Welcome to Visionary Pursuit, a podcast where we explore what it takes to turn your big, bold ideas into reality. I'm Carolina Zuleta. I'm a life and business coach and your host for this podcast. I'm thrilled to have you here.Â
Welcome back. This is episode 28 of the Visionaries Pursuit Podcast. Today, I'm excited to share with all of you another lesson that profoundly has changed my life. Last week we talked about victimhood and how when we believe we're victims, we stay stuck. We are behind a door that is keeping us from living the life we want.
But when we use self-responsibility, that is the key to open that door and on the other side of that door, we have access to our personal power. And when we access that level of power, we become unstoppable. It doesn't matter what circumstances come our way, we can deal with them and continue moving forward to the life we really want.
And today the topic we're going to talk about is similar. In this case it's about self righteousness and what it's on. The other side of the door are the relationships we truly wanna have with everyone around us, both professionally, our stakeholders, clients, employees, business partners, and in our personal life, our spouse, our kids, our family members and friends.
So let's start by defining what self-righteousness is. Self-righteousness is a mindset that tells us that we are right and the other person is wrong. It comes from a place of certainty that the way we are acting, thinking, behaving, believing is the only correct way as all human beings, I've been self-righteous in my life.
I still am self-righteous in my life. Some weeks ago I saw reel on Instagram, and I think it was a couple's therapist who was saying something around the lines that the quality of a good relationship is not only how long a couple has been together, but how they've helped each other evolve their souls, how much they've grown because they've been together.
And it got me thinking in my relationship with my husband. So I wanna share with all of you a story. When I first met Andrew at that time, I had started a personal development program. I was living in Chicago. It was a year long program, and I was going deep into my own self-awareness, who I was, what I believed, and all those wonderful things.
As part of the program, I had some coaching sessions with the founder of this institute. And because I had just started dating Andrew, I decided that it would be a great idea that we did this first coaching session together. So I asked the owner of the institute that if instead of me doing the session alone, if I could do it with this new guy I was dating.
And he said, of course. And then I asked Andrew and he was game. So before we went into that coaching session. We made an agreement that we were going to say the absolute truth, that we weren't gonna hold back because we believe that if we were fully open, that would be the best for our relationship. We come into the coaching session and this man greets us and immediately looks at Andrew and says, Andrew, what is the thing about Carolina that bothers you the most?
And Andrew says, well, that she's quite self-righteous. I was so confused. I don't think I had ever heard the word self-righteous, and for sure I wasn't self-righteous. And after that, for weeks, I think even months, Andrew and I had very tough conversations about self-righteousness, about how it was so hard for me to see when I was wrong, when I had made a mistake, when I had hurt him.
Today, I am so grateful for Andrew because he never gave up. In fact, he hasn't given up yet 12 years later, and he still points out when I fall into self-righteousness. The difference is that at the beginning, 12 years ago, it would take me months to accept something. Now it could be minutes, maybe hours.
But now I've identified how self-righteousness feels in my body because for me, self-righteousness is a very physical experience. It feels like a knot in my throat. Or an experience of my chest caving in a lot of pressure in my chest that is pushing inward, and I'm sharing this because the first step to overcome this self-righteousness is for us to understand and to become aware of how we experience it in our body.
When I first started dating Andrew, I couldn't see how I was wrong. It wasn't that I knew I was wrong and I was pretending to believe I was right. It was truly that I believed I was right. That is the tricky part of self-righteousness, that it feels so true to us. For me, the last 12 years has been an the last, for me, the last 12 years have been an exploration as to why am I self-righteous?
Why are we all self-righteous? Why do we have this behavior? That creates so much distance from the other person, and I've come up with some hypotheses. Maybe there's more, but this is what I've noticed in me and the people I coach and my friends and family, we are self-righteous because it hurts to accept.
We've made a mistake, we've caused pain to someone. We've done something that is not the right thing to do. It hurts us. Some people might say it hurts our ego, but the point is that the experience is, ugh, ooh, I don't wanna accept I did that thing. I don't wanna accept that I caused pain to another person.
