You’re listening to the Transform Your Life from the Inside Out podcast. This episode
is a throwback episode. It’s episode number 19 and it’s titled Why People Who
Trigger You Are Your Greatest Blessings. And you’re probably thinking, “Jim, what the
hell are you talking about? People who trigger me, I don’t want to be around. I
want to share a couple of thoughts with you and I’ll dive deeper in this episode.”
Is people who trigger you are your greatest blessing because you have the greatest
opportunity to learn about your biggest limitations. You know, I want to share a
story here. I don’t recall whether or not I shared it in the episode, but it was
about in Thailand how monks, when they would want to eat potatoes, what they would
do is they wouldn’t clean the individual potato. They would throw all these dirty
potatoes in a vat, a big bowl, whatever you want to call it a that. And they
would stir it. And as they would stir it, these potatoes would bump into each other
and the friction would rub the dirt off from the other potatoes. So by the
friction, they became cleaner. So people that are your triggers create friction. And
when you actually dig into that and understand the triggers and understand the
friction, now you can grow and metaphorically you can become air quote cleaner and
stronger. Enjoy the episode. Hi, I’m Jim Fortin, and you’re about to start
transforming your life from the inside out with this podcast. I’m widely considered
the leader in subconscious transformation. And I’ve coached super achievers all around
the world for over 25 years. Here, you’re going to find no rah rah motivation and
no hype, because this podcast is a combination of brain science, transformational
psychology and ancient wisdom all rolled into one to take your life to levels you’ve
never thought possible. If you’re wanting a lot more in life to feel better, to
heal, to have peace of mind, to feel powerful and alive and to bring more abundance
and prosperity into your life then this podcast is for you because you’re going to
start learning how to master your mind and evolve your consciousness. And when you
do that, anything you want, then becomes possible for you. I’m glad you’re here.
I’m curious. And I’m curious about what you’re thinking right now about the
introduction and people triggering you. Because people triggering you is probably one
of your biggest sources of irritation and frustration in life. And it’s also,
perhaps you’ve not recognized it, but triggers are a huge source of stress for you.
And you know what things trigger you. Maybe somebody says something in a particular
way and you get all bent out of shape. You know, maybe somebody is driving and
they’re driving too fast and that triggers you. They’re driving too slow and that
triggers you. Maybe they’ve got a bumper sticker that triggers you. Somebody makes a
particular comment you get triggered. Maybe it’s a situation like customer service.
Maybe it’s not fast enough for you and you get triggered. Maybe somebody makes, you
know, a face at you in some way and that triggers you. What I want you to look
at in this episode is all the things that trigger you and all the places you flip
out because, again, those, and Trust me, you know that you’ve got days full of
being triggered for the most part many of you Those are huge opportunities for you
to grow to learn and to evolve First things first any time that you’re triggered
You’re making a judgment about someone or something as a matter of fact other people
do not trigger you What triggers you is your value system and your judgments Because
when people do things, they just do what they do, and it’s you who is triggered. I
mean, it doesn’t trigger them or they wouldn’t do it, right? And, you know, you
look when you’re triggered. Maybe somebody swerves into your lane. And let’s say that
you have a judgment, which actually it’s not safe at all. It’s actually, texting and
driving is very, very unsafe. And it’s actually more unsafe than actually drinking
and driving. So, but maybe somebody actually swerves in your lane and and you
actually get triggered because you think they’re texting Maybe somebody’s wasting water
and you think well, okay. I’ve got a judgment about that people shouldn’t waste
water when they waste water I get mad. I get angry. I get bent out of shape one
of my coaches For a long time a transformational coach her name is Lori Lori was a
massive impact and a massive influence on my life as my coach and We were talking
about triggers one time, and she said that what triggered her husband, he grew up
very poor in Brazil. And when their kids, you know, when their kids would make a
mess in the kitchen, she would just go over to the paper towels and, you know,
pull out a handful of paper towels, you know, kind of wrap them around their hand
and then clean up the mess. Well, that triggered her husband because he grew up
poor. And literally, she said they couldn’t even afford paper towels. But so what
would happen is when she would wrap a lot of paper towels around her hand, her
husband considered that wasteful. And he grew up where you’re not supposed to be
wasteful. So that was a trigger to him. What about this? Do you get triggered when
somebody takes up two parking spaces and you can’t park your car or someone
littering or someone being late? That’s a big trigger for a lot of people. What
about people that are too early, you know, to your house, to your parties, to your
events, whatever. Is that a trigger for you? Some people, for example, get triggered
when other people leave the kitchen dirty and their partner wakes up in the morning,
