to go around to all the balloons and she has to pop them and then open up the little piece of paper and then go find the gift. 

And it ends up being this super fun scavenger hunt, and both kids just love it. 

In fact, my daughter 100% expected it and requested it after she saw what happened for my son. And it's just so much fun. 

But let me tell you, I am tired. I'm very tired. I'm ready now for the banners to come down and the chaos to kind of end. We're done with birthdays for the rest of the year. All the family's had birthdays already. So now it's just time for the holidays. 

Let's dive in, though, to talking about our subject for today. The concept of this podcast is actually a topic or a concept that I have had on my list of things to talk about for quite some time, probably months and months and months. 

But it wasn't until my client recently said something to me and I'll tell you what she said in a moment, but what she said just really struck me. And I wrote it down, and I said, I have to write this podcast. It's time, it makes perfect sense now. So let me give you some context. 

This client spent some of her coaching sessions with me, talking about her relationship with her husband. You recently have heard me speak about marriage on the podcast. 

I did a podcast around the thoughts that you have about your marriage and how that affects your ability to feel balanced. And so it's not surprising that, of course, marriage tends to be a topic that comes up on our calls. 

And for this client, she was really struggling with her husband's emotional ups and downs. 

In this case, he'd been sort of down or depressed for quite some time because he's in between jobs. And although he's been getting tons of interviews, it just seems to keep going on and on and he's not quite landing the job. It's understandable, of course, that he would have some downs and a little bit of depression at this time. 

And my client was just really struggling with this, struggling to figure out how to interact with him, particularly with his mood swings when he was down. 

And oftentimes this whole interaction would lead to a fight, which would trigger more things and then it would just kind of spiral from there. So it wasn't really just about this moment or the job. It was about this pattern that had been happening. 

And so we spent a few different sessions talking about this and on the last one, she said something to me that was just so profound and it's at the heart of what we had been coaching on and it just all finally clicked for her. 

She got on this call and she said, “it's not my job to make my husband feel happy.”

Let me say that again for you.

I really want you to think about how impactful this belief truly is. 

It's not my job to make my husband or anyone happy. 

This actually came up with one of my best girlfriends who's in town right now and visiting me. And her husband has been going through a funk and was frustrated, and she kept trying to cheer him up over the course of many days, maybe even weeks. And it just wasn't working. 

And she said, I don't know how to make him happy. 

I told her, it's not your job to make your husband happy. 

So take a moment and just think about how often you go around attempting to make someone else feel something. Usually it's in the form of a positive emotion. 

How often do you go around thinking it's your job to make someone else feel a certain way? 

• You want your husband to feel happy. 

• You want your kids to feel celebrated on their birthday. 

• You want your kids to feel excited. 

• You want your boss to feel like you're doing a good job. 

• You want your team to feel like you support them. 

• You want your clients to feel heard. 

• You want your friends to feel cared for. 

How often when you're really honest with yourself, do you go around thinking that it's your job to make someone else feel a certain way? 

Another way to ask this or say this is sort of the reverse. Like, how often do you go around trying to make sure someone does not feel a certain way? That sounds like this: 

• I don't want them to feel disappointed. 

• I don't want my kids to cry or be upset. 

• I don't want my team to feel like they're not important. 

• I don't want my friends to be upset with me. 

• I don't want my company to feel like I'm not a team player. 

How often are you attempting to buffer someone else's emotions or try to control how somebody else is feeling? 

Now, if you're like my clients, it's a lot of the time. 

People pleasing.

In fact, this is the heart of people pleasing. People pleasing is about trying to save people from feeling a certain, usually very icky feeling emotion or trying to take too much responsibility for how somebody else is feeling. 

This isn't your job. 

Just as my client recently learned and this is the first point that I want to make today as we talk about other people's emotions. 

It's not your job to make someone else feel a certain way, not even your kids. Nor is it your job to prevent someone from feeling a certain way, not even your kids. 

With my client and her husband, I asked her if she stopped trying to make him feel happy or to get over the discomfort of the job search and the depression of the job search, what would she do with his emotions, how would she interact with those emotions or with him? 

And I remember she had to think about this one. She may have even had to spend some time between sessions thinking about it, journaling about it, considering it. 

But ultimately, what she came back to is her job was to show up as the best version of herself as a partner and a wife. 

