Transcript

OLD vs NEW · Wanzology

OLD vs NEW Holy Moses, holy Moses. Hi, how you doing? Welcome to another episode of WANZOLOGY!! I am your host, The Wanz, and I'm trying, I'm battling, battling, and battling onto the next. I hope that you and yours are doing well. What's cooking? How's your summer going? You digging it? I'm digging it, except for a few minor setbacks. Uh, I'm not doing too bad. This week, I think I'd like to discuss old versus new. When it comes to behaviors that you don't like, things that you do that kinda tick you off and you wanna change them, how do you go about changing habits? How do you go about changing thought patterns? How about changing, mm, I don't know, how you talk to yourself? How you spend your spare time? How are you constructively building your-self (two words). Old ways, retail therapy, going getting drunk, tearing up the town, buying a new sports car, I don't think those work anymore. I don't think that going out to increase your debt or all those other things, I don't think they do anything other than mask symptoms of the problem. If your back hurts, and I mean it really, really hurts, and you take a buttload of ibuprofen to kill the pain, well, a day later the pain is back 'cause the ibuprofen wore off and you gotta do it again. My dad would say, "You know, the first step to solving a problem is admitting that you have one," which for some is hard. I mean, it's very, very difficult. They behave like there's no way on the planet they could be wrong about something. I hope that, like me, you avoid those people or at least let them talk until they're done so you can leave. It has been said to me, "Just because you're wrong doesn't mean I have to tell you you're wrong." Hence, avoiding a conversation I'd rather not have. Old ways. The old ways of fixing things, and I'm talking about mental things, behaviors, and self-esteem, confidence, fear, all those little things. There are new ways now. New ways, i.e., CBT or cognitive behavioral therapy, and DBT, dialectic behavioral therapy. All these behavioral therapy pathways. There's meditation, there is mindfulness, there are a buttload of ways that you can fix or try to fix your-self (two words). Some of them work. Most of them don't. And the only reason I say that is not because I've tried all of them,it's because, like New Year's resolutions, everybody starts off really fast, really strong, but as time goes on, the results are less and less noticeable. One day it's like, "I'm not doing that. I'm not gonna meditate for 10 minutes. I'll meditate later." Next thing you know, it's the next day and you missed a rep. You missed an opportunity to be consistent. How many of you signed up for a gym membership right after the first of this year, 2026, and are still going, hmm? Oh, raise your hand so I can see you! Yeah, I'd say there's a good percentage of people who have either quit or are going to quit because they don't go, and that's kind of the way things are with these new ways of doing things. The old ways have been tried, tested, and certified as true. Your older brother did them, or your dad, or your mom, or your older sister, your cousin, or uncle, or somebody did it. They did it an old way and it worked just fine. So why do you need a new way? The reason that you may need a new way of doing things is the last line of the Serenity Prayer, "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." Yeah, that last part, the wisdom to know the difference, what does that mean? Do you know the difference between an old way and a new way of solving things? Are you cognizant of how you used to do things in high school as opposed to how you do them now? How about college? How about your first marriage? How about your last marriage? Are there tidbits that you remember just didn't work on the communication side, on the time management side, on the constructive conversation side, on the support side, on the faith and trust sides? By this time in your life, you've had some experience with those things when relating to another person. Enough to know that being a jerk all the time and not saying thank you and always trying to look in somebody's phone and always trying to know where they are or just suspecting them of this, that, and the other, that doesn't work. It's a surefire way to destroy a relationship. What's a new way? New way that would enhance the relationship? Open communication. Non-blaming sharing of opinions, meaning you're talking about something, but you don't use the word you because that other person is the subject. If you're feeling a ‘certain sort of way’, it really isn't someone else's fault that you're that way, but they influence your behavior. You don't like it, and you react to it. So it's more your problem than theirs. Does that make sense? You take a pebble and you throw it into a still pond, what happens? Bloop, and there's ripples, and those ripples keep going and going and going until they reach the shore, something stops them, right? That's the way behaviors are. Have you ever noticed that when you are nice to someone, you smile at them, they'll smile back? If you speak kindly to someone, "Good morning. How are you doing?”, “Hope you're having a good day.”, “How are you today?”, “How's it going?" That's way different than, "What the heck are you doing here?”, “Why are you doing that?”, “Would you please stop? That's annoying," which is a polite way of saying, "Knock it off!" But the two are different, right? You're communicating an idea, but how would they be interpreted? The interpretations are completely different. Do you know the difference between saying, "You should do this," and, "You know, when I felt like you do, I did that"? Do you know the difference between, "What you wanna do is..." and, "Man, I think I know what that feels like. When I felt that way, I, uh, I tried this and this." You can't make somebody do something. That's the old way. I'm the youngest of three kids, and so the old way was, "Do what I tell you to.", “Well, why?”, "Because I'm the parent and I tell you to do it." That's the old way. What's the new way? "Take out the garbage.", "I will." Time goes by, garbage not taken out. "I thought I asked you to take out the garbage.", "Oh, I'm sorry, it slipped my mind. I'll get right on that." No garbage gets taken out. A little later, "Hey.", "Yes?", "You ever gonna get around to taking that garbage out?" The old way, that would've been your third strike and you would've been ‘struck’. There would've been some kind of motivation, painful, somewhat painful motivation to remind you that the sooner you get something done, the sooner you don't have to worry about it anymore. The new