Worrying about what everybody thinks can hold you back in so many areas of life. If you constantly find yourself rehearsing the judgement of others before it even happens, you’re in the right place.
What’s Covered in Episode 5
- The simple trick I learned from Martha Beck to reframe my fear
- Who “everybody” really is, and why they’re actually insignificant
- Why you have imaginary arguments in the shower
- The concept of the “generalized other,” and why it’s so dangerous
- How to pick new members for your “everybody team”
Relevant Links and Credits
- Martha Beck: Finding Your Own North Star
- 7 Ways Your Subconscious is Sabotaging Your Health and Happiness (Download)
Podcast Transcript: Episode 5: How to Stop Worrying About What Everybody Thinks
Welcome to episode five: how to stop worrying about what everybody thinks. This is really a continuation of last week’s episode and I thought I was going to fit this into last week’s episode and I was like, no, this just needs to be its own thing because this tool that I’m going to share with you in today’s episode really changed my life and how I approach things.
But before we dive in today I want to remind you of a free download I have on my site. It’s an ebook and an audio combined. So you can either read the book or you can listen to me read it. It’s really like a bonus episode of the podcast and it’s called seven ways your subconscious is sabotaging your health and happiness. So if you’re working on something, whether that’s your health or a goal in your career, whatever it might be, and you feel like you just keep hitting all these roadblocks and getting in your own way, you’re definitely gonna want to go grab that and see what might apply to you.
I’ve had a lot of feedback from it and people are like, Oh my gosh, did you crawl inside my brain? I didn’t. I promise, I don’t have that capability. But you can grab that by going over to mindspeakpodcast.com/sabotage. Put in your email and I’ll send it right over to you.
In the last several episodes, I’ve alluded to the fact that not being myself, feeling like I had to hide behind a mask or not fully express myself or not share my opinion, stay in the corner and hide. I’ve alluded to the fact that I really believe that that was the true one of the true root causes of my downward health spiral. And I see this pattern show up with a lot of my clients, not only for the bigger juicy life things, but even just things as simple as worrying about what other people think about what they’re eating.
Maybe they feel really good on a protocol of a healing diet and there’s certain things that you know they’re choosing not to eat so that they feel better, but then they get in a social situation and they just feel all this pressure of like, Oh, I have to eat the pizza or I’m going to be that person. Can you relate to that? Another thing I think of is the holidays are coming up. They’re right around the corner and I know historically I have felt so much pressure around the holidays to do certain things, go certain places, participate in things that I didn’t really want to participate in, all because I was worried about what other people would think if, you know, I took a little bit of a different stance during the holidays, so I can’t really think of any area of life where this phenomenon doesn’t show up for people.
And if we let it, it can dictate our entire lives. We can live our entire lives worrying about what everybody’s going to think and that can be crippling and constraining and can just lead to a life that we don’t like living. So how do we stop worrying about what everybody thinks? I’m going to share my favorite trick with you today. This is one of my favorite things of all time and it comes from Martha Beck. Martha Beck is this fabulous life coach. I think she has a column in Oprah magazine, I think she still writes for Oprah magazine, but I read her book Finding Your Own North star a couple of years ago and she talks about this trick in the book and I’ve employed it ever since and I’ve shared it with clients and it is just my favorite. It’s a three step process that I am going to walk you through right now.
So step number one, when you think about everybody and what everybody’s thinking about you is to get really clear about who everybody really is. Because when you say everybody, what do you really mean by that? We like to think that everybody is this inclusive term that means everybody in the whole world. But the fact is, I hate to break it to you. Everybody in the whole world couldn’t possibly care about your actions or what you’re doing. They don’t even know you. So we know it’s not everybody in the whole world. So who is this elusive everybody? I want you to sit or walk or wherever you’re at right now. I want you to think who is everybody who comes to mind when you think of everybody? I bet if you really sit and try to figure it out, it’s likely that only three to five people or groups of people, like maybe people at a church or people at your work or you know, wherever three to five people or three to five groups of people are going to come to mind.
And most likely those people are going to be people or groups that you’re afraid of disappointing or maybe they impose some sort of spoken or unspoken standard on your life. So maybe everybody in your head is your coworkers, your grandparents, your husband, and for some reason your third grade teacher, you just can’t let it go. She’s always in your head. So when I sat down to do this exercise a couple of years ago, it’s, it’s evolved since then for me. But when I sat down a couple of years to do this, I realized that my everybody was mean coworkers from like 10 years ago. Family members that I don’t even really get along with and people on social media that I don’t even talk to. So, people who are really loud and opinionated on social media and you know the trolls. So that was my everybody… mean coworkers from 10 years ago.
