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 do to protect yourself, and your loved ones, regardless of your circumstances.
Hart Habit Eight: Protect
This comes from the eighth Hart Habit, Protect. It started with a sentence I read: love bears all, or love always protects, depending on the translation. When I looked into the Greek word actually used, I found there's no direct English equivalent. Protect was the closest translators could get, but it's worth understanding how it works both internally and externally.
The declaration: I protect myself and others from my feelings and judgments, and I protect my secrets and theirs from the rest of the world.
Who to Trust With Your Secrets
Protecting your secrets doesn't mean locking everything up inside yourself alone. We all need to talk about what we're carrying, and we all need someone to share it with. The real question is who's actually safe to share it with.
Some people are legally designated as safe: therapists, attorneys, doctors. They have a legal obligation to confidentiality. Coaches should offer the same, and I do. But your best friend, your cousin, the person next to you at a bar, none of them are obligated to keep your secrets. They also might not be equipped to hold the weight you're handing them. Loving you doesn't automatically mean knowing how to help you heal.
It matters to be thoughtful about who hears your innermost things, because not everyone is worthy of your vulnerability. Some people will use your secrets against you, either because they mean to, or because they're hurting, and hurt people hurt people.
When it comes to protecting other people's secrets, one option is to avoid getting close enough for people to share them with you in the first place. If you don't have close relationships, nobody hands you their secrets to carry. I'm assuming that's not the life you actually want, so if someone does entrust you with theirs, honor it. Be a vault. It's not your place to share someone else's story with anyone else. The only exception: if a vulnerable person is in real danger, report it, specifically to non-police adult or child protective services.
Protect Everyone From Your Snap Judgments
The second part of Protect is protecting people, including yourself, from your snap judgments and feelings. That doesn't mean your judgments or feelings are bad. They're not. But they're sometimes subconscious, and can be brought into conscious awareness for a second look before you share them with anyone.
Protecting others and yourself from those unexamined moments gives everyone room to actually be who they are.
How to Do It
Start with what I talked about last post, Non-Verbal behavior. One way to protect people from your snap judgments is to stay conscious of your non-verbal behaviors, and take a moment to process before letting anything, verbal or non-verbal, out into the room.
Then check your actual thoughts in the moment. Are they focused on what you want, or what you don't want? Are they open to both subjective and objective truth? Are they trusting people to be who they really are? Are they honoring your Self, your boundaries, what your Spirit and Shadow are telling you, and where your strengths lie?
All of that is the Hart Habits at work, and each one plays into how well you can protect others, and yourself. Protecting others from yourself isn't about staying quiet and holding back who you are. It's about being conscious enough of who you are and where you're headed that you can send exactly the message you mean to send, when you mean to send it, with the impact you actually intend.
Be the Vault
This circles back to the first point: be the vault. This comes from Brené Brown's research. She's spent over a decade studying shame, vulnerability, and how we relate to ourselves and each other. In Braving the Wilderness, she lays out seven elements of trust using the acronym BRAVING, and the V stands for Vault.
Being a vault means that when someone shares something personal, confidential, or vulnerable with you, you hold it. You don't pass along stories that aren't yours to tell. When you become the vault, you're perceived as trustworthy, and you actually are, because you're not out there gossiping. If you're not gossiping about other people, nobody has to wonder whether you're gossiping about them.
Wrap Up
That's the eighth Hart Habit: Protect. Share your secrets only with people who are safe, whether legally bound to confidentiality or proven safe over time, and be a vault for what other people entrust to you. Protect everyone, including yourself, from unexamined snap judgments by using the Hart Habits to get more conscious of your thoughts, words, and non-verbal behavior.
As you practice this, you might notice a shift, from being seen as guarded or unpredictable to being seen as unshakeable and reliable, especially in the hard moments. If that's who you want to be, Protect is a Habit worth practicing on purpose.
Recommended resources:
Braving the Wilderness by Brené Brown
Question of the day: How do you protect yourself and others from your snap judgments and feelings?