The Causey Consulting Podcast

Everyone's a Spectator...

Sara Causey

People want to project their stuff onto you. Perhaps not for long, but it can derail your attempts to find freedom if you let it.

Links:

https://causeyconsultingllc.com/2024/11/04/welcome-to-opinion-city/

Links where I can be found: https://causeyconsultingllc.com/2023/01/30/updates-housekeeping/

Need more? Email me: https://causeyconsultingllc.com/contact-causey/ 

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos! 

Welcome to the Causey Consulting Podcast. You can find us online anytime at CauseyConsultingLLC.com, and now here's your host, Sara Causey. 

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. In today's episode, I want to talk about opinion city. I'll probably also write a blog post about this, and if I do, I'll drop a link to it. About this time in October, I published an episode titled freedom, creating a life on your own terms. And not surprisingly, it's been a popular episode, because people are hungry for freedom, for independence, whether it's financial freedom, autonomy at work, independence from a boss who's a jerk, and colleagues that work their last good nerve. People are hungry for this. And I wanted to talk about the idea of opinion city, because there's this yarn. I don't know who originally said it, but it goes something like this, when you're young, you worry a lot about what other people will think. When you hit middle age, you realize you don't actually care what other people think. You want to live your life on your own terms. Then when you hit old age, you realize that nobody was ever judging or paying attention to you anyway, because people are self absorbed. They're thinking about themselves in their own life, and they're not worried about what you do. I would say that's true up to a point. I would put a proviso on that there are people who will care and or who will have a strong opinion about it for a season, for a period of time, not necessarily for a long time, but to say that nobody's paying attention, nobody has an opinion, I think, is being a bit short sighted as a cliche as a yarn goes. It's not a bad one, and it's really meant to be a good reminder that your life is your own. You have to make your own decisions. That's one of the reasons why I always say repetitively in this podcast, I don't tell you what to do or what not to do. You have to be your own best advocate. Draw your own conclusions. Decide for yourself how to manage your life, because I don't freaking know. Some days I feel like I'm hanging on by a toenail. I don't know how to tell somebody else to manage their life. That's a gas. But it's not quite accurate, in my opinion, to say, Well, no, nobody's watching. Nobody's gonna say anything. Not quite here's the way that I would phrase it myself. People want to project their fears and their ideas and their shortcomings and the things that they're too scared to do onto you. I read something that Tim Denning wrote about Nobody judges things like side hustles or hobbies, and I think that's accurate, because so many people now have side hustles and or hobbies that they're desperately trying to monetize. Such are the times in which we live now. I'm recording this spoiler alert. Peek behind the curtain. I'm recording this before election day. By the time it hits the airways on let me look at the calendar Thursday, November 7. I don't know if we'll have a result. I don't know if we'll know anything by then, and I don't know if it will change anything. We have been living in this hellscape of inflation and cost of living crisis. And it's it's been a nightmare. It's been a freaking nightmare. I saw the other day on LinkedIn, somebody had posted what I believe to be a true statement about how difficult it has been to be in staffing, recruiting or HR, really, ever since the pandemic started. For me, 2021, was a great year, but every other year besides that, has been the poops. It has been incredibly difficult. It feels like you have to work twice as hard to make half as much, and then the half as much that you do get doesn't go half as far as it should, because by the time you go to the grocery store or you put gas in the car or you pay the bills, it's like, well, $20 used to actually be something. Now $20 is about like $1 or $5 used to be. This is nuts, completely crazy. So I don't know if the outcome of the election is going to change a gosh darn thing. I don't want to get too political here, but I kind. Trying to sort of doubt that we're gonna have any kind of Hail Mary pass or big, major miracle, but I hope and I pray that I am wrong. I'm tired of this. I'm tired of feeling squeezed. I'm tired of feeling like we've been living in a damn vise grip for the past four years. This sucks. Who's gonna fix it? I don't freaking know. I don't know, but we have to keep on living. So my point for this episode is so many people just to survive. When you look at inflation, you look at cost of living, you look at young people trying maybe to afford a home for the first