Be a Better Friend and Experience Less Rejection With These Two Steps
By PeggySue Wells
You are not big steps away from anything;
you are small shifts away from everything.Keith Kochner
What kind of friend are you? What is it like to be with you?
If an honest assessment shows room for improvement, today is the opportune moment to make some shifts. If you are ready for shifty days, here are two shifts you can make by noon guaranteed to help you be a better friend and experience less rejection.
After my own personal evaluation, these two steps took me forward. Each one was a shift in my outlook, a simple attitude adjustment that is reaping a lifetime of benefits for me and those dear to me. Surprisingly, these steps also helped me look better — inside and out. Even my posture improved.
1. Release others from your expectations.
Repeatedly doing the same thing but each time expecting different results is the description of insanity. Expecting someone who has continually treated me poorly to suddenly treat me with honor and respect is going to disappoint only one person. Me.
Expecting an irresponsible individual to act responsibly today is sure to prove frustrating. Certainly, people can choose to make good choices. We hope and pray that they will. It was the expectation that tripped me up. I had to allow other people the freedom to be who they are by releasing them from my expectations. It’s what I want them to do for me.
I had a neighbor who telephoned only to complain. Initially, I greeted each call with enthusiasm, looking forward to building a neighborly relationship. But every encounter was a tirade of criticism. No matter how often I adjusted our lifestyle to please my neighbor, the disapproval continued. After several months of this pattern, I no longer expected us to become friends. I released my neighbor from my expectations.
Surprisingly, I spent years expecting that this time my spouse would treat me honorably. Even after he left, I held high hopes that he would reverse his choices. Though I only invested months in expecting my neighbor to be a pleasant addition to my life, I held onto higher expectations for my spouse for decades. Long after patterns showed me he was not going to be what I anticipated him to be, I continued to clutch my expectations close. I created excuses for his actions and denied reality.
Stubbornly I gripped at possibility and ignored the obvious pattern.
Possibility or Pattern?
Taking an honest look at who a person really is based on his or her consistent behavior is a hearty dose of reality. Letting go of my assumptions of how I thought he should behave, of how I assumed he should treat me, was a healthy step forward. When I finally took off my rose-colored expectation spectacles, I no longer left each phone call and encounter perpetually hurt because my high hopes were not fulfilled.
If someone in your life has a history of being inconsiderate, don’t look for him or her to be concerned about your feelings. If your aunt is consistently malicious, I doubt she will suddenly morph into Miss Personality Plus at the next family reunion. If your spouse withheld money, affection, or respect before, he or she is sure to do the same after the divorce. If someone didn’t treat you well before, don’t expect the behavior will be different today.
Healthy relationships occur when we set aside our expectations of how another should act, be, and do. When we release others, we are set free from unhealthy patterns, disappointments, excuse making, and the exhausting effort of living in denial. The person you set free is you.
Check it out:
If you are thinking maybe this time about anyone, it is a signal that you are clutching expectations regarding how that person should act, behave, or feel.
If you are regularly offended, it is a sure sign that you’re harboring rigid assumptions. Expectations are offenses in the making. And offenses can trigger the blame game.
2. Stop blaming.
As long as I continued to blame others for situations, I stayed stuck. Whether I blamed my spouse, my parents, or myself, the blame only kept me cemented in the same spot.
This is a universal principle. When you or I blame a neighbor, in-laws, an employer, the church, the government, or God, blame cripples only one person. Me. It has no effect on the target of my blame. That other person is not sitting at home wringing his hands because I am convinced that my circumstances are his fault. That other person is living life while I resemble Winnie the Pooh’s gloomy, gray, albeit cute, friend Eeyore.
Does that mean the other person is no longer responsible for his or her behavior? Does it mean that you or I have not on occasion been treated abysmally? Or that I wasn’t hurt?
Certainly not. The hurt, pain, betrayal, and devastation are real. Fact.
A man can fail many times but he isn’t a failure until he begins to blame someone else.
John Burroughs
However, by playing the blame game, those facts became my excuses for not moving forward. Freedom came when I acknowledged the truth of the situation. People made choices. I made choices. He made choices. She made choices. Some of those choices hurt me deeply. Some of those choices made a Grand Canyon–sized impact on my life.
Now, what choices was I going to make today?
A friend or counselor who allows us to vent, to cry and scream about our pain, is a gift. Initially, when all we feel is the betrayal, a tender listening ear can help us express our grief and verbally process.
“How are you?” My brother telephoned from out of state. His question was rooted in common courtesy and he expected the customary, “Fine thanks, and you?”
“Some days,” I confided, “it hurts so bad I can’t breathe.”
Curled in a fetal position and crying for days is a common experience for those who experience the betrayal of a spouse, the loss of a loved one, the elimination of a job, or a critical diagnosis. But camping there, the pain became my identity.
Event or Identity?
When I spoke at a national conference, an attendee asked me to look at her résumé before she submitted it to a potential boss. Rather than listing her education and professional experience, she spent paragraphs explaining that she was divorced but had since made peace with her ex‑spouse. Being divorced and the pain surrounding that chapter in her life had become her résumé.
I’ve seen the same in women’s groups, both professional and social. For many women, it doesn’t take long before they share they are abandoned by their husbands, divorced, rejected, and now struggling to be a single parent. Ironically, men in similar situations rarely confide such details. Just picturing it is laughable. It may be part of their history but it is not their address.
For women, the demands of motherhood are topics we share with friends and family. For both single and married moms, there are days when life’s challenges are more intense than others. Yet there is a vast difference between dealing with current concerns and claiming a card-carrying permanent victim status.
In the case of a divorce, one spouse is eager to move on to a new life. For that person who emotionally left the relationship some time before, the divorce is a tedious hurdle. For those of us who dreamed of living happily ever after, we can stumble through the process quite wounded. For me, this was not how I thought my life or my wedding vows would turn out. I couldn’t accept that the person I gave my life, love, body, and future to could treat me so callously. I got stuck in my pain. And bitterness.
Recovery began when I limited the amount of time I spent in this place. A day of crying. Ten minutes of venting on the phone. A lunch date with a friend. An hour with a counselor. Permit yourself seven paces. Seven paces to mentally beat yourself up. This principle allows us to grieve, to cry, to feel our broken heart, and to blame myself or someone else for the situation.
Then we must step out of the wallowing. Give up our hope for a better past. Face the reality of the present and make choices that move our lives forward. I’d rather be traveling through the sand on my way to the Promised Land than be perpetually camped in the stinking desert.
It happened.
So what?
Now what?
Be not a slave to your own past. Plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so that you shall come back with self-respect, with new power, with an advanced experience, that shall explain and overlook the old.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Check it out:
Do you regularly offer excuses? If you show up late at a place and waste further time by blaming your lateness on the kids, the dog, or the traffic, you are playing the blame game. You are blaming someone or something else for your situation.
The only person who believes your excuse is you. When you are late, it is apparent that you did not plan your time to arrive at least 15 minutes early in case you were delayed by life.
In the military, fifteen minutes early is on time. On time is late. Soldiers quickly learn that there are only four acceptable responses — yes, sir; no, sir; I don’t understand, sir; and no excuse, sir.
When I dropped making excuses, my days and relationships streamlined. Free from cumbersome excuses, my conversations improved. People are attracted to those who fully live life without excuses.
For You:
To help you shift your conversation away from blame and onto positive, life-giving topics, click here for a free download of healthy conversation prompts.
