Just because you’re right doesn’t mean that’s the right way of going about it.

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You’ve probably been in a situation where you know you’re completely right so you aggressively push your view because you know you are right. Well, that’s probably not the best way to handle a it. A lot of times, those who are right really try to assert their positions because they know they are right. And then there are those who believe they are right as well and try to assert themselves, but that’s another story. The two are intertwined, but not synonymous. Personally, I have a pretty logical thought process, so when I know I am right, I tend to refuse to listen to other voices of dissent, which can work to my detriment sometimes. Once, I had a discussion with a coworker who was not familiar with a process that kept insisting they were right when I knew they had no clue of what they were talking about. Because I knew I was right, I tried to show them how to get to my line of thinking, but didn’t really take into consideration their feelings. Because I didn’t do that, the person tried to sabotage me later because they felt as if they weren’t properly listened to. This is what happens when you try to steamroll people without listening to the opposition even if you are right. It will come back to bite you. What I failed to recognize was that the person absolutely hated to be wrong and called out for it in public, which caused them to hold on to their hard feelings and try to ruin what I was working on to satisfy their own feelings. You can say that people shouldn’t do that, but that doesn’t stop them from being human and acting out their feelings. A lot of times in academic , political, and work settings, people don’t really assess feelings and how they play into situations, but when you don’t assess them, they will topple you as in the recent election.

Many intelligent people went into the election on the soundness of the polls, but never took into consideration how people felt. A lot of working-class Americans were fed up with the state of government. Democrats who fought for Bernie Sanders felt slighted and were not properly brought back into the fold, causing them to vote third party or not at all. A lot of Republicans didn’t like either party and decided not to vote, and then the political elite wondered where they went wrong. A lot of times, things are rolled out in government that aren’t properly explained to people and as such, the people resent that and question why the programs were implemented in the first place. One of those projects is Affirmative Action. I’ve heard white people express dismay at it because they see people of color who seemingly had the same socioeconomic level as them surpass them and only know that it was due to the color of their skin. Programs such as this are worthy, but if they are not explained to the masses, they will face opposition because those in the elite know it is right, but think there is nothing more to do because they are right. It even took me a long time to come to understand the purpose of Affirmative Action. To summarize, everyone is biased. Each race is predisposed to favor their own based on cultural, social, and economic cues. That does not mean it applies to everyone and every situation, but it is prevalent. Look up race blindness, where someone can recognize those within their own race, but have face blindness when it comes to other races different than them. There are all sorts of biases out there that may or may not benefit you. As such, if you are one race and go to an employer who is the same race, you may have a slight advantage over others who are not the same. Now imagine that on a large scale where the majority of employers are white. The results are going to be the same, but on a larger scale. There is no racism involved, but slight biases do exist that no one ever noticed. AA tried to correct this, but it cannot work if it is not explained.

On a personal and social level, this attitude can lead to the failure of things that are completely righteous and well-meaning, but just because they are right doesn’t mean it can be forced on others without considering their feelings and opinions. Recently, I’ve watched videos of the Black Pete, a blackface figure, from the Netherlands and how the people there have vigorously fought against the political correctness of this long-held tradition. Those who are agitating for change are correct in their estimations of the character being a racist emblem of a time gone by, and they are correct in protesting it, but they must also think about the opposition. When you question the validity of this tradition, these people take it as an assault against their heritage and who they are. When they feel assaulted, they will fight for what they feel is the disintegration of their people, when in actuality, it is just one racist aspect that can easily be changed. How it should be handled is not an easy answer, but it is easy to see that you need to take into consideration the feelings behind the character and what it means to the people. So the next time you know you’re right and the other party is completely in the wrong, try to consider not their position, but their feelings tied to their position instead. You don’t have to change their minds to see the rightness of your way of thinking, but you just have to acknowledge their dissent and how they are feeling. That is enough to open an honest dialogue of what is really operating beneath the spoken words and actions that you do see. Because it’s what you don’t see that will kill you. Am I right, Hillary?

