My inspiration for this blog came on completely by accident – or maybe I should call it divine intervention. I have been taking a break from social media, at least from putting out content, since Thanksgiving. I’ve spent time thinking about what I want to do with my business going forward and trying to settle on some decisions. Through this, I’ve done research about some things I should probably do, and one of those was to connect my personal Facebook account to my business – at least make sure that I’m presenting that side of me to my personal Facebook community. So, that is what I chose to do today.

In the process of doing this, I decided to update some of my personal info. My husband, who says he’s not on FB, but oddly enough gets on there at least once a week, pointed out that I don’t list him as being my spouse. He wasn’t happy about that for some reason… Of course, it was an oversight so while I was in there updating for my business, I decided to update that information too. While I was doing that, I saw the option to not make that update public and I decided to do that – it’s not new that we’re married. We’ve been married for 25 years. Well, in the process of updating that info and moving on to the next thing, something happened and the update with my spouse’s name turned into an announcement that we had gotten married that day! OMG – a flood of comments ensued and I was so embarrassed! Here I was on Facebook with the intention of putting myself out there more for business reasons, and this happened. I immediately began the process of beating myself up for messing up and thought “that’s what you get for putting yourself out there.”

Why would I think that? I think that way, for one, because I’m not really comfortable on social media, at least when it comes to posting much. I do post more now than I ever have, but I still worry that what I post will look stupid or not be relevant. I don’t know why I do that to myself. I rarely think anything like that when I see someone else’s post. I really don’t judge other people half as hard as I do myself. 

I know I’m not alone in this. 

That being the case, I’m going to offer up a suggestions to manage this kind of self-inflicted angst and stress.

You’ve got to change the way you think and talk to yourself when something like this happens! I’ll own that this isn’t easy and it does take practice, but you can definitely work on your reactions to things that happen in your life. When you feel yourself going down the rabbit hole, decide to change your feelings about what happened. You do this by changing your thoughts first. 

In this case, I decided instead of being embarrassed and spending the rest of the day feeling stupid and bad about myself, that I would try to see the humor in it. I changed my mind or thoughts from the reflexive negative space I was in, to a space where I could see the whole thing from a different, nicer, forgiving perspective. I’m a person who is really the best at beating  myself up, so believe me this wasn’t easy. 

The stages or the change in my thinking followed this path. At first I was annoyed at my husband, briefly, thinking if he hadn’t made a big deal of the fact that I didn’t list him as my spouse, this never would have happened.  Then I moved on to, “why do I always cave in and try to please other people?” – after all, that was what I was doing when I added that information to my profile, trying to make him happy. But then, it started to be ironic because in all of this, he actually has to approve that he’s my spouse on FB – why something would go public pending approval is beyond me, but that is indeed what happened. Then, I started thinking about several occasions when I would tease him about marriage – suggesting that it’s a contract and most of them are renegotiated from time to time and that maybe we should do that one of these years. Now, here we are. I’m waiting for his approval and I’m fielding comments right and left. It was surprising though, how many people don’t comment – I got enough comments and they’re still coming, but lots are just thumbs up and it occurred to me….

Not everyone is really paying that much attention to me anyway. I don’t mean that in a bad or negative way, I just mean that the situation is definitely larger in my mind than anyone else’s. The reality too is that not everyone is going to be mean or critical. It’s so easy to assume what people might be thinking, but the truth is, you don’t know what they’re thinking and they might not even be giving this any thought at all. I’m not sure who this quote belongs to, but “what other people think about you, is none of your business” is one that I’ve personally tried to clutch on to. It’s a great reminder that you really don’t know and if you’re busy beating yourself up for something like this, you’re making assumptions about other people and that really isn’t fair. You want them to give you the benefit of the doubt, shouldn’t you do the same? More importantly, this thought pattern does not serve you, not even a little bit.

What might have happened if I hadn’t made a conscious choice to change my mindset about all of this? I would have continued to beat myself up about it, then of course blame my husband for the whole thing. I would have sulked and been depressed the rest of the day. I never would have written this blog and made lemons out of lemonade. I would have taken the whole thing out on my husband, in one way or another that evening ruining both of our nights and our son’s too. Lastly, I probably wouldn’t have slept much that night, finally coming around and feeling bad about my behavior on top of everything else – got guilt?

Changing my thoughts about what happened changed the way I felt about the whole thing and how the rest of the day went. I made light of my mistake in a comment on that post. I connected with quite a few people who commented on the post which was, as it turned out, fun. I learned something about Facebook. I became inspired to write this blog. My day turned out a lot more joyful because of how I decided to think about the whole thing. I laughed about what happened with friends and then later that night I laughed about it with my family. It was a win-win.

As you can see, how you decide to think about a certain thing or event does impact your emotions and sets the stage for the rest of your day. It not only impacts you personally, but also trickles down to your family, your clients, co-workers – with whomever you spend time. You may not always be in control of your circumstances – what happens around you, what people think and do, but you do have control of how you think about those things, and what you think creates how you feel.

Am I reluctant to run right back to social media? Oh yeah – it is still out of my comfort zone, but a necessary vehicle for me to grow my business. The good news is that I can use this experience to my advantage now. I now know to be more careful and thorough before I hit the post button for sure, and I also know that if something goes sideways, it will quickly pass. See you out there!!

J