Lesson 8
Never expect any thanks in this life.
This lesson is taken from the movie Alfie (2004) I personally recomend it, its one of the best pua related movies.
Ok so it sounds fair enough to just say never expect any thanks in this life, but just saying it is too easy and will not really have a major impact in our lives unless we take a minute to think about it. So first of all: why should we not expect thanks from people if we do something for them?
I would say you could find a million reasons, but I find the following particulary important:
1) because you can never control other people's reactions. In order to avoid being desapointed, never set your expectations too high.
2) because by expecting something from someone else you sureender control over your emotions to the other person. I have suffered from this all my life and I know many of you may have too. Have you ever founded yourself, as I mentioned in one of my first posts "how to gain confidence and self belief" emotionally floating on a roaring sea? Like you have no control and the exterior happenings just roll you arround like waves would roll a boat in a storm? One of the things that prevent you from loosing the emotional frame is by being in the command seat and doing things because you know theh are right.Now, never let social feedback dictate your actions, and never ignoee social feedback. Thats the paradox we have to live in.
3) because if the sence of worth for your actions is dependent in the value other people give them, your frame is subject to the frame of the reciever, and that makes your frame weaker.Part of being a leader is knowing whats best for the team, and in all situations you will find yourself in a team setup, in which you need to know how to make things work so that you and the other people in the team are beneficiated. Ill post about leadership later on, as im working o a real guide on how to be a respected leader. But what concerns us here is the frame hierarchy in a group dynamic.In order for you to be the leader of the team, your frame has to be stronger than the rest. The frames of the people in your team, and in the potencial opposite team, have to be subject to your frame in order for you to win.
So in practice that means that you cant expect validation from the people arround you, because in order for you to be the leader you are the one that is suposed to validate the actions of other people, in the measure in which they are beneficiary to the objective of the team.
Lets use an example to clear the doubts: say you are the president of the united stares.This is a great example, as the president is democratically elected and is supposed to be the lesder, but also is supposed to respond to the people of his country. So there is a dynamic in which the voters are the ones that have the ultimate power over the president, but the president none the less has to lead those voters as any leader has to.
So, if you are the president, and im a voter, you cant be expecting me to thank you all the time can you? You as the president cant get down on yourself because people are not writing you thanks letters and quit, you have to lead. If the president one day came to the stage and was like you ingrateful people, all I do for you and you dont even take the time to write ma a thanks letter... would that make him look like he was in control of hes frame, or in desperate need for validation?
Another example. Say I bring roses to my girlfriends house and her cat just died and shes pretty sad about it. If I expect a reaction, in this case thanks but any reaction, and I dont get what I was expecting, I will feel that my action of buying and bringing those flowers was not apreciated, when in fact its just the cats death that made her less expresive, but she actually apreciates those flowers even more now that she is sad, and they provide a sence of relief she is too troubled to express.
4) because if you do things expecting a reaction, especially thanks, you will be doing then with an agenda, an outcome dependancy. That is felt by other people, and woman are particulary sensitive to this kind of attitude.I addition, it is just a very weak, needy place to come from, and we do it all the time withoutt even thinking about it.
This lesson is a particularization of Eckhart Tolle's being in the now teaching, in the sence that being in the now implies not expecting anything from the future, therefore not expecting any reaction in the future, therefore not expecting any thanks in the future.So we could extend this lesson to be named never expect any reactions for your actions, work with what is presented to you in the moment, and learn and train yourself to be good at improvisation, because as my drama reachers used to tell me, life is a big improvisation act, so learn to master the craft.
Thats it for today. I hope you have found value in this, next week we'll be talking about lesson 9, the last in this series, and Im proud to annouce that its been a success, so I have decided to expand this to the next level. I have recieved mails from many of you asking me about personal situations, and im glad to give you free advice, so I have opened an email adress:
projectbuenosaires2013@gmail.com, and you can send me your questions there, ill respond in the next 24 to 48 hours depending on the complexity of the question. Also, sometimes I recieve requests to explain in more detail things in my posts or sugestions about topics to write about. Ill be takeing suggestions and requests on post topics at the same adress, or as a pm too.Lastly, im in twitter, you can look me up as @projectbsas, and there ill be anouncing new posts, new videos and more.
Jason