Transcript

Are You Sure? · Wanzology

Are You Sure? ”Because you don't drink, don't smoke. What do you do? You don't drink, don't smoke. What do you do? Subtle innuendos follow, must be something inside!” G’day! G’ day! Welcome to your Wednesday and another episode of WANZOLOGY!! How's your time on this planet going at this moment? Be honest. Kinda okay? I hope it's okay because if it's okay, that's better than not okay, okay? Oh man!! It is summertime here in the Great Northwest and we're hitting that stretch where we usually get a stretch where temperatures climb higher than the occupants of this berg, of this region, are used to and it's hilarious to watch. The Northwest isn't known for its heat, so when it gets above 85 degrees here, it's torturous! We're gonna have a couple of days of 90 degree weather! Yeah. If I really wanted to amuse myself, I'd go hang out in the parking lot of Home Depot, just to see how many people are gonna buy in the air conditioner. It's only gonna last like a day, maybe two. But if you want a part with 350 to $500 of your hard-earned cash for a couple of days, by all means be my guest. I'd rather rent a hotel room somewhere. Indecision is the biggest bugaboo I think that humans have going when you're not sure. Life gets kind of interesting, we'll call it interesting, if not challenging. How do you become sure? You're going to be asked, “Are you sure?”, someone could ask? What would you like for dinner? Oh, I would like, uh, fried chicken, corn on the cob and a salad. “Are you sure?”, maybe you're out at a restaurant. I'll have the Caesar Salad with chicken. “Are you sure?” How about driving? Oh yeah, I remember where your house is. “Are you sure?”. How do you know you know what you know? How do you even figure that out? Because you're human, right? And humans believe they know things. When's the last time that you were sure about something and then when you actually executed on that thing, it was incorrect. Like an address. Someplace that you've been before, you probably know exactly where your nearest McDonald's is, right? So you head off in that direction and it's not there, and you realize, “Oh, actually, I was going to another McDonald's, not the one that I usually go to.” Or what about someplace you haven't been in a while? Maybe you go to the doctor once, twice a year when you get the dentist's office mixed up with the doctor office, but you were sure you knew where you were going. Or someone asks you, “Don't you remember?” I'm really bad at that one, because my brain goes into defensive mode and goes, “If I remembered, why would you ask me? Obviously, I don't remember! You were reminding me or you were telling me!” Ugh. It's very frustrating, very frustrating, very annoying. How do you get sure of something? The safest way to be sure is, first of all, remember you're human and humans make mistakes. I think that being sure is more about being accurate than it is being precise. Meaning you may not remember every single word that was said to you in a conversation, but you remember the general tenor of the conversation. You may not remember the exact color of whatever was being described, but you remember what the object was that was being described. That's the difference between being accurate and precise. Now, what can happen is that the asker of the question is expecting, anticipating, wanting a precise answer, and when it doesn't come, they become confused and ask follow up questions, which makes you less sure. Funny how that works, isn't it? Someone else is trying to confirm with you what they thought they heard, and it causes you to question what you said. Why is that? It is because humans make mistakes. Now there are those who are, how you say, guilty. They are very, very, very guilty of not letting themselves make mistakes. Even when they make mistakes, they didn't do it. It was somebody else's fault. It was something else's fault, it wasn't my fault. I remember being in a relationship where I felt like I was on defense all the time. It could be a Tuesday, and I would say out loud, “Maybe we could go to the movies on Saturday.”, so Friday comes and I would say, “Oh! This is cool!! It's gonna be tomorrow, tomorrow's Saturday, right? Let's go do this!!! And the question would be, “But I thought you said we were gonna go to the movies on Saturday?” and I would say, “No, I knew I was thinking about that, but I don't recall deciding that.”, “Well, I thought that's what you meant.” So I started to be careful and say, “You know, I was thinking maybe…” but it would still happen. Then I tried doing, “What are the chances, what are the chances you might want to go to the movies on Saturday coming?”, which more times than not, “Oh, I don't know what's playing…”, and then you go through that whole thing, talk about what movies you like, what you don't like, what you've seen, and what you haven't seen, but you really don't decide and still Friday comes, or Saturday comes and you want to go do something else. “But I thought we were going to the movies today.”, is what you hear and you don't recall making that commitment. You inquired, you got more information, but it wasn't really decided. Has this ever happened to you? Are you sure that's what happened? Are you sure that's what you saw? Are you sure you didn't leave your keys upstairs? Are you sure you finished that report like you were supposed to? Now there's no sin about having self-doubt. I mean, I would question if you didn't have self-doubt, I would question if you were always sure you had not made a mistake, 'cause nobody's perfect. So of course I'm gonna question, “What do you mean?” if I say, “Are you sure?”, and the answer is, “Yeah, I'm sure.” “Okay, great!”, but you're still human and even if you're sure there's that space, it could be tiny, that tiny little nugget of, “Am I Sure? Maybe I should double check. Maybe I should triple check.” I have this really bad habit of setting my phone down in my living space. And the phone case is black. My dish towels, they're black and if it's at night, you know, I usually have one light on just to save electricity, right? So depending on where I put my phone, I may or may not see it. I was sure that I left it in the kitchen. Go through the kitchen, and I don't see it. So then I'm off to the bedroom. In the nightstand, in the desk, in the office, and then I'm back to the dinner table, and then I'm at the other computer station, and then I'm back to the couch where I usually sit, don't see it. So I go back over all of those places again, slower and a third time. “Wow!! What did I do with my phone? Oh, I left it in the car!” So I gotta go out to the car and there it is, sitting in the holder. I was sure I brought it in. I guess I made a mistake, which when you're by yourself