00:00 

Hey there, this is Intentional Living with Tanya Hale and this is episode number 153, "The Manual." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale and I'm your host for Intentional Living. 

00:19 

Alright, hello there, my friends. Welcome to the podcast today. Happy to have you here. We are going to talk today about something that is called "the manual." Now, when we think about a manual, my brain immediately generally wants to go to like an owner's manual for maybe an appliance that I have just bought, or a car. It's something that's going to tell me what to expect and how it should work. But I'm going to shift this a little bit and tell you about a kind of manual that we often have in our lives that we don't really think of as manuals. We have manuals for people. This is like an instruction guide we have for somebody in our life about how we would like them to show up and behave so that I can feel good and happy and not have bad thoughts. Alright, we, in essence, are wanting other people to behave a certain way so that I can feel a certain way. We want them to be in charge of our comfort. 

01:22 

So here's a tricky thing about manuals. The people we have manuals for generally don't know that we have a manual. We think that they should just know what we want them to do. Now, it seems justified to have expectations of other people but it can be very damaging when our emotional happiness is tied directly to their behavior and them behaving in a certain way. 

01:49 

So the thing about manuals that's so fascinating is we think that the world will run better if we have manuals, if everybody behaves how we want them to. But what happens is that people don't. Shocking. People don't behave the way we want them to. And so manuals, these manuals that we have, actually punish us, not the other person, and they are great at damaging our relationships. When I am the one holding a grudge for not showing up the way that I expect them to, I'm the one who has the bad feelings. And somewhere in all of this, we think that we will be happier if the other person changes. We want to alleviate our own discomfort without us having to do the work of managing our own emotions. We want somebody else to change their behavior so that I don't have to manage my emotions. And overall, this is a very disempowering way to live, having manuals for other people, because we are handing over the power of our feelings, of our emotions, to someone else. "When they behave this way, then I'll be happy. Then I'll be peaceful. Then I can rest." We're giving all of that power to somebody else. We're putting it in their hands. Not fair to them and very not fair to us, because that makes us the victim. And we talked about that a little bit last week. 

03:20 

So it is incredibly empowering to learn to drop the manual and to start taking responsibility for our own feelings We do not have to give other people power over how we feel. I think our society is...we've grown up with these ideas of "oh, she makes me so mad." "I feel so angry." "I get so triggered." These kinds of phrases that are blaming how we feel on other people. "She triggered me." No, people don't trigger you. Your thoughts trigger you. People are just doing people things, right? We trigger ourselves because of our thoughts, because of our manual of how people should or should not behave. 

04:02 

Let me give you a big list of common manual instructions And I'm gonna do she's and he's in here, and it could be either way. But just listen to the content of these. So "she should call me back when I call and leave a message." "She should text me back when I text." "She should remember my birthday." "I should be invited to her party." "She should tell me thank you for what I did for her." "She should be kind and supportive when I'm frustrated." "He should ask me about my feelings." "He should support me more." "He should listen to me for as long as I listen to him." "She should call when she knows I'm going through a rough time." "He should tell me he loves me." "He should know what I want for my birthday and buy it for me." "He should listen to all my hints." "He should know I don't like it when he does that." "He should know I don't like fast food." "He should be more emotionally available." "He should like to watch rom-coms with me." "He should make more money." "He should spend less time at work." "He should spend more time with the family." "He shouldn't spend so much time watching sports." "He should take out the garbage without being asked." Blah blah right? 

05:25 

All of these. Did you hear the word "should" in there? That's our manual speaking. Our manual is a "should" book. Right? "Should." They "should" do this. "This is what my expectation is for this person." And the thing is most of our manuals are very very thick. They're very complicated. They're very intricate. They're very detailed. We think that if the other person inherently knows all of these things, this huge book of rules that we have for them, if they inherently know that, they must really love us. Yeah, it doesn't work that way, my friends. Nobody knows what's in your manual. Right? Then the problem with manuals is that adults get to do what they want to do. And that includes you. You get to do what you want to do. Nobody else can have a manual to determine how you are supposed to behave. Just as you do not get to have a manual to determine how someone else behaves. 

