Citizens of the World: A Stoic Podcast for Curious Travelers - It Doesn’t Have to Upset You

Episode Date: April 1, 2022

You know when you’re traveling and you see families fuming in the airport or no longer speaking to each other at dinner? Chances are, one of them, or multiple people, blew something out of proportion and are still reacting to it. Why does this happen? How can we be more emotionally resilient, that is, more Stoic, and enjoy a more smoothly flowing life? Let’s dive into why things don’t have to upset us with an AirBnB story…Do you ever go blank or start rambling when someone puts you on the spot? I created a free Conversation Cheat Sheet with simple formulas you can use so you can respond with clarity, whether you’re in a meeting or just talking with friends.Download it at sarahmikutel.com/blanknomore and start feeling more confident in your conversations today.

Welcome to Live Without Borders, a travel and wellness show for expats, the expat curious, and globally minded citizens of the world. We are the travelers, the culturally curious, the experiences and not things kind of people. And we know that freedom is about more than getting on a plane. It's about becoming the most heroic versions of ourselves, which is why on this podcast you will hear insider travel secrets, inspiring expat stories, and advice on how to live abroad. but you will also hear episodes that will help give you the clarity, focus, and skills you need to create a life that will set your soul on fire. I am your host, Sarah Micatel, a certified clarity coach trained in the Enneagram, and I first moved abroad on my own at age 18, and I have been permanently enjoying life in Europe since 2010. If you are ready to make some big moves in your life

and want my help moving from someday to seize the day, visit live without borderspodcast.com. know when you're traveling and you see families fuming at each other at the airport or you see them at dinner and nobody's speaking to each other anymore and they're just staring at their phones, chances are one of them or multiple people blew something way out of proportion earlier in the day and they're still reacting to it. Why does this happen? And how can we be more emotionally resilient? That is, how can we be more stoic, capital S, stoic? And enjoy a more small, smoothly flowing life. Well, let's dive into why things don't have to upset us. And we can start with an Airbnb story. I was recently traveling around Scotland with a friend of mine.

And circumstances came up and we had to spend our first few nights at a hotel. That's not my first preference. So we were super excited about going into our Glasgow Airbnb. We were ready to is stretch out, have our own rooms. We were out all day on a tour. We had left our stuff at the hotel. Then we went back, picked it up, and headed to the Airbnb. And it was like an automated lock system, so nobody had to be there to greet us. So it was like totally fine that we showed up at like 10 p.m. or whatever it was. So we go inside and discover that it hadn't been cleaned. Like the beds weren't made. All the towels had been like thrown in the tub. So it was obviously. that a cleaner had not shown up that day. And at first we were like, are we seeing this correctly?

Like, this seems a little weird, but we didn't make a big deal out of it. We were just like, oh, are you seeing what I'm seeing in my crazy years? Is this place snuggling? So we were pretty laid back about it, but I know many people, and I'm sure you know people like this too, who if they had walked into a situation like that and were tired and just wanted to lay down and then realized like somebody had been sleeping in the bed they were going to be in. And obviously in an Airbnb or hotel, many people have slept in that bed. But especially in the time of COVID, we don't necessarily want to be like sleeping in a bed where the sheets haven't been made. But some people would have made that situation into a catastrophe. Like, oh my God,

how could they do this to me? They're so irresponsible. But as Marcus Aurelius said in the meditations, you don't have to turn this into something. It doesn't have to upset you. Things can't shape our decisions by themselves, meaning situations themselves don't upset us. It's what we make them mean. The cleaning service hadn't come that day. That's the fact. Our opinion about this determined how we felt about it. We could consider this a catastrophe, or we could be reasonable people. If you do feel yourself getting especially reactive in a situation. Pause, take a deep breath, and then just take a step back, get some cognitive distance, look at the facts, and then look at what you are adding to the story. Are you the type of person who would say, of course this would happen. This is always the

way things happen for me. It's just like my rotten luck. Or maybe you would say, how dare he do this to me. This is like a personal affront to me. I feel attacked. This person is so incompetent. Or maybe you would think something like, I knew I shouldn't have trusted this guy. I had my doubts, but I went against it. And this is just something that might immediately like flip in your brain before you give yourself some space. So that might be your gut reaction. But take some space and think about like, what is the real story here? Why am I adding that? extra layer, because that's often something that we don't give ourselves to space for. Why am I automatically thinking in this angry way? What's underneath this? What am I making this mean?

I've shared this quote before on this podcast, between stimulus and response lies a space. In that space lie our freedom and power to choose a response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness. And again, that was Stephen Covey, author Stephen Covey, quoting something that he found somewhere, but he had said at the time, like, oh, I think this quote like perfectly summarizes a core belief of the Holocaust survivor, Victor Frankel. So give yourself some space between stimulus and how you react to something. Acting stoically means trying to understand where somebody else is coming from, and this applies to misunderstandings as well as people who insult or offend us.

