TSSL - Episode 17 - How to Stop Caring What Others Think About YOU

So this week we talk about some good tips on how to not care so much about what others think of you, which is helpful because as you improve you social skills you are often putting yourself out there to be judged. We also talk about when it can be good to break some of the rules we've been talking about. Know the rules so you can BREAK the rules.

Be sure to check out The Hidden Brain Podcast - especially the recent episodes - 'Hummer Us' & 'The Story of Stories'

Thank you so much to Wax Mustang for the intro and outtro music - "Powerball"

....

I always appreciate any support ; D 

https://www.patreon.com/TSSLpodcast

paypal.me/TSSLpodcast

Thank you!! Thank you! - Nathan.  : D

Transcript

Unknown: 0:57

Baby away from the body I'm thinking much in the back seat for the Powerball we could do it all with the baby. Put the winning you know, as gains off of sheets sing along, man. And just when it couldn't get better, she talked to me and saying you got the chin? Ah, you got the juice, you have the bison, you token and walk in the right way sundown on a highway know the feeling baby? What's going on out there? What are you doing over there? zooming away for a bit, I'll come back to the social skills slot. The social skills lab podcast, I'm your host, Nathan, Episode 17. Today. Last episode we were talking about taking up more space. I want to mention too, that sometimes it's appropriate, most of the time, it's appropriate to take up a good amount of space, wherever you're at, just feel comfortable taking up more space. Because a lot of people will kind of, you know, inadvertently, subconsciously kind of shrink themselves in the presence of others. Basically kind of deferring to them. But it's good to take up more space, just don't do the prototypical manspreading like if you're on a bus, you know, where you're just kind of like taking up too much space. Like, um, you know, like, if your space my space is more important, I'm just talking about in general, I think you get it. Let's see here. I also was going back and listening to some episodes. There was like one or two things where it's like, I've actually kind of changed my mind or seen some things from a different perspective, I kind of want to mull it over a little bit more, but any type, anytime you're like a rule, or an idea. And like, and even if it appears to be true, just know that it actually made, it actually might not be true in the future, because the truth always seems to be fluid. Things change, the world is always changing. So something that worked two years ago might actually for some reason, just not work anymore. So even though I believe that some stuff is a rule, that doesn't necessarily mean it's always gonna be a role. It's kind of hard to explain, but I mean, you'll still notice stuff in your own life that as you grow as time moves on, you do have to make adjustments you do have to calibrate and a lot of times too. I've noticed that when you learn the rules about something, once you learn all the rules. Sometimes you learn when it's actually even better to break rules. So as you get more experiential, you'll pick up on these things like oh, yeah, actually, I can do the exact opposite. It'll even be more effective. Like sometimes if someone sometimes someone like accidentally like just bumps me a little bit I'll just be like, oh, that hurt. Like being like super whiny about it, but I just I'm just doing it as a joke. And it could it sometimes it comes off as like pretty funny. Or if or if like someone's kind of like being like hi lording over me. You know, trying to big league me. I'll act like super subservient and like deferring to them, like on purpose. And it I make it pretty obvious so it kind of just like makes a joke that like point a kind of just points out that the guy was being kind of an asshole about it. I don't know. It's It's hard to explain. But you'll you'll start picking up when that's actually can be pretty effective to break a rule. Especially if you make it obvious what you're doing. Also notice too that a couple episodes ago, I mentioned that, I think is on the episode about attitude. Dude, I talked about having a lot of gratitude. And I mentioned that I was going to really put a lot of effort into being more or having more gratitude, because there's a lot of studies out there that shows that it actually is. One of the best ways to elevate your mood is to have a lot of gratitude. So I was joking. I was joking with a buddy of mine. I was I sent him a text message. It said something like, how's your? How is your GP? Ah, how has your gratitudes per hour going? Because I heard this on this other podcast, Anthony jeselnik was talking about laughs per minute, as a joke. He was talking to another comedian. He's like, have you ever measured your LP? LPs, she's like, what's that he's like, your laughs per minute. I guess as a way to, like, go over his old standup sets and see if he's getting more LP RPMs sizes is choking my buddy. I'm like, how's your GPH your gratitudes per hour. But it's actually kind of a good reminder that, you know, there is a lot to be, have gratitude for. I mean, for one, like imagine, like being in World War Two, that would just be a shitty time to be alive. So at least we're in relatively peaceful times. I was using my drill, I was drilling some two by fours, and the drill bit flew off. And it just like, I've never had that happen before it usually the drill, the drill bit usually stays in place pretty good. But it just flew off, flew right at my face and hit me about an inch from my eye. And like, hit me pretty hard. Like it actually left a mark and a tiny bruise for a couple days. And I was thinking I'm like