Judge A Doctor’s Steady Hand, Not Their Hand Color
At the risk of having you think I watch too much television (I love stories, it’s true), I’ll tell you what I was watching this time: Grey’s Anatomy. I have a couple thoughts on the show, both positive and unflattering, but I’m going to stay on track for now, so…
I watched last week’s episode in which racism came up.
To their credit (in my book), I think they did a fantastic job of bringing it up. However, this is The Universal Laws that Rule-Skool so I never stop at what mass consciousness sees or thinks. For one thing, if I did, then I would have to resign myself to a racist world, and I’d miss what people truly judge. In order to understand the universal laws at play here and to make sense of judgments, we need to look at several aspects of people.
Here’s what doesn’t make sense: everyone – with any color of skin – and every gender and every age is discriminated against. So, it’s not about your gender, your sexual orientation or your age: it’s really about you. Should this change?
Sorry but the fact that there is judgement (which is discernment at a higher vibratory level) is harder to change than the way people will receive the color of your skin; ultimately, the color of your skin is not what people will judge you on. Nope, not your skin, your habit of picking your nose (that people really do give you nasty looks for), not your intimate mate-choices and not where you are from. You can’t change any of these, nor should you – oh, except the nose-picking, we’ll get to that in a minute.
Let’s put it this way, to not be discriminated against (or to minimize it) you don’t have to change your physical composition, but your energetic attitude is everything!
Take it Personally
Have you heard that you shouldn’t take things personally in life? Well, sometimes you need to take it personally. See, if you are to be wise and truly spiritually evolved, then you have to be wise enough to know what you should not take personally and what you should take to be all about you.
Here’s the contradiction, the paradox, for this lesson: people live in their own world and they don’t see you, so what they do or say, you should not take personally. At the same time, when you find that people all tend to treat you the same way take it personally because it’s all about you.
If you don’t like how people treat you, then it’s time to change your energy and attitude. Better still, regardless of how you like the treatment, you should connect with your authenticity and come from there every time, regardless of how you get treated. Of course, this will also shift your energetic attitude or the energy behind your attitude.
Let’s go a bit deeper with this all so that it either makes more sense or so that you can grasp it at a deeper level (which is called grokking it, but spell check just doesn’t like that word so it always tells me that it’s wrong- is that my spell-checker discriminating and being racy?)
He Doesn’t Know How To Take it Personally
Sheldon Cooper, Ph D – he doesn’t know that he should take some things personally…
I love the TV show Big Bang Theory so that I binge-watched the episodes in order. Two thumbs up!
In the show, Sheldon’s character is full of himself. He is confident to a tee and he is certain that you’ll adore him almost as much as he adores himself. In every moment when there could be a question or doubt about Sheldon, his response always turns things around, perceiving anything in his favor. ‘Of course you like me, I’m brilliant.’ Or ‘I’ll do it, I am the smartest one in the room, so you’ll all want me to.’ Are typical thoughts or phrases that come from Sheldon. On the one hand, he is oblivious that people think he’s annoying or arrogant. On the other hand, he is authentic and he is so filled with self-value, that if you watch the show and are close enough to the screen, some of his self-value might overflow onto you.
Sheldon doesn’t take things personally, even when –perhaps- he should. He’s a great example of basing his view of himself – his self-image- and his opinions of himself on his authenticity. No, he’s not perfect, but he is true to himself. If you and I were so authentically-centered, we’d be like Sheldon: in love with ourselves, with life and oblivious that bad days exist (or that people don’t like us).
In this way, Sheldon can serve as a role model to us all: be you and be oblivious of how others perceive you. After all, why should you care about what’s going on in someone else’s head?
Of course, by being oblivious, Sheldon also misses a life lesson that is trying to show or tell him that he needs to take others into account as well. Instead, because he is oblivious, he keeps repeating the same experience and his friend continue to think that he’s self-centered in a negative way.
You Shouldn’t Take Racism Personally
When you first meet someone, they will discriminate and pre-judge you. And they won’t be judging just your skin color, they will judge you in more ways than you can count. They will read your body language, everything from your stance to how long your hair is; they’ll read your smile, your posture and your eyes. They will judge your clothes, your jewelry (or lack of), your shoes.
They will have already put you in a box of classification, as if you were a file in their mental office, before you even speak. But then you will speak, further classifying you.
They may deem you to be good, bad, like-able, friend-material, smart, not worthy of being listened to or spoken to or they may decide that they want to have sexual relations or marry you – all in the blink of an eye. This has been proven in body language studies where people even predict who will win an election based on a photograph of candidates and nothing else.