way is that whole, "Is something wrong?”, “Is there a reason that you're not helping me out around here and taking the garbage out?”, “Did I say something wrong?”, “What are you thinking?" Now, that may work, but not if you're old school. New school works that way. Let me put it to you this way. Jails and penitentiaries are filled with people who were raised on ‘timeouts’. Conversely, they are also filled with a lot of people who got their ass whooped. I can only speak from my experience. I got my ass whooped, but I learned when I was raising my kids, that old way didn't work. I started asking them questions because they had the propensity to tell me they knew. "Hey, I don't think you wanna do that." "Oh, I know.", "Don't forget to..." "I know. Yeah, yeah, thanks, Dad. I know." So my response became, "Oh, okay, prove it. Prove to me you know." My youngest son was gonna go out after hanging out at the recreation center, and I said, "I don't think you really should do that. I think you should come home." "Well, I may wanna hang out with the fellas and do this." "I don't think that's a good idea." "Well, why not?", "Well, because the fellas are probably gonna get you in trouble.", "I know what not to do, Dad.", "Really, prove it! What happens if you guys are hanging out at the store? Two of you guys go in there, you're standing outside, and then those two that were inside come running out because they stole something. What are you gonna do? What if you're just minding your own business walking down the street, one of them picks up a rock, throws it at a house, breaks a window. What are you gonna do? Or worse yet, what if you're walking and there's no streetlights and it's down to you and just one of the other homies, and a car pulls up and someone tries to snatch you, what are you gonna do?", "Um, yeah." I learned that by asking leading questions, namely because I was curious, my sons developed better problem-solving skills, 'cause they thought about things before they went and did them. There's a good thing about being the first one out of the party as opposed to being the last one out of the party. You know what I mean? New ways of doing things. Mindfulness versus sitting in a pool of your own emotions, sitting there getting all soaked in them, wallowing in your pitiful sorrows. Which one do you think is better? Do you know the difference? Do you know the difference between an okay feeling, a good feeling, and a bad feeling? If you can discern between those three, you're already off and running on new ways of doing things. What's really fun about new ways of doing things is it's internal. You don't need a psychiatrist or a psychologist, you don't need a therapist. There are practices that you can get to know the inside of you just by sitting with yourself and letting your mind do what it does. Every time it does, you kind of bring it back to the middle. Strays off to the left, "Oh, nope, nope, come back over this way." Kind of like steering a car down a straight road. You ever notice that you steer on a straight road, the car seems to always wanna go one way or the other, and you always have to make little corrections to keep it from doing that? That's what life is about, in my opinion. In my opinion, three-quarters of life after you get out of the education system is figuring out when to do what and why, or when not to do something and why, and the wisdom to know the difference between when you should or should not. That's how you gain experience. And everybody knows in order to say you've been through something, you have to go through something. There's a lot of fakers out there who, "Oh, yeah, I remember when I was getting straight A's." Well, then why can't you solve this simple problem of how short this board should be? Seems like it'd be a simple X equals algebra equation. I was never any good at that, and besides, algebra's not gonna work when you're talking about a human. A human is unpredictable. You never know what a human's feeling. You never really know what they're going to do in reaction to those feelings. You just never know. And yes, being that you're human, other people wonder about you. I wonder about me. I wonder if I'm doing stuff right. A friend of mine told me earlier today that she had a meeting with her therapist, and her therapist likes me. “I've never met your therapist. How the hell does she know what to like and what not to like?” I can't wait to have the conversation. I suspect it has more to do with my friend and their change from how they used to be to how they are now. Old versus new, new-new! I mean, like never been there before If you have always tried to reason with someone who is unreasonable and you've gotten mental fatigue from trying and trying and trying again, as my dad would say, "Well, you know, when you're tired of getting wet from pissing up that rope, you'll move.” Pain is the greatest changer known to man because man does not like pain. Hence the classic example, you haven't gone to put your hand on a hot stove in a long time, have you? Not on purpose anyway. Why is that? In order to learn, one must try new things in order to find out what doesn't work. Why? Because it gives you experience. The old versus the new and the wisdom to know the difference. Think about how you used to do things versus how you do them now. How did you used to do things before you were in a committed relationship, got married, had kids? Now the kids are gone and grown, and it's just you and that person that you still love, but there's no real alternative, so you stay there because it's comfortable and they're actually pretty nice. Or there's that other person that you've stayed with for now fifteen, twenty years, and they're just intolerable. They always berate you and put you down and belittle you. Why would you stay? Maybe that has something to do with why you don't feel so good on the inside. I'm just saying. The wisdom to know the difference means you have to fall down and get up more than a few times in order to figure out how not to fall. Makes sense to me. Your results may vary because, well, because you're not me, and I'm not you. I'm pretty sure your way of doing things wouldn't work for me, and the way that I think about and do things may or may not work for you, I don't know. What I do know is I don't mind learning more than one way to do things. Doesn't matter what it is. I like having possibilities. That's all I have for this week. I've talked a lot and I hope it makes some kind of sense. I hope that you can pick up what I've been putting down. If not, well, let's try again next week, 'cause if it's Wednesday, it's time for WANZ OLO GY!! I am outta here, See ya!!