06:28 

When we start letting go of our manuals, we start moving into what we call emotional adulthood. This is the place where we start taking charge of our own emotions. OK, and this is the thing: none of us have to do anything that we don't want to do. Because we're all adults. I get to choose. Therefore, I am responsible for meeting all of my own needs. You are responsible for meeting all of your own needs. Your spouse or your friend or your child, if they're an adult, is responsible for meeting all of their own needs. When we think that the other person should feel our needs, we oftentimes start manipulating and trying to control their behavior so that we feel better. "He doesn't fulfill my needs," Well, it's not his job to fulfill your needs. It's your job to fulfill your needs. It's your job to just learn how to love and appreciate having that person in your life. We think that controlling the other person by them changing their behavior, that it's going to help us feel better. 

07:45 

But the thing we have to start embracing is that our happiness lies entirely within us. Completely independent of what the other people in our lives do. Other people can do things, sometimes, that give us positive thoughts and feelings. But they will not do it all the time, because guess what? They have their own human life over there that they're living and they're caught up in. And nobody spends 24 hours a day thinking about somebody else. Even when we have these brand new little babies that take a lot of time, we're not thinking about them all the time. Our brains go other places. We just do not do that. And if we expect our partner to always make us feel good by always recognizing what we think we need, then we are giving away our power of feeling good. When other people don't follow our manual, we are guaranteed negative emotions. 

08:42 

Let me give you a recent experience that I had. I went to an event and there were two women there that I had some thoughts about that I thought they should at least say "hi" to me and acknowledge me. And I was completely shunned by these two other women. And during the event, I think I did a pretty good job of just going, "well, you know what, it is what it is." It's awkward. I don't know how to behave. I don't know how to handle the situation. But I didn't get upset and I didn't get angry and I didn't roll my eyes and I didn't make any snide comments under my breath. I was doing really good at the event. 

09:20 

But afterwards, I noticed as I started to really think about it, I got very judge-y. Anybody else is judge-y? Anybody else's issue out there? Because it is mine for days. I just think that "judge-y" is just what I'm going to deal with my whole life, and learning how to be aware of it. But I got really judge-y towards these two women and I was having thoughts like they should have talked to me. They should have at least acknowledged that I was there. And then I started saying things like, "oh, it was just so funny that they were doing this. It was just so weird that they behaved this way." And I was working with a coach on this and she kind of was like, "whoa, whoa, you're being really judge-y." And I realized that me saying things like "it was so funny, it was so weird," was actually code language for me for saying what I really wanted to say, which was "they were so rude." Alright, there's my manual speaking, my manual that's saying, "this is what they should have done so that I would have felt better." I would have felt better at the time and I would feel better now. 

10:24 

So I think it's very easy for a lot of us to have all of these platitudes of kindness, these outside ways of smiling and pretending like nothing's wrong and being kind on the outside. But I thought that they were rude because of my manual of how I thought that they should behave, which guess what? They're adults, both of them are adults. They get to show up however they want. And if they don't want to talk to me, guess what? That's 100% their right. They don't have to. 

10:58 

So if one of the first things that I have to start doing in my life is recognizing that I have a manual. I have to look at that situation and I have to go "whoa, I have a manual for how I thought that they should have shown up and what they should have done." And I have to decide that I can't and that I don't want to control other people. In that situation, I was having a rough time managing myself in understanding how to handle the situation. I didn't know how to handle it and it was very obvious that they didn't know how to handle it either. In that situation controlling them would be impossible. You know, especially afterwards, I was having a hard time controlling my own thoughts and controlling myself. But once I start to recognize that I have a manual and that I was having expectations of them, then I can start to stand out of the situation a little bit and I can go "oh whoa, look what I was doing." And once I start to get curious about it, then I can start to explore what I would have wanted them to do differently and why. 

