Opinion Porn - Christine Kane

When you’re a Soul-Sourced™ entrepreneur, you are a creator and a thought leader. As the one in charge of managing a team and guiding your clients, it’s important to stay cognizant of where your energy is going.

There are energetic repercussions of being inundated with the world’s thoughts, so let’s look at the nitty-gritty of what opinions really do to our hearts and souls. 

Listen in for a story from my early touring musician days that may seem unrelated on the surface but highlights just how tricky we can be to ourselves. 

This episode quickly unpacks how projections/thoughts/reactions impact our psyche and ways you can manage your energy and power when you’re participating (or not) in the cacophony of public opinion.

Episode Transcript

What might I be avoiding right now that makes this opinion seem so very important to put out there.

Welcome to the Soul-Sourcedâ„¢ Podcast, unconventional business advice for the highly creative, secretly sensitive and wildly ambitious entrepreneur. I’m your host, Christine Kane. Let’s do this.

Hello my friends and welcome to the Soul-Sourcedâ„¢ Business Podcast. This is episode number 55, and I’m going to talk about something that I call opinion porn. And the reason I’m talking about this is because a theme that has just continued to be on the surface of everybody’s mind is just the amount of noise that’s out there. Whether it’s social media comments on news posts, comments on next door apps, all that, all the opinions that just kind of seem to pile up about anything from whether or not you should wear a mask, whether or not you should have a vaccine who’s better for having one, not having one, which one’s better, who’s the better political party. You know, it just goes on and on and it goes, even it goes all over the place. It’s just opinions are everywhere.

And I want to be clear that this is not a political commentary or any kind of social commentary. I’m not smart enough for those kinds of things. Where I always land on anything like this is what are you doing inside with any of these things that happen? So mostly I coach entrepreneurs, but I, I also attract people who aren’t entrepreneurs and sort of just like what I’m doing here and that’s fine. But when it comes to entrepreneurship, one of the things that I do love about coaching in that way is that the real challenge for any entrepreneur, anyone running their own business is really understanding how to manage your own energy and how to manage your own power. And the thing about opinions is that we all have them, but opinions are like thoughts to the meditator. When you, and I know I love, I have a lot of meditators here, but when you sit down to meditate, especially when you’re new to it, everyone’s always so shocked at how many thoughts come rushing to the surface and will not stop. And it’s not just thoughts, it’s thoughts about the thoughts. And then the spiritual ego takes over and says you shouldn’t have these thoughts. And if you were really spiritual and a really good meditator, you wouldn’t have thoughts.

And what ends up happening is that it’s really just thoughts arguing with thoughts, and opinions are the same way. They are kind of just like these little water bugs that are on the surface of our consciousness. They float around, we all have them. They’re just like thoughts when you’re meditating. And for reason we have become a culture and we may have always been this way, but we’ve pumped become a culture that if I have an opinion, you need to know it. And, and social media to a large degree has encouraged this, but we just slap out comments left and right. We don’t think about their impact. But the thing that I want to look at is not slapping out comments and the culture and all that stuff. What I want to look at is you, because as an entrepreneur, as an owner who is managing your energy, really and truly the only place you have, any even sort of autonomy in this area is within yourself.

And when it comes to something like opinion porn, what tends to happen is that with that much energy rolling around in the surface and our whole brain training becoming about our opinions, just getting whipped out there, left and right. What I see happening is that the opinions and the frustration with the opinions, and then the judgment of the opinions and the opinions about the opinions and about the judgment of the opinions is that all of this just kind of keeps us each, if we let it in a trance. And what I like to tell my clients is that our opinions really trap our hearts and our souls beneath the clutter. And in the end, all they are is just these, these projections, these thoughts, these reactions that ultimately keep us distracted from something deeper.

And I’m going to tell a story and I don’t know if it’ll apply at all, but it’s sort of similar in some ways, because the truth of the matter is when you’re running a business, you got to go deep. You have to be a creator. You’re being a thought leader, you’re leading your team, you’re leading your clients and you just simply have to be very cognizant of where your energy is going. And the story I want to tell is, um, way back from when I was on the road as a musician. And when I was on the road, I did have some time on a tour bus when I toured with a dance company that, uh, created a ballet to my music. But when I was on the road, for the most part, I was driving my car or my guitar player was driving the car, had a big SUV and drove all over the country. And as much as I always started off those trips saying, I’m going to keep up my songwriting habit, I’m going to keep eating well. Usually by somewhere around day six, I would start, you know, pulling out the food that’s wrapped up in bags that has barcodes, things that crinkle, things that crackle, things that pop, things like food in little chain restaurants that make all kinds of zingy feelings and sparkly drinks and all that kind of stuff, just because you can get so numbed out on the road and you’re just using food to stimulate anything inside of you because of the road is hard.

