What You Tolerate, You Teach

I woke up last night disoriented, with my tongue pushing against my mouth.

It actually pushed through, and I felt the tape come loose.

I'd put on 9 to 5 before bed. I turned it off at the part where Lily Tomlin had stolen a dead body from the hospital, locked it in her trunk, and was speeding away with Jane Fonda and Dolly Parton, all three of them unraveling brilliantly.

Apparently my sleeping brain took the bully-boss energy and went looking for its own cast to fill the roles.

I have a few candidates on file.

Back to the waking up: I remembered what the tape was there for and, half-conscious, thought I could keep my mouth shut without it.

So I pulled it off my face, rolled over, and went back to sleep.

It's not until right now that my mind returned to it.

I've been sleeping all week with my mouth taped shut.

I'm reading Breath by James Nestor, and one of the things he makes a case for is breathing through your nose rather than your mouth, including while you sleep. So I've been taping my mouth shut at night to see what happens.

What has happened is that I've been sleeping better than ever.

And yet, when I woke up disoriented, my first instinct was to rip off the thing that seemed to be helping.

And I thought: of course.

Because sometimes we reach for relief before we reach for what's actually good for us.

I've been thinking about another version of this for a long time now:

What you tolerate, you teach.

I've written about it. I teach it. I sit with clients inside it.

And still, it keeps finding new ways to show me something I hadn't quite seen before.

The tape brought it back this week.

Breathing is something we don't think about. We don't wake up and decide how we're going to breathe that day. We just do it.

Which means it's possible for something to become a pattern without us ever deciding that it should be one.

That got me thinking about all the other things we do without noticing.

The way we answer when someone asks for too much.

The way we laugh off a comment that actually stung.

The way we say it's fine when it isn't.

And then say it again.

And again.

Until it's fine becomes the standing agreement between us.

We're not necessarily making a conscious decision to tolerate something.

We're just making a tiny decision in the moment.

This isn't worth making a thing about.

I'll let it go.

It's easier this way.

It's the polite thing to do.

And sometimes it is.

That's what makes this complicated.

I have a moment I remember very clearly.

A friend was doing a birthday concert for my mom. She and her band were playing on a patio one day, taking requests from the audience. Except it wasn't really a request situation. She was working out her next set list, so everyone got to pick a song from the list and, in a way, we got to be the DJ while she and the band supplied the music.

My sister picked Lay Down Sally.

It was a dig.

She knew exactly what she was doing.

And she knew that song got under my skin.

I grew up with enough trouble around my name.

My last name, growing up, was Dick.

That was a difficult name to get through primary school with.

And my first name is SalliAnne, which meant people often shortened it to Sally.

So there were years of Sally songs that didn't exactly feel like compliments.

Lay Down Sally.

Mustang Sally.

Sally, That Girl.

You get the idea.

And just to be clear: I love people named Sally.

In fact, I literally just added my 90-year-old Aunt Sally to my email list.

I don't want her reading this and thinking I've spent my life holding a grudge against the name Sally.

I haven't.

I just don't want to be called it.

Because it isn't actually my name.

And because I'd already been teased enough about being a Dick, I decided, for some reason, that teasing me with a name that wasn't mine was going too far.

Or maybe it was simpler than that:

If you're going to call me a dick, then you don't also get to call me a Sally.

As an adult, I've gotten much better at not tolerating the Sally.

I'm much more likely to correct someone when they shorten my name without asking. I'm much less willing to laugh along when somebody turns it into a joke.

But that afternoon, I swallowed it.

I felt it.

And I swallowed it.

Not because I didn't know what was happening.

I knew exactly what was happening.

I swallowed it because it felt like the polite thing to do.

It was easier to laugh than to make it awkward.

Easier to let it go than to be the person who objected to a song.

So I didn't say anything.

Nothing happened.

That's the part I keep coming back to.

Nothing happened, and something got taught.

I taught my sister that she could make that joke and I would absorb it.

And I taught myself that being polite was more important than saying, Actually, I don't like that.

That's different from not having a boundary.

I had one.

I knew exactly where it was.