12:06 

Now, this is kind of interesting because when I figure that out, "why would I want them to," then I can start to understand my thoughts in why I have the manual. Because we always think that if they change their behavior, that I will feel better. But again, let me remind you. Other people don't control our feelings. Only we do. So in my situation that I just shared with you, I thought that they should acknowledge me. And when they do, if they had acknowledged me, then I would have thought, "oh, this person likes me." And I would think that that's what makes me feel good, the fact that they like me. But it's not. It's not what they did. It's my thought about what they did. If they would have said, "oh, hi, it's nice to see you again." I could have had the thought that, "oh, this person likes me." And that's what makes me feel good is my thought. It's not the fact that they said, "it's nice to see you again." So we give responsibility for how we feel to another person. And that feels horrible. Because most of the time, other people are not going to behave the way we expect them to behave. And why would we want to give anyone else that power over how we feel? 

13:24 

Our main goal here is to stop trying to control other people and learning to control ourselves, to start taking responsibility for how we feel. Not only is this empowering, but it creates better results in my life. Now, quick caveat. We don't stay in relationships that are harmful or that are not serving us well. If there's some kind of abuse going on, we need to protect ourselves. We're not talking about all of this kind of stuff: "You should not hit me." These ideas of "people should not hit us." We're not talking about that kind of stuff. We're talking about regular interactions that we have with people. What we need to understand is that boundaries in relationships are very appropriate, but manipulating to try and control someone else's behavior is not appropriate. We have to know the difference. We have to be able to recognize when we're setting boundaries, when we're manipulating. 

14:30 

I know that as I look back on all my years of being married, I was doing a lot of manipulating, not even aware of it. Not even aware. I know I was working with a client a long time ago, actually, and she was talking about doing something for her husband. And she was thinking that she was coming from a place of kindness. But when we talked about it, she was like, "well, if I'm doing this, he should be doing this in return." And we talked about the fact that she was being manipulative in having these expectations of her husband, this manual for her husband, of what he should be doing in response to what she was doing and how that really was not loving behavior; it was manipulating behavior. And that was a hard pill for her to swallow. In fact, she left that coaching session a little perturbed with me. But she came back the next week and she was like, "you know what, I see it now. I see that it was manipulating." And we have to start learning to see this kind of stuff because manipulating is trying to control other people. It's having a manual for how they should behave. So we have to learn to know the difference between boundaries and manipulating because trying to control other people will only make us feel, and even act like, a crazy person every time. But we have to move into this place where I choose how to respond. I choose how to feel. I choose how to think. 

16:06 

Now there are two exceptions to the manual, and that is if you are a parent of younger children, obviously we have to have expectations of our children and what goes on. And if you are a boss or a manager of some sort and there are people that work underneath you, again, you have to have expectations. You have to have somewhat of a manual in those situations to teach and to train and to make things run smoothly. But those two exceptions aside, we're just talking about all the rest of our relationships. When we drop the manual, we start allowing others to live how they want. And we don't make it mean anything about us. These two women that I encountered, how they behaved had nothing to do with me. It had everything to do with how they were choosing to show up and how they wanted to behave. And guess what? They get to do it however they want. But if I can separate myself out from the fact, and realize that it had nothing to do with me, I step into a place of empowerment and liberation that is amazing. We can just choose to love the people in our life with no expectations of how  they should behave. Can you imagine if we were to drop the expectations of our spouse, expectations of our siblings, expectations of our parents, expectations of our adult children, what if we just dropped all of that? And just decided to just love them? 

17:39 

Here's the thing, we can definitely make requests of people in our lives. But whether they honor this request or not has nothing to do with us. It has everything to do with them. They're just an adult, making their own choices, and it has everything to do with them. So here's an example. Being on time may be very important to you. But here's a news flash that I've had to learn in the last few years: it's not important to everyone. Not everybody cares about being on time. But and this is the thing...when somebody we love is late, it does not have to mean anything about us. Because really it's all about them. We, meaning this is my own experience, may be tempted to think they don't respect me or my time. But in reality, maybe they just struggling managing their schedule. Maybe they're being late has nothing to do with you. Right? Isn't that liberating to realize that "oh, they just struggle at times." 

18:24 

Now it's not to say that you can't set a clear boundary about the behavior and what's going on. You may have plans to to go with a group of friends to go out to dinner, and let's say you have one friend who is notoriously 30 minutes late, but you have plans and you want to do this. It's very appropriate to say "hey, we're gonna be leaving at 4:45, and if you're not there, we're just gonna go ahead and leave. We really hope that you make it. If you don't, we'll let you know we're gonna be at this restaurant and you can drive over there on your own and meet us. We would love that but we're gonna be leaving at 4:45." We don't have to hurt feelings. We don't have to create drama, right? We can just set a clear boundary and just say "hey, this is what's happening," right? "We hope you make it. We would love to see you there." 

