Episode 17: You’re Judging Today’s You With Yesterday’s Rules

You’re showing up. You’re doing the work.
So why does it feel like you should be doing better?

This episode looks at a pattern most people don’t even realize they’re running — judging who they are today by who they used to be… or more accurately, who they think they used to be.

Through real-world examples and lived experience, this is a look at how the past — especially an edited version of it — quietly becomes the standard we measure ourselves against.

Not about fixing. Not about going back.
Just awareness… and what changes when you start seeing it clearly.

If this hit, share it with someone who needs to hear it. 

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Presented by Madison’s Path
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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

There is something I've been thinking about. I think a lot of us do it without actually realizing it. How many times have you caught yourself thinking, I was better than this yesterday? Or this wasn't as hard before. Or I should be better than this. You can't really explain why or how you feel like that. What if you're measuring who you are today against someone who doesn't even exist anymore? Welcome to episode 17. You're judging today's you with yesterday's rules. I'm Bob. This is a show about what it means to be a man in today's world, navigating real life with strength, purpose, and clarity. No hype, no fixes, just awareness and the work that comes with it. Let's get to it. So my regular job, uh, one of my duties is to mentor uh new hires. It's a two-year training process for us to be certified. And I uh I do hands-on mentoring uh once they complete all the federal requirements, and and there's a lot of federal requirements involved, and there's several tests and exams and that have to be passed on certain timelines, and and then there's a long hands-on practical instruction portion, uh, which is where I come in. So I was working uh with a student recently, and he's he's pretty early into this practical uh hands-on training, and he said something that kind of hit me. He said, I was doing so much better before my break. Now, to give you context to this, he had been off for a couple of weeks taking care of some regulatory requirements. Um, and this was actually his first day back in the field on the job, and he was very disappointed with how he was doing. And when he said that, my answer got me to thinking about how true this answer actually was. My response was simply this. We tend to judge who we are by who we were, and more precisely, we judge by who we think we were. And I sat there with uh with that for a moment, and it kind of ran around in my head. It was one of those moments where I said something, and the the truth of my own statement kind of hit me. Because I do this, I guys, girls, whoever's listening. Most of this stuff I'm talking about is me. All right, this is this is me figuring myself out, my shit out in real time. Um, and I'm hoping some of you benefit from this. But I don't think this is common. Break, I don't think this is rare. I think a lot of us do this. In fact, I'd say most of us probably do this, and it'll show up everywhere across relationships, work, anything skill-based, anything identity-based. And it's not going to be obvious that you do this to yourself. You're going to feel like, oh, I'm just being honest with myself. And it really falls into two traps. And the first trap is that I used to be better. And they usually start with statements of I was doing better before blank, or I've fallen off, or I should be further along than this. And they're really just reflections of frustration, of impatience, of uh forcing your performance. But it's more than this, because it's really a distortion. The moments we're comparing ourselves to in the past, those are our peak moments. We're judging ourselves by the times that we got it as right as we can get it. And then we're looking at ourselves in the present, in real time, where conditions have changed, where the world has changed, we've changed, we're not in the same headspace as we were at that peak moment. And it's not a fair comparison. Trap number two, the other end of this, the opposite side of the coin, is that oh, I just I'm not good at this, or I've failed at this before, or I always screw this up. And it makes us approach these situations with hesitation. We we hold back, or we try to avoid it entirely. And again, it's it's another distortion because we're looking at the exact opposite. We're looking at our performance at our worst in a situation, and we are looking at that that past failure, and we're allowing it to limit us now. And you're not even looking at the possibility of doing the thing yet. You've you've made your decision before you've even acted. And see, here's here's the real bitch of this. They're actually the same thing. They're the same mechanism, it's the same limitation, the same thing happening in both instances. We're letting the past become the authority on what our future is. And the present, it gets judged instead of experienced. You're not even giving yourself the chance to experience it before you're making these decisions on how it's going to go. You know, it's it's crazy because a lot of us tend to use our best moments against ourselves. And then others are going to use their worst moments against themselves. And in either case, it's the same thing. You're you're letting the past make the call about the present. So the question isn't just what are you thinking