A Hmong Woman’s Place

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Divorce is frowned upon in our culture because it means you failed. The onus is put on the woman to strive to maintain and she is mostly blamed when a marriage disintegrates. Why didn’t you do more to keep your man? What did you do to make him unhappy? Did you not satisfy him for him to stray? So we tell our young nyabs (married female relatives) to endure more. Whatever the case is, the answer is always to endure. I’ve encountered one very young male individual who absolutely hated divorced women for no apparent reasoning. He saw them as the problem to everything, when in fact, they were liberated from this patriarchal system that sometimes indentured them to their married family. Not all Hmong marriages are unhappy and not all Hmong marriages are lacking, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t issues that are apparent. Oftentimes, people do not want to acknowledge the bad things because they do not want the whole to be painted in a bad light, and in doing so, these issues are never addressed from the few. This happens across all cultures and societies and we simply sweep it under the rug at the expense of women, minorities, the LGBT community, and more.

When there are more options, that means there is room for more than one voice, and some people are afraid of change. It is okay to be afraid of change, but to not allow these voices to come through is oppression and oppression comes in many forms. We use oppression through power, beliefs, and cultural and societal norms as propaganda to enforce our power. In our culture, a divorced woman is essentially branded a pariah and treated as less than in society, while a man is not seen in the same light. What this does is create an imbalanced power structure where men can choose to abuse their position in a relationship and women can choose to accept the abuse. This does not just exist in our culture, but cultures everywhere. When a woman is afraid of becoming a social pariah, she will choose to suffer many indignities because she knows what her fate will hold for her.

As a nyab, some young girls are subjected to harsh mother-in-laws who force them to cook and clean around the clock because they have been bought. This is another power structure that forces women to bow down to their elders because they feel indebted to them because money has been paid to their parents. Sometimes, this money is seen simply as an offering and is given to the married couple to start their lives, but in some cases, it can be used as leverage to control a woman who isn’t behaving as her husband would like. Some argue that it is a perfectly sound custom because we’ve been doing it for centuries, and it is, but there are people who exist who exploit this system for their gain, and once again, it is at the expense of women.

When a woman chooses divorce, she chooses to empower herself, and I think some people are afraid of that power. When a woman stands up to her mother-in-law, it topples the power structure, and some people resent that, but that is how change comes about. If we Hmong women want change, we must know that the change lies in us. When you choose to stand up for yourself, you gain the ire of the community, but you will also command their respect. For you can either choose to have them accepting of you and not their respect, or you can choose to have their disapproval and their respect. We are so afraid to stand up for ourselves because we don’t want to upset the balance of society, but it has always been stacked against you. The change that must come about will come in having your voice heard. When you are heard, you will know the power that you hold and no one can take that away from you.

Cheating yourself out of your own life

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Recently, I’ve had to deal with a harsh reality of a family member refusing to undergo medical intervention to save their life. Without it, they would eventually die in two years. The reality is that many of us are going through personal situations at the moment, but not all of us are emotionally equipped to deal with it. After I came home from the hospital visiting them, my boyfriend asked me how I could be so happy when I was staring at such a harrowing situation. That is how you deal with it. Feel and acknowledge all your emotions in the moment. Process and understand them fully. If you decide to suppress them, they will come out in other ways. Deal with the situation in the moment, but it is not something that should permeate the rest of your life. Let go of expectations for others because you will only find disappointment at the end of that rope. Accept that whatever may come will pass with all you could’ve done.

We are not meant to live in grief and misery, yet we think that we have to wallow there to appear as if we care. You can care without doing so. Everything is transitory and the sooner you recognize that, the sooner you will be able to accept any and all outcomes. At the end of the day, I hope you can say that you tried your best and that is all you can hope for. I can live with the idea that I tried my best even if the outcome is not what I predicted, for it is something out of my control. We can only control how we react to situations, not the situations themselves, and yet, we feel guilty when the situation goes awry. We beat ourselves up and hold ourselves accountable for other people’s decisions, forces of nature, and diseases we cannot comprehend. This helps no one and it certainly does not help the situation. We need to learn to reset our feelings everyday so they don’t bleed into each other and only take responsibility for the moment. Start with a clean slate.

We spend our whole lives worrying and hating ourselves for things out of our control and it is these emotions and not the actual events that haunt us. How is it useful to anyone to keep wallowing in these emotions? The only thing it does is destroy our self-esteem and our future relationships with other people who come into contact with us. We carry these shards of hurt with us because we blame ourselves and act as if they do not affect us and when someone happens to stumble upon one, the emotions of the event pricks us with pain. This is what we’ve always done, but it is not healthy.