time, which feels completely out of reach. Many people are working side hustles. Many people are trying to monetize their hobbies. So if you're at a cocktail party, let's say and you're like, Hey, I'm Bob. I'm a tax accountant by day, and then at nine and on the weekends, I love to paint. I don't know if I'm any good at it. I don't think I'm any Renoir or Picasso, but I enjoy it. It's a stress reliever. And who knows, maybe one day I'll set a shingle out on the side and try to sell some or wind up in a gallery. You never know. If you say that at a cocktail party, people be like, well, that's great, Bob. It's awesome. It is so psychologically important that you have an outlet for your creativity. That is wonderful, because it's okay to earn money through work or or, let's say this. Hi. My name is Cindy, and during the week, I work at an office. I do admin, clerical work, and then on the weekends, I drive for Uber just trying to make ends meet people. Yeah, I totally get it. Totally get it. That's putting somebody in a neat, tidy box that others can relate to. And it's also, I think, like conformity and the herd mentality. These people are not stepping out of line. People are supposed to make money through work, through earning it. You're not supposed to have money come to you through any other means except a, J, O, B, so these two scenarios that I've presented to you, nobody's going to think twice about it. Now let's consider a different possibility. Let's say that Bob goes into the cocktail party and he says, Well, I've been a tax accountant by day for several years, and it is just mind numbing. I am so burned out I don't want to do it anymore. I love to paint. I've been doing it at night and on the weekends, and I want to do that for a living. I'm planning to quit tax accounting and just step full time into being a painter and see where it takes me. People who they're not related to Bob, they're not dependent on Bob. They have no say, and they're not impacted by Bob's personal finances whatsoever. You're gonna do, what are you crazy? Are you out of your mind? You have a good, stable job. You're never gonna want for work, because everybody has to pay taxes, companies and individuals. Why would you do that? You're no Picasso, you're no Van Gogh. You're not gonna make it. Do you know how many people try to make it as painters, and they never end up in a single gallery? You're gonna wind up selling your crap for $5 a pop at a flea market. Are you nuts? That's that's the kind of reaction. But yet, if Bob says, Yeah, I'm keeping my day job, and it's all right, but I paint on the weekends just as a hobby, maybe it'll be monetized. Maybe it won't, I don't know. Well, that's fine. That's great. Good for you. People want this neat, tidy story. It reminds me of the time when Marlon Brando was on The Dick Cavett Show, very famously, after he rejected the Oscar and he talked about how the press and Hollywood in general, for that matter, likes to sell celebrities as commodities so that they're no different from a bar of soap or a box of tissues. You know that when Clark Gable shows up, he's going to basically play Clark Gable? You know that when Gary Cooper shows up, he's going to basically play Gary Cooper? Regardless of the role, you're getting a commodity. You're getting a stereotype or a prototype of some kind, as opposed to an actual flesh and blood human being who might be versatile. And I think people we meet out socially have that same expectation, and part of that, really and truly boils down to fear, and some of it's jealousy. You're doing something that I wish that I could do, but I can't, or in my mind, I feel like I can't, I could do it, but I'm just not going to do it, because I'm totally afraid. I had an encounter like that, personally, with a woman. It was during 2021 during the Great resignation, when it was just the market was totally insane, obviously an artificially manipulated boom. Cycle that we were in. And this woman, I'm going to be careful how I tell this story, because I don't want to, you know, don't want to put anybody on blast. But I was working on this project, and she outright told me, I would love to do what you're doing. I would love to just freelance and be able to decide what clients I work with, and what hours I keep and what hourly rate that I want to charge. Wait for it, because, you know it's coming. But I don't feel like I can. I'm married, I have a baby. I carry the benefits for myself and the baby. I don't feel like I could quit and be a freelancer because of my family and I had nothing but problems out of that particular woman for the entire project because of her jealousy. It wasn't that I was doing anything wrong or I was trying to screw up the project, it was she was going to ride hurt on me and deliberately be a bit of a jerk wad in my general direction, because she resented the fact that, in her mind, I had all of this freedom and autonomy and she didn't, so she wanted to punish me for it. And unfortunately, you're going to run across people who are in that