So when we feel that pain, what are subconscious? What our subconscious mind does is creates a defense, a way of protecting ourselves from accepting that we've been wrong, and that's what self-righteousness is. It's a defense mechanism, so we don't hurt inside. Another reason we are self-righteous. Because certainty makes us feel safe.
Uncertainty feels unsafe to us as human beings. So when we're completely sure that we believe in something and that is the right thing to believe, it's hard to let go of that certainty because it means we open ourselves so we don't know what. And uncertainty is super scary for human beings. So again, our mind is trying to protect us by making us believe even stronger, double down in the belief that maybe someone else is pointing out is not a fact, or it's not completely true, or it's just a perspective.
But we wanna defend and defend our point of view, defend that belief, so we don't open ourselves to uncertainty. Sometimes we have a belief that we've spent so much time and energy believing in. We've sacrificed so many other things to defend this belief. So how are we gonna give it up? That's scary, that's painful.
So again, we are self-righteous. The last reason is because for all of us, it feels good when we believe that we are more ethical, we're more intelligent, or we're more enlightened than others, that we know better than others. When we believe we're better than others, it feels good. It, it feels like a self-esteem boost.
So our self-righteousness is protecting that good feeling. As human beings, the thing we want to believe the most is that we are a good person and our brain will play all kinds of tricks to confirm that we're a good person. One of them is our self ness is believing that we are right, but here's the thing, I don't believe that when we've made mistakes, we've hurt others.
We've wronged others. No matter how big it has been, it doesn't necessarily makes us a bad person. I think another set of beliefs we need to cultivate in order to overcome self righteousness is that good people can cause pain, that good people can make mistakes, that good people can have bad behaviors.
When we allow ourselves to be in the ambiguity of humanity and not put ourselves in a box of like, I'm a good person and therefore everything I do has to be good. We can experience more freedom in being humans, and we don't have to defend ourselves so much. The strongest set of beliefs we have is our identity is everything we believe about who we are.
So for example, if I believe I'm a good mom and my kid comes to me with feedback of how I wasn't a good mom to her. That is going to hurt and my self-righteousness, my defensiveness is gonna come up to protect the identity that I'm a good mother, or if I believe I'm a good leader or I'm a good boss, or that I'm ready for the next level in my career.
When someone comes to point out how I may not be ready, how I may be making a mistake that is actually hurting my team or holding us back from being a high performing team, I'm gonna want to defend because I wanna keep the identity of a good leader, a good manager, someone who is growing in their career intact, and our brain tends to believe that if we accept that we're not perfect, then we're the opposite.
But part of what I wanna do with this podcast is to start planting the seeds in your mind that our humanity is not so black and white, that all of us are made of all the colors that exist, and we cannot only be put in one box or the other. So the bottom line is we are self righteous because we are trying to protect ourselves from feeling uncertain, hurt, wrong.
Or having a feeling that we don't wanna experience. So now let's talk about what is a problem with being self-righteous? I think the other thing we want as human beings is to be understood. I heard one cell in DeGeneres say It's good to be loved, but it's profound to be understood, and I couldn't agree more with that.
I think we all go through live looking at others and asking, maybe not verbally and direct, but asking in our minds. Do you see me? Do you understand the experience I'm having as a human being? Do you understand what I'm feeling and thinking? Can you witness me and my life? And self-righteousness stops us from witnessing and fully understanding the experience of the other person, and that's when relationships start going south.
So what is the answer? Like I said, if you think of self-righteousness as a door, the keys to open that door are humility, curiosity, open-mindedness, and empathy. So like I said, so as I said earlier, if you, so, as I said, if we think about self-righteousness as a door, that on the other side of that door are the quality of the relationships we wanna have with people on this side.
What we need, or the keys we need to open this door are empathy, humility, curiosity, and open-mindedness. Where we need to start is by becoming aware of those moments where we're being self-righteous. How do you experience self-righteousness in your body? How can you tell yourself, oh, right now I'm being self-righteous.
