Give Them a Piece of Your Mind

So you’re angry – there’s a bit of a rant.
You’re clearly affected so who caused it?

What did they do?
Jump ahead of you in the bar queue? Cut you up on the motorway? Call you a wuss on the pitch? Stared at you on the train?

Was it worse than that?
Maybe they got your order wrong? Perhaps they showed a complete lack of interest in serving you? Maybe they were a complete jobsworth? Maybe they’re qualified cheats?

These are all people you don’t even know and you’re already well on the way to giving them a piece of your mind – or, if you prefer the physical solution, a taste of knuckle!

Or perhaps they are just perhaps a bit thick, stupid, mindless ...

So what’s our natural reaction with these types of folk? They’re annoying, frustrating, aggravating, and need to be taken down a peg or two – shown the error of their ways – taught a lesson.

How we allow ourselves to wander – or is it blunder - into these flashpoints, these areas of personal conflict, ire and rage, is a pattern we slip into seemingly not out of choice, but more out of necessity. We have a necessity to assert our identity because there is something about this annoying person that has, cumulatively, impacted upon us in a very personal way – they have struck at the heart of our identity, who we think and feel we are.

I am

On the face of it, one of the generosities of my encountering someone who is really mindless would be to actually “give” them a piece of my mind; to share with them some of my own faculties in order to facilitate some things for them. It is a human kindness. Whether they’ve dropped something, are asking directions, or are just preoccupied with something else – it’s all the same. I’ve helped their mind by giving them a piece of mine for a short while.

However, in the common usage sense and meaning of that phrase, when I ‘give them a piece of my mind’, what am I really doing? I’m telling them what I think of them. I’m applying my view of the world, my set of rules about how the world should run on the basis of “My rules right – their rules wrong”. That’s the piece of my mind I’m giving them, AND probably insisting that they accept it as well!

The presupposition here of course is that my view is right.
Which is as far as it goes if I “call the shots” and if I take the attitude “that’s it – like it or lump it!”

However – things are different if I align my view with my identity; for if I do that, then everyone and everything that doesn’t conform to my view impugns, calls into question, my identity. My person, my very being, is challenged. I will stand up for myself – I will defend myself – I will prevail – I must prevail or I will lose my sense of self-worth. And if don’t prevail, or if I see myself as not prevailing, then I will look to reassert myself at the very next opportunity. This whole state, this mind set, can be seen residing under the banner “Do you, or don’t you, know who I am” and it lives together with a complete lack of humility.

Dipping lights, emotions and hierarchies

We’re driving at night and dip our lights when another car approaches. This is normal.
If the approaching car doesn’t dip its headlights – what then? We flash our lights and they dip theirs. They were distracted and have now conformed. This is normal.
If they don’t dip theirs – what then? We are more than temporarily dazzled. We can respond by doing nothing and just endeavour to concentrate so we can maintain our orientation on the road until they have passed. This is normal.
We can also respond by putting our lights on full beam in order to counter theirs. Reactive as this may be – it is still an option.

These are all robotic responses – they are a set of “If > Then > Or” choices and outcomes.
However, we are humans not robots – and we have emotions and hierarchies of values.

If dipping headlights, for us, is a set of actions judged and placed purely at the behavioural level then we’ll respond in the aforementioned robotic way. We’ll treat the non-dipper as behaving in an inappropriate way and no emotion will enter the arena of activity.
If we take the non-dipper’s action out of the behavioural level into a higher level, our emotional involvement will start to get charged up. We get tense and taut, we’ll start to verbalise our thoughts – and suddenly we aren’t the driver we were just before we encountered the non-dipper.
Our response at the next level up (skills and capabilities) is to judge the non-dipper as being incompetent, incapable of driving properly at night. “How difficult is it for you to do something as simple as dip your lights, moron?” we shout as they approach and then go past in just a matter of seconds.
Our response at the next level (beliefs and values) is more along the lines, “You shouldn’t be on the road, you’re a menace, it’s dangerous what you’re doing, society needs to correct you, I need to correct you...” and so on.
Our response at the next level (identity) is highly personal. This driver is not dipping his lights for ME. More to the point, these are my eyes he’s dazzling, my driving he’s disrupting, my car he’s putting under threat etc. This is me he’s directing his action at – doesn’t he know who I am?

