How to have more compassion...
…for people you think are stupid, crazy, incapable…
That time of year has rolled around again. We’re going to gatherings and festivities and it can be so easy to become triggered by friends and family in emotionally charged situations.
Everyone has different filters for how the world works, and these ideas shape our values, interactions and conflict with others.
The purpose of this episode is to help educate and guide exploration into how to be more compassionate towards people you think are crazy or stupid.
It helps to ground us when we recognise that everything we can see in another human being, we probably contain within ourselves as well.
There are so many ways to bring compassionate love into our lives.
I’ll explore the Graves Model (or spiral dynamics) with you and how humans operate from different values systems of thought. I’ll run you through the different values levels to help you understand the different ways people see the world.
Over time humans evolve and our values change.
We think that people are stupid or crazy because we’re operating from different values levels.
Just remember that we’re all doing the best we can with what we have.
See below for a full transcript.
Don’t forget to go to the bottom of this page and let me know in the comments any questions or what you think or just share the love on social. Thanks
Podcast transcript.
I am here to bring you another episode and this one is about how to be more compassionate towards people that you think are crazy or stupid now this is a bit of a you know a click batey sort of a title, because honestly I feel really weird putting the words crazy and stupid in the title of our podcast for some reason, but this is the time of year where again we can get triggered by our families.
I don't know. It's a time of year where we I feel like we can use a little bit of education around like…
…how to think psychologically our way out of the problems that we find ourselves in when we're catching up with friends and family when times of heightened emotions are heightened and just things can go awry.
Now. I could have created this episode for you at different times throughout 2020 and 2021 when lots of people and still are. Were pointing the finger and you know laying blame on someone else for their stupidity or their arrogance or their crazy behavior or like being this or that like you know any I could have inserted any name calling name right? with this. And the point is that from a subconscious level, when we are looking at someone and we think - you are absolutely nuts, or you're wrong, or and we get like we feel really emotionally charged about something I want to talk about that in this moment, and this is not going to be one of those like really deep, wildly you know elaborate psychological explanation or anything like that.
It's I do want to give you some psychological explanation for…
…what's happening at the subconscious level when we're looking at someone we think oh my gosh, I wish you would just shut your mouth.
And it's common this time of year, not for everyone. So I want to talk about that. And the thing is being more compassionate.
There are so many ways to bring compassionate and compassionate energy and compassionate love into our into our lives.
And so this is just one way it's a unique sort of a way but it is about having such a deep perspective around what is happening, and a bravery and a willingness to take our part of the responsibility for it. That I found this to be incredibly life changing when I learned what to do. So the context behind this, is at a subconscious level, very, very deeply unconscious, as in we're not consciously aware of this level. And I spoke last week about lineage and how we, or last episode, around lineage and how we take, you know ideas from our lineage and beliefs from our lineage and we make them our own and we live like that.
So we have these ideas about how the world works. And these ideas can influence our opinion, our opinion about people in different cultures, different countries and political climates. Just people that we feel annoyed by, like we just when we feel really charged or triggered or upset about something.
It's because we understand it in some way. And our emotions are signaling things to us. They're not necessarily, it's not that we're just angry and it's someone else's fault. Although that's not to say that people haven't done something wrong in your specific situation. I'm sure you know what I mean. But our emotions are always signaling to us. So inside of this, we have at the very subconscious level, our beliefs about how the world works, what's right, what's wrong, what we've seen before, what we haven't seen before and our opinions on whether we like something or we don't like it, whether it be another person and idea an action a behavior, whatever it may be.
So because of this there are certain things, and I'm trying to explain this very simply, but at a subconscious level there are things we don't even take in, we have so much information that has been delivered to us on a moment to moment basis that our brains and our subconscious, you know, capability we can't actually absorb it all.
We can't take it all in. So we delete some of that information. We distort some of that information to make it fit what we already know and feel and understand.
