Latest / Wanzology / How much is too much?
Transcript
- Knowing When To Say When Welcome to your Wednesday. It's Wednesday, Wednesday, Wednesday. Hi. Welcome to another episode of WANZOLOGY!!! I am your host, The Wanz and, uh, very interesting thoughts crossing my mind these days. It's a very difficult question that I ask this week: If you know how much is too much of a given thing and you go past that line that you thought marked the, uh, entrance into too much, and you go farther, do you go back to that line or have you made a new one? What is the process that you go through determining what your boundaries are? How much is too much for you in any given situation? How do you come to that conclusion? Have you ever thought about that? I really love this Clint Eastwood movie. It's called Magnum Force, and it's Clint Eastwood playing Harry Callahan, dirty Harry, and he's buttoning heads with a lieutenant and on the side, this lieutenant has recruited these new cadets, and these new cadets are charged with ‘serving and protecting’ randomly. They randomly protect the public against mob bosses, drug dealers, pimps, and nobody can figure out how are these criminals being taken out, they're not even getting a trial or anything, and Harry figures it out. Harry figures out that these cadets have taken it upon themselves to clean up the city and doesn't know that his lieutenant is guiding them until near the end. Harry, uh, disarms a bomb that was in his mailbox and he keeps it in his car. He is gonna take it down to the station and he is intercepted by this lieutenant. The lieutenant is gonna march him off into someplace secluded so that he can be ‘eliminated’, but he fights back and now some of these cadets are coming after him and he vanishes them, and it's near the end of the movie where those lieutenant vows to prosecute Harry with his own system, “Who's everybody gonna believe, you or me?”, and he gets in this beat up car now and is going to drive off so he can make this case against Harry Callahan, not realizing that Harry had the bomb in the car and he turned it on and then let the lieutenant get in the car to drive away and car explodes. And the camera goes to Harry's face, and he makes a little grin and he says, “A man's GOT to know his limitations.” I love watching the last 10 minutes of Magnum force just to hear him say that because it reminds me, I need to understand where a line is. Just like everyone has a threshold of pain, isn't there one for being too happy, too sad, too lonely? How much can you take? How do you determine how much you can take? How much can you give and how do you determine how much you can give? It's different for everybody. There's no real right answer, but the question needs to be posed for this reason, I think that if you know where your boundaries are, if you know how much you can take. It makes it a lot easier to protect yourself against the outside forces that you don't control. You get very good at recognizing when this is a situation, “I'm not comfortable with, so I'm gonna leave”, or “I can't leave because I don't feel comfortable going out there yet. I wanna wait a little while.”, or “Would you stick around? I don't really feel good about being alone.” How do you know? How do you figure this out? How do you figure out where that line is? And once you know where it is, do you go past it? Some people do. Some people are always pushing their boundaries. They always want to see how much farther they can take things. I don't think it's unhealthy. I think it's bloody dangerous. Put the bullet in the revolver chamber and spin it around it. How many clicks do you think you're gonna get before you blow your brains out? How many chances do you actually have, versus, how many you think you have? What is enough? If you go to all you can eat, it's pretty easy to determine when you've had enough. You don't feel like putting any more food in your mouth 'cause you're full and you're done. But how does that work when you're like at a sporting event, like a baseball game and it's the fourth inning and your team is getting clobbered down by eight, ten runs and you haven't even reached halfway through the game yet, do you leave? Do you wanna just move on to something else because this is no longer entertaining. Do you have a limit to how much of ‘this’ you can take? Or how about a movie? You go to a movie somebody said was really good, and you go to the movie and you're 10 minutes in and you're like, this sucks! How long do you stay a how long do you keep telling yourself, “It'll get better. It'll get better.”, before you just say, “It's not better, I'm leaving!” How many bites of a meal at a restaurant you've never been to before, do you have before you determine that the place has crappy food? Everybody has limits. How do you determine yours? And if you don't know, why don't you know? Don't you think you should know? Don't you think that you should have a process for figuring out where your boundaries are? Because if you don't know where they are, how can you enforce them? How can you keep people from violating your boundaries if you have no idea where they are? Now I'm not, I'm not trying to tell you how to figure that out 'cause I think for everybody it's different. But I do, I do think, and this is because what I've seen, there are a lot of people who have no clue. They have no idea how much is too much or how much they can take, how much of what they give is ‘too much’. Some people have a really hard time recognizing, I