Hey there! Welcome back to the show. This is episode number 272.  I’m excited to share today about a first step in the process of reframing, gaining perspective, and objectively considering your circumstances in a way that can help you have some power. To get started today, I wanted to share a couple books that I’ve really enjoyed recently in a segment called The Book Nook.

Segment: Book Nook

The first book is called The Women. It’s a new Kristen Hanna novel just released. I grabbed it upon the recommendation of my good friend, Jansen Bradshaw from Everyday Reading, who is on top of all things books all the time for all age groups. So, if you aren’t yet following or on the newsletter for Jansen Bradshaw, Everyday Reading, Give her a follow.

As soon as she mentioned it being one of her favorite books she’s read recently, and this was ahead of the release, I pre ordered it on Audible, so it downloaded last weekend, right on the release date, and I Loved it. It was a fantastic dive historical fiction novel set in the time of the Vietnam War with a debutante daughter who decides to sign up for war after her brother has gone off as a volunteer to serve in Vietnam.

The family has a long, rich history of naval servants and a hero’s wall of all the pictures of the men who’ve served their country, and so it’s a point of pride for the family. And the story, how it unfolds, and the women involved in the service as nurses in the active military zones during the Vietnam War, with all the controversy that surrounded that war, all the controversy surrounding women at the time, women working women involved in places where men didn’t think they should be.

Was fascinating and I, of course, Kristen Hannah is a phenomenal writer. I’ve read most of the books that she’s written and have loved all of them. And this one is no exception. I highly recommend it. Pick it up and give it a go.

The second book that I want to share today is called The Good Part.

This was a book that I pulled off the Librarian’s Recommendation shelf at my local library. It’s by Sophie Cousins. And it was just looked lighthearted and interesting. The book centers on a woman who’s in her, mid-twenties living with roommates in a small apartment in New York and just having a, a mid-twenties go of things.

She’s on the low rung of ladder at work. She’s using dating sites to find a good date and is having some weird dating experiences and she stumbles upon a. wishing machine. And she wishes that she can just skip to the good part. It reminds me of that Instagram song that was popular in, a couple of years ago, you could do a reel and skip to the good part.

So that’s what the book kind of centers around this idea of skipping to the good part. As you can imagine, the protagonist, Lucy wakes up 16 years into her own future. The way she navigates the unfolding of this situation is So interesting and hilarious to me. There are some tragic pieces. There are some funny laugh out loud moments I was reading a hard copy lying in bed reading, you know next to Dave and there are a couple times I was laughing so hard.

I was nearly crying, and he just looked at me like what is happening over there. I thought the story was fun and entertaining and thought provoking. I went to the gym the next day and told a friend I’m reading this book and I can’t believe the choices that this girl is making. And I think the perspective being, I would at my point in my life be Lucy’s future self.

So, imagining what would I feel like if I had skipped the last 15 years, if I had gone straight from being in my mid-twenties to jumping into my forties. waking up one day in the life that I currently live. In some ways, the thought exercise had me feeling so, so grateful for all the things that I hoped for and wished for in my 20s that are now part of my everyday life and so much a part of the way that I live that I forget to be grateful for them often.

And in some ways, I thought, who, would I ever want to go back? To those college years to, the uncertainties, but also the excitement and spontaneity of that time. So, a great thought provoking, hilarious book, The Good Part by Sophie Cousins. I will link both of those in the show notes, The Women and The Good Part.

If you’re looking for a good read, check them out.

It Is What It Is: Objective and Subjective Truth

I’ve mentioned. A couple weeks ago, maybe, that I am working right now as an adjunct nursing professor for Bryan and Stratton College. It’s a Midwestern and Eastern based specialty college and of course I work in the College of Nursing. I’m working as a clinical instructor in behavioral health and that means that I’m on site at a mental health hospital for a 12 hour shift each Sunday this semester.

