Perfectionist Professional Woman Podcast

Welcome to the Perfectionist Professional Woman podcast. This is Episode 6, “Seeing Each Other as God Does.”

I’m Keri Martinez. I’m a wife and mother of three children and three bonus children. I’m also a certified life coach and a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. For a good portion of my life, I equated perfection with happiness and success. I thought that striving to be perfect and do things perfectly was the key to feeling happy and to being successful. I’ve since come to realize that perfection isn’t necessary to achieve either one of those–quite the opposite, in fact–and that has made such a difference in how I think, feel, and experience life. So if you’re a professional woman and you’d like to know how to release perfectionism so you can trade self-doubt for self-confidence, stop beating yourself up, and start enjoying your life more, then come with me. Let’s do this together.

Hello, and welcome to the podcast. This week, I’m doing something a little different and I am actually recording a video version of this podcast. I’m recording a presentation that I gave last night to my ward’s Relief Society group. And if you’re not a member of my church, the Relief Society is our church’s women’s organization. Last night, I was asked to give a presentation on seeing ourselves and others as God sees us, and there was a sister that had to leave before I got to my presentation. She asked if it was available anywhere else for her to view, and I said, “No.” But then I woke up this morning and thought, hey, wouldn’t it be fun to record this so that I could share it not only with her, but other women that weren’t able to make it and people outside of my ward’s boundaries? Because I think the content that I shared was very valuable. It has certainly helped me a great deal in my life, and I hope that it can also help other people throughout the world. So that’s what we’re doing today.

As I said, the topic of the presentation is seeing each other as God sees us. And what I hope to do through here is to offer you some different perspectives, some different lenses, so to speak, through which you can view the world and other people to help you change your experience with them to help make it easier for you to love and accept other people. So, in the church, or in Christian religions, we are given various commandments from the Savior to love our fellow man. In the New Testament, there is the commandment (and in the Old Testament), “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” In John 13:34, the Savior says, “A new commandment I give unto you that you love one another; as I have loved you that you also love one another.” And in the Doctrine and Covenants, we’re told to be one, and we’re told that if we are not one, then we are not Christ’s.

So sometimes when I read or hear or think about these commandments, these scriptures, I can feel a little overwhelmed and inadequate. And like I just, this is hard to love each other as we love ourselves, it’s hard to be one with people that we don’t know, and that we’re not sure are going to accept us. It’s a high bar to try and love other people as the Savior loved them, right? And sometimes it’s challenging because to love other people, because we don’t really love ourselves first, or we don’t even like ourselves. Sometimes it’s easier to like and love other people more than it is to like and love ourselves.

So these commandments can be challenging to follow for a variety of reasons. And certainly they can be challenging, more challenging to follow based on the people that you’re interacting with. But there’s a quote that I heard in a BYU devotional back from 2013 that talks about how “God loves us unconditionally, eternally and unchangingly. Our worth is infinite because we are his daughters and sons. No one spirit is more valuable than another.” So my point in sharing that is that yes, it can be challenging to love ourselves to see ourselves as God sees us. It can be challenging to love others and see them as God sees them. But it is worth it to try. It is worth it to keep trying. When we fall down and fail, it is worth it to keep going because of the great love that God has for each of us that is unconditional, eternal and unchanging. Because our worth is infinite, it is worth it to try and build up that belief within ourselves and to also help others build up that belief about themselves.

So let’s think back to the commandments that I just referenced, and let’s start by looking at what happens when we don’t follow them. Can you think of a time in your life when you have been judged wrongly or misjudged by another person — could be a parent, a spouse, significant other, children, other family members, friends, neighbors, co-workers, teachers, church members, or even complete strangers? Can you think of a time when you have been misjudged by someone else?
Then turn it around, and can you think of a time when you have misjudged someone from one of those categories, you have misjudged another human? Okay, so I can think of examples in my own life where I have been misjudged by and misjudged people in each one of those categories. And I point that out to say that it is completely normal for us to do that. It is normal and natural for us to judge other people to varying degrees–we all do it.