I once watched a show where a dying man asked a Tibetan monk what to do with his life as he was scared because he was dying. The monk gave some general answers, but this is what I would say: You only have so many days left. Why do you use them to feel anxious and worried? It is okay to feel so, but when it takes over the rest of your life, it is no longer useful. You should worry about the problem for a time, but don’t let it consume the rest of your day. Death is coming for us all and I hope you can die feeling proud of the person you are today. If you are not, then you should take actions to change that. Do all you can physically to live, but mentally, you need to accept that death is coming or you will always worry about something that is out of your control. Enjoy the rest of your days the best you can and tackle situations as they come along, but don’t let them consume the rest of your happiness for you are only cheating yourself out of your own life.

The Distractions We Face

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I find myself more and more disconnected from my life and more plugged into social media. Even when I have no need for it, I reach for it because it is mindless and fills in the time. To be honest, it’s become an addiction to know the latest thing even when it doesn’t concern me. I’ve recently had a very tiny bout of depression about it because I feel as if it’s consumed my life lately. I feel as if I have no time for anything else, when that is not the reality. I’ve retrained myself to be more mindful of who I am in this digital age; for when I neglect my own wishes, I’m only wasting my own time. Whenever I feel as if my life is out of control, I try to put things into perspective to take control back.

I’m trying to limit my time on social media and really structure my day more so that I can fit in what I truly want to do like reading Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, catching up on episodes of Netflix’s Peaky Blinders, and writing my novel. I’m a realistic person and I know I can’t magically make more time in the day, but that I must work with the time I have. We sometimes get into a rut where we want to attain something, but we also are scared of the hard work that goes into it, so we do nothing and hate ourselves for doing nothing, causing a cycle of depression and guilt that spirals down. My boyfriend was just remarking that he didn’t want to turn out like his hermit uncle who had no girlfriend, but did nothing to remedy his own situation before me.

What’s worse? Finding out you didn’t get what you want or never finding out at all? There’s work to be put into this life and everything else is merely a distraction, albeit glorious distractions. There is a drive that propels us to want more, and some of us are born with it and some of us are not, but it can be developed. If it is not developed, unfortunately, it results in a lot of unhappy people with unfulfilled wishes. We’re all living in cocoons where we have goals in mind, but are also afraid of the pain we must endure to reach that goal, so we satisfy ourselves with distractions in the meantime. Sometimes, we just need a reminder that we must work with the time we’ve got and do our best, for time comes for us all.

Strip away a man

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If you carry yourself the right way, you will not get in trouble. If you speak the right way, you will never get into an argument. If you educate yourself, you will not find yourself ignorant. If you wear the right clothes, speak eloquently, and obey all rules, you should have no troubles with the police. Police officers have a very hard job, and they have to make snap decisions that will ensure they will go home for the night. However, what happens when a person is stripped away of all these things that they wear to identify them and a police officer has to make a snap decision? Think of it as this way: take a black man who’s wearing a sweater that represents the college he graduated from, pants that show he an active member of his community, and a hat saying he has never gotten a ticket in his life. What if he were stripped of these things in his first encounter with police? If the police couldn’t see these things, what are they left with? Simply a Black man. That’s it.

A person can acquire all these things to make himself more agreeable to the rest of society, but if he is stripped of them, no one knows he was a Harvard professor like Henry Louis Gates Jr when he got into an argument with a police officer outside of his own home. Or like when the officer who shot Philando Castile didn’t know that he worked at a school serving lunch to the community’s kids. Or like Floyd Dent in Detroit, who an officer planted drugs on, but didn’t know he had never received any criminal offense. What it results in is the case of Jonathan Ferrel. He was in a car accident and pounding on doors all bloodied in the middle of the night. He was a bright and active former college student who needed help, but when police encountered him, all they saw was a black man because he had literally been stripped of his identity. He saw himself as a man in need, but the police saw him as a deranged Black man and shot him. He lost his life simply because he didn’t approach the police the way someone should after an accident.