It’s been an interesting experience for me, and I really appreciate the opportunity to work with students who are just getting their feet wet in the world of nursing. Mental health can be a tricky field to come into, especially as a nursing student. I think in general, there’s been some opening and acceptance and discussion, wider like community-based discussions around mental health and mental illness over the last several years, I’ve seen that, and at the end of the day, from where I sit, there is still a huge negative stigma associated with the idea of mental illness.

We don’t see mental illness the same way that we see physical illness. A lot of times we assume that people’s mental illnesses are a result of bad decisions that they’ve made that they should know better. Lots of different conversations. So being able to talk about these biases and things that come up.

For the students on site at behavioral health hospital has been interesting. All of that is a little bit of an aside. The reason I was telling you about this nursing job is that one of the assignments that the students have each week is to do a clinical evaluation form and on their evaluation form.

There’s a space for them to talk about objective and subjective findings. So, they are focusing on a case study, choosing a patient to get to know a little bit, to investigate their chart, and approach this scenario as if they were the nurse in charge. And so, they’re Looking at objective findings and subjective findings.

Objective findings and subjective findings are things we talk about every single week because there can be some confusion around what counts as objective and what counts as subjective. This isn’t something that we necessarily have to think about all that often in our own lives. In fact, most of us are experiencing the world and telling ourselves a story about it.

A lot of subjective information happening in our regular lives. That’s just natural.

Objective vs Subjective

Let me just briefly reintroduce you to the differences between objective and subjective.

Objective means not influenced by personal feelings or opinions. Objective is a representation of measurable facts. This is a viewpoint that is unbiased, impartial, and based on verifiable evidence. So, in the world of nursing, objective information are things you can measure, like a patient’s blood pressure, or weight, a percentage of their meal that they’ve eaten.

Sometimes objective on a nursing report may include a quotation, like patient stated and then in quotation what the patient said. That’s something that if you had a tape recorder you could have measured, you could have recorded it, and it would have been hard for people to See it any other way, that is what the patient said.

What that means then moves into subjective. So objective is what happens, what is happening, what is measurable, what is neutral.

Subjective on the other hand means based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions. A subjective perspective can also be called a personal perspective or an individual point of view.

An example of something one of my nursing students may put in the subjective section of their clinical evaluation may be patient appeared disheveled or patient seemed to be in a poor mood. Those are opinions based not on measurable. Facts or on neutral circumstances, but inferences made by the personal perspective of the student themselves.

Objective and subjective are both important. We need both. Both make up our world and our worldview. Understanding that there is a difference can help us know where our energy will be best spent in reframing, in putting some energy into what we can and cannot control at any given moment.

What is objective in our lives?

As I’ve been talking my students through this part of their evaluation and, every week we go over what is objective, what is subjective, how do we know the difference, how do we Boil things down to what someone else could verify, what someone else could see, what is measurable, what is verifiable, all of that conversation has also had me thinking about positive psychology and some of the different ways that I’ve heard similar discussions as stepping stones to well-being.

In fact, in a lot of great reframing therapies like cognitive behavioral therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, dialectical behavioral therapy, these are all different types of therapy that begin with a step of acceptance of circumstance. And that acceptance It really boils down to recognizing what is an objective, neutral circumstance that is unchangeable and out of our control, and then what is everything else?

What is everything else that we’re laying on top of that, which generally involves our own personal bias, stories, perspective, opinions, thoughts, and emotions around the objective circumstance. So, understanding that difference can have key implications for Our energy management for our ability to form perspectives for the way that we can zoom out and create some space between what is objective and all the subjective layers that we add to it.

I mentioned that I want this episode to serve as a steppingstone or a first step along this process of going from maybe feeling bad or stressed or frustrated or overwhelmed to feeling a little bit better. And the first step is going to simply be recognizing what is objective about whatever situation we’re in.

Starting to be able to peel back some of the subjective opinions, stories, emotions, layers that we have, and just see things objectively, clearly. And there’s a couple different ways we can do this.

