Kay:
Hey there and welcome to another week of the Kay & Shi Show.
Shi:
We’re so glad to be jumping into the topic for this episode really looking at the role of society and how it shapes who we are and the characters we develop over time.
Kay:
Now, one of the best ways that I’ve ever heard this explained is actually a combo teaching between two of my personal favorite teachers. This is Kay here, and those teachers are John Maxwell and my sister Shila Morris. So, the quote from John that gets expanded on by Shila that I just absolutely love is one of John’s most famous quotes where he says, “Everything that you want is uphill.”
Shi:
In fact, if you’ve ever heard John speak, you’ve likely heard him say this message. It’s one that he says often and integrates into most subjects. Even when he did his minute with Maxwell filming about it, he said, I’ve literally said this thousands of times, I could probably do the arm motion and you would all know what I’m about to say. And that is absolutely true because whenever he says this, he puts his arm up in order to indicate an incline and then he says all of your habits, your bad habits are downhill. So, you’ve got this real visual representation of the things that are worthwhile are uphill and this is an intrinsically, I think, easily recognizable universal truth that the things that are worthy that you want are going to take time, effort, and dedication.
The teaching that Kay is referring to here is one that I often share with my Sociology students and that is that everything worthwhile is uphill, but everyone’s hill incline is different and it’s different based on who you are as a demographic and a psychographic and as a piece of the human family. So, if you are from a wealthy family and you are from the majority race which is white in most parts of the world, and the ruling ideology that comes with that if you are part of that, your hill incline is much less steep than someone who is a minority and ethnic who has possibly any kind of felony record. If you’re from a single-parent household, all of these things increase the incline of your hill. So yes, everything worthwhile is uphill, but the rate of incline on everyone’s hills is different. And when we understand that we start to:
(a) now analyze our own hill and
(b) start to understand how this impacts everyone.
Kay:
So if you’re a person of color, a single parent who has to work multiple jobs, and you want to move out of those multiple jobs and into the entrepreneurial space it’s going to be a lot harder for you to do that than a single white person who is fresh out of college that likely got paid for on their behalf, or that they were easily able to obtain student loans in order to finish and complete their college journey. So, it becomes more difficult based on what you’ve got stacked against you and so a lot of people I think are hypnotized by the meritocracy that we have here in the US. You do good and what you do is if I can just pull myself up by the bootstraps, if I can just take enough action, if I can just work hard enough, then I can achieve anything and while yes, that is true some people have to work harder based on where they land, like Shila said, within their demographics and their psychographics.
Shi:
Climbing any hill is difficult and so you can see how sometimes people who don’t understand this incline piece get frustrated like, well, look, I still had to work hard for all of my things. That’s true. Climbing a hill is hard, scaling a cliff is a lot harder, especially if there’s no net or no gear. And so, understanding that helps you, I think, orient yourself as we were talking about into where you fit, because you don’t exist in a vacuum and none of us do, and we all are heavily influenced by our environment, our culture and our society. And that’s the piece that we really want to bring forward at least in this segment is understanding that you are definitely striving up your own hill and that it’s going to take work and there’s so much more context around that, and you can climb the hill better when you understand that.
Kay:
One of the things you can also do on your hill is if you understand this principle that not everyone’s incline is created equally, you’re able then to maybe help somebody who has a steeper hill at understanding that your hill is less steep. If your incline is easier, you’re less winded getting to the top. You’re not sweating as hard as you’re working. You probably don’t have as many boulders in your way, or if you face a boulder maybe you come over it easier, but you learn a few things. You have the opportunity to come behind somebody and help them up their hill as well. So, understanding where you land within this can be a helpful juxtaposition for maybe reaching out that hand and helping push somebody else up their hill.
Shi:
Now, in the next segment, we’re going to look a little bit more about the role of society and how it shapes who you are so make sure you tune in to that.
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Shi:
Alright, we are back at it here talking about the role of society and some other contextual things that help us understand who we are as people on our quest to build our best characters that we possibly can and today we want to address that you’re more than you may think.
Kay:
Now you’re more than you may think because you likely have a construction of inner beliefs and thoughts and things that you kind of ascribe to. But what you might not know is that society and where you came from, your parents and their beliefs about who you are as a woman or who you are as a man or who you are as a business owner, or who you are as fill in the blank, has a lot of expectations that come along with it and that can shape who you are too.