Family members I don’t really like, and people on social media that I don’t even talk to, which is so lame because those were the people that I was allowing to dictate my life’s decisions because they were just living in their rent free inside my brain. Naysaying everything. Oh, that was a humbling wake up call. And it wasn’t. Most of the time it wasn’t even what they were actually saying to me was what I was pretending that they would say if I did do something or if I did eat something or if I did put my foot down, I would make up these elaborate stories and dialogues in my head of like a future confrontation. That hadn’t even happened. I know you do that too, where you’re like taking a shower in the morning and you had a really bad day at work the day before and you’re in the shower.
You’re, you’re like telling your boss off and you’re, you’re saying everything that you, you want to say to your boss but you’re not actually going to say, and then your husband walks in and he’s like, who? Who are you talking to? Nobody. I’m not talking to anybody. What do you mean? You know, it’s happened to you or you did it in the bathroom mirror or you did it in your car. Just like you also pick your nose in your car and you pretend like nobody can actually see you do that, but there’s windows in your car. Okay, I went on a tangent. So step one is you have to get clear about who your everybody really is. So hopefully with those examples I provided for you and you know your own thinking over this, you’ve realized three to five people or groups of people that really at the core of it constitute your everybody.
So you know who your everybody is. The next thing to do is understand what generalization is and then you’ve got to stop it in its tracks. So the question is, if your everybody is only made up of a few people or a few groups of people, why do they feel so big in your mind? You know, if you picture these three people in the room with you compared to the whole world, that’s not a lot of people. But in your head they feel like these big scary monsters and you feel like there’s so many more people. Psychologists have a really fancy term for this and it is called the generalized other. And to illustrate this, I want you to imagine that your mind is a football stadium and all of the people sitting in that football stadium, we’ll say it’s a packed house today. There’s not an empty seat whatsoever.
All of the people in that football stadium are representative of everybody in the world who you’re so worried about what they think that is representative of everybody. Now, if you were to go to a normal football game, you probably have a couple of friends tag along and you wouldn’t really know anybody else there. That would be a true representation of everybody. But your brain doesn’t like for there to be unknowns and your brain has to make sense of everything. So when you think of everybody in your head, when it feels so daunting the way it does, what your mind does is it generalizes. So with this football stadium analogy, what it would do is it would take those same three to five people and then clone them over and over and over again until those same three to five people have multiplied like creepy zombies and they’re making up the entire football stadium, or you can also picture it in your head like these three to five people there, these little cells in a petri dish and they’re dividing and dividing and growing and growing.
You know, like a, like a little fetus in the womb where you see it multiplies and grows and grows and grows. That’s what your brain does with jerky people is it convinces you the everybody in the world is a jerky person. So you should just go back in your hole and stick to the status quo and never do anything cool or outside of the box or anything that you actually want to do. And this goes back to last week’s episode where I was talking about our tendency to magnify criticism and minimize praise. We really tend to brush off praise, but then we get one snarky, mean comment and that’s the only thing we can think about. This is just the survival part of your brain trying to keep you from getting hurt again because the mind’s job is to move us away from pain and to move us toward what feels good.
But unfortunately in today’s modern world that safety mechanism can really keep us stuck. Okay? At this point you know who your everybody is, you understand what generalization is. So now let’s talk about the third step, which is making sure everybody is on your team. Even just realizing right now that you’re, everybody is only made up of a few people is really, really powerful. Awareness is always the first step in anything and once you come to that realization, what you can do now is you can consciously choose new members for your everybody team and you get to call the shots. If this sounds cheesy to you, I don’t care because this has worked so well for me because here’s the thing, your mind, your brain is going to generalize no matter what. It has to make up a representative story about what everybody really means. Just like it has to do with the concept of infinity, which is impossible for our brains to grasp, or the concept of nothingness.
