Kate's Nuggets

How to Be Special Without Being a Jerk
Episode 13

Podcast Opening over Theme Music:
Hello and welcome. This is Kate's Nuggets, the podcast where I share bite-size nuggets of wisdom about self-leadership. I am your host, Kate Arms. I invite you to listen lightly, let these ideas wash over you. Take what you take and let the rest go. You can always come back and listen again.

Kate Arms:
Today I want to talk about how to make sure that we feel special and important, which is a real human need.

We need to feel like we matter and we need to find a place of belonging where we are important or we feel like something's missing.

And I want to talk about how to do that without coming across as a jerk or selfish or arrogant.

Because in addition to being special and important and like we matter, we also want to have good relationships with people.

And if we're busy proving to people that we're special or important they end up feeling repulsed. They feel like they are an object that we are manipulating to make ourselves feel better about ourselves.

If you've ever been in a relationship with somebody who makes you feel that way, you know that it feels icky. And what you really want is you want them to see you as you and to value you as you.

You want to be seen and heard and you want to be important as a person. You want your inner experience to matter.

You want who you are to be more important than whether you make this person feel good enough or special.

So you don't want to be the person that other people are responding to by distancing and you want to feel special and important and like you matter.

How do we do that?

It's not easy for most of us. Most of us have really bad habits.

In an ideal world, our parents would have made us feel special, important and like we mattered just because we were us. And they would have done that so consistently over so much time that we would have just come to accept that this is how the world sees us.

It would have embedded itself in our self-concept at a level that sustained us until we believed it no matter what the rest of the world threw at us.

Most of us were not so lucky. Most of us came to believe from the world around us that we had to be something special or do something special to matter.

Most of us came to feel this way not because people did bad things to us, but because people didn't know any other way of treating us. Because most people are caught in a cycle of trying to get the attention that they think they deserve, they know they deserve.

Everybody deserves to be treated with inherent worth and dignity and respect and regard simply because they are a human being.

Many of us haven't had that need met and haven't met that need for ourselves and haven't had it met by other people. So because we weren't swimming in the waters of regard for ourselves, regard for us as people, we learned problem behaviors to try to get that regard and respect.

I'm going to introduce you to a five-stage development of problem behaviors escalation that comes from Adler's work. There's a good description of this in the recent book, The Courage to Be Happy. But here's the summary.

The first thing that we try is we try to seek approval. We try to be the good child, the well behaved student. We want to get praise from our parent or from our teachers. As adults, we want to get praised by our boss.

We want acknowledgment and recognition.

The problem with this, of course, is that if it's not forthcoming, we feel bad about ourselves, and we change our behavior in order to manipulate others, to give us that reaction.

Now, if we don't get that approval, we get dissatisfied, we get resentment, and we start upping the ante.

We start cheating to try and get that recognition. We use deceptive behaviors to get that praise. We hide our flaws and our vulnerabilities and our weaknesses in order to be seen as strong and capable and powerful.

If that doesn't work, we up the ante again. We go from seeking approval to seeking attention. Seeking approval is about meeting other people's concerns and saying, yes, we can help you out. We can make you feel great. We can be the person that makes you feel like we're amazing, that you feel special, that you love having us around.

Seeking attention doesn't need that piece of paying attention to other people's concerns. Seeking attention comes through being the class clown, wearing weird clothes, asking lots of questions, being the squeaky wheel.

We get a privileged position in the community because we get people's attention.

We either make them laugh, make them smile, make them pay attention to us because we've got drama coming in, or we're annoying and irritating and we're the fly in the ointment, and they respond to us because we're irritating. This is a privileged position. We get all of the attention in the room if we ask all the questions.

If that doesn't work, we escalate again.

We enter a power struggle where our goal is to be right, where everything becomes about winning. We set up a battle. We seek a battle. We set up active disobedience or passive disobedience.

This is where passive-aggressive behavior comes in. I'm going to win this battle by not playing your game and just letting you spin circles around me.

This is the behavior someone engages in when they throw a controversial topic into a group of people and watch the other people get into a heated argument for their own entertainment.

They can think, "I won. I was in control. I made that happen." It makes people feel special and important. I am the center of this group, even if I'm not the center of attention, because I planted the bomb and they exploded.

If that doesn't work, well, then we escalate again.