Chatter by Ethan Cross

There’s a great book by Ethan Cross called Chatter, all about the voice in our head, why it matters, how to harness it.

He’s a researcher, and in one of the chapters he talks about two different Ways of viewing situations. One is from the perspective of the immersers. People who view an event from the first-person perspective, he says, often get trapped in their emotions and the verbal flood they release.

They share accounts describing their stream of thoughts zeroing in on hurt, adrenaline infused, pissed off, betrayed, angry, victimized, shamed, stepped on, humiliated, abandoned, unappreciated, pushed, trampled upon. These immersers go inside internal conversations. that lead to negative feelings. The circumstance, the objective happening, is then layered upon with internal dialogue of immersive, biased opinions and stories, which can then make the situation feel worse than it would be objectively.

A second group he calls the distancers. These are people who unwind from the emotional weeds, leading them to feel better. They can see an argument more clearly by understanding how other people might feel. Thinking is clearer and more complex when you view a f Events with the insight of a third-party observer emerging from experience with a more constructive story, stepping back to make sense of experiences.

The stepping back, zooming out, gaining perspective piece becomes important with identifying objective and subjective. What could someone else see? What would a group of people, committee of people, agree had happened? When we are experiencing a circumstance that is leading us down a spiral of self-loathing or of negativity or a frustration and overwhelm, the first step may be to pause long enough to be able to step back, a pace or two and see the situation through an objective perspective.

What would someone else agree is happening? What can I neutralize about this circumstance to where I’m not infusing it with opinions and bias, but where it’s just, it is what it is.

Ethan goes on in the end of this book chatter to give some tools that can help with this. And there’s a couple that I think can be helpful.

One is distance self-talk. This is where you create distance with language by using your own name. For example, if I was having a hard morning because I slept in and then everyone was in a hurry and we got the kids to school late when I’m telling myself this story, even better, maybe telling someone else about it or journaling about it so I can really get it out of my head.

I could do that in third party, neutralizing it to objective circumstance would be something like Miranda’s alarm went off at 6 30 and she didn’t wake up until 7 o’clock. She woke up each of the kids and they took 20 minutes each getting dressed and getting ready for school, and they left the house at 805. Each of the kids got to school 10 minutes after the bell had rung.

That is, a measurable There’s not a lot of emotion in that there’s not the like, oh, I’m so mad at myself that I got up late and I was really stressed out getting ready. But just if you can peel it back to neutral to what happened, what is measurable, what would someone else watching a recording say?

And that distant self-talk of using your own self as the third party and talking about it from a different perspective can be helpful.

Another tool that Ethan advises is imagining advising a friend. What if your friend told you this story of the thing that you are thinking in your mind, like the story that you keep going over the difficult thing that’s happening to you.

What if a friend was experiencing that? How would you be thinking about it if it was someone else’s experience, not your own? And what advice would you give that person? A lot of times we find it easier to advise and be kind and compassionate and open to our friends than we are to ourselves. So have you ever considered, even writing down your circumstance your story, even the subjective story with all the emotions included, and then reading it as if it was your neighbor experiencing it or one of your friends.

How does that change it when you imagine someone else experiencing this thing that you are currently experiencing? How does that neutralize it? That it, suddenly, it’s not your emotion, but you’re able to see it from a different perspective. That can be helpful in that, paring it down to objectivity.

Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach

I’ve started to listen to a book by Tara Brach called Radical Acceptance, that I’m Really loving. This practice of radical acceptance stems from a Buddhist practice of accepting without judgment things that are happening in the moment and is a foundational principle. Tara is not only a Buddhist, a practicing Buddhist, but also a Clinical psychologist and so she infuses her psychology with these mindfulness practices from Buddhist tradition And one of the first steps that she talks about is what I’m sharing in this episode pausing enough to just acknowledge what is And not layer over it with all of the things you feel about it or the way that you want it to be different.