category. So while you're on this search for freedom and creating a life on your own terms, you're gonna have to be prepared for that. I've just started getting into some of the works of Ken achey. A couple of his videos popped up on YouTube, and I was like, holy smokes. There were times that he said things that I have said myself verbatim. That's when you know you're on a certain wavelength. You know that it wasn't just the algorithm feeding you something. It's Kismet. You were supposed to see this video, and he tells the story of being in his 40s. You know, relatable for me, I am too being in his 40s and getting tenure at a university, and everybody around him was like, oh my god, this is awesome. You don't have to fight to be published anymore. You don't have to worry about being fired. You're in like, Flynn, baby. Everything's great. And he's like, and he said that he didn't like how structured everything was, that he would have to have his entire life planned out for months and even years in advance with that tenure. So it was like, Okay, next year, on December 14, you're going to be at a symposium in London doing this, and from November 1 to November 7, you're going to be teaching the Iliad, and on September 15, you're going to be required to go to Tampa, Florida for a conference. I mean, it was like everything was just boom, boom, boom, structured for him, and he felt suffocated by that. And he described that tenure as being like a golden cage. I felt a similar type of feeling when I got that corner office, when I was in a management role, I had a grotesquely oversized corner office, not one that I asked for, either, by the way. And I sat there and I did the whole routine, man, the whole ball of wax. I kicked back in my chair, I put my feet up on the desk, and I looked out the window, and I was like, This feels like a Pyrrhic victory. My boomer parents always told me that this was the kind of thing that you're supposed to strive for, and now that I'm here, this sucks. I had a very similar reaction to what Ken did. I didn't feel free. And for me, freedom is huge, huge. Don't fence me in i think that may even be some sometimes the unofficial astrological motto of Sagittarians, Don't fence me in the minute that we feel trapped. It's like, Man, I got to get out of here, even if I'm like the proverbial urban legend coyote that chews its own arm off to get out of the trap, just to be free. Man, I'll do it. I don't. I don't want to be in a cage, gilded or otherwise. So I really understood what Ken was talking about, but he went on to say, there's a difference between friends and friendly Associates, and I want to flesh that out in this episode a little bit better. I would actually make it a four tiered system, true friends, friendly associates, frenemies and outright overt enemies. So in Ken's definition, friends are true blue friends, and that's how I would define it, too, true, blue friends that stick by you, that are supportive, that have your back, they don't talk trash about you to your face or when you're not around either one, they don't gossip, they don't try to squash your dreams, even if you need tough. Love now and then, or they express an opinion that's contrary to yours. They're not doing it from from a place of malice. They're doing it because they actually truly care about you, and they don't belabor the point a friendly associate, as Ken defines it, is probably going to be the majority of people that you think are your so called friends. He experienced this when he walked away from his tenure because he wanted to be a screenwriter. He wanted to write books and write screenplays and sell his ideas to Hollywood and see his notions made into films, and be like, Oh, are you crazy. You have this tenure. You have a safe job. You have this is a midlife crisis. Something is wrong with you. So they projected a lot of their own fears and a lot of their own beliefs about tenure onto Ken. I think some of them would even say things like, Do you know people would kill for a position like this? They throw their own mother under a bus. If that's what it took, and you're just throwing it away, you're gonna regret it. I think so many creatives have heard that exact type of junk before, and entrepreneurs too. It doesn't really matter whether you're talking about you want to go into business for yourself, you want to set a shingle out and be a full time freelancer and hunt and kill your own mate, or you want to be a writer. You want to be a painter. You want to be a sculptor. It's same old, same old. You're gonna hear that same line. Are you crazy? What are you thinking? You're gonna fail? I mean, in the business world, you hear that all the time. Do you know how many small businesses fail? Do you know that most small businesses don't even make it to the five year anniversary? And then there's another round that doesn't even make it to the 10 year anniversary. Are you crazy? What makes you different? And so on and so forth. So for Ken, he really came to see that his pool of friends, True