Something that I’d like to bring up, though, is that typically, when we’re in one of those situations of either being judged by or judging someone else, we move into blaming and shaming. So when someone else is judging us, we blame them. And when we are judging someone else–misjudging someone else–and we realize it, we can move to a point of feeling shame about that. And I just want to offer that either one of those options, blaming someone who is misjudging you or shaming yourself when you realize you’re misjudging someone else, neither one of those is useful. They don’t actually improve the situation. Blaming someone else isn’t going to stop them from misjudging you, and shaming yourself isn’t actually going to stop yourself from misjudging people in the future.

And another reason that it’s not useful to blame and shame is because judging other people is normal, natural and healthy. Now that may seem like something, a weird idea, but just hear me out here. Each of us and our human brains, our brain’s Prime Directive if you’re a Star Trek fan, or our brain’s primary function is to keep us alive. Yes, it does other things, but its primary goal is to keep us alive. And in order to keep us alive, it has to make snap judgments about anything that might potentially harm us physically, emotionally or spiritually. And that includes other people, right? When we meet somebody new, your brain, it makes sense that your brain is going to try to make a quick determination of whether this other person is going to hurt me physically, emotionally or spiritually. So it is normal, natural and healthy to do this. But that doesn’t mean we just want to let our brain operate this way all the time. Because it is normal, natural and healthy for toddlers to throw temper tantrums, but we also know that it is beneficial to help them learn to manage themselves so that they can integrate and operate well within society as they get older, right?

So sometimes our brains are operating off of incomplete information, when we’re judging other people, or sometimes our brains are just misinterpreting the information that they’re given about other people. So in those situations, it makes sense that we want to try and override our brain’s default operating functioning of judging these other people, and maybe look a little deeper on them. So intentionally trying to see others as God sees them. And that includes ourselves. Intentionally trying to see ourselves as God sees us is one way that we can override that default judgmental process that our brain does, especially if the judgment of the other person or ourselves is negative. Intentionally trying to figure out how God sees that other person or ourselves can move us out of that judgmental space.

Okay, so I think it’s one thing for us to understand that intellectually, right? But trying to apply that or put it into practice can be a whole different thing. So, about five years ago, I attended a training through the school district that I worked for with a man named Steve Zuieback. And he shared something in that training that has given me a different set of goggles to view other people; it has changed the way I look at other people, and in a big way. And it has made it easier, I think, for me to see other people as God sees them, or at least to get me closer to that. I am certainly not there yet. But I am, I can definitely tell that I am closer towards that than I was before I learned this concept.

So the concept he shared was actually created by a man named Michael Grinder, and it is called the “Circles of Humanness.” And I will put links in the show notes, too–there’s a great video that Michael Grinder has on YouTube to give you if you’d like more information about that, I will put, excuse me, I’ll put a link to that in the show notes for you to check it out. But basically, in the Circles of Humanness, he talks about how there are many layers to being a human. And the graphic that he shares is a series of five concentric circles. And the circles increase in importance, the further into the circle you go. So the outer layers of the circle are less important than the inner layers.

So let’s take a look at what those layers are. The outermost layer is “appearance.” Okay, so that’s things like how you look, your skin color, hair color, eye color, height, weight, gender, you know, tattoos, piercings, the clothing you’re wearing, also, you know, cleanliness. All those kinds of things–how you appear to the world. The next ring in is “behaviors.” And so this is things that you’re doing–actions and also things that you’re saying. The next ring in is “styles” and styles has to do with how you’re behaving within different contexts. So for example, how you behave at church is a little bit different from how you behave when you’re at home with your family versus out at a restaurant versus at a funeral versus at a party, right. So that’s what styles are. The next ring in is your “values.” So these are your beliefs that you live by that guide your life, and then the innermost circle is your “core identity.”

And Michael Grinder says that we size up, when we meet somebody new, we size them up within 40 seconds. And what we are using to size others up are these outer two layers–the “appearance” and their “behavior.” So we are making a snap judgment, our brain makes a snap judgment of this person we’re meeting based on how they look and how they act or what they’re saying, right? He also says that it’s not a problem that we do this; we just need to be aware that we do this. Because once we’re aware of it, we can change it or manage it. You can’t change or manage something if you’re not aware you’re doing it, right? But if we’re aware of it, we can change it if we want to.