Simply acknowledging what might be right now. And knowing that you can get to the next step of how you want to change it, what you want to do differently, and all the feelings you might have about it. You’ll feel better beginning from a place of neutral. So, beginning with a pause to back up and say, Okay, what is happening here?

There are a couple fantastic quotes that I want to share from Radical Acceptance that kind of get to the heart of this and how this, accepting that something is what it is allows us peace and openness to move into Being more practically happy one quote is she shares what a friend had told her that “Feeling that something is wrong with me is the invisible and toxic gas I am always breathing.”

Does that sound relatable to you? Do you ever feel like something’s just a little off or wrong? That you’re not quite enough, or you’re not doing it just right, or why are all these things the way that they are? Tara says, “When we experience our lives through this lens of personal insufficiency, we’re imprisoned in what I call the trance of unworthiness. Trapped in this trance, we’re unable to perceive the truth of who we really are.”

Another quote from this book that I love is this simple line,

“The boundary to what we can accept is the boundary to our freedom.”

It may sound trite to say, oh, it is what it is. I mean that with this overwhelming sense of compassion and love and grace and gratitude that when we are able to pause and recognize the objective and neutral way of our circumstance of the way things are right now, that frees us up in a way to emotionally be nimble and creative and find solutions for what comes next in a way that we might not be able to if we’re so busy making stories up about the way that we wish things were different right now, accepting the way things are right now in the moment is important.

 A willingness to experience all of humanity and to not feel stuck. I must just, as I’m saying that, it’s making me laugh because my core value, like the most important thing to me, based on my personality, based on my astrology, based on all of the things, my Enneagram is freedom. Feeling stuck is my least favorite feeling in the whole world.

I avoid the feeling, the discomfort of feeling stuck. Like I’m running away from a tiger and there have been circumstances in my life that I cannot change and that Feeling of I can’t change this and I’m you know, I feel like I’m bound to something like Shackled is so uncomfortable for me one of the most important lessons that I’m learning You know, continually learning is the freedom that comes from acceptance, accepting the circumstances that I can’t control releases that feeling of stuck.

Once I’ve accepted, it is what it is. I don’t have to pour energy into cutting myself loose. I can move on into different emotional areas where I have flexibility, where I can be creative, where I can change things. And it begins That acceptance, it begins with what is happening and taking away all the stories that I have around What that might mean and just zooming out Enough to see what is objectively true right now today and can I be okay with that for now?

Can I be okay with it right now today as I’m talking about this? It’s reminding me of something that I experienced during my labor and delivery processes, I decided to have my children through a method called the Bradley method, which is husband coach childbirth or partner coach childbirth. When I was pregnant with my first with Milo, we had one of our friends and neighbors who had been a Bradley method coach years prior come over and teach Dave all about the Bradley method and me too.

But I had a little bit more understanding of what was happening physiologically during labor and delivery because I had been to nursing school. I was a nurse. And so, I had done, I learned all about it, but I had also been present at several, maybe three different births during my OB rotation, which was cool to be able to, see those things experience some of them.

In the room and have a little bit of understanding of what, what was going to happen. So, Dave and I sit down with the Bradley Method coach and we’re learning about the different stages of labor and the intensity of the contractions and the relative timing of everything. And something that she told us that ended up being critical was that a contraction will peak intensity at about 30 seconds. And after 30 seconds, it may last for, a minute or two, but it, its intensity won’t increase. It’s like a wave and it speaks out around 30 seconds. And then if you can hold on, then it will go down once, it’s crusted and starts to go down before the next one begins.

And she recommended that at 30 seconds, Dave whisper to me, it’s not going to get any worse. Somehow knowing that I was. in the most intense part of the contraction would allow me the acceptance that I could continue to you know, manage the pain at that point. This became crucial as I was laboring for hours and hours with Milo toward, I don’t know, maybe hour 15 or something.