As you can see, with all these responses there is a cumulative pathway. The ‘emotional backpack’ is filling up with meaning every step of every level.
If we carry the worldview that ‘morons and incapables’ threaten or impugn our identity, or that questioning our beliefs about who should be allowed to drive on the road threatens or impugns our identity, then that backpack gets overfilled very, very quickly. The filling gets amplified from every level below.

“Mr Loud”

There are some of us who do carry things thus - here’s part of a conversation I overheard in a restaurant recently. (I’d add here that I only clearly overheard one voice from this conversation, since it was quite loud! And therein is another clue.) A group of four at the adjacent table were talking sport. “Mr Loud” (let’s call him) held sway, and eventually the topic became the Paralympics. Mr Loud’s brazen pronouncement was, “Oh I didn’t watch any. I just couldn’t bring myself to do that – watching those people. That’s not sport. It’s just not right is it?”
While no one else in his coterie challenged his myopic worldview, I resisted a huge temptation – biting my lip and sitting on my hands – not to give him a piece of my mind.

Clearly, for Mr Loud, disability in others strikes deep. His belief is that disability sporting activities – right up to and including the Paralympics - are not sport. He feels what they do is not right – and presumably must be stopped. He labels them as ‘those people’, and just talking about the subject makes him uncomfortable. Yet he’s more than happy to share this worldview, so it’s part of his identity. Nothing will ever shake him from this view, this stance, except perhaps some very extreme personal circumstances.

Prejudice, in whatever form, always goes deep to the level of identity. At some point, proud Mr Loud, sitting atop his world, has views that are almost certain to be involved in a collision with those of someone equally forthright at the other end of the spectrum of compromise.

Keeping the pieces of our Mind

Keeping our mind intact should be one of the things we strive to do every day. Every time we ‘lose it’ by giving away a piece of our mind, then for that day – or that stream of consciousness – we can’t get it back.

I am often reminded of the client I saw who said she had ‘depression’ – except that she was acting out depression to mask her anger. She was happy for the world to see her ‘depression’ but not her anger. She had no peace of mind since every waking moment she was letting pieces of her mind fall into the abyss between her anger and her depression.

Why do we find it easy to get so irate behind the wheel of a car?
We’re in our own little box, thinking we are hidden from the world, and in this box we can express ourselves and be true to our identity and our beliefs. We can behave in whatever way we choose.  The world can still see and hear us of course – but the biggest danger to us is that for every ill-considered comment, every rant, we are giving away a piece of our mind.

If we can keep all the pieces of our mind together, then we will have peace of mind. Our judgements, our appreciations, our actions, our productivity, our thinking and our health and wellbeing, are all best served from a mind that is fully intact. We are able to make the best sense of everything if we are grounded, centred, complete.
We might feel distracted and unable to give our full attentiveness to something because we “are not all there”, or “my mind wasn’t with it”, or “my mind was in another place”, or “I couldn’t get it together”, or “my brain wasn’t in gear”, and so on. However we may describe it metaphorically, it all boils down to something being missing – and the missing piece is a piece of our mind.

Conclusion

So where is your mind today?
Is it all there?
Did you give someone a piece of your mind – however casually – on the way to work?

Check out how much of quality of behaviour do you currently ascribe to other levels such as capabilities, beliefs and values, identity or things spiritual?

Whatever the answer, it’s worth remembering that whatever you have placed in the domain of your identity – that is not really you. It is just what you think or what your views are. You weren’t born with your views. You’ve acquired and learnt them along the way. You can choose to keep them because they are serving you well or change them for others that will serve you better.
The real you lies behind all that.

So - as I sat on my hands in the restaurant, I became comfortable in the knowledge that I still had all the pieces of my mind and that behind the facade of prejudice and discomfort, there exists the real Mr Loud.