These are just a few of the more obvious ways that people size you up when they first meet you – and I’m not talking about negative people, I’m talking about all people. Even if you were blind, you would still seek to comprehend your world and you would size everything up; you too would still be judgmental.
Can you believe that we process so much information about someone in less that a second? Watch yourself – look around at someone now (especially someone you don’t know). Just glance at them and then look away and ask yourself what you think of them. Ask whether you like them or not, if you’d sleep with them, whether you think they are smart, nice. You’ll already have significant opinions that come from a first impression and that are, likely, not going to change.
When someone first sees you, they will judge you. Ignore that. It’s all in their head.
The World Belongs to Those Who Work With It:
If you care enough to penetrate a person’s blink-judgement (as in the judgments they made about you in the blink of an eye), then you’ll have to change their perception. You’ll have to be one to those people who don’t insists that the world be the way they want it to be, but rather they work with the world as it is so that the world works for and with them.
This means that you’ll have to tell people how you want them to see you (Sheldon tells them he’s brilliant and adorable); you’ll have to point out the strengths or the parts of yourself that you want them to focus on when they are thinking about you. They will perceive you as you want them sooner or later, as long as you can behave or be what you are pointing to.
This is persuasion, a good kind.
Perceptual Blinders
Think back to someone close to you. Have you noticed that sometimes you look at them and you notice things you hadn’t noticed before? Or a third person says something about your best-friend or spouse and you’re like, ‘no, that’s not true’ – then you physically look at your best-friend or spouse and go ‘oh, I hadn’t noticed!’.
Here’s an example: for Halloween my daughter bought an angel costume. My friend and I texted each other about our daughters’ costumes and my friend said my daughter wasn’t dressing as an angel, she was an angel.
Who perceives (sees) my daughter clearly, me or her? I looked at my daughter again and thought, she’s right!
We see the world and people based on how we perceive them; we perceive them based on where we are focused. I had been focused on my daughter’s grades in school, her needing glasses and her messy room. I wasn’t seeing an angel, I was seeing issues I wanted to take care of for her.
Time To Perceive the Point
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Yes, people are racist. True, but more significant still, they are more judgmental than they are racist – generally speaking – so that they are judging much more than just your skin color.
My point to you is that if you don’t care about the person – perhaps because they are a stranger on the street — then don’t waist another thought on what they think. If you do care what they think, then don’t chastise them for being judgmental because we all have to assess people in our lives and most of the time it means judging them. We have to determine whether someone can be a friend, a lover, a colleague; we have to determine whether or not they can fit into our lives and how they can fit.
In the Grey’s Anatomy episode, the theme had to do with the surgeon, head of cardio, being annoyed that a male, white man (with a New Zealand accent) was hired under her – and she doesn’t like people assuming that she’s a nurse or directing conversation towards him just because she is female and has dark skin. She doesn’t take into account that this man presents himself well: he is confident, nice and she finds that she too is charmed by him. The world is the world and it’s tough being an African-American woman surgeon, but that’s just the way it is. It may not be right, but it’s not necessarily wrong either. Men have an assertive flow and the masculine flow has a natural leadership quality, so it makes sense that people would look to a confident, male surgeon. There isn’t something wrong with that, just like there isn’t something right with people assuming she’s a nurse.
Simply put, we are all different; the idea of equality is impossible. You can’t make me the same as you and you can’t make an African-American female surgeon the same as a make kiwi (that means New Zealander) the same either. There skin, gender or race – however, should have nothing to do with how steady your surgeon’s hand is. The smarter and better they are at surgery the more you should like them. If you are going to discriminate, discriminate against the surgeon who screwed up their last patient!
Again, I liked how the show handled racisms, but they were missing something deeper. Sure, I know there are people who only judge another by their race, but you probably won’t respect them as a person any way, so let’s focus on the people you want to get along with, the people you do respect and love and who you want to have feeling the same way about you:
You can’t change the world or how people see other people in the world, but you can make sure that you have self-presence and that you make a good impression because then people are more likely to make positive blink-of-an-eye judgement about you.