Being the best version of yourself.

And so then we were actually able to start talking about what that meant. What did it look like to be the best version of herself and the best wife she could possibly be? 

When her spouse was not feeling great, was in a funk, was depressed, we talked about holding space for his emotions. We talked about not judging him for his emotions. 

We talked about just being there and letting him emote or cry or be angry or feel discouraged. We talked about not giving advice. We talked about times when other people have done that for her and how that made her feel and what happened. 

So many beautiful things can happen in your relationship, whether that's with a partner or a boss or a friend or a team. So many exceptionally beautiful things can happen when it's no longer your job to control how somebody else is feeling. 

It is impossible to control how someone else feels about something.

The second point I want to make about other people's emotions is not just that it's not your job, it’s actually impossible. 

Now, I say this to my clients a lot. When they feel hurt or disappointed or upset or frustrated or angry, it doesn't really matter what the circumstances are, whether they're completely justifiable or not. The reality is, no one or nothing can ever make you feel anything. Nor can you make somebody else feel anything either. 

Now, here's what I mean by that. And then I'm going to give you an example. 

Emotions are literally your cells vibrating in your body. When you are feeling an emotion, scientists can quite literally look at the cells in your body and notice that they're vibrating. 

And then when you stop feeling whatever it is that you're feeling, the cells stop vibrating. So on a very biological level, emotions are vibrational experiences inside your body. 

Our emotions are connected to our thoughts.

And what we know is that those vibrational experiences have a connection to what you're thinking in any moment. 

The literal words that are going through your head have an effect on the vibrations in your body. And no one can make those vibrations happen in your body, and you cannot quite literally take vibrations and stuff them in somebody else's body. 

That doesn't mean that people don't have influence over the way you're feeling, or you don't have influence over other people's emotions. Of course you do. 

But, the responsibility for how you feel and how other people feel lies in the individual. 

Responsibility is the key word here. 

This is actually really, really great news, because it means that you are always 100% responsible for how you feel. 

Whether you choose to feel excited, energized, filled with joy and happiness, or whether you decide to feel connected or valuable. You get to decide that.

Or you get to decide if you feel upset or overwhelmed or frustrated because you control those emotions too. 

Again, there are likely other people and circumstances that might influence or kind of help you to feel a certain way or to not feel a certain way. But the responsibility of those feelings, they fall on you or them depending on the circumstance that we're talking about. 

I have a client that's not getting paid what she thinks she's worth. In fact, other people in the company are getting paid more than she is and maybe doing less or doing something similar, and it feels super unfair to her. 

And this topic has come up a lot for us in coaching, because fairness is a value of hers, but also because she doesn't feel valued in her job. 

You get to choose how you think about a situation.

Now, I don't disagree that if she were to get paid more and she would get paid, like, equal to what other people are getting paid, that it would make it easier for her to feel valued in her company or more valued in her company. But the reality is, she gets to control whether she feels valued at her current pay scale or not.

This has been so hard for her to wrap her brain around, because she just really wants to figure out how to get up to the level of pay that her coworkers are at. 

And I want to help her do that. In fact, even during our time together she's already received an increase in pay and a promise of more. So we're celebrating that, but it's still not quite at the level she wants it to be, but it's certainly much closer. 

And so she just wants to figure out how does she make this happen? And she sort of wants to almost complain about why it's been happening this way and the injustice of it.

But when we get into coaching, I don’t let her go down that rabbit trail. What we focus on is what she can actually control. 

She can't control how other people pay her. It's not a part of her role to determine her pay scale, or other people’s pay scale for that matter. 

But what is in her control is the value that she brings to her company. And you are infinitely more likely to bring more value to your company, which will likely result in higher pay when you see yourself and feel valuable to them versus when you are feeling like you are not that valuable and perhaps even indulging in the lack of value that you are bringing your company.

You are infinitely more valuable to your company when you see and feel yourself as valuable.

So let me say that again. You are infinitely more valuable to your company when you see yourself and feel valuable to them than when you're worried about not being valuable and the implications of what that means.

When you know your value, because that's coming from the way you're thinking about yourself and what you're bringing to the company - you make faster decisions, you're more bold, you advocate for yourself, you have better ideas. You're way less likely to people please. 

