Ep #78: When Someone Hates You

Welcome to The Life Coach School Podcast, where it's all about real clients, real problems, and real coaching. Now your host, Master Coach Instructor, Brooke Castillo.

What do you mean 78? Holy cow. I'm so excited. I'm so excited to be here with you all. Kids are back in school. Whoop, whoop. Let's have some fun now. You guys, I am feeling like I am on the verge of an explosion in my life. I've felt this way. It was interesting, the last group that was here, I said to them, "Can you guys feel it? Like I'm ready to take it all up to the next level." What that means is I've been doing all this work up to this point and now I can feel the fruits of my labor, so to speak. It's very, very exciting. Those of you who know about the Law of Attraction are with me on this, like all of a sudden I'm manifesting like crazy. People are coming in to my life that are amazing. I'm getting all these amazing opportunities and the students that I've had and the amount of growth that they've had, the quality of the work that they're doing. I can't even tell you guys. I'm just like in a really good space.

Let's see. Have you guys checked out my other podcast, How to be a Life Coach? If you haven't, make sure you check that out because today we're having a very, very positive wonderful topic called When Someone Hates You. Wow. Now, some of you maybe lucky enough to never have had anyone hate you. If that's you, then congratulations, but the rest of us, this podcast is for us. If you're a coach, maybe you'll have a client that someday has someone that hates them. Maybe if you have a teenager, you guys can relate to this, someone telling you at least that they hate you but they really don't. Anyways, here's the deal, I have found that as I have grown more and more in my business, the more popular I've gotten, the more listeners I have, the more audience members I have, the more haters I have, which is not enjoyable.

That's actually not what I'm going to talk about in specifics because there's a lot of you that listen to this that aren't coaches, that aren't maybe popular yet in terms of your businesses where you're having as many haters. What I want to talk to you about is mostly in your circle of life, in your environment, in your school maybe, in your neighborhood, so to speak. What do you do when someone hates you? Maybe it's not hate. Maybe they just don't like you, but I wanted to use the hate word here because I think that when someone really genuinely hates us, it's a lot more intense, but you can apply everything that I'm going to teach you in this podcast, of course, to someone just not liking you or not caring for you.

One of the things that I learned a long time ago is that not everyone is going to like me. I'm not like a really bland personality that just fades in that people can ignore. I'm typically really loud and opinionated and a little much as people have described me, "She's a little much." Then one of my best friends, Jody, is a lot more much than I am and she has a lot of haters too and she has a lot of haters at her work that customers somewhat that write horrible things about her on Yelp. She has to deal with that, but also just people in her life just don't enjoy her personality, don't like her, and she's having to deal with that a lot so we have this conversation quite a bit.

First and foremost, let's all go to the place where there is someone that hates you. How do we know that they hate you? That's the first important thing. In order for us to classify that in the model as a circumstance, they have to have told you that they hate you in no uncertain terms. Otherwise, it's you projecting that on to the person and therefore, that is just a thought. We're going to assume for the sake of this argument that they have told you that they hate you. This person has told you, "I hate you," or has expressed severe dislike of you, or has said something similar to “f you” to you. For some of you, this may be someone close to you. This may be someone like your husband's ex-wife. This maybe an old friend. This may be someone that maybe you did "something" to someone in your life that has told you in no uncertain terms that they hate you.

I want you to acknowledge, first and foremost, that someone telling you that they hate you is a circumstance. All right? It is neutral. I know that so many of you will say, "How can you say that? That's such a painful experience to have someone say that to you. It's so violent. It's so horrible." It's really not. It's really not a horrible experience until you interpret it that way. That's really important for you to understand. Someone telling you that they hate you is neutral until you make it mean something. That's the first thing. It's a circumstance, it's neutral. Someone can tell you that they hate you and if it's a benign person that doesn't know you or whatever, that's not going to affect you as if someone that you genuinely care about were to say that to you. How you choose to think about that circumstance is going to influence what you feel. That's the first thing that you need to know.

The second thing that you need to know is that people are allowed to feel and say whatever they want. Talk about this all the time on the podcast, that people really are allowed to hate whatever they want to hate. They're allowed to say whatever they want to say to you or to other people about you. They're allowed. I think one of the hardest things for many people is to not try and control a person who is hating you. We want to fix it. We want to make it different. We want them to behave differently. We want to justify ourselves so they will change how they feel. But if you can remember that them hating you is a circumstance and that they're allowed to do whatever they want, they're an adult so they're allowed to hate whoever they want including you, it will release you from that desire and that need to try and change them or to tell them that they're not allowed to hate you, that that's not a good thing and they should do something different. Those two things will immediately give you relief if you can accept them.

Now, the important thing to ask yourself when someone has expressed that they hate you or severely dislike you or whatever, what are you making that mean? Now, so many of us make it mean something about us. If somebody says, "I hate you," I can make that mean that I'm hateful, that I'm not a good person, that I did something horribly wrong, that I am not worthy. I can make it mean so many things that will cause me a tremendous amount of pain. If you're experiencing this right now, it's a really, really important question to ask yourself, when someone hates you, what are you making it mean about you? When you make someone else's feelings mean something about you, you are in a tremendous amount of pain usually.