holy cow that just like an inch, it would just went straight into my eyeball. And it could have been really bad. So I have a lot of gratitude for having both my eyes. Because I could have easily been blind in one eye. And as a thing, and Tim, like, you know, they always recommend wearing safety glasses when you use a drill. And nobody does. Like I never do it. I still don't do it. But I'm definitely more careful about making sure that drill bits in there. But I have been consciously thinking about things to be grateful for more often during the day. And yeah, I think it's a, I think my mood is, at least it's holding steady as far as I'm usually in a pretty good mood. So I highly recommend getting up your GPA ages. Yeah, just see what it does for you might start feel a little better. I'm also like, really been focusing on trying to meditate some more. The cool part about meditating meditating is as soon as I start, as soon as I'm like, Okay, I'm going to I got a few, got a few minutes here, I'm going to just start meditating. The first thing I do is just focus on my breathing. So that's a good thing, you should always be conscious of what how you How is your breathing, for one. If you're in a conversation, if you're breathing really well, I noticed too, like if I'm a little nervous, and I'm talking to someone, my breathing is shallow. And my whole line of communication is a little bit off. So having a good control of your breathing will really help you with your social skills. So when I meditate, the first thing I'm I focus on is my breathing, that it's like nice and steady, slow, deep breaths, as opposed to quick and shallow and fast. Which kind of just throws off your whole, your whole respiratory slash body functions and stuff like that. So meditations been really helpful, been doing it some more. It's good stuff, I recommend doing that to something that's going to improve your social skills is caring less about what other people think. Because when you're working on your social skills, you're trying a lot of new things. You're really putting yourself out there. And for me, something that was pushing against my pushing against that advancement in my mind was how I was being perceived my perception of how other people were perceiving me. And that's usually the stuff that's you know, you're just making up In your mind, but it was very real to me. So something that you're gonna have to work through is caring, less and less and less about what other people think about you, it's kind of a fine line. Because I mean, you don't want to be an insane person, right? You want to be an effective communicator. So in some ways you do care what people how you are being perceived. But as you trust in your own integrity, you can actually not worry about what how you're being perceived, as long as you have good character. And it's kind of weird, it's like you're taking you you're really not taking yourself so seriously. Not taking life. So seriously, it'll just come across a lot better. If you're not as concerned about how you're being perceived, you're basically just being super present, right? You're, you're staying out of your head. So my advice for this for caring less about what other people think about you is, I mean, you can go big, like you can go stand in the middle of us are in the middle of intersection on the corner, and to start like singing your favorite song out loud in front of people. You know, that would be a big step, you could totally do that, like, you know what I did, I actually was I went out with my friends and I started doing karaoke at these local bars, I thought that would be a good way to really kind of get over how I really get over how I worry about what other people thought about me. Because you know, when you go up and do karaoke, you're probably not going to be that great. You're not gonna be probably not gonna be very good. You just have to get over looking stupid in front of people. And the first time I did it, I mean, I was really nervous about doing it. Like I said, I'm, I think I'm a naturally introverted person. So the last thing I want to do is get up in front of people on a mic and sing. So kind of just doing the things that are the opposite of what you want to do, it's a good way to get you to grow a lot faster. So I did that a few times. And I got to be honest, it was like, it actually was pretty fun. Yeah, it was a lot of fun doing that. And it definitely helped. I think, it definitely gives you more confidence and stuff like that. But you know, you can just take baby steps. Anytime you are trying to grow. As a person, sometimes you go big, like, doing karaoke, or sometimes you just take baby steps. But as long as you're kind of always pushing yourself to lean outside of your comfort zone, you will grow. So you want to keep leaning outside of your comfort zone. It'll help you quite a bit. But one thing I was thinking about this specifically, is you know how sometimes you'll get ready for like, you got to go run some errands or whatever. You're going to get dressed. You're gonna pick a some nice, you're like your favorite shirt or whatever to go out. Sometimes I'll actually on purpose pick an ugly shirt, or with my hair's a little messed up, I'll actually leave it messed up. Sometimes wear mismatching socks or something like that. I don't wear mismatching socks to work. But sometimes I'll just wear it out just to remind myself that it really doesn't matter. Or I'll wear an ugly shirt just to remind myself that it doesn't really matter. No one really gives a shit. Sometimes, like I said, leave my hair a little disheveled go out to remind myself to stop caring what other people think about me. It's kind of like it's I think it's a good exercise to do something