Right now, I'm defending myself. We have to operate from a belief that all of us are self-righteous. Not because we're bad people, but because we're human. And self-righteousness is a way that human beings defend themselves. So when we have those two things, we believe that we are self-righteous, that it's not about, if we are, we're not, but more about when are we being self-righteous, and how do we experience self-righteousness in our body?
Then we can take a deep breath and stay with a discomfort of wanting to defend ourselves, and instead of doing that, stay quiet. Stay breathing, stay with the discomfort of the physical experience you're having, and from there, engage your curiosity. When someone is giving us feedback, when someone is telling us something about how we behave or what we think, or we what we believe, it doesn't mean that the other person is also a hundred percent right, so we don't have to agree with everything that everyone is telling us.
But what we have to do in this moment is be curious enough to find out in what we're hearing from the other person, what might be true, what might be a blind spot for us, what are they truly saying to us? And from there, we can engage our empathy, where we can look at the other person and fully understand their experience, not from our point of view, but from their point of view.
From how they hear what we say, from how our words hurt them, how our actions hurt them, how our behaviors annoyed them or frustrating them, or stop them from being their best. At some point, empathy is the ability to stand on the other person's shoes and understand their experience. So if we do those two things, if we're curious and we bring empathy, then we can start opening that door and then the last step is to be able to tell the other person, huh, I hear you.
I understand how this, that I said hurt you. I understand how my behaviors created this harm. I understand how me as a leader and my actions are blocking my team. From achieving what we all want as a team. And when we're able to say those words and truly mean them, we start experiencing our freedom, our freedom to be our full human self with all our flaws and our mistakes and our opportunities to grow and our blind spots.
And this brings me to the most important thing we need to do in order to. Not be self-righteous and connect in a true and authentic way to the people that we want, and it's to learn to be our own best friends, to stay on our own side. We won't be able to overcome our self-righteousness if we are harshest critics, if we are so hard with ourselves.
In fact, I believe that the person we're trying to protect ourselves the most from is our own selves. When I learned to be kind to myself. Even when I had made a mistake, even when I had acted in a way that hurt, hurt others, or I acted in a way that I didn't wanna act, but I learned to be kind to myself and look at myself and be like, okay, yeah, that was a mistake.
Yeah, I didn't wanna do that. Yes, I created some harm and I still love myself and I'm still on my own side and I'm still believing I'm a good person. When I can do that, all my defenses go down. I don't have to protect myself from anything again, and then I can witness the experience of another human being.
I can understand my behaviors through their eyes, and I can acknowledge that and that my friends, it's what makes us feel the closest to another human being. Maybe you've had the experience that someone else wronged you, and when the other person says, oh my gosh, yes, you're right. I'm so sorry. Of course you are annoyed.
Of course you are frustrated. Of course you're hurt. I am so sorry that I said this or that. I acted in this way. It is the warmest hug we can receive. It feels good in our body because again, the question that we all carry in our hearts every day of, do you see me? Do you understand me is answered in that moment.
Overcoming self-righteousness is hard and you don't do it once. You do it every day again and again. But the more you overcome it, the easier it gets to, to, and when you start seeing the beautiful benefit of staying close to the people who surround you, it makes it all worth it. So my invitation today is that we all embrace our humanity, that we see ourself righteousness as something we do as human beings, as a defense mechanism, and that we accept that we are flawed and that we hurt people and that we make mistakes, but that none of those things makes us a bad person.
So in order for us to be the visionaries that we want, the leaders in this world that we want to be, I want us to see how perfectly imperfect we are, and remember that we can repair, that we can learn, and that we can be better every day. But it all starts by lowering our differences and accepting our humanity.
All right, I'll see you next time.
If you're currently pursuing a big, bold idea, we need to talk! In my coaching program, I'll teach you how to manage yourself, your own thoughts and emotions, as well as your team and your money, so you can turn your beautiful idea into a reality.
Go now to carozuleta. com slash consult, that is C A R O Z U L E T A dot com slash consult and complete the form to book a complimentary call with me. See you there!Â