And when I would come back from those trips, to get back into normal food, like steamed vegetables and a simple piece of fish or something, which is how I normally eat, was so hard. It was like retraining my entire body to become habituated to something new, as opposed to addicted to crinkly, crackly, zingy food that just stimulated. And the reason I’m sharing that is like, I’ve joked about that at many levels because it’s, it’s really the it’s similar to meditation. It’s similar to creativity. It’s what are we getting distracted by? And what are we looking to find that stimulates us, like really zings us versus avoiding the more boring, sometimes the more uncomfortable, the more still, the deeper stuff that’s inside of us. And that’s what I notice opinions doing to people, whether you’re reacting to the opinions or having the opinions or slamming your comments out there or whatever it might be, it really is not helping you get any deeper.

And again, this is not about being kind. It’s not about being a good Christian or being a good Buddhist or being better behaved or more spiritual. It’s not that, because that’s one angle of looking at it. But when you really look at managing your own energy, managing your own power, understanding what truly matters, then the real question about all these opinions and this whole ticker tape parade of our thoughts and this endless stream, that is rarely true. And in fact, I would say almost never true, is really just to see very clearly inside of you, what you’re distracting yourself from. Like, it is so much easier to be projecting outward, pissed off, commenting, opinionated thoughts every which way. And what happens is we dive toward them and it actually feeds the habit much like my crinkly packages of food. It feeds that addiction, it keeps it going. It just feeds it and you’re constantly projecting, outward thinking something’s wrong out there when really the call for any of us doing deep work that matters and wanting a life that truly matters. The call in all of this opinion porn is always going to be to turn back inward, because like I said, it’s not about deciding to be kind or putting on some fix and being a polite person it’s really about navigating and managing your own energy and asking yourself, what might I be avoiding right now that makes this opinion seems so very important to put out there, how is this little opinion, this little water bug on the surface of my consciousness, distracting me from what I really know is a priority to me or what I know what matters to me.

And can I be courageous enough to turn away from this habit, this addiction, this, this little pornography thing, this opinion porn that’s out there, take a deep breath and challenged myself to sit still and be quiet. Let the opinions rage out there and do the work that matters most to me right now. And by work that matters most to you right now, I don’t necessarily mean the writing, the recording, the whatever it is you’re doing. You could also just go sit still and stare at a tree or be with your daughter or go sit with a friend or make a cup of tea or do something that brings you back into what’s real. What’s true. And an energy system that is more aligned, even if you just sat there and breathe, it would do a lot more to serve the, the end intention of your life than getting lost in those opinions.

And it’s sort of like meditation practice, a really good meditation teacher is going to tell you not to try to repress the thoughts, not to try to change them or fix them, but really, to rest as awareness, rest as the backdrop, where all these thoughts can run around scream how important they are and you sit and breathe, notice them, come back to center, notice them, come back to center. And so the gift of all this opinion porn, for those of us who want to use everything in our lives as a teacher, the gift of it is that it really is brain training for you. It really is energy training for you to ask yourself and to watch. Why do I think these opinions are so important? What is the energy behind this opinion? Why do I feel the need to put this out there? Why do I feel so much disgust and really be with that and breathe with that and be willing to be still and be uncomfortable and let all the things happen out there that happen and do what you can to do your work in the world and know that you slapping down one more comment on a Facebook post about something horrible is probably not going to do anything more than strengthen your ego, which loves to say things like ha, I showed them or whatever our egos do, but our Egos have this need to constantly be fed.

And we’re in a world right now where if you let it, you can constantly that fed. And it is a very convenient distraction from things that are really true and worthwhile and that truly matter, or at least that you’ve said that matter because typically those things require some leaning in, they require all your presence and they often require a little bit of discomfort like sitting down and making a video, sitting down and writing something, whatever it might be or just sitting still. And yet any of you who meditate. And I know a lot of you do know that when you do sit down and you let the thoughts do their big raging and you sit, you sit still and you stay on that cushion and you don’t move, you realize that at some point they stop mattering so much.

At some point they didn’t no longer wield the power. It’s not always that you reach any kind of Nirvana, but you start to realize and see them for the addiction that they are. So it’s the same thing with all the opinions out there right now, and all the frustration we feel with it. Our choice is to come back to center, come back home, breathe, and do something, check in with yourself to find the thing that matters. And that’s all that. And that’s all it’s about right now because the world isn’t going to change because you stamp your foot and have another opinion, but you can indeed manage your own energy. Do the thing that you do, run the business that you have and lead the life that you have and do it with equanimity and call in a little grace and then move onward.

And that’s all I want to say, because I think it’s really important for us to remember our own power and our own circle of influence and what truly matters. And all you need to do is next time you have an opinion, watch the energy of the opinion and ask yourself what it’s distracting you from. And that’s all. Thanks you guys for listening. I will see you next week.