When you feel like you have to make up for a lack of value because you're not feeling valued, you say yes to way too many things. You get overwhelmed and exhausted. You worry a lot about what other people are thinking about you. You second guess your decisions. You seek a whole bunch of validation from other people, all because of the way you're feeling about yourself.

You are always responsible for your own feelings, and other people are always responsible for theirs.

The third point I want to make about other people's emotions is that all emotions are okay. All of them. The disappointment, the anger the offense, somebody feeling a lack of support or not feeling valued, all emotions are okay. 

I talk a lot about this on the podcast. And just last week, you heard me interview my client Skylar on feeling your feelings. And she talked about how uncomfortable it is to feel your feelings, particularly all of those icky feeling ones. 

I don't like to call them negative because I actually don't think there are negative and positive emotions, but for sure there are ones that don't really feel good to us, that feel uncomfortable, that feel foreign, that we just kind of wish weren't there. 

And she talked about her experience of learning how to feel her feelings and  exactly how we did that in coaching. But today we're talking about it in reverse. 

It’s okay to feel all emotions.

Because if it's okay for you to feel your emotions and to not judge yourself for feeling angry or disconnected or frustrated or overwhelmed, if it's okay for you to feel those feelings, then it's also okay for other people to feel them too.

I believe that every emotion is useful to you. 

Every emotion gives a little bit of knowledge to your brain on what's going on and to your circumstances and if you're moving in the direction you want to be moving or not.

The image that comes to mind for me when I think about a person trying to make sure that everyone one else around them is feeling okay or feeling a somewhat positive emotion, when they’re essentially trying to prevent other people from feeling their emotions because they feel bad and they don't want them to feel bad. 

The image that comes to mind is somebody that's trying to keep everybody's bucket full. 

Have you read that children's book about filling people's buckets? I can't think of the name of it right now. It's such a good story about kindness and how our interactions and relations with people, how they affect other people and how they affect us.

But the image that's coming to mind for me is that you're walking around trying to make sure everybody's bucket feels full. 

You're trying to make sure that they're overflowing, right? 

You're going from one bucket to the next at every interaction, just making sure that everybody has a full bucket.

It's exhausting to think about. 

It becomes so self sacrificing. 

You end in burnout.

That's why people pleasing causes so much imbalance in people, because it has you focusing on something that's ultimately uncontrollable. It's impossible. 

I had a thought a few years ago that really shifted things for me when it came to other people's emotions. And it was when I realized not only was it okay for people to feel emotions, it was sort of rude and disrespectful to think that someone else was incapable of managing themselves through their own icky feeling emotions.

Me trying to buffer other people's emotions and try to make them feel a certain way or try to cheer them up. A perspective of that is to say that you don't trust that the other person is able to handle themselves in the middle of those emotions. And how disrespectful is that? 

One of the most honoring and respectful things you could ever do is believe that every human being is able to handle themselves and their own feelings, even our kids. 

Imagine how life changing that would be for you if you believed that your kids were capable of feeling really big feelings, that it actually benefited them to feel their feelings, that they would learn through their failures and through those big feeling emotions. 

We deprive our kids of their life lessons when we don’t let them experience big feelings.

Because most lessons in life come from that. And when we don't let our kids experience hard feeling emotions, we deprive them of their life lessons, which actually makes life harder on them in the end. 

Okay, let's recap.

There are three things that I really want you to take away as we talk about or think about other people's emotions.

The first one is it's not your job to make someone feel or not feel a certain way.

Number two, it's actually impossible for you to make someone feel or not feel a certain way, that everyone has responsibility for their own emotions.

And the third point we want to make about other people's emotions is that it's okay for them to feel all of them. In fact, there's a lot of good things, there's a lot of benefits when you believe that other people are capable of managing themselves and their big emotions. 

But now let's talk about what you can actually do, what's actually in your control when other people are experiencing their big feelings. And I sort of said this earlier in one of my examples. 

One of the very first things I will ask you is what is your goal?

Now, I have conversations all of the time with my clients about their goals. Not their big goals - I mean, I do talk about their big goals, but their little goals, their daily goals that they have in conversations or projects or circumstances or situations or relationships.

Here's what I mean.

If you have a big presentation coming up, you can't control how other people are going to feel or respond to that presentation. 

You can't control if somebody else likes it, connects to it, is happy with it, that can't be the goal because it's not in your control. 