or when your husband leaves his clothes somewhere, or maybe your wife or your
partner, she leaves all of her makeup all over the bathroom. There are all kinds of
things that trigger people, and what I want you to understand for the most part,
even though I said all earlier, but for the most part, any time that you’re
triggered, you’re triggered because you’re making a value judgment, a quick segue here
off topic. When I say for the most part, let’s say that, and I’m going to use a
husband and wife, let’s say for example that she leaves her makeup all over the
bathroom and there’s stuff everywhere in the mornings. Now, that could trigger him
for a couple of reasons because maybe he’s very clean and very neat, but another
reason, which we’re not going to go to here, but I want to share, if he’s
predominantly visual, which means he processes the world through his thinking,
predominantly visual, what he may prefer is an orderly environment. And if the
environment is not orderly, then that triggers him. And that’s actually more
neurological than psychological. But as I’ve said two times now, for the most part,
any time that you are triggered, you are making a value judgment about one or
something. Speaking of judgments, a huge, and I mean a huge trigger for a lot of
people, is that when someone judges them or someone looks down on them,
or when someone is air quote, disrespecting them. So let me ask you, do you get
triggered when somebody actually talks down to you, or they look down on you, or in
some way you think they’re judging you. Does that trigger you? Ponder that for a
moment. Consider that. And I’m sure a lot of you listening can probably say, “Oh
yeah, that gets me going.” Well, what I want you to understand here and I want you
to fully get is that when people judge you and you get triggered,
what you’re doing is you are literally judging them, which you’re mad at them for
judging you or you’re triggered, but you’re actually doing the same thing right back
by being triggered because your triggers, as I said, for the most part always come
from judgments. So when people judge you and you get triggered, what most people do
is they get triggered and they judge right back about the very thing they don’t
want to be judged about. I mean, that shows you how illogical we are as a species
and as beans. Pretty humorous. I want to share a story with you here and I just I
don’t remember where I heard the story but it was about monks in a monastery and
let me ask you this let me back up here when let’s say you want to boil some
potatoes and you bring them home from the store what do you do with the potatoes
before you boil them? Well most people that I know of they wash the potato,
then they put it in the water and boil the potato. The story about the monks, what
they do is they put all of the dirty potatoes, the muddy potatoes in a big pot
and they let the pot just stir and kind of rotate all the potatoes in the pot.
The reason why, this is very powerful, the reason why is that when the potatoes rub
against each other in the big pot, that creates friction. And the friction actually
cleans the potatoes. When potatoes bump into other potatoes, it rubs the dirt off.
So this whole podcast is about people triggering you and this being your greatest
opportunity to grow. I want to share a story with you here in my own life. If
you’ve been listening for any amount of time, you know that my brother -in -law is a
shaman, and I, for a lack of better words, I apprentice with him. Over the years,
and I’ve done this almost 25 years, he’s had upwards of about 30 apprentices. And
right now, for the past several years, he’s had, I think, 12 or 15,
there we go, 15 apprentices. And in the early years, when we were all together, he
would literally help us evolve by putting us in situations that would cause a lot
of stress and a lot of friction. And then what would happen is a lot of the
personalities and a lot of the egos would come out and people’s personal proclivities
and judgments and everything else. And we used to travel the world going to power
spots. I mean, my family has been inside the Great Pyramid at Keops for two nights.
We have been inside Day -O -Day, we had caught in Mexico for two nights doing
ceremony on the Spring Equinox and Boo LaRoo in Australia. And in the early years,
you know, when you get a lot of people traveling, there’s a whole lot of ego and
a way that he moved us out of the ego was to basically put us like potatoes in a
pot and stir the pot. And what I learned many years ago is that people literally
in the world, they mirror us. However, we’re showing up in the world and whatever
our emotions are, and if we’re getting bent out of shape or we’re getting triggered,
that has nothing to do with the people that are doing what they’re doing. It has
to do with those people are triggering something in us, which is a reflection of
us. That’s why I said, you know, the title of this podcast is, I don’t know what
the title is, I forgot what I titled it, but basically is being triggered and the
people that trigger you, they’re great as blessing because they give you the biggest
opportunity to grow and evolve yourself. And you know, I think you’re getting by
this point, when we’re triggered, it’s always external things that trigger us.
It’s always somebody in traffic or somebody leaving a coffee cup out or somebody
doing something air quote the wrong way or whatever it is or somebody posting
something on Facebook or Instagram or blah, blah, blah. People are triggered by
external things, but triggers are not external. They’re all completely internal.