Shi:
Right, and when we say you’re more than you may think, we’re not talking about the spiritual teaching and perspective of that. You are a soul having a human experience and living in this human body, which we love that, and you’ve heard us talk about that here before. But we’re really talking about that construction of your identity based on your environment and your society and the culture that you grow up in. When humans are born, they are blank subconscious states open to receive whatever it is they will receive and whatever it is that they receive on a repeated basis is what will shape who they become. Now, you’ve heard a lot of stories through the years of probably people coming from horrible circumstances and turning out completely different, but they still learned from that environment what they wanted.
Now, they learned how not to act or how not to be, or who they didn’t want to be, but it was still learning from that environment. What blinds most people is realizing some shocking statistics like if whatever political party affiliation your parents had, 90% plus of people will have the same political affiliation. Whatever your parents or primary group, whoever it was that raised you, whatever their views were on some of the major issues or whatever their cultural customs were that’s what you’re going to see is right and that’s what you’re going to perpetuate into your adulthood and that’s what you’re basing who you are on as. You may like all of those pieces, but if you don’t like some of them, I think there’s a lot of power in realizing that you got programmed that way and that you can change it.
Kay:
But you might think that a lot of people get into their adult life and say, “Oh, I never thought that I would, but I turned out just like my mother” or “I never thought that I would, but I’m just like my dad,” or you say something, and it comes out of your mouth and you’re like, “Wow, I hear my parents talking here.” So, the patterns that come into play when you’re in that zero- to the five-year-old stage are so important. But when you are a little kid like that, a toddler, tiny under the age of five, you are a wide, open book to the whole wide Universe and your brain is literally forming its neural pathways in order to create the personality and the person that you then become. In fact, many traumas that we have later in life, whether they are repeated cycles from things that happened to us in that zero- to five-year-old age. So, understanding that we’ve got this preset of programming but that didn’t necessarily come to you by choice gives you the opportunity to maybe choose something different if it’s not constructive for your life.
Shi:
I love when you see the light bulb turn on for people and realize that they do have that choice, how powerful that can be, and what else is powerful is the way that we as humans within our societies and our communities reinforce these ideas of what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s popular, what’s not. There are all kinds of what we call social norms at play that dictate how you’re going to behave and think about how you behave differently in front of different people. Your coworkers versus your friends versus your intimate family versus somebody you’re sitting next to on an airplane. You act differently in different situations. Those are all reflections of the fact that you live and function inside of a society that has rules and expectations on everything from how you act based on your biological sex to how you act in a power dynamic, like a student and a teacher, or a boss and an employee. So, so many interesting things to examine here as we kind of look at that macro level that shapes who you are individually.
Kay:
I do want to just put a quick microscope in on something Shila just mentioned, which are those predetermined rules around the gender that you were born with, and just think that this is a really good example of this kind of society’s roles at play. If you think about a boy wearing a dress, not a boy cross-dressing or a boy who is trans, who is a drag queen but just a regular boy with a boy’s haircut and boy’s shoes wearing a dress that might rub up against something inside of you that says, “That’s not right.” Well, back in the 1700s men actually wore dresses more so than women and it was just a part of the fashion. So, is that fashion or is that something society says, pants equal boy, dress equals girl? Even down to the bathroom symbols being the triangle for the girl indicating that they’re wearing a dress, and the two legs for the boy indicating that pants are being worn. So, when we think about that, I think it helps to shine a light on the point that we’re making here that you may be more than you think.
Shi:
Alright, we’re going to have a quick commercial break and we’ll be right back.
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Kay:
If you enjoy hanging out with your two favorite sisters, we have a little favor to ask of you.
Shi:
You know, families are always asking favors, it feels like this one shouldn’t be too hard. We hope that if you hang out with us here and you enjoy it that you’ll drop us a review on your podcast streaming platform and let everybody know how much you love the Kay & Shi Show.
Kay:
Whether you listen on Spotify, Apple iTunes, or right on anchor.fm we want to know what you think. So, please leave us a review and let’s get back to the show.
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Shi:
Alright, up next in this segment, we want to talk about another really interesting macro concept that shapes who you are, and this one is pervasive and yet sneaky, and it’s been called by all kinds of different things. You probably best understand it as the rhythms of life, the rhythms of nature, the cyclical nature of the way things go. All things have a season, all things move within nature, which is an incredible concept. Our favorite conceptualization of this concept comes from the author of “Think and Grow Rich” Napoleon Hill, who calls this driving force “the cosmic habit force.”
Kay:
Woo, woo, woo, woo, woo, woo, woo, woo! I feel like this has to have some kind of theme song with it. We need jackets made. If this isn’t some kind of Star Trek logoed show situation, the cosmic habit force is on the case.
Shi:
I love it and I love the way that Napoleon Hill describes this. The cosmic habit force is that momentum and energy that flows through. Energy always has to be in motion. It’s got to be moving and so this is the pathway that it naturally takes. And for most creatures they just have to follow it blindly. For us humans, we get the beauty of free will and getting to choose how it is that we engage with this cosmic habit force. But so many of us end up defaulting to programming that either society gave us, or our family slash primary group gave us that doesn’t always serve us or help us and when we do that in that kind of blind way, Hill calls this “hypnotic rhythm.” This is a concept we first heard in his incredible work called “Outwitting the Devil.” We would definitely recommend. A fascinating book, a great read, and really interesting. I know, Kay, when we first encountered the idea of the hypnotic rhythm, it was something pretty mind-blowing for both of us.
Kay:
Well, let’s just think about this in a physical perspective. Now, if you’ve ever been around a mom with young children, you’ve likely experienced something that many of us like to call the mom sway. Now there’s a group of women standing in a circle, and one of those women is holding a baby and swaying that baby back and forth. Most of the time the rest of the women in that circle also end up swaying back and forth alongside that mom even though they are not holding babies. Now, this is a good physical example of kind of the hypnotic rhythm at play. There’s one person doing something, and other people start to follow along. Well, if we think about this from maybe a macro perspective, let’s say that maybe your family, like our family, has a history of alcoholism and you fall into you see your parents drink on the weekends. You see your parents have a couple glasses of wine or a couple of beers when they get home at the end of the day from work and then you perpetuate that into your adulthood until before you know it–oh no–you have an alcohol problem or maybe you just have a habit that isn’t serving you, but you’ve seen it perpetuated. It’s perpetuated by society and woo you fell into the rhythm.
Shi:
Yep. The hypnotic rhythm at that right. Think about both of these words here. Hypnotic means that you’re not even always aware that you’re in that state, that you’re just blindly following along, and rhythms are part of our lives and something that are very attractive to us. Even your heartbeat is a rhythm. So, when we get pulled into these hypnotic rhythms, it can be really tough to shake your head and shake yourself free from them, and in the example that Kay just used, which alcohol for us is the most stark example because we awoke out of the hypnotic rhythm of it and realize how pervasive this hypnotic rhythm is. It’s not just you saw mom and dad drink; you saw it depicted in every major TV show and movie you watched and in every setting.
Kay:
Okay. Quick side note, Vampire Diaries, a show about teenagers. How many episodes do they drink? Every single episode. You all are teenagers.
Shi:
It doesn’t need to be included but it’s so much part of our culture and our society right now that it is absolutely included and it’s weird to see the more we get away from it the more we realize. It’s such a destructive habit, but it’s very profitable and of course, it’s very addicting and so you can see how these things under a capitalist economic system can really come together to perpetuate a hypnotic rhythm that is not positive and helpful for human beings, long term.
Kay:
Well, the caffeine-alcohol cycle really came to fruition back in the 1920s when capitalism was starting to take form, industrialism was really at its rise in our country and we had people working in factories having to wake up early in the day and get home and not be so upset about extreme, long working hours, crazy working conditions. So, Napoleon Hill actually talks about this in “Outwitting the Devil” that alcohol being a numbing agent made people more placid and able to stay in uncomfortable situations for longer. So, it’s this coffee-alcohol cycle. I wake up in the morning and I’m exhausted from drinking the night before/being completely overworked in terrible conditions, so I chug a bunch of coffee so I’m ready for the day and now I’m back at the grind. I’m in the grind for 10 to 12 hours then I get home, but I’m energetically wired because I’ve been doing all this stuff all day. So, I start numbing myself with alcohol which also makes me forgive the horrible things that happened to me throughout the day and the alcohol also helps me go to sleep only so that I can wake up and do the coffee-alcohol cycle that fuels the factories. So, this was back in the 1920s we really saw this rise. But that hypnotic rhythm got set off in our society and it has not reversed yet.
Shi:
You know, alcohol is a major hypnotic rhythm but there are countless hypnotic rhythms and small ones and big ones. So, we challenge you as you hear this concept to just think about where you see them in your life, where you see them in society. Where do you have a place in your life where you want to make change, where you’re maybe struggling, or you’ve plateaued? You might be engaged in a destructive, hypnotic rhythm that you’re not aware of and hopefully, this little teaching has helped.
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Kay:
We’re excited to unpack this particular topic today because like our mom told us growing up, you are the five people you hang out with so choose carefully.
Shi:
Which is why here as we talk about the role of society and the role of some of the more macro forces shaping you as a human being and as a character that we have to talk about the role of the groups around you. Particularly, of course, as Kay mentioned, our mom liked to say you are the five people you hang out with so choose carefully. This has been resounded by tons of different teachers, the average of the five people that you spend the most time with so there are lots around this. But the theory behind it just demonstrating the fact that, as we talked about in the last segment, there are rhythms to everything, and when you are engaged habitually in someone else’s rhythm, your rhythms will start to match so you better make sure it’s one you want to dance to.
Kay:
Well, let’s just say that you have a friend who has a habit of not exercising or your closest three friends. Let’s put it that way. Your closest three friends have a habit of not exercising. In fact, they’re at the point where they’re even kind of proud of the fact that they don’t exercise, and you decide that you want to start an exercising habit. Now you go to your three friends, and you say, “Oh, I’ve started exercising and I feel so good, but man, I’ve had to start waking up early in the mornings and that’s definitely difficult and I’m finding myself more tired at night.” Well, those three friends are not likely to help you keep that habit going when the times get tough. Chances are the dialogue would look something like them saying, “Oh man, well, why would you even get up that early anyway? That’s ridiculous!” or “You’re just crazy for getting out there. An hour on the treadmill every day? Are you kidding? I would be exhausted.” And the rhetoric around something that could be positive change for your life, ends up becoming disempowering.
Shi:
Right. Or even in their best efforts, they’re trying to support you and they say something like, “That’s more than I could ever do” or “That’s a lot more than I’ve done” or “Well, you’re still beating me.” So, appreciate that they:
(a) want to stay friends with you and that they
(b) want to give you accolades.
But neither of those things are helpful for you in staying accountable to the goal that you set forward and those kinds of changes can be really hard, and it can be tough if you choose to make a habitual change, like an exercise routine, or like you heard us talk a lot about alcohol in the last segment. We were so grateful that not only–especially Shila here for me–two of my five people made this change with me and so it made it incredibly easy to avoid that rhythm and be completely off of it, which has helped with the lasting change.
Knowing that you’re the five people you hang out with that the implications on your habit structure are impressive. But you think about this when you hang out with somebody for a while and you ungroup. Don’t you notice that you talk like them–not about them, like them? As if you spend a concentrated amount of time with someone, you start to say the same phrases, you start to talk the same way. You might even start to have the same foods and those kinds of things. If you have five people around you who are incredible and impressive and courageous and kind, then you’ll start to reflect those things too. But a lot of us struggle if our five people don’t reflect those things. How do I change those five people? And that can be really tough.
Kay:
Ooh, changing the five people can be very difficult, especially if maybe one of those people is in your environment, not by your choice. We’re not talking about the five closest friends. We’re not talking about the five people that you choose or your five family members. We’re talking about the five people who occupy the most of your time. So, this could be a coworker. This could be someone at your gym. This could be…
Shi:
A family member.
Kay:
…a family member, someone that you engage with and spend the most time with. It’s not your five closest friends who you become. It’s the five people you spend the most time with. So, how do you persevere forward if maybe you live under the same roof as this person or maybe you work alongside them. It can definitely be a little bit of a conundrum or a difficulty to change the five people or even change yourself.
Shi:
As Tony Robbins tells us, “If you don’t like a relationship, change yourself first, then if you still don’t like it, then you can change the relationship.” So always understanding as we close out this episode of talking about the role of society, the outward influences on who you are on the inside, and who you turn out to have a massive impact. And of course, you can change anything. That is the beauty and the power of free will. You’ve been gifted this spark of consciousness and you get to choose how to spend it and where to use it. Understanding how you fit into this context, hopefully, has given you some ideas on how you can use that consciousness for your own gains with a little bit more integrity and a little bit better.
Kay:
Remember it starts with you and as you begin to change yourself and find either the people who are around you will decide that they want to go away, or they will change alongside you. You will make that change for the better, and it will be positive for your life, even if it’s hard. And hey, when it does get hard, remember, you’ve got two sisters in your corner who are always rooting for you.
Shi:
We love you. We support you. We hope you have a great weekend.
