Brilliant One:

Some days, I feel like a stand-up comic practicing a bit.

I tell the same stories to different people, something we humans do to make meaning out of the events of our lives and to connect with one another in the process. Sometimes, I optimize these stories for laughs.

Other times I mess with the stories, optimizing them for mindset shifting effect. I watch how they land, emphasize this point to him or share that silly detail to her, titrating the whole thing for an optimal level of impact. These days, this is a big part of my work. Stories can be incredibly transformational. If you tell them right, they are more powerful teaching tools than any list of bullet points will ever be.

But I can reflect on a time in my life when I frequently told the same story over and over with a singular intention in mind: the desire to feel understood.

On the surface, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to feel like the people around you understand you and your experience—especially when you’ve had something happen that was intense for you, but might not be fully appreciated by those around you. It’s also tempting to want to feel understood when you’ve done something you know won’t be popular or easily comprehended by those around you, but you had what you felt was good reason.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I still share the thoughts underlying my big decisions with my vendors, partners, loved ones and teammates. Mostly I do this to enrich our collaboration. When they know how I thought about a question or arrived at its answer—especially when my decisions are surprising or counterintuitive—it boosts our ability to work and play together with aligned focus and intention.

Also, I can’t always see every angle or consider every input on an issue. Sharing what’s happening behind the scenes of my thinking allows the geniuses I live and work with to help me see things I would otherwise have missed. And that levels all of us up.

But here’s the real deal: one of my top priorities when I free-write every morning is to offload anything that feels like a grudge or grievance. (If I let them grow, they almost always turn into creative blocks. So I dump them on the page and leave them there.) About a year ago, I noticed a pattern: when I tracked these baby grudges to their root, almost all of them started when I felt misunderstood. This is especially true for this fact pattern:

• I have a conversation with someone where they say something about what I must be thinking or feeling
• They’re wrong about my thoughts or feelings
• The context is so trivial it doesn’t make sense for me to try to correct them, or I do correct them and they still don’t seem to get it
• I’m irritated
• The next day, I’m still irritated
• I write it out.

If you know me, you know that I practice the fine art of MYOB (minding my own bizness). And it is not my business to persuade, cajole or manipulate anyone else into understanding me. That’s why, along my personal growth journey, I’ve chosen instead to practice releasing the need to feel understood.

Follow me here:

1. Taking things personally is the #1 source of drama between humans.
2. Being able to move through life independently of the opinions of other people is the #1 liberation lever from that drama.
3. When you expect others to understand you and they don’t, it’s almost inevitable that you’ll take that personally and get in your feelings/what the kids might call ‘butthurt’.
4. No one—not even the people who love you unconditionally—can fully understand you 100% of the time, even if they try very hard. Because no one else is you. No one else has the exact mix of experiences, beliefs and talents you do. No one has the relationship with your Inner Being, Source and spirit that you do. No one has your intuition or your calling. No one has learned exactly what you’ve learned about life.

So when you’re seeking to be understood, you’re asking someone to do the impossible. And you’re setting yourself up for unnecessary interpersonal drama and dissatisfaction.

And in the effort to feel understood, you may find yourself practicing the energy of a struggle story. (This is the opposite of the energy you want to dwell in if you want to feel good.) Very few of our unwanted emotions truly arise from things that happened in the past. They arise from our continued rehearsing and regurgitating of those experiences and feelings.

When you try to “fix” someone’s misunderstanding of you, you may actually feel good about your decision but want others to *get* why you made it. To that end, you have to share all the things that happened to you when you were a kid or earlier in your career that you’re trying to avoid repeating with your decision. In other cases, you might actually feel bad even though others think you should feel good. But you want to feel justified in feeling bad, so you pull out your struggle portfolio and start showing-and-telling.