Blue, real friends, was quite small. Mostly, what he had around him were friendly associates. Now in my chart, I would add people like frenemies and overt enemies. Frenemies obviously the portmanteau of friend and enemy, somebody who smiles to your face while they stab you in the back, someone who pretends that they're down for you, but really they're just a turd. They don't care about your health and well being, and they might even try to goad you into making bad decisions, so they can sit up and laugh at you and mock you when things go awry. You have to be so careful with people like that. Obviously an overt enemy. You know where you stand. You know that this person does not like you and doesn't want to have anything to do with you unless it's to hurt you. All of that's clear. You know that whatever you try, they're going to say something snarky about it. They're going to always have a negative opinion. Okay, it is what it is. But with people in the middle there, whether it's what Ken calls a friendly associate or what I would label a frenemy, you have to be careful. And it may very well be that those people do not need to be in your life. So if you are thinking, hey, I want freedom. I want to create a life on my own terms. I want to do something different, whatever it is that that looks like for you, you may find, as Ken did, that the people you thought were you're down to ride True Blue homies are not they're people that are going to be left on the sidelines in order for you to move into the next phase of your evolution. And that's okay. It really is. Not everybody is meant to be in your life for your entire life. Some people stay for a season, and then some people leave, and sometimes they come back. Sometimes you might have a friend from childhood or adolescence. You're away for a long time, and then they come back later, and everything's cool again. Those things happen too, but you want to be careful about not surrounding yourself with people who just browbeat you and who make you feel crappy about yourself. I'm thinking now of that scene in as good as it gets, where Helen Hunt says something to Jack Nicholson and his character along the lines of, I don't want to know you, because every time I come around you, you make me feel terrible about myself. Don't Don't be around people like that, man, if all they have to say is negative things and they're telling you that you're terrible, you have no talent. You're never going to make it. Life is a biatch, and then you die and become worm food. Man, who needs all that? Who? Who needs it? Who needs it? I would also say that sometimes it's better to just play your cards close to the vest. It may not always make sense to telegraph every move that you make. There are some people who believe that if you going on a diet, you should tell everybody, because it will keep you accountable. If you are about to make a big career change, you should tell everybody. If you're about to quit your job and move into something creative, you should tell everybody about it. Honestly, I disagree. You know, if you've got a few tight down homies in your wolf pack, maybe you tell them. Maybe you don't. I don't know that's up to you, but I wouldn't trumpet everything to the world. Me personally, I wouldn't Some people believe that they do better if everybody knows their business and they they're worried about the judgment. Well, if I fail this diet, everybody's going to look at me. Well, if I say that, I'm going to make a career change and I don't, everybody's going to look at me and go, well, there, she failed again. I don't know that that's the best motivator in life. Honestly, I think if we're doing something that we truly want to do, and it comes from within, we should have enough oomph, enough chutzpah from our own selves that we don't need that outside validation. We don't need the quote, fear of other people judging us in order to behave a certain way. Just a point to ponder. Think about how much you share with the world and with the people around you, and consider whether the individuals that you've surrounded yourself with fit into what Ken calls true friends, or are they friendly associates, or are they frenemies? Do you need that kind of spirit in your life if you're contemplating a change, or you want to see if you can monetize a hobby. You want to see if a side hustle can maybe grow into something more. Do you want to pollute your brain with people who are telling you negative thoughts over and over and over again? Now I'm definitely thinking of Peter McWilliams book, you can't afford the luxury of a negative thought now that can be coming from you. You can be your own worst anti cheerleader, or you can be absorbing it from so called buddies who are just telling you gloom and doom all the time. If you're planning your own Exodus, if you're looking for your own definition of freedom, is that something that you want to include in the journey? Stay safe, stay sane, and I will see you in the next episode.

 

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