So you may be familiar with the scripture from Samuel, 1 Samuel 16:7, verse seven says that, “man looketh on the outward appearance,” so that kind of goes right in line with what Mr. Grinder says here, that we’re judging other people based on their appearance and their behavior, “but the Lord looketh on the heart.” So my little add-on to Michael Grinder’s idea of the Circles of Humanness is, the Lord is judging us based on our core identity. He’s not judging us based on how we look, the clothes we’re wearing. You know, the Lord is judging us based on our heart, which I am interpreting from Michael Grinder’s model here, of that’s our core identity. And I think our goal is to get to the point where we can judge others also based on their core identity and not skip over not even consider appearance and behavior. I don’t know if that’s possible for us to do that in this lifetime. But for sure, it’s possible for us to intentionally look beyond just the appearance and behavior to look at other things that would be more valuable and more useful at helping us to connect with others, to relate to others, to feel compassion and love for others, to see them as God sees them, than if we just stay stuck in judging other people based on their appearance and behavior.

Okay, so when I, as I mentioned, when Steve Zuieback presented this concept, I thought, “Oh, yeah, that’s well and good. That makes sense. I can see how all that works.” But then he said something a little bit later that really blew my mind. He said that, “You can have the same identity and values as someone else, but how you wear it can be different.” And I don’t know why that hit me the way it did. But that really landed very deeply for me when he said that. When he said that, I had an immediate recollection of a father that used to drop off his child at a school I worked at years before. And this man had a shaved head. He was tattooed from head to toe, had piercings all over, he often smelled of alcohol or weed or cigarette smoke. He used language that hurt my ears. And I remember, at the time, when I would see him drop his child off at school, that I immediately decided we had nothing in common, I wanted nothing to do with him, he just seemed so different from how I was choosing to live my life and what I thought was important. I made a snap judgment that he was not a good parent that he didn’t care about his kid, purely based on how he looked and how he was acting and the words he was using. I had all kinds of judgment about his choice for his lifestyle. So that immediately flashed into my mind when Steve Zuieback made this comment about how you can have the same values and different, but you can, you can have the same identity and values, but how you wear them can be different. And it occurred to me at that point that, so I had been thinking that we did not share the same values around love for our children. But it occurred to me then that I really couldn’t make that judgment. And there was actually lots of evidence that he did love his child, because every day he brought his kid to school. Every day, when he brought his kid, the kid had clothing and shoes on. Now they weren’t always clean, but the kid was clothed and had shoes on his feet. The, he got the child to school in time for breakfast. I don’t know if they didn’t have food in the home or what that whole situation was like, but he got the child to school in time, so the child could eat breakfast. And then the child stayed there so that they can also eat lunch. The child came with a backpack. I have no idea what was in the backpack, but I’m just going to assume that there were stuff in the backpack to help the kid be successful and to learn in class that day. So actually, when I looked at it that way, there was all kinds of evidence that we had the same value of loving and caring for our children. But I had been completely oblivious and unwilling to see that because I was stuck in viewing him only based on the external two layers of his humanness, which are his appearance and his behavior.