My friend and I sympathized with our Airbnb host. We didn't automatically assume the worst that he was out to get us. Would we have preferred a clean apartment to a dirty one? Yes, we would have. But we weren't attaching our self-worth to what was happening in this situation. We were not taking this as a personal attack to us or to our character. It was just a situation to be managed. And we also had perspective, right? Like right now, Russia, has declared war in Ukraine. They're bombing people. They are killing civilians. Having some dirty sheets is really not that big of a deal. Like zooming out, like what is my issue to other things that are happening in society that it was not a big deal. It was a first world problem. I'm bringing it up because people do blow these things like this out of proportion all the time you see it every day. And letting your emotions rule your life.

that way is a very poor way to live. It's going to shorten your life if you stressed yourself out so much. The Stoic said that we should approach life with apothea. And that sounds like the English word apathy, which means indifference and that's not what apathia means. Epitha is more like equanimity, emotional balance, a calm mind, not getting swept up in passions, which the Stoics said is the emotional suffering caused by incorrect value judgment. So we are like, put into a situation and we are making a value judgment about what's happening in this situation, but often these judgments are incorrect. And that's what's causing us a lot of pain. Seneca said we suffer more often in imagination than in reality, meaning we experience the world

through our own interpretation of events. We're creating drama in our heads, which leads us to feel a certain way and to act out. That is, if we don't give ourselves the space between stimulus and response. And a reminder that we all have the ability to feel all of the passions, the unhealthy emotions, but we're particularly affected by a specific passion according to our enneagram type. Here is how Russ Hudson described the passions of the nine enneagram types in his audiobook, the enneagram nine gateways to presence. And again, when we're talking about passion, we're talking about the unhealthy emotion that is coloring the way we are seeing ourselves and the world, the tinted glasses we have on that are distorting our view. So according to Russ, type one's passion

is resentment, frustration, disgust, annoyance with everything. They think their likes and dislikes are facts. Type two, pride, which is false humility. Tews want you to know everything, they do. They want to be recognized as the best friend, and they try really hard to be thought of in a favorable way. Type three, vanity. This is an old-fashioned term for narcissism. Three's look at what other people value, and they do it because they want their approval. And like all of passions, this is not a conscious thing. Type four, envy. This is the addiction slash expectation of being disappointed and it manifests physically as sighing. Here we go again. Other people are more privileged than me. Other people have more happiness than me. Type 5, Averisse and Russas. It's not true that

fives withhold information. This is like a famous thing that people say about fives. It's not that they withhold information. That's the one thing that they love to give away. Here, Averis is a withholding of the heart, contact, soul, pulling back, and contracting. Their instinctual response is to hide the heart and make sure and nothing gets to it. Type six, angst, a spiritual anguish. It's this is a kind of despair. It's like a twisting feeling that's always there in the background. Sixes get really carried away by their anxious thoughts. Type seven, gluttony, and this is gluttony for experience. Sevens try one thing and then they're like, this isn't it? It must be something else that I'm looking for. Like, what is next?

and they bounce to the next thing. And the issue isn't with the experience itself, but it's the fact that sevens are not present for any of it. They're constantly on the hunt for the next thing. Type A, lust. The eight personality masks true aliveness. It varies sensitivity and vulnerability, and it replaces it with lust for control and power and energy.

The ego tries to become powerful in a way that is different than the real thing. And type nine's passion is slow. loss, which is numbing out self-erasing, a kind of resistance to doing the work that can lead to true liberation and self-development. So nines need to acknowledge that they matter and that they don't have to hide. And again, that all came from Russ Hudson's audiobook, the Enneagram Nine Gateways to Presence. Now, I'm a nine and my friend isn't also a nine. So when we were being like very laid back in this situation, it wasn't because we were in this. We were in this unhealthy state of, well, we don't matter. So it's totally fine if we have dirty sheets. Like, who cares?

No, we could be laid back about the situation and stand up for ourselves, but doing it in like a kind and compassionate way. So I messaged our host and I said, oh, this apartment is really beautiful. But unfortunately, the cleaner didn't come. And then I got on the phone with him and we had a chat and he was mortified and was saying like, my gosh, I've been hosting for like six years and this has never happened to me. And, you know, I could tell he felt really bad and I didn't want to make his situation worse. So at first he was like, well, do you want to stay in a hotel tonight? And really, my friend and I did not want to. We just wanted to have our own rooms and have like a relaxing night's sleep. And so our host was able to get a cleaner to come over. And there was like a big,

there was like a misunderstanding of that day and it doesn't really matter why it happened. The point of the story is that we didn't make a big deal out of it. The host was able to resolve the situation. Somebody came over that night and gave us clean sheets and made the bed and gave us new towels and all was fine and the host ended up giving us half off of our stay, like refunding half of our stay because he felt so bad. But we never made him feel bad in any of this situation. We're like, you know what? We understand. Like these things happen. it's not that big of a deal. We don't have to get upset about this. So we took the action that we needed to take to get our flat cleaned and that was it. We didn't have to like blow it out of proportion.