Most people are judging you based on what they consider to be positive attributes. They are looking for people who they perceive are like themselves, people who match their values, beliefs, and who like doing the same things as them. Think about your inner circle, the people you welcome or want close to you in your life- there aren’t many, right? Now think about the people at work that you connect with or that you like working with – they tend to be like you, don’t they? This shows us that we all will place most people outside our inner circle – We will either not like them or, more often, we won’t consider them. I’m in Starbucks and I’m not judging people, I’m mostly just not considering them. Right now, in my world, what I’m writing is all that exists, they don’t. The baristas that I see often and K, sitting next to me, they exist, but no one else does. We just don’t have enough time and life to know hundreds of people and have them be someone we really know. If a person isn’t meaningful or significant to us, then we don’t notice them at all.
How many people are there in the world who are like you? Not too many, and you become good friends or colleagues when you do meet the people who share your world view and who have a similar outlook on life.
In other words, discrimination isn’t a bad thing in the sense that we are constantly discerning whether the people we meet are going to be one of the few people we will consider (take into account) in life. It’s not a bad thing to know what kind of people you like and seek them out. A racist person who only looks at another’s skin color is limited. They are closing themselves off from meeting other people who share their world view and I, of course, don’t recommend this, nor do I recommend you wasting time caring that they are racists. You have bigger fish to fry.
Sometimes we are in circumstances where we do experience racism. If this is on your plate of experience, then you’ll have to practice positive persuasion. You may have to prove yourself and take a look at who you are and what your present about yourself, knowing that it will be seen with an unfair eye. Don’t feel bad or like life’s tougher for you than it is for another because you can always find someone with a more challenging and unfair experience than yours. Life is hard on everyone, there’s no discrimination there. It’s hard for you and it’s hard for me, just in different ways.
Anyway, the point is that you will experience more or less discrimination based on you more than your skin. What kind of person are you?
People tend to like certain people more than others. Name your favorite movie star – if he or she walked in the room, do you think heads would turn? Do you doubt that people would be nice to him or her and want to be friends with him or her? No doubt and this is regardless of their skin color. If Will Smith walked in the room or Jennifer Lopez did, people would flock to them. Why doesn’t their race matter? Why hasn’t it kept them from being iconically-famous? Because both of these movie stars have presence which causes people to see far more than their race. People see their success and their fame and sometimes, even forget that they are a race to be discriminated against.
Now contrast this with a homeless person off the street who could be white or what ever race you like. Instead of welcoming this person, wouldn’t people ignore their presence? Of course. Discrimination takes how you feel and live your life into account and it weighs these heavily.
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Show Up in Style & Be Note-Worthy
Why is it that some people are better liked than others? Why are people nicer to some versus others?
It’s because they show better. They look nicer, and this is often reflected in their physical appearance and presentation, but how they feel about themselves is more pronounced than their clothes and it speaks louder than their skin color.
How you feel about you precedes you actions, your words and your appearance. Actually, how you feel about you tends to dictate these. When you look at people (whether you are aware of seeing it or not) you will see their self-doubt and their insecurities. You quickly sense whether they know what they are talking about or if you should dismiss their ideas.
If you want to experience the opposite of discrimination – inclusion and an assumption that you should be liked and treated well – then stop to look at how you feel about yourself. Penny, the cute blond in Bing Bang Theory, seems to be liked by everyone every where she goes. Penny turns heads (both men and women’s) when she walks in the room. Sure, most heads are nerds or geeks, but still. She likes herself, even though she’s not brilliant and she’s pretty good to herself, unlike her boyfriend Leonard who has the opposite experience and isn’t so confident. They are both white, but he’s more discriminated against than she is – not due to their race, but due to their presence and how they feel about themselves.
How do you treat you? Do you use kind words? Are you sweet with yourself? Are you kind and compassionate?
You wear your self-image on the sleeve of your sleeve and people process this before making other judgments.
The Teachable Moment
The point to The Universal Laws that Rule Skool is for you to empower yourself and pragmatically improve your life. You’d be in the wrong place if you think that you are going to change others and you’ll be wasting your energy and time if you are insisting that others change and not be racist.
Discern, Don’t Judge
The wise person is one who learns to be discerning and to not be judgmental with themselves. You may think you are judging others or being racists against another race, but the only person you are affecting and the only person you are hurting is you because now you are applying your limiting beliefs onto your own experience (your perception). When you look at someone, you will see things about them in the blink of an eye, but there are other things you’ll miss. You will also project things onto them, applying characteristics to them that don’t apply, which comes from your limiting beliefs. Have you ever been forced to work with or spend time with someone you don’t like and then found that they are one of your best friends once you’ve gotten to know them?
Your energy precedes you, so stay open and open to yourself. As you get better at not judging yourself and at honoring yourself, people will see you differently – and they may not even notice the color of your skin.