Like have you ever really thought about what nothing actually is? Or like what infinity, what infinity really looks like, man, sorry, pot smoking in the basement voice again, I can’t help it. Just like we can’t comprehend those things. We can’t comprehend everybody. So no matter what, your brain is going to make up a story. So the key is to make sure that that story serves you. So you get to pick new members for your everybody team and you want to make sure that they are people who would support you unconditionally. People that you can go to no matter what. And they’ll always give you a high five. They’ll always give you encouragement. They’ll never be a dingbat. Now, this doesn’t mean that they would never throw you some tough love. I’ve got some people on my everybody team, my imaginary everybody team who totally throw me tough love, but they do so in a constructive way.
And again, these are all just stories and my brain, my brain is going to make them up anyway. The differences is now I have cool stories. The other great thing is that you don’t need to personally know the people on your everybody team. They can be people from your real life, but they can also be inspirational. People or role models that you don’t actually know. The cool thing about this is you get to pick, one of my old clients told me that she was gonna put Oprah on her everybody team, because I don’t, I don’t know if it gets more fail safe than Oprah. And one thing that stinks, especially when you are going through a healing journey or a period of transition, is that often in real life, it’s hard to find the support that we really need. Or maybe we have been mired in toxic environments or raised in toxic environments where you know that unconditional, amazing support doesn’t exist in real life.
So you do need to turn to role models and authors and people on the internet. Most of the people on my everybody team are people that I don’t know in real life. I’ve got, I’ve got a lot of people on my everybody team these days. Like Brooke Castillo, the life coach school, dr Nicole LaPera, the holistic psychologist, Sean Croxton quote of the day show, Dr. Kelly Brogan, Elizabeth Gilbert. My team has gotten bigger. It’s bigger than three to five people now. And I make sure everybody on my everybody team is a-list, top notch. Cause if I’m going to have imaginary people chattering around in my brain, they better have some good stuff to say. And you can say that this is cutesy or cheesy or make believe, but you know what else is make believe your current sucky everybody. So if it’s all pretend anyway, make it a pretend that feels good.
So here’s how this works in my life. Whenever I find myself feeling self conscious, wanting to do something big or bold or new, wanting to take a risk, go for it. I consciously run through my everybody list and I say, what would these people have to say about that thing that I want to do? And it’s almost like I can hear their voices in my head cheering me on and now that I have all these cool people on my everybody team instead of the feedback that I used to get, which is ugh, do you really think that’s a good idea? Do you really think that’s gonna work out for you? Good luck with that. Now it’s like, Oh girl, that goal that you have is really cute. I think you should aim higher. I don’t think you’re pushing yourself far enough. What if you did this? And then I’m like, Oh my gosh, that’s such a great idea. I’m going to go do that.
This is, this is literally what goes on in my head, but it’s way better than the imaginary conversations that I used to have, which were the conversations that happened in the shower where I was constantly telling everybody off preemptively. I don’t do that so much anymore. Now I have these imaginary conversations that light me the F up. Your coaching takeaways for the week. Since I went on some tangents about nose picking, amoebas, zombies, and whatever else I talked about, let’s just reiterate the three steps. Step one, get really clear about who your everybody is. If you need to journal that out, go ahead, but I bet they’ve already popped into your head. Step two, understand generalization and stop it in its tracks. Realize that your brain is making up a story and step three, make sure everybody is on your team and I’m going to do something fun this week over on Instagram and I would love for you to join in if you’re so inspired, you remember you can come follow me over @hollyfisherhiggins on Instagram.
What I’m gonna do is, it might not be Tuesday, it might be Wednesday. Just keep an eye out for the post, but I am going to make a post with a compilation of my everybody. So I’m going to introduce you to my everybody team and if you wanna make your own post about who your everybody is or if you want to tag some of your everybody people in the comments of my post, come do that. It’s first of all, it’s just going to be fun to see who’s in your everybody team and it also spreads positivity and love and maybe I’ll get some, some new ideas for some potential teammates. So come, come hang out with me on Instagram and we’ll share our new everybodys.
Thanks for hanging out today. Don’t forget you can head over to mindspeakpodcast.com/sabotage. I always think of the Beastie Boys whenever I say that, I’m telling y’all it’s sabotage. Sorry. If you don’t know who the Beastie Boys are anyway, mindspeakpodcast.com/sabotage to get your free downloads. I have really, really appreciated all the ratings and reviews that you have left on Apple Podcasts, fist bump to you if you left one for me, that is the coolest, and until next week, have I made it clear that I want to be on your everybody team? That’s a role I really want to play for you. Until next week. Go believe in you. I do.