I just didn't enforce it.

And that's where this gets interesting to me.

Because we tend to talk about boundaries as though the problem is that we don't know where they are.

Sometimes that's true.

But sometimes we know.

We feel the thing land.

Our body knows before we've even put words around it.

The belly tightens.

The breath changes.

There's a little pause.

And then we make a choice.

Sometimes the choice is right.

Sometimes we decide it isn't worth addressing.

Sometimes we decide the relationship matters more than the moment.

Sometimes we genuinely don't care.

But sometimes we tell ourselves we're being gracious when what we're really doing is swallowing our own reaction because making the other person comfortable feels more important.

I've done that.

A lot.

I've always been pretty good at being easy to be around.

I can let things go.

I can make a joke out of something.

I can tell myself I'm not going to get worked up over something small.

And some of that is a quality I actually like about myself.

I don't want to become someone who needs every slight acknowledged.

I don't want to turn every uncomfortable moment into a conversation about my feelings.

But there is a difference between I don't care and I care, but I'm going to pretend I don't.

Those can look exactly the same from the outside.

Your body knows the difference.

That's part of what the tape has made me notice.

I've been paying more attention to my breathing during the day, too.

I'm listening more.

I'm more deliberate about when I open my mouth.

Not because I've suddenly become a person who has nothing to say.

Quite the opposite.

I'm noticing how often I used to fill the space simply because there was space to fill.

How often I smoothed something over before I'd even decided whether it needed smoothing.

How often it's fine came out before I'd actually checked whether it was.

It's a surprisingly useful filter.

Do I actually want to say something?

Or am I trying to make the moment more comfortable?

Those are not always the same thing.

And I think that question applies to a lot more than conversation.

How often are we making ourselves smaller because it's easier for everyone else?

How often are we calling that maturity?

How often are we calling it generosity?

How often are we just trying not to be difficult?

I'm not wearing tape everywhere I go, for what it's worth.

Although I did discover this week that trying to push through a hard workout while breathing only through your nose is a very effective way to discover exactly how much you like having the option of opening your mouth.

Turns out I like it quite a lot.

But the tape has made me pay attention.

And maybe that's the useful part.

Because I'm beginning to see that changing a pattern doesn't necessarily start with doing something dramatic.

It starts with noticing the moment the old thing happens.

The moment you reach for the tape.

The moment you say it's fine.

The moment somebody calls you Sally and you feel that little internal reaction.

The moment you realize you're about to swallow something because being polite seems easier.

That's the moment.

Not the aftermath.

Not what you wish you'd said later.

Right there.

That's where the choice is.

I don't think the answer is to stop tolerating everything.

That sounds exhausting.

Some things are genuinely not worth our attention.

Some jokes don't matter.

Some comments can roll right off.

Sometimes grace really is grace.

The question I'm asking myself is a little different:

Do I actually not care?

Or have I gotten so good at tolerating things that I've stopped noticing when I do?

Because those aren't the same.

And I think I've confused them before.

Maybe that's why the idea keeps coming back to me.

What you tolerate, you teach.

Not because every person around you is waiting to learn how badly they can treat you.

Not because everything is your fault.

But because relationships develop patterns.

And we participate in those patterns.

Sometimes actively.

Sometimes by what we don't say.

Sometimes by laughing.

Sometimes by staying quiet.

Sometimes by deciding that being polite is more important than being honest.

I don't know yet how to change every pattern that lives inside the most automatic things I do.

I don't think that's how this works anyway.

You notice.

Then you notice again.

You catch yourself sooner.

Maybe you say, "Actually, I don't like that."

Maybe you let it go because you genuinely don't care.

Maybe you laugh because it's actually funny.

Maybe you say nothing.

But this time, the silence is a choice.

That's different.

The instinct, every time, is to rip off the tape.

I noticed that last night.

I didn't pull it off.

I'm still sitting with that.

PS — What I'm describing here is a more serious phenomenon at work than it might seem. It has a whole day inside my Leadership Jumpstart, and it's some of my favorite work to do with a room full of leaders. If you'd like to dig into it together, you can find the details here.