So you can still take action if it's needed. The Stoics say that you should play an active role in your life and in society. We're not just letting things happen to us. Sure, if a situation doesn't require any action, then you can like let a roll and move on. But if you need to act, then act. The Stoic Chrysippus had a metaphor about resisting life versus accepting it, and it goes something like this. You're a dog tied to a moving cart. You can either dig in your heels and be dragged, or you can just start walking. Either way, you are moving, but you can decide how painful or easy it can be. In addition to taking a pause before you react and questioning your immediate judgments and the first impressions, look for the good in the situation. So when my friend and I were in that apartment in Glasgow, it was a beautiful apartment. And we were thinking, wow, we are so excited that we get to spend

the next few days in this place. It's a great location. There's so many cute cafes around. I'm with a friend. If you are the type of person who often sees what's not right in a situation when you walk in, I encourage you to give yourself the challenge of anytime you notice something bad, take a moment to notice the good. Another example of emotional reactivity that I saw recently was a very ironic example that has stayed with me. So I was participating in a stoic online meetup. we were about to do a meditation. And all of a sudden we got Zoom bombed.

And if you don't know what that is, it's when strangers hijack your Zoom meeting and anything goes. And it often can get like really lewd. And so there was this guy who came in and who was hiding his face, of course, and started singing this really gross song. And then like somebody else jumped in. It was just sort of like chaos. And then the chat started to get super vulgar.

But when it first happened, I was like, oh my gosh, is this just a very avant-garde form of meditation? Because I had no idea what was going on. And then it just got Router and Router. And I was like, oh, no, we were definitely hijacked. And our host was trying to manage things and she's visually impaired. And so it was not as easy for her as somebody else to try to get control of the situation. And there was some sort of like bug in the system. know, but she wasn't able to kick them out. So she had to shut down the room. She was able to

restart it, but it was just kind of confusion. And so only some people were able to come back. And most of us were very kind about this and, you know, just expressed our compassion for the host because, yes, we are practicing stoicism, but we're still human beings, right? We're not like perfect sages who have like perfect emotional balance all the time. You know, we get rocked too, but that's why we do these practices. So when things come up, we can be kind of, you know, as resilient as possible. But there was one participant who immediately went to the meetup page and wrote kind of a scathing review saying how like mad she was about the situation. And, you know, if the host don't get it together, she's not coming back to another.

one. And that's just a perfect example. And again, an ironic one since it was a stoic medium of she didn't like pause and reflect and think about, you know, maybe the host is really embarrassed and stressed out. And, you know, she's doing her best. Instead, the person who wrote the critique just was talking about how they personally were mad. And the person who wrote the critique definitely definitely needs to study more about stoicism because she was not making any effort to understand how the host might be feeling in that moment. She was just doing an immediate event with no pause between the stibulus and response. Going back to that Marcus quote again, you don't have to turn this into something. It doesn't have to upset you. Things can't shape our decisions by

themselves, but that person who wrote that bad review, she was letting her thoughts and feelings get the better of her. And thoughts and feelings and behavior, they're all intertwined. If you feel upset, it has to do with a current thought you have, but feelings can also bring up old thoughts, and this can affect your behavior. So if you think that you've been disrespected and you're feeling hurt, then your instinct might be to lash out. But your actions also influence how you think and feel, you don't have to lash out. You can choose to pause and take a wider view of what's going on. And if you want to hear more about where emotions come from and what they are, you can go back and listen to my episode, how emotions are made and how to master them. And by the way, action influencing

emotion works for other situations to any situation. So let's say that you are feeling down. You're a little depressed and you just don't feel like seeing anyone. You just want to lay in bed and you're just feeling blah and you kind of just want to like roll around to that emotion. Taking the action of dragging yourself out of bed to meet a friend can lead to you having fun, shifting your feelings to more positive ones. I mean, if you stay in bed, that's not going to happen. You're just going to dwell and marinate in like bad feelings. But if you take action and engage in things that normally make you feel good, you're moving in the right direction. And this is what cognitive behavioral therapist would prescribe. Yeah, work on your thoughts, but also get your butt out of bed and start

living. Start taking action, taking control of your life. Most things are not in your control, but here's what is what you think, feel, and act. It's your thoughts, it's how you respond, what you choose to do. And this is not easy work. You know, this is among the hardest work that you will ever do. But this is the path to freedom and emotional resiliency and to cultivating your character. When life is not going your way, take a breath before you respond. Consider the other side. Take the action that needs to be taken and don't blow things out proportion and look for the good in the situation. When you get curious with your thoughts, when you learn to challenge your judgments, when you become aware of the patterns that have been holding you

back and you get closer to the essence of who you are, this is the path to flurge. and fulfillment and well-being. This is the path to the good life, to a life worth living. Do you ever go blank or start rambling when someone puts you on the spot? I created a free conversation sheet sheet with simple formulas that you can use so you can respond with clarity, whether you're in a meeting or just talking with friends. Download it at sarahmicatel.com slash blank no more.