is easy. But what about when you're with other people? What about when you're with that significant other, or you're buddies, your BFFs? BFFs are great, they don't ever really notice things like that, significant others my experience has been it's hit or miss. It is hit or miss. My memory just never has been that good, since I was a kid. Man, I used to get beatings for forgetting to feed the dogs and take out something for dinner or take out the garbage or take in the garbage cans or something. Didn't happen all the time, but you know this is a perpetual thing. It's not about forgetting once or twice. It's like when you've forgotten for like the eighth or ninth time and it's supposed to happen regularly and you just space. So this person would always say, “Don't you remember?”, that's how the sentence would start, and it became a trigger for me. They tried to change it with, “Well, I'm sure you remember…” and I, my brain would instantly go, “Uh, nope.” And then I'd feel some sort of way, most of it being inadequate. That's right. Self-doubt, baby. It's a wonderful thing. It always made me feel ‘less than’. It made me feel not capable. It made me feel like I didn't know how to listen. I didn't know how to remember I was defective. Therapy, thank God, helped me reframe. Reframing, if you don't know, is looking at a person, place, thing or situation that you're perceiving and then putting it into another light or trying to see it differently than what you were first thinking, I was told when somebody says, “Well, don't you remember?, instead of going, “Oh crap! I don't remember.”, you just calmly say, “Well, I may not remember…”, and guess. For me it's like names. You know, there are people that I've known for 20, 30 years and when I'm trying to introduce 'em to somebody, I forget their name, even though I know exactly who they are. It's embarrassing, but I've gotten very, very good at going, I'm sorry, what was your name again? If it's somebody new, it's easy to do that, but if it's somebody that you've known for a while? The trick that I learned is the person that you're introducing them to, usually you know what their name is and the person that you want to introduce, you don't have to use their name. You can always say, this is a good friend of mine, then let those two introduce each other, or, I love it when there's groups of people. 'cause invariably you have four or five people, one name you're gonna miss. So you have this person you wanna introduce, you say, “Everybody, this is ‘so and so’! ‘So and so’, this is everybody!”, and let everybody take care of it. But it's very difficult to stop time in that split second you realize you have the ability to reframe. You have the ability to reset yourself and give yourself a little bit of grace. You're not gonna remember everything. You're not gonna remember everyone's name. You're only human, remember? There aren't very many people who have perfect memories and those who have perfect memories. Good for them. There's probably a lot of things that they don't wanna remember what they do anyway. I can remember a lot of things. The farther out I go, the farther back into my past, the more general the memory is. The less specific it is. So when asked, “Don't you remember, we talked about this months ago?” “Well, no.” Don't fall into the trap of, “Oh, you must not care, you must not be listening to me.” All these little things that may come out as barbs. All you have to do is say, “Well, I do the best that I can and sometimes I fall short. That's because I'm human.” If you can do that with yourself in that split second, rather than manufacturing something, even if it's, “Well wait, what do you mean? Was it this other time or this time?” And if they're mean, they'll not only correct you, but they'll correct you and then challenge why you don't remember. I don't think most people do that on purpose. I don't think they do it to hurt. I'm not sure where you are at because everybody's different, I know for me, I have to go through a lot of self-talk. I have to stop myself in the moment, reframe…first, I have to self-talk, because I'll trigger and I'll trigger and defend. Sometimes it's not very pleasant sometimes I'm mean. I got picked on a lot. It was easy to set me off. I was defensive a lot, but I'm working on it. Nobody's perfect, remember? So when someone asks you, “Are you sure?”, I think the safest, most honest answer is, “Well, I think so. I could be wrong.” I think so, but I could be wrong. How hard is that? If you throw that out there and it's not accepted, why is it not accepted? Not your fault, you're human, remember? So if that other person's like, “I can't believe ‘this’ and I can't believe ‘that’…”, what does that have to do with you? When they start a sentence with “I”, you're not in their head. “I'm not sure.” Perfectly legit when you're not sure. If you are sure and you're wrong, well guess what? The benefit of being wrong is you have an opportunity to learn what is considered to be right. When you're wrong, you have a learning opportunity. If you go far enough in your past, especially in school, there were a lot of times that you didn't know. You didn't know what a noun was. You didn't know what a verb was. You didn't know what five times five was. As we get older, there may be less things we remember and that's perfectly normal. So you can kid yourself and say, “Oh yeah, I know.”, well are you sure? Are you? Cause it's okay not to be. Give yourself some grace. It's okay not to be sure. “I think so.”, perfectly legit response. In that way, you save yourself from going through those exercises of being held accountable to somebody else's level of accomplishment. I really hate that. “Well, I have no problem doing this…”, or, “So and so doesn't do that…”, yeah, you'll notice that I am not them, I'm me. I'll leave you with this, it's not always that easy, but it's just as simple as practicing, “You know what? I do the best that I can and sometimes I don't make it.” “I don't accomplish what I want to…” “I don't remember what I want to…” “I don't finish what I want to…” “Eh, I'm human”, and leave it at that; truer words were never spoken. “I'm human, oh, well.” If you get to the point where you learn to laugh at yourself when you get to those points, bonus! Bonus!! Take it easy on yourself, 'cause Lord knows, there are people out there who just don't want to take it easy on you or themselves. They don't really have a flashing light on their forehead to let you know what's coming. So I have come to the end and yes, I'm sure. I've said everything to the best of my ability based on my experience. Hopefully you can relate, and if you don't, well maybe next week. Thanks for listening though, I really appreciate it, and I will talk to you. Ciao for now!!