Here's what I want you to know. Someone else's feelings, their feeling of hate is about them. How do we know this? We know this because our thoughts create our feelings. Other people's thoughts create their feelings. If someone else is feeling hate, it's because of their thoughts. In this situation, it would be their thoughts about us. One of the things that we try and do is change other people's thoughts about us so they won't feel hate, and it's just exhausting, right? I got to go to that person who hates me. I got to try and change their brains so then they'll feel differently so I can make myself feel better about what I'm making it mean.

Here's something I want to offer you. You do not need to change how they're thinking. You do not need to change how they're feeling. All you need to do is change what you're thinking and what you're feeling. If we were going to run a model on this, in this C line, we would put, "Sally hates me. Sally said she hates me." Then I would look at my T line, which is the thought and that also answers the question, what am I making that mean? I'm making it mean I'm not a good person. I'm making it mean I did something terribly wrong and then I felt terrible. I felt awful. I feel unworthy. Then what do I do? How do I act towards Sally? Or maybe Sally hates me and I make it mean that Sally is a bitch and that I hate her. Then all of a sudden, I'm the one acting hateful.

Look at it, what are you making it mean? If you can make it mean that Sally is making a choice, Sally is having thoughts about me that are hurting her, right? That's a really, really important point when you're talking about hate. Hate is one of those emotions that only the person who is thinking the hateful thoughts experiences. If Sally hates me, I don't feel hate. I may feel upset. I may feel sad. I may feel diminished, but I don't feel hate. She feels hate. Hate doesn't feel good, by the way. Unless I hate her back, I'm not the one feeling hate, she is. A lot of people have this perception that if someone else is feeling an emotion towards us, that then somehow that emotion will get on us, that we will experience it. Some will say, "I definitely experience their hate." No, it's impossible. You can't experience someone else's emotion. You can experience something that they said and what you thought about it, but you will only be experiencing the feeling that you created with your mind. You're not experiencing their emotion. It's absolutely impossible for you to feel the emotion of somebody else.

Now, inevitably, someone will say to me, "Well, what about energy? What about the energy of their emotion? Like, you can feel it when you walk in the room." Now, there's a huge difference here and I want to make sure that I'm really clear. Many of us are highly sensitive and we can sense someone else's emotion. We can sense what they are experiencing. That is very different than us experiencing the emotion ourselves. I can walk into a room and sense that someone's very angry. That doesn't mean that I am feeling their energy in terms of having the same emotion as they are. Be very, very clear about this. Someone else is feeling anger doesn't mean that you're feeling anger as well. It means you're sensing that they're angry. Make sure that you separate that out. Other people's emotions are for other people. Our emotions are for us. If someone's feeling hate towards us and they're even "directing it" towards us and talking to us about it, we never experience their emotion. We only experience the emotion we create by what we make it mean. I hope the makes sense.

One of the things that you can ask yourself after you ask yourself, "What am I making this mean?" is "How do I feel?" It's really important that you distinguish your feeling from the other person's feeling. If the other person is feeling hate, make sure you check in and see what you're feeling. Are you also feeling hate towards that person? Are you feeling compassion for the person? Are you feeling defensive and upset and angry towards that person because they're expressing hate? In this moment, it is so important that you acknowledge what you are feeling and that you take responsibility for your own feeling that you are creating. What this will do is first, it will bring you back into your power of owning your own emotion which is very important in a moment like that. It will also help you recognize that you are the creator of your own emotion because you'll be able to identify the feeling that you're having and why you're feeling it.

Now remember, you're always feeling a feeling because of a thought you're having. If you think the feeling that you're having is because of Sally, because of this other person hating on you, you can self-correct and remind yourself, "No, she doesn't influence me. Her feelings don't influence me until I have a thought about it." When you recognize the thought you're having by asking the question, "What are you making it mean?", then you can see the feeling that you're having and you can attribute it toward your own thinking.

One of the hardest that you will come up against is maybe your desire to change how the other person is feeling. You may not like it that Sally hates you. You may want to change Sally's feelings, but before you attempt to even have a conversation with Sally and change the way Sally is feeling is you have to acknowledge what you're feeling and make sure if you're going to talk to Sally, it's coming from a positive place. If it's coming from a place of desperation and fear and embarrassment and defensiveness, you're going to have a much different result than if you're coming from a place of self compassion and understanding.

I remember I did this work and I've talked about it on this podcast before when this person didn't like me and I actually think that there's a few people, and I can't put it in the C line but I think there's some people that probably hate me. One of the things that I like to say jokingly to myself is, "I get it. There's a lot of times when I don't like me either. There's a lot of times when I actually hate me. I understand that. I can relate to that person." As soon as I say that to myself, it makes me laugh a little bit. I get it. But then I understand that their feelings are coming from the way that they're thinking about me and so I try to imagine how they might see me from their perspective, how they might be thinking about me, and why they would be causing all this negative emotion in their own life. I promise you, when that happens, I can come from a place of compassion.

