Holding Space for Other People

In today's podcast we are learning what it means to hold space for other people.

Lately a common theme I see with my clients is this sense of needing to make other people feel better. So often we take on the responsibility to make other people feel a certain way…

• Sometimes this comes from a place of love (we just want them to not feel the way they feel)

• Sometimes this comes from a place of control (it makes us feel so uncomfortable when they feel this way so we need to make it stop)

• Sometimes this comes from a place of selfishness ( we want to feel better about something so we need them to feel better)

So I want to teach you all a few things

1. People are allowed to feel their feelings

2. People are allowed all the time they want not just need but want to take to process their feelings

3. People are allowed to not always be happy, joyous, content, etc it's actually normal and apart of the human experience

4. People are allowed to have their thoughts about your actions even if you didn’t do whatever the thing is on purpose, it is their thoughts that create their feelings, and they are allowed those, it is not your job to control or change their thoughts

5. Of course you can apologize when you “hurt” someone’s feelings or cause negative emotions, but you have to be doing it for yourself- not for them to change how they are feeling because you are not in control of them

I also want to take about what I learned from my Teacher’s Brooke Castillo and Kara Loewentheil- they taught me the concept of the Manual

When we have a miscommunication with someone- we hurt their feelings or they quote hurt ours we have an internal manual that states what the other person should do

1. They should forgive me right away or they should change how they feel immediately

2. They should “know where we are coming from”

3. Whenever we are “shoulding” someone else we need to take a look at our thoughts

   1. Why is it so important that they change the way they feel right away? What are we making their feelings mean about us? What are we making it all mean?

What we have to learn to do is hold space for other people, their thoughts, their feelings and their opinions:

What this looks like is creating space outside of us. Picture yourself with a belt on with water bottle holders, and inside each of those water bottles is the space for someone else.