19:41 

Now most of us, I know when I was married anyway, I had a huge manual for my spouse. So many ideas of what he should be doing and how he should be, and I think most of us, if you're married, I think it's so easy to have a manual for your spouse. And we think that if they are more like we want them to be, that there will be less conflict. Let me ask you this question. What if they did everything you wanted them to? What if every time you said, "jump," they jumped? What if every time you said, "will you do this?" Bam, it was done immediately. They got up out of the chair, they took care of it. But they were miserable because of it. And they were resentful of you because of it. But they did everything you wanted them to. Would that make you happy? Good question, right? What if they're doing everything exactly how you want it, but they're miserable? Would that make you happy? 

20:53 

So if you want to start getting an idea of what your own manuals for people look like, I want you to just try this one exercise. Pick one relationship in your life that is very complicated. And it may be your spouse, it may be an adult child, it may be a sibling, it may be a friendship, but I want you to take that relationship and I want you to write down all of your shoulds. What should they do? And I don't want you, I know we've talked about this a lot, so I don't want you to monitor everything you're writing down. I just want you to just sit and just start writing. What are all the shoulds? "They should be on time. They should call me. They should text me. They should be the first one to reach out. They should invite me to go to lunch more often. They should go when I invite them to go to lunch. They should," I mean just all the shoulds. "They should offer to drive once in a while. They should offer to pay for lunch because I paid last time. They should, should, should, should, should," right? Get all those shoulds out of what you think, okay? That's going to give you an idea of what your manual looks like for this person. You can see all the expectations that you have. 

22:04 

Now, once you've done that, I want you to write down what you think you would feel like if this person did all of those things. Okay? And what would you be thinking about this person if they did all of these things? Most likely you would be thinking something along the lines of, "they must really love me," right? So, this is the thing. What if they're doing that against their will? But they're doing it to try to make you happy. That's a tough one to look at, right? So, then here's the next thing I want you to do, but with this list that you're making, I want you to ask this question. Can I think this same thought? Like let's say we go back to what would you think about this person if they did all these things and you think "they must really love me." Can you think that thought without them doing what's on your list? Can you think that "they must really love me" if they don't jump as soon as you say the will you take the garbage out? Wouldn't that be awesome if we could think they must really love me even when they didn't do what we told them to do or asked them to do or requested of them? 

23:32 

So here's why a manual creates so much suffering, because we doubled down on our negative feelings. Here we go. They don't do what we want, negative feeling number one, and we make it mean something about us, negative feeling number two. So what if you ask your spouse to take out the trash bins every Thursday night, and he keeps forgetting and he doesn't do it? You're always frustrated. There's one negative feeling. And then you start to make it mean that he doesn't respect you. There's two negative feelings. You've doubled down on the negative feelings. Okay, so what if we just decided to make requests of people and allow them to make their own choice without making it about us? What if we let go of the rules and expectations and we made requests with no strings attached? What? Like, is that even possible? Is that fair? Whether that's fair or not, we have to decide if that thought is that fair. Is that serving us? Is it helping me show up the kind of person that I want to be? 

24:50 

We live in a society where there is so much value placed on fairness, on equality, especially in marriage. Like, we're weighing out everything. I was following this one, well, I still follow it on Facebook, a group that I love and I hate it at the same time. I love it because there's some really good, thoughtful things for me to process, but I hate it because there's so much whining on there. And I remember one lady got on and she was angry that her husband got home after working all day and did not change as many diapers at night as she changed during the day. So she would literally count how many diapers, and she told us in her post, she would count how many diapers she changed during the day, and then she would count how many he would change after he got home at night, and he did all the diapers, and they weren't equal. And so she was upset and angry. And this is what is not helpful for us. 

