How to Stop Letting Anxiety and Negative Thoughts Ruin Your Life Pt. 11

Maybe one of the reasons you’re feeling so much anxiety and negative thoughts is that you’re not doing the main thing you can to protect yourself and your loved ones, regardless of your circumstances.

 00:00 Intro

00:44 Topic Intro: Protect

01:30 TL/DW: Here’s the solution

01:34 Protect Your Secrets and Theirs

03:24 Protect Everyone from your Snap Judgements and Feelings

04:01 How to do it

05:35 Be the Vault

06:57 Wrap up​

 

Topic Intro: Protect

This material comes from the eighth Hart Habit, which is Protect.
The origination of this habit was that I read the sentence that “love bears all” or “love always protects.”
There are couple of different ways it’s translated to English.
When I did a little research into the Greek word that was actually used in that context, I found that we don’t have an English equivalent to it.
Protect was the best they could really find, but it’s important to understand how it works both internally and externally.

TL/DW: Here’s the solution

The Habit is Protect and the Mantra is “I protect myself and others from my feelings and judgments, and I protect my secrets and theirs from the rest of the world”.

1. Protect Your Secrets and Theirs

When I say protect your secrets, let’s talk about what that means.
What it doesn’t mean is to keep everything locked up inside of only yourself, okay?
We all need to talk about the things that we’re dealing with, secrets that we have in our lives and we all need someone to share those things with.
The important part is to think about who is safe for us to share our secrets with.
In this society, we have some people that are legally designated as safe like therapists, attorneys, and doctors.
All these people have a legal obligation to privacy and to keep your information confidential.
So, right off the bat, those are places where your secrets are safe.
Coaches should also offer a confidentiality policy and honor those same guidelines. (I do!)
But, your best friend, your cousin, the person you’re sitting with at bar, none of those people are obligated to keep your secrets.
They also may not be qualified, prepared, or capable of holding the weight you’re carrying.
Just because they love you doesn’t mean they know how to heal you.
It’s also important to be smart about who we share our secrets with and who we tell about the innermost things that we’ve dealt with, because not everyone is worthy of our vulnerability.
Some people will use your secrets against you, either because they’re nefarious and have ill intent or because they are hurting and hurt people hurt people.

When I’m talking about protecting their secrets; one of the ways to do that is to avoid having people tell you their secrets in the first place.
If you don’t have close relationships, people don’t share their secrets with you, you don’t find yourself in any sort of situation where you need to keep their secrets.
However, I assume that’s not the reality you want, so if someone entrusts you with their secrets, it’s important for you to honor that and be a vault.
I’ll talk more about being a vault in a minute, but understand that it is not your place to share someone else’s story with anybody.
The ONLY exception is if you know that a vulnerable person is in danger. You need to report that to authorities, specifically non-police adult or child protective services.

2. Protect Everyone from your Snap Judgements and Feelings

Before I jump into how to be the Vault, I want to talk about point two, which is to protect everyone from your snap judgments and feelings.
This should not be mistaken to say that your judgments or feelings are bad in any way. They are not inherently bad, but they are sometimes subconscious and can be intentionally brought to the conscious for evaluation before being shared with others.
When you protect others and yourself from those moments, you give space for people to be who they are and you give space for yourself to be who you really are.
There is a simple, but specific way to do it.

How to do it

As always, I have a tool.

This time, it’s The Hart Habits, the 10-habit framework I developed to teach myself how to live as love in action.
First, let’s consider the habit I talked about last week, which is Non-Verbal behavior. 

One way to protect others from your snap judgments is to be conscious of your non-verbal behaviors and take a moment when needed to process information before allowing anything, verbal or non-verbal, to be expressed back to the other people in the situation.

 

Secondly, consider your real thoughts in the scenario.

Are your thoughts focused on what you want or what you don’t want?

Are your thoughts open to both subjective and objective truths? 

 Are your thoughts trusting people to be who they really are?

 

 

Are they honoring your Self and your boundaries, what your Spirit and Shadow is telling you, and where your strengths lie?

All these things are Hart Habits, and each of them play into how you can protect others and yourself better.
The “protecting others from yourself” is not about you being quiet and not sharing who you are with others.

Instead, it’s about being so conscious of who you are and where you’re going that you are able to send the messages you really want to send, when you want to send them, with the intention and impact you want to send them with.

3. Be the Vault

The third point goes back and touches on my first point, which is to be the vault.
And this refers to the work of Brené Brown. {I love her. She’s amazing.}
She is a researcher in Texas who has done 10+ years of research on shame and vulnerability, relationships with ourselves and others, et cetera.
In her book, “Braving the Wilderness”, she developed what she called the seven elements of trust. She used the acronym of B.R.A.V.I.N.G and the V in B.R.A.V.I.N.G stands for vault.
In the book, she talks about the value and importance of being a vault for people so that when people do share information with you that is personal, confidential, deep, or vulnerable for them, you hold onto that information and do not share stories that aren’t yours to share.
When you become the vault, you are perceived as trustworthy or safe, and you are trustworthy and safe, because you’re not out there sharing information that’s not yours to share.
If you’re not gossiping with someone they don’t feel like you’ll be gossiping about them with someone else.

Wrap up

So, this is what the eighth Hart Habit, Protect, is all about.
How you can protect your secrets and theirs from the rest of the world?

• Share your secrets only with people who are safe, whether it’s legally or because you know that through time in relationship and be a vault for other’s secrets.
• Protect everyone, including yourself, from your snap judgments and feelings about things by using The Hart Habits to become more conscious of your thoughts, words, and non-verbal behaviors..

As you practice the habit of protecting other people, you might move from being perceived as manipulative to being seen as someone who is unshakeable and reliable in chaotic or difficult times.
If that’s something you want to be, then protecting others is a key habit for you to practice.
As always, I’m so thankful to be here with you.

Until next week, I love you.

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QUESTION(s) OF THE DAY — How do you protect yourself and others from your snap judgements and feelings?

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