And then we generalize that information we place it into categories and effectively what's happening is we're already…
…at the unconscious level only filtering for what it is that we know.
Now, I go into this in many of my courses at a deep level and I'm sure you have heard me talk about the basics of NLP and how our subconscious works.
But what's effectively happening is we are filtering for the beliefs that we already have. We're filtering for the emotions that we already have. We're filtering for the attitudes we have, the languages that we speak, the language that we use, we're already filtering for the things that we have been trained from, since we were born about how the world works. And the things that we've learned, we're filtering for evidence of that constantly.
So we delete information that goes against or does not match who we are and what we believe, which is I mean, that could be a whole episode in and of itself. We just simply delete what is not a match for the filters that we already have. And these filters are your beliefs, your decisions, your attitudes, your emotions, your values, your meta programs, and your language.
There are these seven filters and we learn these filters from when we're growing up, having experiences, learning things, making decisions about stuff. And that's what we decide about the world. So when we're, you know, just operating as a normal human being and this 2 million bits of information are entering our subconscious at any moment.
We delete what doesn't match what is already in our filters and part of the lineage work that I mentioned last week, last episode was around changing those filters. When we change those filters. We start carving a new pathway for ourselves but until such time as we change the filter, we might even really like our filters and not want to change them.
We are out in the world looking for evidence of what we already know. Now what does that have to do with thinking people are crazy and stupid? Well, are you ready for this?
Whenever we look at somebody, and we think you are - insert whatever word - we can only comprehend that in another human being because there is some part of us that is filtering for it because it's what we know is some part of us. It's who we are. We only ever see who we are and what we know…
So in effect, we're filtering for things, we can only comprehend another thing and another person, an attribute, a state, what someone's doing,…
… if they've been conniving, if they are wonderful human being. We can only comprehend that if it's in ourselves. And this is a really confronting thing to realize, and no, it's not the end of the podcast. This is the context of what it's based on OK? So I'm not just going to close up and say everything's a mirror if this you know, no, bear with me, right?
Where we're out in the world we can see and comprehend and understand things and people and like this is like if you are somebody who appreciates beauty, you'll see beauty everywhere. If you are someone who loves human beings, you will see love everywhere. If you're someone who is angry, you will see opportunities to be angry everywhere. Because we're constantly filtering for who we are and what it is that we know, which is why it's important to process our emotions. But this is something that works for us, and works against us. It's a natural phenomenon of the subconscious mind.
It's not like it's bad. It is just how we work. And so we can make it work intentionally for us. So that's the context. The first thing I want you to know is that it's all based off of our filters of who we are underneath.
So when you're looking at another human being, and you think you are, oh, there is this saying that goes - 'when you are pointing the finger there's three fingers pointing back at you' and I truly believe that that saying is based off of the NLP knowledge of understanding that we're only ever experiencing what we are filtering for.
So that's the first thing everything is a mirror if you can experience it in someone else. It's in you too.
The only reason why I like to remind myself of that because when I say it to myself, sometimes I want to tell myself, I'm a jerk, and I should shut up because I want to be frustrated at the situation. But the reason why I really like it, is because it reminds me of our innate humanity like people act silly, crazy, weird we all make mistakes, we all do weird things, we all we all like none of us are immune to stupidity at different times. We just, we all have moments.
When I get really righteous and I like to point the finger. If I get really honest with myself, I can think of ways at least one, every time when I am doing something similar in my own life, and I haven't even thought about it like that. And I bet someone else who's not me, who's been watching me, could tell me all of the ways that I've been acting like that too, but it's difficult to see when it's very unconscious for us. So it helps me stay I guess, I don't even want to say compassion, because I don't know if it's compassion when I'm feeling really firery about something but I guess a little bit aware of humanity.
I guess it's a space opening for compassion, it's a space opening for forgiveness, it's a space opening… it doesn't excuse bad behavior ever.
But knowing that if we can comprehend what someone's doing, it's in us too. It's just an interesting piece of information right?