like that. So you know, all these little things. They slowly get you moving in the right direction of the main overarching goal, which is to be more present, be more authentic. stop caring so much about what other people think about you. And the irony is when you do that people actually start to or if not everyone, which is Who cares? It just seems to people just seem to respect you more. They can just sense when you aren't so concerned about making everyone happy. Something else I was thinking about. I might have mentioned this before. I've noticed when I go back to listen to some of the podcasts, there's some things that I'll say I'll repeat over. I've mentioned before, you know, if you hear twice, maybe it's important But I was thinking, a pretty good tip I heard a long time ago is if you want to improve your social skills, get a job, where you're forced to use social skills, like maybe even get a part time job, or volunteer or something like that. Because if you're at a job or you're in a cubicle, you're on a computer all day, you don't really interact with people, other than email, or text message, you're kind of you don't, you're not really getting a lot of experience, or opportunities to use your social skills. So maybe you just get a job or you're forced to, like, let's say, customer service job or a greeter, or I don't know, like, like, I had a job. One of the first jobs I had was I worked at a call center in St. Louis. And we would take calls from like different companies like Purina and Smith, Barney. And HBC was the other one, I think, was like Mitsubishi, it was just like, we just contracted through different companies that basically be on the phone all day. And that's probably the first time I've, I was forced to talk to people, new people quite a bit. And so it's pretty good experience. I think I learned a lot from working there. So yeah, that'd be something to try if you really don't feel like you're getting enough experience, using earn f opportunities using you're working on your social skills and whatnot. Over the last couple of years, I've been doing a lot of job hopping. I've been going to a lot of job interviews, I've probably had, I don't know somewhere between 10 and 20 job interviews in the last two years, which is more job interviews than I've had in my entire life. And at first, it was like, I was pretty nervous about it. I was actually, I think I was actually overdressing. Because I remember hearing that you should always wear suit. But in my industry as a technician, it's almost like your overdressing. And I think that I don't know, I just I learned a little bit here and there about job interview skills, you know, went online and watch some videos and stuff like that. But I thought it was a really good experience going to job interviews, especially with the internet, it's so easy because they have all these like job recruiting sites like zip recruiter and Glassdoor and it makes it really convenient, you could just upload your resume one time, and then submit it to like 40 different companies. So I would like you know, put my resume up. And then apply to like, you know, three or four jobs every couple days. And I usually get about, I think if I submitted to maybe to 100 jobs, I got about 25 calls, or emails or whatever. And then I ended up going to certain I was definitely going to a lot of interviews. And there would be jobs. And I'm like, Well, I'm not even really interested in that job anymore. I don't really think it'd be a good fit. But I would still go to the interview just to get the experience. And, you know, some places when you submit for submit your application, they actually want you to fill out another application, which is kind of dumb. But if the job seemed pretty interesting, I would, I would go ahead and do it. But I noticed that the more interviews I went to, the more at ease I was like, I think just the fact that I was getting so many calls kind of made me feel like it's not even a big deal if I get the job or not, which actually came across in interviewing. But I was just like real casual, real friendly. My main thing wasn't really to highlight my technical skills it was to highlight my Pete my interpersonal skills, because a lot of these jobs are looking for people who are good with customers. So yeah, I got a lot of job offers. It was pretty cool. Like this one. The last time I got the job I currently have I actually got like three job offers in two days. That's pretty cool. So yeah, go on a lot of job interviews. It's a really good skill to have, it's actually going to be one of the ways you'll make more money very quickly is by being a good interviewee. You can make you can land a job that you that you actually like, and that will pay you more. Money's good. I like money the last couple days. I drive a lot for work. So I've been listening to some more podcasts and listening to this podcast called hidden brain by Shanker vedantam. Shanker, and I'm not sure if I'm saying that, right. But it's a podcast on like psycho. It's like a, it's about psychology and stuff, I've been listening to it for a while, there was a couple really, really good podcasts he put out lately, one was on humor, and the science behind humor. And the other one was on, it was called the story of stories, or, yeah, the story of stories, they were both, both of those episodes are really good, because we talked about storytelling before. And we also talked about how to be funny. But this really just goes into a deep, deep dive into the science behind both the structure, what makes it work, what makes it not work. So those are really good podcasts that I recommend you should check out. It's just a good podcast in general, the more you can learn about psychology, it's