How should you approach the police after an accident? No one knows, and yet people say if you had done this the right way, this wouldn’t have happened to you. We are so concerned about doing things the right way, when there is no right way to present yourself as a non-threat if the other party already perceives you as threatening. You can tell Black people to try just a little harder to not get shot, but that’s the same as telling women to try just a little harder to not get raped. We put the onus on the victims because we don’t want to be responsible for their tragedies. If you had only…I want to say we are responsible for these tragedies because we have accepted them as truths. Only when you acknowledge the situation for what it is and your part in it will the outcomes change.

Is your salmon shirt gay?

My boyfriend asked me if I’d heard of the color term ‘salmon’ being applied to women’s clothing, and I replied that the term was invented strictly for men’s clothing for these situations:

Guy 1: Hey, bro, why you wearing a pink shirt?

Guy 2: Nah, dude, this is salmon. Not gay

He then proceeded to tell me that two guys at his work had almost the same conversation except for the gay part, but it’s pretty much implied. It’s been ingrained in our heads that pink is for girls and blue is for boys, so much so that some guys have gay-panic at the thought of being accused of being one simply for wearing a pink shirt. And some people thought it was stupid Target was no longer separating their toys by gender. That stuff stays with you and it is not so simple as letting boys be boys and so forth. The sexes will always be different, but each individual should have the choice to choose how they portray themselves. The same goes for race. Each race has their own cultural differences and we need to stop spouting the mantra of ‘we are all the same,’ because that doesn’t celebrate diversity and assumes someone had the same experiences as you. However, that doesn’t mean every individual of that race encompasses those cultural differences, for they still can choose how to portray themselves.

And then there’s the gay part. To be called gay is to be called weak, inferior, and different. And in this society, to be different is unnatural and so some of us shun that term. Society has always shunned the different because different means anarchy and the unknown. To be different means society has to conform to you, so what does society do when they fear you and the unknown? They make you conform to them. It is an innate fear, but to recognize this fear is to recognize we can rise above it. Sometimes, you don’t have to change the world, you only have to acknowledge the cultural, gender, and sexual-orientation differences that exist and know they apply to a group, but not individuals.

How to be an elite sports player

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Okay, so there are some players out there who just rock no matter what, but then you encounter those out there where the game gets mental. Of course, to become an elite athlete, you have to have innate abilities, practice, and grow, but practice doesn’t include anything mental, and that’s where a lot of players who are lacking in this area can improve. People have already devised various ways to mentally focus and visualize success on the field, but they don’t necessarily attack the core of the issue. The core of the issue is that a good portion of the game is mental and if you can shut out the rest of the world, you’re fine, but if you can’t, you need to work on your mental as well as your physical abilities.

Oftentimes, we see a brilliant player spiral downward such as Tiger Woods after a personal scandal. Sometimes, players beat themselves up for losses and mistakes that occurred years ago and this memory still eats at them. Mentally, they have not left these things out when they are playing, so it affects their time on the field. First, they must learn to see mistakes as learning opportunities, for as long as they hold on the memory of it being bad, they will always feel bad about it. If they can let go of these mistakes, they will free themselves from the guilt of it. As long as they attach a reassuring thought with the memory, they will be able to feel differently about their mistakes and see them in a positive light.

So you’ve probably heard the story on the Chapelle Show where Charlie Murphy plays basketball with Prince and Prince turns out to be phenomenal. I believe this is because overall, Prince believes in himself so much that he can step over hurdles that most athletes face on a daily basis. Because he believes in himself so much, he exudes charisma and doesn’t second-guess himself on the court. To achieve this level, athletes must hold themselves to higher standards in their personal lives and live by them. If they are able to do this, they will also gain similar beliefs in themselves and it will translate to their sport. When a person is sure of who they are in their personal lives and does not fear mistakes, they are able to hold their head high in their personal lives and in the public court.

Interventions are best served warm

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Everybody loves a good intervention. I mean, have you seen A&E’s Intervention? We do interventions because we care for the person and want them to change, but when we run an intervention, we are dealing with the symptoms and not the source. Oftentimes, I watch the show and I see the family members and friends reading statements about how it has affected them. A lot of times, this simply does not get through to them. The best of them may feel guilty, but that will never get someone to stop what they’re doing. If you don’t address the source of the issue, you’re just treating the symptoms and the problem will always be there. A lot of times, the source is something that occurred years past or even something no one knows because it has been suppressed.