about? It's not just how are you doing this now? The real question in this becomes what are you measuring yourself to? So, what's the pattern here? Because it's not just about what we're thinking, it's not about the fact that we're pre-judging a situation, it's also what we're using to judge that situation against. You know, so what is actually happening here? And it's it's not that you're just thinking about the past, it's that you're using it as a baseline to judge the present. And not only that, you're using it as a forecast for your present performance. And what we're doing is we're taking the past and we're making it the default setting. Whatever we've done is what we're always going to do. And then every situation that comes along, we're going to compare it to the past. And we do it automatically. Our brains are built this way. We're built for repetition and for patterns and for for it's it's hardwired into us. You know, I've mentioned this word a couple of times. Uh neuroplasticity. I mean, we're we're built for this. The problem is we've we start applying the wrong metrics to it. And when we do that, every situation it gets run through something that's already happened. You're not walking into this moment clean, you're you're walking into this moment holding on to what you did yesterday. And think about that for a second. Because is what happened yesterday true right now? How does the you of today compare to the you of yesterday? And what it does is it leaves you in a position where you're not asking what's true right now, you're asking how today ties into yesterday. And that's exactly what my student was doing. He was sitting there comparing the hymn of three weeks ago to the hymn of today. And the hymn of today was using a skill that he hadn't practiced in a while, that he hadn't done anything with that is very perishable in the short term when you're new to it, just like any skill is, and coming back to it cold and expecting his performance to match that which what it did before. It's the same thing we all do. We all do this to ourselves day in and day out. And this next part is really going to get you. Because that reference point we're judging from, we think it's accurate. But I can promise you it's not. It feels reliable. In your head, this has happened, this is a thing, this is this I can trust because it's in the past and I can't change the past. But that memory is not complete, it's selective. And your confidence in that memory does not equal the accuracy to it. But you trust it, like I said, because it's done. We can't change the past. Well, therefore, it's it's got to be correct, right? The problem is we draw these things out of context, right? We we use the how I was doing last week, we're focusing on our best repetitions of whatever. And the bad repetitions or the the struggle that we had with those good repetitions, that fades, it gets minimized. And any effort, any inconsistency, it just goes away because you're not focused on that. All you're focused on is how on your results were, how fucking perfect you got that. You know, we remember the moments where we were we were dead on. And we don't remember how inconsistent it was. It's it's like watching uh sports highlights. You know, we we keep the best plays, and then we drop the rest of the stuff, you know. Go watch watch the highlights on a baseball game. There's nine innings of stuff going on, but you're gonna get the best six plays on that sports highlight, and that's exactly what we do to ourselves. And then the other thing we we fail to look at is the context of these things. Are the conditions today identical to yesterday? No, I can guarantee you they're not because no two days are exactly the same. Are you exactly the same as you were? Are you? I can promise you, I've never met a person that's exactly the same day in and day out. The pressure, the repetitions, the environment, you, barometric pressure, I don't know, everything. Everything's different. Nothing's going to be the same. So, in essence, you're really comparing two completely different situations and trying to say, oh, these are the same. And it's a myth, it's a mismatch. You're comparing an edited past to a real-time present. You know, there's a thing I teach in our Unstuck program, and it's in essence, it's this. You can't change your past. I can't ask you to go back five minutes ago and press play on this. And I can't ask you to go forward in time and listen to next week's episode right now for me. They're both impossible. Because the only place you can act, the only place you have power is right now. But the contrast to that is because the past has already happened, because yesterday it's it's said and done, it's written in stone. You can't change yesterday. It feels certain. Meanwhile, right now, most of the time feels pretty damn unstable. And you weigh that in and you couple that with the idea that your brain is built for pattern recognition. Your brain looks to be able to predict what's going to happen. So its first instinct is to take yesterday's data and fill in any gaps on today. So, what is your brain going to do? It's going to trust the things that can't change. And it it's it's so it goes goes to the past, which is written. And it it uses that past to do to fill in those blanks. So when anything feels familiar, and pay attention to this, this next statement applies to a lot of things, not just this topic. When something feels familiar, your brain assumes it knows what's going on, and it's going to be exactly the same as what happened last time. Huh. So now you've got this version