know I do. I don't always notice the body language clues that tell me someone isn't enjoying my particular brand of sarcasm. Sometimes I miss the clue that I've said something that has emotionally harmed another person. I didn't realize I had gone too far, and once I realized I knew exactly what to do. I'm trying to not have that happen. How much is too much? It's different for everybody and if you don't know how much is too much for you, how are you gonna know how much is too much for someone else? How are you gonna determine these things? How do you set your boundaries? How do you set those lines of your person, your space, emotional and physical, how do you set those so that when somebody broaches them looks like they're going to push in on your boundary, you say, “Eh, eh, eh, no, no, don't do that! How did you know how to do that? Maybe you didn't put it out far enough. Maybe you put it too close to you. It would be an interesting experiment to think about how you determine how much of anything is too much for you. It's different for everybody, but understanding what your limits are is very important. In any given situation, the circumstance of knowing where your limit is, it might save your life. It might put you in a position to save somebody else's life. It might put you in a position where you're bored to tears, and it might put you in a position to save someone else from the boredom. No one knows. Sorry. Every future teller I've ever run into has been wrong. They suck at it. I remember when I was religiously reading the horoscope every day thinking that it was predetermining what my day was going to be like until I realized that it didn't, and so it lost its importance, I didn't really care. But how do you figure it out? How do you come to the conclusion of what too much is for you? It's not like you put your hand on a stove and then they turn on the burner and you determine how much is too much heat, you already know that, but what about emotionally? How much is too much being ignored? Too much being coddled and weighted on hand and foot. How much affection is too much? How much lack of affection is too much? How much horrible communication, unhealthy boundaries, reckless behavior, these are things that you may even be instinctually knowledgeable about, but I want, I want you to really think about how you came to those conclusions, how you came to the determination of what and where the line is, the boundary between “Okay” and, “Mm-hmm! No, no, no, no, no!” It's different for everyone. The process of figuring it out is different for everyone, but it is still one of the coolest questions to ask yourself for any given circumstance. How much is too much? How do you know when to say when? How do you come to that conclusion? “Oh, that's it!” Well, what got you to, ‘oh, that's it’? Were there steps? Was it an escalator? Elevator, people mover? What was it? Interesting thought, huh? And you can use it in so many places. I mean, the easiest one is of course an all you can eat buffet. You know when you've had enough. Do you know when to say when? 'cause you don't want to get any more food, so it's time to leave. But what about when it comes to something else? Something like you're out watching your kid play a sport and they're getting clobbered and the weather's horrible. Do you pull your kid or do you just stay out there and take it? They look miserable, but you wanna make sure that they understand you have to stay committed even in the worst times. Is that really healthy? What does that show them? Staying past your limits. Staying past your limits is not always good, especially when you're not sure where they are. So knowing when to say when is important. It's important to develop a sense of boundary for yourself. I mean, you can't really do it for anybody else, but how do you come to the conclusion that I need to say ‘when’? I'll leave you with this. I just said that phrase and it's like, you know when you go to a restaurant and you get like pasta and they say, “Would you like some fresh ground pepper on that?”, and you say, “Sure!”, and so they'd take out the big grinder thing and grind, grind, grind, grind. “Just say when.”, grind, grind, grind, grind, grind…how long do you let them go? I let them go a long ways 'cause I don't mind pepper and I just look at them, “No, not yet. No. No. Okay, now.” it's always different. It's a nice little game to play when you're learning how much is too much so that you can determine when to say, when. What's my limit of being in traffic? Not enjoying it before I just go nuts. I bet you'll be clear the traffic before you reach that boundary and uh, if you reached the boundary before then, I guess I'll be seeing you on the news, “A driver went ‘postal’ today on the interstate, shot 20 cars!” If you ever get a chance, watch a movie with Michael Douglas called Falling Down. Falling Down with Michael Douglas. It will help you determine when to say when, most definitely. So, at the end of this episode, I would just like to say thank you and, uh, you know, if you don't mind, tell somebody about this podcast. I'd really like a lot of people to help me, help me figure out how this all works. Help me figure out whether I'm nuts or not. Well, not nuts, but, I like talking about stuff and the way that I think about things is different, hence, I really never have a script. I just think ‘the mind is a terrible thing!’ So be careful and for heaven's sakes, know when to say when!! Ch-ch-ch-ciao for now!!! By-eeeeeeee!!!