So that's the context that this is based on.
But I want to talk in a sort of a larger context now. At different points about time and culture. We were conditioned at different values levels. So Dr. Clare Graves was a psychologist in the US who carried out research on Maslow's hierarchy of personal needs in the 1950s and 1960s. And Dr. Graves endeavored to validate the theory of Abraham Maslow, and did so by creating this thing called the Graves Model. Okay, it's otherwise known as spiral dynamics. You might have heard of spiral dynamics. Graves unfortunately passed away prior to his model becoming as world renowned as Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Though, it is said that Maslow acknowledged Graves theory to be superior to his own, which I think is really, really interesting.
So I'm going to sort of paraphrase a section of my NLP training Be Your Own Coach NLP Immersive and talk about values levels here for a hot minute because this changed my life. It's something that we go much deeper into in my training. It's one of many things we talk about, but this understanding of values levels really supported me in becoming ultimately so compassionate towards people that I really disagreed with, or I really did not understand.
And I'm going to really try and paraphrase it and shorten it inside of this podcast to kind of keep it as interesting and tight for you as possible. But if you want to learn more, you can also read up about spiral dynamics you can read up about the Graves model, highly recommend it. And of course, if you want to you can come and learn neurolinguistics with me and see how it applies inside of all of our subconscious minds, right.
So the Graves model is based upon this idea that humans operate from a values system of thought and that certain value systems or levels exist within ourselves and the world at large, which dictate how we view the world, our world view. So the types of goals that we set for ourselves, the things that are important to us, what we see as irrelevant, what we see as - hey, ho what we see as stupid and crazy🤪.
There are eight levels according to Graves, although spiral dynamics now suggests that there are many more levels, eight different levels. And these eight levels have certain attributes to them. And you can notice that in these eight levels, where you might have lived, you might have been born, you might know somebody who exists at this level, there might be in a place that you lived, there might be an entire culture that you could fit within a certain level.
What happens is sometimes you know throughout history, collectively we are all born into a values level depending on the time we're in the culture that we're in, you know, the way history has gone. We are typically born into a specific values level and that can depend on you know, what is safe at the time what's, what exists at the time.
And then over time, human beings, we evolve our values change, what's important to us, changes, what we learn about from our past, what we recognize and what we want to change changes.
So more values levels have been created as time went on. But now what we see, is that there are people who live and exist inside of every single values level, there's not one that's better or worse than another. They just are their own personality, their own ecosystem. And it depending on when you were born, where you were born, even the family that you were born into, we can traverse the different values levels, we can move through them if we want to, but sometimes we don't even, we're not aware that we are in a values level.
And so what happens is, all of us, well, I can't actually speak for all of us. Let's just say, for some of us, during our lives, we reach a moment where there's an opportunity for us to take a leap. There's an opportunity for us to change the, here's that word again, lineage, right, to change the lineage of where we have come from, and to make a new choice and to live from a different set of values.
And we see this in things like you know, someone's been an executive their whole life and then they sell everything that they own. And they want to, you know, live in a community and give everything away because they just don't see the point of all the achievement anymore. They have different values and they want to live in a different way. Or we see countries that have been ravaged by war or corruption, turning into democratic systems of politics where there are more rules and laws and ways ,that you know, hierarchy is kind of maintained a little bit more.
And certainly we've seen it in the last couple of years where there have been prominent human beings in our in our population here on Earth, who have been willing to completely go against the grain and speak out because they're afraid of like global political, geopolitical collapse, and who go completely against the grain and get absolutely vilified for what it is that they are talking about. But they're actually operating from a certain values level, they've given up knowledge and even money sometimes, and they've just kind of spoken out against a system of thought that they believe is right or wrong.
And this is not about right or wrong. But understanding values levels is so fascinating, because….
…one of the reasons why we think people are crazy or stupid or arrogant or whatever, is because we are operating from one of these values levels and the person that we are looking at can be operating from another values level.