25:56 

We can make requests, but we can't be tying strings and we can't be angry when people don't do what we want them to do. We need to learn to recognize our own response to our requests and people not doing what we want them to do. And we need to make our own response our work. Changing them is not our work. Changing our own response is our work. So the example that I gave you that I went through. My changing those two women's response to me or behavior toward me, that's not my work. That has nothing to do with me. My work is learning to recognize my own response and seeing my own judgment in that and learning to let go of that judgment and learning to give them space to be who they want. That is my work. My work has nothing to do with them. And here's a huge benefit here: when we stop trying to control other people, they then feel safe to be their true selves. And this is what creates connection and intimacy in relationships. When they feel like they cannot show up their true selves, or we're going to be angry and we're going to manipulate them and we're going to try and control them, there is no space there for connection and intimacy to develop. 

27:29 

When we throw away our manual, we are creating a space for the other person to show up authentically, to show up who they really are. And this is what creates connection and intimacy. Not somebody feeling like they're always being controlled. And this, my friends, is going to mean that sometimes we're going to have to do things we don't want to do, like take out the garbage bins yourself. But our relationship will improve dramatically when we stop being angry about not being able to control other people. Is it worth the three minutes to take the trash bins out without drama to feel more love for your spouse? What if you just let go of that drama and just decided that, you know what, I'm just going to take them out. It's worth it to me. I don't want to be angry with my spouse over this. So I'm just going to take it out so I can feel more love. Are you willing to give up your manuals in order to feel better and to have stronger, more connected relationships? Relationships will be better when the people around us don't feel manipulated or controlled when they can show up as authentically them. And if we don't want relationships, I mean, what are we doing here? Our whole life is built around how we interact with other people. We are created to want to connect with other people and to have these relationships, but we are not having deep intimate relationships when these manuals are stuck in between us. 

29:17 

Okay, give this a try. Start looking for your manual. Start seeing of where you have all these expectations for all these other adults who get to do what they want in their life. See what's happening. Now this is the deal: it may be really hard for you to see, and this is where working with a coach can be so helpful, because I'm an outside party. I look at your life from the outside and I can see things that you cannot see because you're in it. If you're in the ocean, you're in the ocean. There are sharks coming. You can't see it because you're in the ocean. If I'm in a helicopter up above, I can go "whoa well shark two o 'clock," right? I can see things that you can't see, plus I'm not emotionally involved in your life to the point where I get  distracted by that. This is what I do I help you see your own work and I help you engage with your own work so that you can move into deeper stronger more intimate relationships with yourself, with God, and with other people. 

30:25 

This is why life coaching is so powerful. It will move you into spaces that you didn't even know that you really needed to move into. And it will move you through these processes faster than you can do it on your own, because I do believe that eventually you can probably see your own stuff. But what if you could see something this month and work on it and make that relationship better this month, as opposed to not being able to see it for a year because it takes you that long on your own? I mean, are you gonna get there? Yeah, you'll get there, but it's a difference between, let's say a month, and a year. How much time do you want to spend in this broken hurtful relationship when you can work through your stuff and get moving into what you really really want? 

31:23 

So, my friend, this is what I do. I help you see your stuff. I help you see your work. I help you identify your work so that you can move on and you can grow up into the amazing middle-aged woman that you were meant to be. Middle-aged is awesome. Growing up into this stage of our lives is brilliant, but we have to be willing to become aware. And we think that awareness is going to be hard and overwhelming, but I can promise you your life is already hard and overwhelming if there are things that you're not seeing. And actually becoming aware is incredibly liberating and empowering because then we know what direction to go. If you would like to set up a free consult and work together on this, you can go to my website tanyahale.com, go to the "contact me" tab, I think it is. And you can set up your free 30 minute consult and we can talk about how coaching would benefit you and how it's going to help you. 

32:34 

Okay. That, my friends, is what this is all about. Let's get started on our own work. Let's stop trying to control other people. Let's stop worrying about other people. Let's let go of all that crap and let's move into taking care of ourselves, being in control of ourselves, doing our own work, so that we feel better and we engage better and we move into becoming a better version of ourselves. Okay, have an awesome, awesome day my friends and I will talk to you next time. Ciao. 

33:06 

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email: a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go to tanyahale.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya.