Stop getting triggered by others and start understanding what your triggers tell you about yourself. If someone makes you mad, it’s not about them; it’s about a belief you hold to be true that’s likely not. This simple exercise will help you flip the script, understand your triggers, and find opportunities to heal those old limiting beliefs. You’ll gain a powerful tool for self-discovery and transformation, allowing you to rewrite old narratives and embrace true personal growth.
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What Being Triggered Tells You
Unlocking Your Triggers: A Self-Discovery Tool
I am so glad you’re here. I’ve got a neat trick for you to help you understand what being triggered tells you. First, a little exercise. I love this. If I were to come up to you and say, “You are a green duck,” what would you do? You would probably be like, “Cool, whatever.” Nothing, right? You would maybe laugh, maybe be confused, maybe be like, “That April is a little odd.” You would have no reaction. The reason you’d have no reaction is that unless you are indeed a green duck, you know no part of that is true. It doesn’t mean anything to you.
Triggers: Why Blaming Others Hides Your Growth
Here’s what’s interesting about triggers. This is going to be an unpopular opinion because many people are like, “That person triggered me, or that movie, that thing, or whatever triggered me.” They want to blame it on the other person. Guess what? It’s about you. What being triggered tells you is that there is some small part of what that person, television show, song, whatever, is saying that you believe to be true. Because of that, it bothers you.
Dig into that trigger, and you can neutralize it—that is incredibly powerful. Share on XWhat’s so cool about this, if you can get over being pissed off about the fact that you don’t get to blame other people for when you’re mad, if you’re triggered by it, it’s indicating to you that there’s a deeper thing there. There’s something that you need to address, work on, a limiting belief that you have that probably isn’t even true. Most of our beliefs were given to us before we were six years old. I say “given” because we pick them up from the people around us.
Neutralizing Triggers: Healing Limiting Beliefs
They’re not necessarily things that we believe today, but we rarely look at them. When we get triggered, we assume it’s the other person. What if instead we got curious and we thought, “Why am I triggered by this? What does this mean to me?” Get curious, and wonder why it’s bothering you, what it makes you think, journal about it, write it down, and talk to a trusted friend.
If you dig into that trigger, you can also neutralize it. That is incredibly powerful. When I say neutralize it, you might say, “What do you mean by that?” You can either make it something that you can work on that isn’t triggering for you anymore, or you can simply understand the trigger. Sometimes people trigger you because they act against your values. In that case, you could say in that area, it is more about them.
You're in control of how you feel; you're in control of the action you take. Share on XYou’re in control of how you feel. You’re in control of the action that you take based on the fact that they don’t agree with your values. If you are like me, then you just don’t associate with them. If they’re doing something and you feel the need to say something or push that energy back, I do that as well. The ones that I’m the most concerned with for you, the ones that are going to change your life, are those triggers that are based on limiting beliefs. When you get to the bottom of it, and let’s use one that happens to a lot of people, someone says something to them, and it makes them think they’re not smart.
Rewriting Your Past: Shifting Childhood Narratives
What it is is deep down, they have a fear that they aren’t right for some reason. Everybody is smart in different ways. This is always going to be a limiting belief that they’re going to have inherited from someone. The way that you work through that is to think about when you first experienced this. If you can remember the first time or one of the early times when you felt like someone didn’t think you were smart, ask yourself, what was true then that is not true now?
I’ll use an example from sports. You’re a little kid and you’re playing in Little League, and they say, “Are you a moron? You didn’t see that ball fly right past you.” What was true then that isn’t true now? Number one, you don’t have some parent who isn’t a coach yelling nonsense at you because they don’t know how to coach a child, because that was a lot about whoever the coach was.
If something's triggering you, chances are it's something within you begging for you to heal it and solve it. Share on XTwo, you’re not ignoring your responsibilities because you’re in Little League and you’re bored, and you’re a kid, and you have a short attention span. Do you see how these things that happen to us when we’re much younger, when we look at them with our adult brains, are not the same situation, they don’t have the same meaning? Not to say that kids are wrong to attach the kind of meaning that we do. It’s just the brain power that we’re working with. At that moment, we think everything is about us.
Transforming Triggers Into Opportunities For Healing
The cool thing is, if you are lucky enough for someone to trigger you today or this week, you have the power to dig in and find what’s causing that and work on that limiting belief. There are lots of exercises, and there are other exercises here in the show that I’ve done for folks to help you overcome limiting beliefs. There are lots of resources for you. If something is triggering you, chances are, the thing that’s making it happen is something within you that is begging for you to heal it and solve it. I want you to give that a try this week and see how it makes things so much easier for you in the day-to-day.