And I'm talking like different values levels or like different universes that we operate from.
And when I learned these in this way, what it taught me, and what I took away from it really was that
A. you know, anything I can comprehend is is inside of me but…
B. also we are all doing the best we can with what we have.
So when someone is operating in and around or inside of a container of thought, a container of thought, like a values level with its own set of beliefs, instructions for how to be, ideologies, ideologies about what's important and what's not. That is contained inside of its own values level and it feeds itself and it works as a values level there are problems there are positives and negatives to every values level. Like I said, One is not better than the other.
But when you're operating from inside of one, someone could be looking at you from a different values level and think that person or that country or that politician is x - Crazy, Stupid, Amazing, Wonderful.
And all it is is a completely different values, which is so fascinating to me.
So I'm going to go through the different values levels, and I will let you go and do your own research on this, but I just want to I want to lay the land here.
1.So the first phase is called survival. And this is where we see you know, for example, like little babies, there's a certain value level where we make noise because we need to eat, we don't eat, we don't survive, and that's it.
2. Then we have the values of called tribal and this is where people get together and live as a tribe and ancestral lineage is extraordinarily important and safety and security is also extraordinarily important. And there's a mentality that goes with the tribal mentality. So what can happen, and this is how they evolve, but I really want you to be aware there's not one that's better or worse than another.
3. What can happen then is someone in the tribe wants to take over and someone want complete ownership or wants to take over the whole situation and then this new value level has evolved called aggression and power. Depending on what values level you are in, you will look at that values level and see it either as an opportunity for further safety; to be taken care of by someone who absolutely dictates what happens or as completely overreaching authority. Right? So doesn't matter. It's just there is a value level called aggression power, and there's often a like an impulsiveness. And a really, really strict ruling that comes with aggression and power.
4. The next one, level four is rules and hierarchy. And this is where more systems come into place, more rules, more laws, a lot of like isms, the naming of different isms and articulating what's right and what's wrong and a different way to kind of maintain peace a little bit more inside of communities. So roles and hierarchy. And again, there are positives and negatives to each but one of the negatives to rules and hierarchies is like so many rules that people can end up not really excelling within themselves. It can go too far. You know, the rules are there to keep people safe, but then they keep them from taking any risks whatsoever.
5. So then this new value level evolved. And the next one is called achievement. And this is where the world kind of becomes kind of like a playground of materialism and abundance and personal freedom. And I'm sure you could picture people or even places where it's really encouraged.
You know, I certainly felt the values level of achievement when I was traveling in the USA and went to New York from Australia. In Australia, we have this thing called tall poppy syndrome, and I think it exists everywhere. It's very common in my home country, whereby typically, it's like if someone is achieving a little bit too much or they're going really well. They're not so much encouraged, rather almost discouraged to keep them. I don't know, humble or something, you know, not to on themselves, I suppose. I don't know what it is. But it's the thing that happens in Australia.
I definitely noticed when I was traveling to New York, people were so encouraging of people's new ideas and opportunities and I don't think it's like that for everyone, but I definitely noticed it when I was in New York State achievement level. And that's not to say that New York is at this level, but it was very much how it felt when I was there.
6. The next level after beyond achievement is group and cause. And this is where we start to see again, you know, the example of the person who's achieved it all gotten to the top of it all gone. You know what, it's not really worth it. I'm going to hand it all off. And this is where we become really connected as a group again, group and cause oriented. It's sort of where more of a we focus. And honestly, like you see a lot of cults at this level. But it's not always the cult it's like serious community focus and a letting go of one person achieving and a focus on everyone achieving but one of the downsides of that value level is like there's not a lot of achieving going on because everyone is so conscious of everyone else.