The next level of escalation is revenge, stalking, withdrawal, self-harming with an accusation that it's your fault that I ended up this way.

This behavior is all about, well, if you're not going to like me and you're not going to include me, I'm going to make you hate or fear me because at least that leaves me in relationship with you. And it's better than it is to be ignored.

Being ignored is so much worse than being disliked.

Beingg ignored is so bad that it's more satisfying to be the target of someone else's abuse than ignored.

If revenge doesn't work, the next level of escalation is learned futility and proof of incompetence. Don't expect anything of me. I'm incompetent. I am going to disappoint you left, right and center. Do not have expectations of me.

Eventually, people who have reached this level of learned futility come to believe that they can't solve anything. They come to believe their own demonstration of incompetence. They come to believe they can't change. They despair of themselves, they despair of life.

They firmly believe that they cannot solve anything.

And then to avoid feeling that despair, they run away from responsibility. So they look at responsibility and they're like, I can't handle that. So they run away from it.

And then, they fail to accomplish anything.

And so this learned futility is an awful place to live.

The goal is still, even in this place of learned futility, to get a special place in society.

In this case, it's "you've got to take care of me because I'm so incompetent. You have to take care of me."

And then by being taken care of in that level of incompetence, you've got a special place.

When people care about you and you are incompetent and they take care of you and they worry about you and you make them anxious, you have a special place in their lives and in their heart.

It's not a happy place, but at least it's a relationship and at least you're special. So these are all the bad ways to be special.

What's that psychologically healthy way to feel special? Because honestly, you are special.

You are a unique human being. I don't care who you are or how badly you think about yourself. You have a unique set of DNA, a unique set of environmental experiences, a unique way of looking at the world.

You have a temperament that is unique to you.

You have an existence and a selfhood that is different than any other self has ever been before or will ever be again.

You are unique and you have strengths and weaknesses just like everybody else. You have things that bring you joy just like everybody else.

You create an impact in the world just by being you that have ripple effects.

So the way to be special, the way to be important, the way to absolutely 100% guarantee that you matter and that you have a special place in the world, is to become aware of your greatest strengths, your deepest hungers, your deepest joys. The things that you can't help doing because they are so natural to you.

When you strip away your fears and your performances and your bad behavior, the natural self that you are and take those strengths and put them into service where the world has a great need, if you put your strengths in service of a great need, you fill a role that nobody else can play.

You bring a way of service to an important need.

By definition, you become structurally important in a way that nobody else ever can be.

You actually create and then fill an incredibly special place in society.

The way to do this is to look around you and see what your family, your community, your work, the world needs. And you bring your greatest strengths and the things that bring you great joy to active service, doing what you can to meet that need.

Frederick Buckner had a wonderful way of putting this. He said, "your vocation in life is where your greatest joy meets the world's greatest need." And when you find yourself in that intersection, the byproduct is that you know that you are special and that you matter.

If you see these problem behaviors in yourself and you want to find a new, healthier way of meeting your need to feel special, what do you do?

The further down the problem path you have gone, the more you're going to need outside help changing how you think of yourself and how you behave. Because the more deeply embedded this pattern of looking for other ways of meeting this need will be in your life.

If you are in the learned futility stage, you may even have created a negative feedback loop in your brain that's strong enough that antidepressant medication will help you jumpstart the process. You may not need that, and even if it is, what helps.

So if you need it, you need it. And please, if you need it, go get it.

But even if you do, you are going to need to work on changing the way that you think about yourself and your habits.

We get really good at behaving in the ways that support our misguided attempts to create this sense of importance and the special place for ourselves in the world.

Depending on where you are on that path and how much difficulty you have identifying your great strengths and the world's needs and how much habit you have about stepping away from responsibility and behaving in ways that put other people off, you are likely to want some kind of mindset shifting support.

You're going to want some skills in relationship building and the habits of putting yourself first because you're going to need to give serious attention to your own strengths and claiming your strengths as the foundation of the service that you can provide to the world.

What I invite you to do, no matter where you are on this path, or if you don't even recognize any of this behavior in yourself is focus on identifying your greatest strengths. How does the world need in a way that you can bring your strengths to bear?

What is the world calling for that your strengths can help you do?

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Here's to Thriving! Catch you next time.
Kate's Nuggets is a Signal Fire Coaching production. The music is adapted under license from Heroic Age by Kevin McLeod.