The Dalai Lama said, and I’ve read a couple of versions of this, but I’ve seen my
brother -in -law demonstrate this for 25 years. I have never, not one time in 25
years, ever seen him angry, frustrated, upset, heated, triggered.
I have never seen anything out of him other than peace, love, and silence.
I mean, just always an internal state of peace. And the Dalai Lama said something
along these lines of, “Never let anyone’s behavior have your internal peace.” Being
transparent with you, this has been something that I’ve been working on for a couple
of years now. And I think it’s the number one thing that I’m working on in my own
growth is to always have a state of internal peace. Because, you know,
just being transparent with you, I used to be pretty high strong and wound up. And
I used to be type A personality and I could move through the world very quickly.
And when people were, you know, when people were air quote doing stupid things or
not moving as fast as I wanted or whatever it was, that would trigger me. This day
and age, I know that I’m not at mastery, but this day and age, it’s very easy for
me just to let people be who they are and let the world be what it is. And where
I’m working from is to let nothing or no one have my internal peace.
So let me ask you a couple of questions. Let’s say that you take an orange and
you cut it in half and you squeeze it. What comes out of the orange? Well,
obviously orange juice and Let’s say you take a lemon and you cut a lemon in half
and you squeeze it what comes out of the lemon Well, obviously lemon juice When the
world squeezes you What comes out of you is your triggers?
Take some time. Let that soak in when the world triggers you meaning things outside
of you And when I say that it’s just colloquial because the world doesn’t trigger
as we trigger ourselves But I’m using I’m explaining it colloquially so that you can
get your mind around it when the world triggers you What I want you to look at is
what comes out of you For most of you and I’ve been there what comes out of you
is anger So when you’re triggered what comes out does jealousy come out?
does anger, there’s judgment, there’s frustration, does fear come out of you,
gives us like the orange when it’s squeezed, the orange just comes out. So whatever
is in you, you want to know what’s in you? Look what happens when you get
triggered because that is what is in you. So let’s go back here.
What if, for example, I’m just supposing, what if Supposing, what if you operated
from a state of internal peace? How would you be in the world then? How would you
show up in the world? What would the world be to you? Consider that. Along those
lines, I want to share something with you that’s very simple, but very powerful. And
again, I learned this on my path that I’m on, is You can’t do anything well
without peace of mind. Think about that for a moment. Think back to a time in your
past when you didn’t have peace of mind. And I mean, your mind was just cluttered
with all this self -talking, all these stories, and all this jargon. You ever noticed
how hard it is to actually act in the world when you don’t have peace of mind?
And then I want you to contrast that when there was a time in your life when
everything was hunky -dory great and everything was amazing and things are just
working well and you’re happy and you had peace of mind. Notice then how easy it
is to operate in the world. So when you’re not having internal peace because you’re
letting the world trigger you, what I want you to get is that it’s so much harder
for you to operate in the world when you’re letting the world constantly trigger you
because you have no peace, internal peace, peace of mind, and when you have no
peace of mind, life becomes a lot more difficult. Also, as I’d mentioned when I
started this episode, people don’t think about it this way, but have you ever fully
recognized how actually mega stressful it is to be triggered?
If you could take a third -party position, a meta -position, and look at yourself
when you get triggered. What happens in your body? What happens with your blood
pressure? What happens with your state of mind? What happens with your focus? For
most people, when they get triggered, it’s like the wheels come off. I mean, they
just completely come unglued and you even see people saying, “Oh my gosh, I forgot
what I was doing or I lost my place or oh geez, I can’t focus. I can’t
concentrate now.” All because of a trigger. So you think about your emotional state
when you’re triggered. Is it peaceful? Or is it, as I said just a couple of
seconds ago, is it like the wheels have all fallen off and you run off in the
ditch? So let’s start in the simple place. What I want to ask you right now,
because we can’t, you know, I tell people all the time in my coaching programs, so
many people want to tackle so much at once. And, you know, you’ve heard the old
phrase that Rome wasn’t built in a day. And even as I’m saying that, I wonder if
that phrase triggered anybody. Rome wasn’t built in a day. But let’s work from
there. And what is one thing that you know you’ve got experience that always
triggers you? And what if you gave that trigger up because you recognize you’re
making a judgment? And let me go back here and recapitulate, even though I think
it’s pretty obvious. What’s funny is if you’re like 99 .999 % of people,
you don’t like to be judged. But yet the interesting thing is that you don’t like
to be judged, but when you’re triggered, you’re judging other people. So you’re doing
to them exactly what you do not want done to you. But what if this, what if you
could take one trigger only, and you could say, “You know what? Going forward, I’m
going to have internal peace about this, I am going to let it go. How do you
suppose your life might be different if you operated from that place as opposed to
the place you used to operate before you listened to this episode? Let me give you
another example here to concretize this. Many years ago out of college, I waited
tables at some very nice restaurants, and I waited tables at the Ritz Carlton,
which I don’t know if you know anything about hospitality, but the Rich Carleton,
for the most part, sets the world standard for excellence in hospitality.