obviously going to help you with your social skills, understanding how people work, understanding how your own mind works, your mind works in ways. I mean, it's just it's so seamless with reality, you don't really understand how it works. But I remember I took a class on psychology. And one of the things that I remember from the class was this woman and she had a brain injury, apparently, that's how they figure out the different parts of the brain a lot of times is when someone gets a brain injury, and that part just stops working. So this is one lady she had a brain injury might have been like a tumor or something like that. But she was she lost the ability to leave, she lost the ability to recognize faces, which apparently is not tied to just general vision, or not incorporated in general vision. So like her vision was 2020. But when they showed her a picture of her mom, she didn't recognize who it was, or even when they showed her a picture of herself, she didn't realize it was a picture of herself. So there's actually a part of your brain specifically for recognizing people's faces real quickly. And I would have never guessed that. I just thought people I didn't know you, I just didn't think that there was a part of your brain for that. So it's just interesting when you learn stuff about your how your brain works, and can be pretty surprising. So it's always good stuff. Check it out, hidden brain podcast. Yeah, one was called humorous, and one was called the story of stories, I'll put a, I'll put a couple links in the of those for you in the show description. I'll do that for you. Because, you know, I'll make it easier for you to find those. I'll do the work for you, you're lazy bastards. I think just one last tip I have for you. It's not kind of on a body language. Tip. I've noticed, if you're talking to like a group of people, or if there's a group of people talking to each other, there'll be in sometimes we'll be in a circle. And then sometimes someone will, a new person will come up to the circle. And sometimes the people just open the circle naturally, to allow that person in. Sometimes if that person is kind of like weird, they'll keep the circle closed. But I've noticed even even in the most normal setting, sometimes people don't open the circle, just because they're not aware of good body language or just good group dynamic. But I always make it a point to kind of turn my body out, just to make an opening for the next person to come into the circle, like all kind of turn, take a small step back to make the circle bigger. So yeah, just be aware of that. That's a good little tip. to always be welcoming, welcoming to new people into the group. And then sometimes you'll go up to a group and start talking to them, and then they'll open the circle for you. So just notice how that happens. And then be aware, to make sure to do it for other people too, because it's just good social manners to you know, welcome people into your group, open the circle, expand the circle, because that's what you're trying to do, right, expand your social circle in small ways and in big ways. I've also remember hearing this other tip called Remember to water your plants. So it's like, if you have let's say you have like three or four really good friends or maybe you have like six or seven really good friends. You want to like kind of keep an if you want to you know keep Have a good relationship with everyone, you do have to occasionally hit him up, talk to him hang out with them every couple weeks, every couple months, you know, every couple of days just depends on the, the, how close you are with them, but you have to at least, you know, talk to him or call him up on the phone or actually hang out with him every few weeks or months at the at the minimum, because if it's yours, that kind of just gonna fade away. So that's called watering the plants, you got to make sure you killed the water of your attention and time to your relationships. Just did make sure that they stay alive, just like just like little plants. I think that's gonna be it this week. If you are enjoying the show, I'd appreciate if you guys could leave a review. Actually, I don't care if you want to go for it. If you don't, whatever, it's really not a big deal. But yeah, if you like it, leave a review, or subscribe if you don't want to. Yeah, whatever. It's all good. But I'll talk to you guys. Probably in another couple weeks or so. Some stuff is just kind of flying in my head. I've been taking pretty good notes. So if I think it's good, I'll let you know. Oh, you know, I forgot to check the email. Because I left an email. I'll do it again. What's the email? Yeah, I forgot to check the email. I checked it earlier this week if there wasn't any, no one emailed any questions. But if you have any questions you want to send email something you want to I might address it on the show or I might just shoot you back a message you can email me at t SSL podcast@gmail.com so the social skills lab t SSL podcast@gmail.com I hope you guys have an awesome week. Remember go out there talk to people don't take yourself too seriously and try to have a little fun later be feeling the effects of a past life from a past life took the right path on the wrong Nike Japan phones taking this right what a bizarre life a pull up a car ride it's a Mustang with the beats Where have you seen what it looked like? Oh, women granted a lot and again an issue for the moon in the stars numerous bronze beautiful beetle people with the lucky young linen and the nice to see to press down so now I'm thinking that life is better with buddy you bet on the brother You win in the tank tops with the eight ball. Oh man, if it wasn't for you if it wasn't for you. Shame it's a damn shame.