of yourself in your head. And we all think this version of ourselves that we see ourselves in yesterday is so freaking accurate. And that's how we color ourselves with today. Um the next day after that conversation with my student, um, there was an individual that one of my coworkers had was having a problem with. And this individual was trying to scam my coworker. I mean, let's call it what it was. He was trying to scam my co-worker. And as I'm watching my coworker engage with this individual, the individual is escalating. He's escalating the situation further and further and further. He's to the point he's getting combative, he's throwing, uh, shall we say, less than nice language around. Um, I'll let you fill in the blanks, but it involved a lot of um sexual favors he was asking for, and um saying that he was actually going to kill us. Uh yeah, great individual. But my coworker is a very level-headed person, but there's a limit. And if if you know this guy, it's it's not hard to read him. He he wears his emotions on his sleeve, and I could I could see that my coworker was nearing that limit. So I told my student to take over control for a second, and I stepped over to the situation where my my co-worker was, and it was only literally two steps away. I had to open a sliding door and it was right there. And I just put my hand on my conductor's shoulder, I pulled him, pushed him back through the door, I closed the door behind me, so now my co-worker's behind the door, and then I'm there with the individual. And this individual started turning all this hate on me. You know, I was a United States Marine. I grew up on a farm. My father was a truck driver and a soldier in the United States Army. Um past Bob would have said, Oh, it's on. Let's go. But in that moment, my decision was not to escalate the situation. My decision was to step in to separate the people and control the space. And I just stood there, and I just stood there looking at him. I think my only response was to take my sunglasses off because they're prescription and very expensive, and I didn't feel like replacing them if this guy decided to hit me. But I stayed still, I stayed quiet, I didn't respond, and I just stood there, controlling the space around me. And it was deliberate, it was a choice. I knew I was not going to offer this man any violence unless it was in defense of myself or others. And I knew where that line was. Like I knew where that line was. There was no question. So why do I bring this up? Because change happens in us. There's a line in a story. Um, the story is oh the the book is called Oathbringer. It's written by Brandon Sanderson. And the one character calls himself a hypocrite. And the response to that is that oftentimes, and this is coming from the story, and I'm going to screw the line up, so I apologize. I probably should have written it down, but the response to that, to that character calling himself a hypocrite is that oftentimes a man or woman in the process of change will often look like a hypocrite. Because behavior and thought don't line up. Me, I stepped into a situation not. Knowing which version of me would show up. As I opened the door to insert myself into the situation, I acknowledged who I was, who I had been, I should say. United States Marine, PTSD, rough life growing up. And I expected something different out of myself. But the part of me that actually showed up in that situation wasn't that man. It was the man who is now, who is level headed, who knows how to control himself and knows how to control the space around himself. Not through violence, not through threats, but just through presence. And in that moment, I realized that I no longer could measure myself against who I was. Hypocrisy? Hypocrisy looks like inconsistency from the outside. And there are people that are just hypocrites. I'm not going to say they're not. But a lot of people, what we're labeling as hypocrisy is growth and progress. A lot of times we call ourselves a hypocrite. And the gap between who we think we are and who we actually are is where that shows up. But the truth of the matter is that if you're operating differently, whether it's your awareness or your behavior, because one changes before the other, even if you don't fully see yourself that way, it's motion in progress. And the question becomes not who you were, but are you willing to see who you are now without dragging yesterday into it? Whether it was my student on the first day he was there, or me the second day he was there, or you right now. Are you doing this to yourself? Because I am. Do it all the time. We judge who we are now by who we were. And it's worse than that because it's actually we're judging ourselves by who we think we were. The problem isn't that it exists in the past. It's that we keep deciding to let it be true right now. And the version of yourself from yesterday, it's not even the full story. It's what you remember the full story to be, what you've edited it to be, what you've created it to be. And that's not to say ignore yesterday, because there's lessons in yesterday. The past, it can inform you, it can help you grow. But if you let it define who you are now, then you're denying all that growth. That was then. This is now. So let me ask you, my friends, if you weren't measuring yourself against who you used to be, how would you show up right now? Yesterday is the version of you that got you to here. But at some point, you have to stop listening to that and be the person you are today. That's it for today. Take what's useful, leave what's not, choose, and keep moving.