I got in the bathtub at the hospital and Dave, and I weren’t even talking anymore. I wasn’t talking. I was just holding his hand and I would squeeze his hand when a contraction began and he would watch his watch and at 30 seconds he would squeeze my hand back and whisper it’s not going to get any worse and I would just hang on through the wave of the pain until it subsided and then, a minute later I would squeeze his hand again, and he would tell me it’s not going to get any worse.

That understanding of it’s hard And I can do it right now. Right now, I can handle it. That was powerful. It was painful, and it was, difficult, and I was exhausted, and in each of those moments, coming to an understanding of what was happening and that I could do it right then, it is what it is right now, I could handle it.

Tara asks the question in Radical Acceptance, “What would it be like if I could accept life, accept this moment exactly as it is?” What would it be like if you could accept this moment as it is? If you could neutralize it to a point where whatever story you’re telling yourself about how you wish it were different could float away for now?

That right now could be okay, that whatever is right now, today, could be enough for today. How would the way you feel be different? How would the way you show up in the world be different? How would the amount of control you feel over and freedom you feel over your choices be different if you felt Accepting of the neutral right now, this relates not only to accepting the neutral of, our circumstances, but also self-acceptance of what is happening with our own in our life and our own emotions. Even accepting our negative emotion in a moment can allow us to feel better. To feel some release rather than trying to change or fix or manage what we’re feeling. Accepting of that can be helpful.

A couple weeks ago I talked about my gratitude and grief journal and I think that for me has been a step in this direction of not only opening my mind to all the things that I’m grateful for which has proven history and such great evidence around how that can train our minds to look for what’s good and look for opportunity and build positive emotion in our lives also creating space for Grief and grieving and sadness and disappointment and stress there is space for both That is the human experience and it’s okay you know that okay is the acceptance of all of the things that we might be feeling and when we are able to Embrace that range of what we’re experiencing rather than deny or avoid or change them all the time That is a first step in feeling more free.

I love an explanation from a clinical social worker, Rebecca Miner, who’s a psychotherapist in Massachusetts, she talks about radical acceptance as a process that involves accepting emotions, thoughts, and circumstances that are unchangeable and out of your control to recognize and accept reality you’re in, even when that reality includes pain.

She says, “Radical acceptance is the process of letting go of the illusion of control and embracing a willingness to notice and accept things just as they are without judgment. This boils down to preventing our pain from turning into suffering. Although the term radical acceptance may sound like someone being instructed to act apathetically or accept all situations, the aim is to embrace facts and acknowledge pain rather than to fight them.”

This is acceptance. It is what it is. Recognizing the neutral circumstance of what is and being okay there for now. I want to just wrap up with a final quote from Radical Acceptance, the book. Tara says, when we pause, we don’t know what will happen next, but by disrupting our habitual behaviors, we open the possibility of new and creative ways of responding to our wants and fears.

I mentioned that today’s episode, this neutralizing, stepping back, seeing our circumstance objectively, peeling back the layers and stories of how we feel about everything and what we’re telling ourselves about everything, and just finding a moment of stillness to be okay right now, that is the door through which all the possibilities for our future can be realized.

What is right now for you? Can you accept your life as it is right now today? Can you find peace with this moment, knowing that there are hundreds and thousands of future moments where things may change, but for now, today, right now? Right this minute. Can you be okay with what is?

I’m so grateful that you’ve decided to spend some of your time with me today I hope this episode has given you something new to think about even just practicing talking about your life or thinking about your life and what is objective and what is subjective and being able to see the difference and differentiate between What is happening at its baseline that other people would agree with and could see and could measure And what are all of the stories that you layer upon that?

Being able to find a small amount of peace and pause in the moment now is the door through which the rest of the peace and happiness in our life can be found. I hope that something that you’ve learned today will help you feel a little bit more practically happy this week. I’ll chat with you next time.