You have to realize that the majority of these people are in deep denial and use other things as an outlet because they can’t emotionally express themselves. When they can’t emotionally express themselves, they delve deeper into their addiction because it helps numb them. Of course, some people are physically addicted, but the majority of people I see with severe drinking and drug issues are those who refuse to deal with their past. If you try to talk to them about actions to fix their problem, it will not help at all. When you talk about actions, they are addressing symptoms, but not the source of the pain. You must address the pain to begin an honest conversation with them so they can acknowledge their pain.

So you see how reading statements of their addiction affecting you may not be the most effective? A good way to start is ask them how they FEEL. Tell them that you see they are hurting and relate back to them what is happening such as I see you’re hurting and you’re drinking every night because you want to drown it out, but it’s always there. And you wake up every day and pretend everything is okay and put on a smile so that no one will know just so you can survive, but I know. I can see the hurt in your eyes. When you can relate back to them the pain and that you see what they are doing and how it affects them, that is a much more effective solution to addressing the real issue. When you can address the hurt, they are forced to confront it and talk about their feelings.

They are not going to change overnight and they may not understand at first, but the biggest step in the road to recovery is acknowledging the hurt. If you can start having them face the actual pain, they will lift themselves out of denial and be able to address the source and then the symptoms.

Changing your past

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I’ve written about this very topic already, but I feel as if I need to delve deeper. All of us have cringe-worthy pasts or memories from our pasts. For some of us, they still haunt us. And in a few cases, we are stuck in our past because we cannot escape the shadow of it. Let me clarify, for I’m not talking about people who refuse to deal with their past and are in denial, but people who have processed their past, but just can’t let it go. The way we are wired, we tend to hold on to bad things because that’s what we do. We have to learn how to change this process and a lot of how we think because it is not productive to our growth. It is completely natural what we’ve been doing for centuries, but it is not conducive to our souls.

What I mean is that oftentimes, our reactions and feelings are innate and something the majority of us would do without being told because we don’t know any better. If little children are molested, they tend to not tell anyone. When someone dies, we blame ourselves for not being there for them. When we hurt someone, we continue to carry the hurt. We need to teach children about sexual assault and that it is okay to tell someone. When someone dies, we need to acknowledge our own guilt and express the times we were there for them. When we hurt someone, we need to process it and move on, but that’s harder said than done because no one has told us how to move on. All these things are hard-wired into who we are, and it will take years before we can change how we think.

Here is how you can start. First off, if you haven’t processed the past, do so. That’s another blog altogether. Once you have processed it, know that you can never change the past. The past is what it is, but that is not the important thing. The important thing is how we FEEL about the past. We don’t carry the past with us, but we carry how we FEEL about it and that is what prevents us from growing. When you can change how you FEEL about the past, you will be able to let it go. You need to know that it is not healthy to keep carrying these things. It does you or anyone else no good to continue beating yourself up for actions that occurred in the past. In fact, the memory of it will continue to drag you down. If you can acknowledge that you are worthy of growth and a clean slate, begin to change how you feel about the past.

When you recall a bad memory, you feel guilty, shameful, or embarrassed of it. These are the memories we tend to hold on to the most. When we do this, we cannot pass the memory and it eats us alive. What you need to do is attach a good thought with it every time you bring up the memory. If someone died before you could be there the last time, remind yourself that you shared a great memory with them another time. This changes how you feel about the memory. Instead of feeling shame, you feel joy at the memory and it fades into your consciousness. You haven’t changed the memory, but you’ve changed how you feel about it. This also works for things you’ve recently done. If you’ve asked a girl out and she turned you down, you may feel embarrassed by it. Remind yourself of the courage you had to ask her out and the memory will no longer contain embarrassment for you. This will allow you to be able not be suppressed by the memory and be able to ask other girls out.

We’ve been hard-wired to react a particular way and the funny thing is that we only think we are doing it, when in fact, all of humanity generally reacts the same way. We need to retrain how we react and feel about ourselves so we can continue our journey. If we are constantly ashamed of our pasts, we will never be able to fully embrace who we currently are and move into the future. This starts with the knowledge that we deserve to be happy and have a clean slate.

The Mindset Revolution

Retraining how you think.

Category: Life