Real talk: all of us love to feel held, heard, seen and understood. We all do. But I want to open up the possibility that you can feel held, heard and seen by people in your life, even when they do not fully understand you or the reasons why you do the things you do. In fact, you can feel and be approved of and loved by people who activelydisagree with your decisions. Don’t believe me? Think about the times you extend affection and approval to others, even when you don’t 100% understand or agree with them.

The desire to feel understood is often just a pretext for the need for approval or the need to be right. Both of these are just different ways of asking permission to make the moves and steps and decisions you want to make. And if you’re waiting on approval, validation or permission, you’re watering down the edge you have access to: the pure power that comes from moving forward in life based on the Infinite Intelligence that flows through you in the form of inspiration and resonance.

Three things happen when you stop seeking to be understood, and release the inner roadblock of feeling misunderstood:

1. You begin to move through life much more freely and easily.
2. Your interpersonal drama decreases.
3. Your joy and speed of personal expansion increases.

Oh and one more big thing: your relationships get better. All of them. Way better.

See, when you practice your way out of needing to feel understood all the time, you do everyone around you a massive favor: you take them off the hook for your feelings. This feels weird at first, especially if you have a history of being an approval seeker or an achievement junkie.

But over time, you learn to take great care of the most important relationships in your life: the relationship between you and you (which is the same as your relationship with your Source).

Over time, you learn how to feel good regardless of whether you feel misunderstood or not. And you learn skills for returning to that good feeling whenever you want to or need to. You learn how to build on that momentum, over time, so you can go from scattershot moments of feeling good to a regular state of feeling great.

In addition to this being a beautiful way to live, does two more things:

1. It gives you access to your highest brain centers, so you operate more and more frequently on the frequencies of creativity, clarity and excellence. And
2. It lets everyone in your life off the hook for the impossible task of making you feel good.

I’m going to repeat this one for emphasis: when you practice operating independently of others’ approval, disapproval and UNDERSTANDING, you let them off the hook for the impossible task of making you feel good.

In this way, you become unconditionally powerful, loving and excellent at whatever it is you choose to use your powers to do on any given day/week/month/lifetime.

This takes the fraughtness out of relationships. It takes the pressure off. It means that when you get together with others for the purpose of living, playing or working on something, that‘s your focus. You don’t have to focus on all the politics and played out scripts. You don’t have to spend time and energy tending to someone’s triggers or withholding your own secrets out of fear. You don’t have to tippy-toe around the laundry list of touchy subjects that cause so many relationships to be so. freaking. exhausting.

Instead, your relationships will swivel to focus on the adventures you can have together, the lives you can create together—the fun you can have together. The ways in which you can support and lift each other up or help each other evolve and grow, even through the unwanted experiences of life, even when shit gets real.

And that’s when relationships go from depleting to life-giving. From draining to thrive-inducing. That’s when you stop having to obsessively police your boundaries with people, because healthy boundaries just become part of who you are and how you live, naturally. That’s when you learn that you’re not here just to give love or find love or receive love, but to be love, in all circumstances, to all people. Even your boss. Even your employees. Even your crazy uncle. Even your ex. (Yeah, I said it.)

Because that’s who you are: love. Unconditional, unadulterated, and apologetic, whether the people around you understand you or not.

P.S.: Is it possible to become totally free of the desire to be understood? Maybe so, maybe not. But you can certainly release a lot of that desire to be understood. And when you do, you’ll recoup a massive amount of life force. I can vouch.

P.P.S.: Last night, I sat in a completely full theater watching Won’t You Be My Neighbor, the new documentary on Mr. Rogers’ life and work. This movie will down-regulate your nervous system and immerse you in the profound goodness of a man on a clear mission of care, love and upliftment. What you may not know is that Mr. Rogers was a fierce warrior in his own way for lovingkindness and social justice, and that he wielded his platform to that end, for decades.

Before last night, I had cried at one movie in my lifetime, ever. I was crying at minute 5 of this film. The guy next to me, who had his motorcycle helmet in his lap the whole time, was crying by about minute 3. It’s pure and enchanting. Go see it.

Head up + heart out,

TNN

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