7. And from there, the next two levels become really, really interesting. This is where we start to see people who have gone beyond achievement who is still achieving, and they're also achieving on behalf of the planet. And this is where we start to see people I think there are so many humans who live at this values level, the values level of systemic results number seven, whereby, you know, it's it's back to an individual achievement but there's an awareness of all of humanity from this level.
And it goes beyond you know, that the focus on the group and making sure everyone is okay and not getting everything done. But it also goes beyond achievement for the sake of achievement. It's like a global achievement. Where the individual really, really benefits right? People like this communicate with people at their level, they are unattached, they believe everything is kind of just an experience. Very, very interesting people and quite misunderstood as well.
8. And then you have level eight, which is global interdependence. And at this level, really a person is just driven by almost like a spirituality or wanting to collect wisdom, right, and this is where they can typically they're willing to take a position that's contrary to popular belief because they can see a world in geopolitical collapse like they're very, very, they've got this perspective on the world that many of us don't share because we are caught up in our own other values level.
So it's like really, really taking a seat, a seat back, beyond achievement, beyond making sure everyone is ok, beyond this individualistic, kind of, I'm having fun, everything is an experience kind of mentality and seeing it all once again is like okay, I've had all of my fun and here's how the world works. And it's very interesting to see people react and respond to people like that. As well because, again, we're all operating from different values levels.
So that's a very brief description of the different values levels. I encourage you to go and research them look up the Graves model, look up spiral dynamics, there's plenty of information on it.
But what I really want you to know from this podcast is that:
A. again, everything we can see in another human being we probably contain within ourselves as well. And that can be just a bit of a humbler, a little bit of reminder of our own humanity.
B. But the values levels to me really supports me in knowing that while I might not understand someone, they are always operating from the best they can with what they have. And sometimes that means a completely different values level.
Much like if you're talking to a group of doctors, they have Doctor jargon. And if you're talking to a group of police officers, they have police jargon and everybody understands, you know, the jargon if they're in that collective group, they know the values they know what happens they know, you know what's desirable, what's not, they know what's important and what's not. And there's there are collective shared beliefs and understandings for those humans.
Much like that values level operates the same it's kind of like a container of thought a container of values, which allow us to survive within sort of a group or a culture.
The next time you meet somebody who may or may not be from your particular family or people that you grew up with. It may be that you have shifted values levels in your life and you didn't even realize, and the people who activate you a lot are actually operating from a different values level.
Or it could be that there are people that you point the finger at and really love to hate on this planet who when you really look into it, are actually just operating from a different values level to you.
And while that doesn't mean we should just leave it, not saying anything. It really does help to develop a little bit more compassion, doesn't it when we can perceive that in another human, see the world a little bit truly from their own eyes, and understand why they are doing what they're doing.
Because often the question when someone thinks you're crazy or stupid, it's like, why are you doing that? There is no reason on earth why you would do that because it's just this this this, this and this, but at a different values level.
There's a different why because there's a different value. It's what's important to a person is different.
So I hope this has helped. It's a bit of a longer podcast today. I do apologize for that, but I really hope this has helped you or at least sparked some curiosity for you to go and do some research on the Graves model, do some research on spiral dynamics and come and tell me how it went for you and if you enjoyed it, and of course, if you liked this podcast, please do let me know but I really want to invite you to come and hang out with me in my NLP training.
So the values level training is just one part of one module of 16 modules inside of an NLP training that I am starting in February next year 2022. The cart is open now there are very special discounts and offers for those of you who want to join me before the end of 2021.
In the course we talk about so many different things but this values level we go deep into it. We talk about how to transition from one level to the next. You know we have deep conversations about it. And amongst many, many other things. So the cart is open now I'd love to have you go and check it out NLP Training here. We will leave a link underneath this episode. And I really hope that you've enjoyed that.
Please take this information know that every time you point the finger you know there's an opportunity for us to see what is available for us there as well. And then just consider to yourself I wonder what values level this person is operating from.
Stay Curious, Stay open. The life you crave is so much closer than you think.
LOVE
Hayley xx
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