So that really hit me in a big way! And then ever since then, I think about this idea of these Circles of Humanness anytime I am meeting (well, not anytime) but I try to, I think about this a lot when I’m meeting new people, especially people that initially seem different or that seem challenging for me to interact with. So I’ll give you another example. During COVID, I remember walking into our local grocery store and witnessing a man (customer) screaming at the top of his lungs at one of the supermarket’s employees. And he was very vocally expressing his opinion about their then mandatory mask policy and how he didn’t want to follow it and didn’t like it. And because of how he was acting, I immediately had a judgment–“he’s so rude and he’s uncouth and he shouldn’t be talking to other people that way” and you know all of that. And that he was just wrong and all of that. And it wasn’t until I later stepped back and I was reflecting back on that experience, and I realized, “Hey, we actually both have the same value around our personal agency. And we value being able to think and act the way we want, and we value not being, we both don’t like being told what to do.” Okay. But how we were that is very different. Now, I say this, I’m not, I don’t want to, I don’t, I still don’t think that how he behaved was appropriate. I think there were better ways–he shouldn’t have been yelling at the poor store employee, they were just trying to do their job and all of that. So I’m not condoning his behavior. But when I recognized that we both shared a similar value, it opened my heart, it made it easier for me to be compassionate and loving, and to see him more as God sees him. So I hope you can see the power behind using this kind of thing. I think that’s the purpose of our life is, I don’t know that we will ever get past our brains making these snap judgments based on behavior and appearance alone, but the more we can practice intentionally looking for, comparing or looking for values that we share in common, the better we will get at being able to be compassionate and loving and see other people as God sees them, including ourselves.
So I will say that every time I have done this, and have intentionally looked for values that we might have in common, I’ve been able to find it. I can’t think of one example where I’ve encountered somebody else, and initially had a negative judgment, but when I’ve stepped back, and tried to find commonality through our values, that I haven’t been able to do that. So it’s a very powerful lesson for me that the more we practice this, the better we will get at it. And that also, there is way more to unite us than there is to divide us. If we stay just on the surface outer layers of appearance and behavior, then we are really missing out on the opportunity to connect with other humans, and to create more peace for ourselves and for the rest of the world.

Now, I mentioned earlier in the presentation that one of the things that trips our brain up in making judgments of other people is when our brain is trying to make a determination or a judgment about someone else, but it’s doing it based on an incomplete set of information. And I shared a video to illustrate how this works. In this video, (I’m not going to include it in the presentation here because of copyright issues) but in this video, there’s a young woman, long blonde hair, young white girl, and she is running across the screen. And then shortly after that you see a man much larger, darker than her that is chasing her, or that appears to be chasing her. And so it’s easy to, seeing only that, to make a judgment that oh, he’s going after her for some reason. But then later, you see the perspective in the video shift. And instead of seeing the woman and the man from the side where it looks like the man is running behind her, it shifts to where the perspective is that the woman and the man running towards the camera. And you can see that they’re actually running more side by side. And you also see other people in the scene, you see a woman that’s standing outside of her car, you see another man that is also standing outside of a car and he’s beckoning with one of his hands to come towards him. You can see a glow of some fire. You see other people that are all standing and getting outside of their car to see what’s going on. And then you see the woman and the man that were initially running, you realize that they are running towards a car accident. And so the realization at that point is that what you initially thought might be happening in the video is completely different from what was actually happening.

So I like to use stories or circumstances like that, to remind myself to always ask, “What am I not seeing?” Particularly when I am interacting with someone whose behavior I am perceiving as being challenging or wrong, whether it’s someone I know like, you know, a family member, my children, whatever, or it’s somebody that I don’t know. If there’s a behavior going on that seems wrong or inappropriate to me, more than likely there is something behind the scenes that I’m not aware of something going on internally for them that I am not aware of. And I may not know what that is. The point is not to try and figure that out in the moment. The point is just to ask yourself, “What am I missing?” to remind yourself that you are missing something, I guarantee it. And when you realize that you don’t have the complete picture, it’s easier to view that other person from an attitude of compassion and openness. Not saying that you need to condone or agree with or accept the behavior, but it makes it easier for you to understand and connect with that person on some level.

I hope that what I’ve shared with you these tools–the Circles of Humanness by Michael Grinder, this idea of always questioning “What am I missing?”–those kinds of things, helps you in the same way that it has helped me to connect with, to see other people as God sees them, to move yourself more closely towards that ideal goal. I don’t know that we’ll ever get there in this lifetime. But I definitely feel like we can get closer to that ideal. And doing so will not only bring peace and openness and love to us, but it will also help to spread it within the world, which I think our world desperately needs that right now.

All right. That’s what I have for you this week. Thank you for listening to or watching this episode of the Perfectionist Professional Woman Podcast. If you’d like to see show notes and a transcript, head over to kerimartinez.com/6. That’s k-e-r-i-m-a-r-t-i-n-e-z dot com forward slash the number six. If you have any questions or comments, you can reach out to me on Instagram or Facebook. I’m @kerimartinezcoaching on both.

Please help me spread some light and love in the world and share this episode with anyone you think might benefit from it. I think the more people who know about these ideas and strategies, the better.

Have a beautiful week – ciao for now!