I mean, it’s just generally a world -class experience to dine or to stay at a Rich
Carleton. So where I learned to work from back at that time was I learned to
deliver extraordinary, I mean flawless, very expensive dinners and meals and flawless
service.
And, I recognized that I came to hold a lot of people in the world of that same
standard, other companies and places that I’ve been to, and, you know, we all buy
things all day long and dine out and everything else. And I recognized also that it
was a great sense, a great, a great source of stress for me. Why? Because I was
expecting, I was holding the rest of the world to my judgment and my standards
about what extraordinary customer service is. And the reality, I was talking to a
friend of mine today, and I did not apologize for making this comment. A good
friend of mine, I’ve known for a lot of years, we were talking about how we both
fly first class all the time on American, and how crappy, for the most part, an
American CEO, hopefully you will hear this, how crappy first class is in American.
Basically, you pay a lot more money, you get a bigger seat, but overall service is
crap in first class and American.
Now years ago, that would have triggered me to know in like, “Oh my God, I can’t
believe they did this.” And, you know, I’m going to just segue here for a second.
My last American Airlines flight, first class, I was flying back from Phoenix to
Dallas. Now in first class, you’re supposed to get served. You know what happened is
the higher coach got served all their drinks and coach before I ever even got a
drink in first class. And in the past, I would have completely come and glued about
that. And now I’m like, you know, it is what it is. What are you going to do?
And why am I going to get riled up about this? You know, so there’s no reason to
get riled about it. But obviously, as you can see here, my trigger used to be bad
service. So Look at something that triggers you and recognize that you know what,
you can let this trigger go because it’s you just simply making a judgment about
something. Let the trigger go. And when you do that and you put conscious effort
and attention into that, you’re going to be surprised at how easy it is to let
things go. And then secondly, you’re going to be surprised that you have a lot less
stress in your life because I guarantee you most of you go through your days being
triggered at least a dozen times and you’re not even recognizing, you’re not calling
it being triggered, but it’s happening all day long. And when you start, (sighs)
letting go of that. When you start letting go of that, life becomes so much easier
to move through. So one more thing I wanna add here is that we’re not perfect.
You know what, you take this out, you start using it like right now, because you
can start using it right now, you start using this. They’re going to be times
because, see, being triggered is not conscious, it’s completely unconscious. They’re
going to be times that, you know what, you’re going to drop the ball. You’re going
to actually forget that you want eternal peace all the time, and you’re going to,
you know, perhaps be triggered. That means nothing. Simply just, you know, mentally
reset and recognize that the next time that happens that you’re gonna maintain your
state of internal peace. So your transformation will take away. Let’s keep it really
simple and let’s listen to the Dalai Lama and that is let no one’s behavior steal
your internal peace. Notice also, I want you to notice the past two hours before
you listen to this podcast. How many times did somebody steal your internal piece?
Were you driving somewhere and somebody cut you off? Were you talking to,
which this used to steal my piece also many years ago, were you listening to an
automated system like an airline system and they’ll say, “Tell me your flight
number.” And you’ll say, “Flight 2704.” And then the voice will say, “Which is
automated. I didn’t get that. Can you please repeat it?” And you’re like, “Yeah,
2804.” And the voice comes back, “I’m sorry, I didn’t get that. You’ve all been
there, right?” Well, I want you to notice the past two hours prior to listening to
this, what has actually robbed you of your internal peace. So the takeaway again is
let no one’s behavior, automated or human, steal your internal peace.
Okay, the next episode, next Monday is a Q &A episode. And it’s from Jennifer.
And Jennifer’s question is, “Can I ever fully overcome my negative thoughts,
even if I’ve been believing them for 40 years?” Well, I’m going to share with
Jennifer on that episode and with you. What Jennifer’s doing here is that she’s
actually, she’s associating and qualifying her negative thoughts and giving them more
power by associating them to 40 years. Thoughts are simply thoughts. So if you want
to hear my answer about Jennifer having many years of negative thoughts and how to
overcome that, make sure that you listen to Monday’s episode. Okay, thanks for
listening and do what you can to make it a great day today and you know what?
Keep the peace. Take care. I’ll talk to you later. Bye -bye.