If that continues to remain the goal, you're going to stress out, feel overwhelmed, won't be able to shut down at night, over prepare, kind of perfect everything in an attempt to make sure somebody else experiences good things with your presentation, which is ultimately never going to be in your control, right? 

But what you can control is how you present. You can control whether you present with clarity of thought. You can control how prepared you feel. You can control how you connect what you’re saying to the bigger goals of the company or the client. 

There's a lot of things that you can be in control of that would look like success in a presentation other than somebody else liking it or connecting to it.

Now, another example. 

If the goal is not to stop your kid from having a meltdown - this is such a good one. I love it so much. 

The goal is to not stop your kid from having big feeling emotions, whatever that is. Whether they have big feelings going to school or doing their homework, or they don't like what you gave for them for dinner, or they're just simply upset because you gave them the blue plate instead of the red one, that's not the goal.

If they're allowed to have those big feeling emotions, then the goal is to not stop those because they're allowed to feel whatever it is they want to feel. 

It's not your responsibility to make them feel anything else or to stop them from feeling them or to even redirect them. The goal instead, at least for me as a mom, is to stay calm. To be an active listener, to try to help uncover what they're actually feeling like the deeper feelings that are going on. 

What you are really in control of.

For me to feel connected to them and not be in judgment of them in the middle of their emotions, those are all things that I'm in control of because it's about how I show up in the middle of my kid having a meltdown. 

Whether justified or unjustified, I can control if I get angry or not. How connected I feel to them. If I have my listening ears on at a deep level or not.

Third example, if you have a meeting with your boss coming up, the goal can't be for your boss to feel or to say that you're doing a good job. It can't be for your boss to give you a pay raise. It can't be for them to validate what you're doing, because those are all things that you never have control over.

But what can be your goal?

• Your goal can be to show up feeling prepared for what you want to say.

• Your goal can be to share the work that you've been doing proudly.

• Your goal can be to make a connection for your boss about the work you've been doing and the bigger goals of the company and drawing connection between those things.

Those are all things that you can control.

Learning to focus on what you have control of and setting goals based on that for how you want your responses to be, your reactions, your meetings, your presentations, your conversations. 

Focusing on what you actually have control over will help you infinitely feel more successful. 

You control whether you hit your goals or not.

You control if you show up with confidence when you're thinking about your goals. In this way, when you're thinking about what you can control versus trying to control how other people respond or how other people feel. 

Okay, so here's the challenge I want to give you this week. 

I want you to think about or make an assessment of how often you are making decisions and operating or deciding how to respond to something, or deciding what to prioritize today or not to prioritize or when you're saying yes to meetings or no to meetings, I want you to just evaluate how often you're making decisions based on not wanting someone else to feel a certain way or trying to control the emotional response of somebody else. 

I just want you to evaluate it to get a sense of how often this is happening and in what way. Maybe you just keep a little journal or something next to your desk or you kind of carry it around with you so you can jot these things down. 

Or maybe at the end of the day, a couple of times this week, you think about your day and you think about what happened that day and you jot down some thoughts about how often you were trying to buffer other people's emotions and what those experiences are. 

And then after you've done that for a couple of days and you've kind of brought awareness to it, I want you to then start to keep it top of mind so you make decisions and you respond differently. 

Maybe you put a little sticky note on your computer screen, or maybe a sticky note on your mirror, in the bathroom, anywhere you find that you tend to kind of buffer other people's emotions or worry about other people's emotions, put a little sticky note that reminds you.

I'm not in control of how other people feel. 

And if I can't control how other people feel, what's my goal today or what's my goal in this situation? Or how do I want to respond to this?

If it's not going to be making someone else feel a certain way we need to keep that idea top of mind for you, so you actually start using it as a tool to start making different decisions.

So you stop trying to control the uncontrollable, and you start living your life in a way that feels very empowered and confident. 

All right, working moms, that is all I have for you this week. 

I look forward to connecting with you again next week. And as always, if you are looking for help or support as a guide through this process, this is exactly the work we do in coaching, and I would love to connect with you.

The whole process starts by booking a free call with me. I call that a breakthrough call, and you can go to www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/book, fill out a quick little form, and find a time in my calendar for us to connect. 

All right, working moms until next week. Let's get to it.