A lot of my students are like, "Whoa. I don't know about that. That's a pretty challenging position for me to consider is that someone could hate me and I could feel compassion towards them." But if you really recognize, if you do this work long enough and you really recognize how terrible it feels to hate something or someone, it feels terrible in your body. It makes it easier to have compassion towards someone who's feeling that, even if they're "directing" it at you or blaming you or using you as an excuse to feel that way.

It's very similar to the work we do on unconditional love. We feel love for ourselves because it feels good to us and we choose not to feel hate because it doesn't feel good to us. When we can keep ourselves in the space of love, we get to feel good most of the time. When we see that someone else is not able to keep themselves in this space of love, when they are using their reasoning to hate, we can have compassion for them. Because there is, in my mind, no upside to feeling hate. People say, "What about taking action? What about, like, can't we hate violence? Can't we hate people that hate?" It doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make sense to hate the haters. It just brings more hate into the world. There is no upside. Hate doesn't protect you even though it may feel like it does. Hate doesn't help you even though it may feel like it does.

Now, if you're in a state of complete despondent despair and hate is the next emotion up, Abraham from Law of Attraction would say that's a good move in the right direction. At least it has some energy behind it, but hopefully, you're only going there on your way to somewhere better because staying in the feeling of hate is going to create a lot of negative emotion and it's going to create probably actions that will give you results that you don't want. When you're thinking about someone that is hating you, answering that hate with hate doubles the hate. It doesn't provide any relief from the hate. My answer to hate, when I am available enough to myself to consciously decide is always love because I would much rather feel love.

Typically, my immediate gut check response is defensiveness, which is resistance, which is not love, and it does not feel good. It feels tight and uncomfortable. Whenever I sense that in my body, I know it's time to relax into myself, do some thought work, and find my way back to peace. Other people's hate doesn't have to affect you ever. It doesn't have to. When you are able to maintain your emotion, regardless of what's going on in the circumstances outside of you, regardless of what other people are saying to you or how they're choosing to feel about your or how they're acting towards you, that's when you really landed an emotional maturity. That's when you really have all of your power back.

The last piece of this that I really want to share that I think is important for all coaches, all human beings is, when you go into the world knowing that some people will hate you, will not like you, you will not be their cup of tea, or any degree thereof, if you're willing to accept that, you're going to show up more as yourself. You're going to express your opinions more than you would otherwise. You're going to be the best version of yourself without deluding it, without apology because you're not going to be worried about what other people think about you. The less worried you are about other people hating you, the more you're going to show up.
When I talk about other people hating you, I'm not just talking about that from the perspective of making a mistake or doing something wrong and someone using that as an "excuse" to hate you, but as you showing up in your life and being willing to have other people not like it, to tell the truth in your family and in your friendships, and be willing to have other people not like it, to write that book that's so controversial and have other people not like it. The people that show up the most in the world, I mean, look at Oprah Winfrey, have so many haters, so many people that hate them because they're willing to show up and take a stand and be who they are. Those haters don't mean anything about them. The more haters you have doesn't make you less or more of a person. Your life gives other people something to push against and I think that's a beautiful thing because I think the more people that have an opinion about you whether it's positive or negative, the more you're showing up, the more you're being who you are in the world.

When you come into contact with someone that is hating on you, that tells you that they hate you, remember, it's neutral. It's a circumstance. Ask yourself, what are you making it mean? Ask yourself, how do I feel? Then take full responsibility. Then ask yourself, how do you want to respond? Who do you want to be in this moment? What is the result you want to create? Trying to change another person is not effective and it's not necessary. You don't have to change how someone else is thinking about you, how someone else is feeling about you in order for you to feel better. It doesn't mean you don't talk to the person. You just make sure that before you do, you're coming from an emotion that will serve you. If you're coming from defensiveness or resistance or hate yourself, you're going to create a result that doesn't serve you.

If you can find your way to compassion or to love, then you're going to be able to have an interaction with the person that brings up the level of the energy instead of bringing it down. I'm not even going to wish for you that you don't have people in your life that hate you. In fact, I wish you do have a lot of people that hate you because it means you're showing up, you're taking a stand, and you're brave enough to allow other people to have an opinion of you and not let it deter you from doing your work in the world. All right you guys, go out there, live your dreams. Make it happen. Don't be afraid of the haters. Also notice that usually the haters are always sitting in the stands, never in the game. Have you noticed that? Pay attention. All right everyone. Talk to you next week. Take care. Bye.

Thank you for listening to The Life Coach School Podcast. It will be incredibly awesome if you would take a moment to write a quick review on iTunes. For any questions, comments or coaching issues you would like to hear on the show, please visit us at www.thelifecoachschool.com.