Today’s post is something a little different – a guest post by Kate Swoboda from Your Courageous Life. If you’re not familiar with Kate, she is this amazing, creative and authentic soul who’s work resonates her beautiful life-filled message. So much goodness in one gal. I hope you enjoy!

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Some people are raised to people-please, to defer to others. I was raised to have an opinion, to speak into it, and to be willing to do something different. I valued my personal autonomy over everything else. And with that, over the years, my life’s timeline had a string of friendships that were left or abandoned along the way.

For years, I didn’t know for sure why friends left, or friendships with potential never lifted off the ground. I had my theories–perhaps I was just more mature than my peers in my teens and early 20s? Perhaps I was seen as boring because I didn’t drink? Perhaps it was that I spent the first 24 years of my life in the more conservative Midwest, and sexism was to blame?

I lifted my chin high and decided that if people didn’t like an opinion, this was their problem, not mine.

Yet somehow it continued to rankle me that the choice would seemingly be between assertiveness versus having close friends. The old adage is to “just be yourself,” yet when I was just being me, people left, and it was getting painful. I started trying to state my opinions in what I called my “I’m being really nice voice.” As in, “I’m saying something you don’t want to hear, but I’m being really nice as I’m saying it.”

No dice. And despite my tough exterior, I lived with anxiety that the people in my life might at any moment decide that something about me was too much to handle, and leave.

Then came the “A-ha! moment.”

I was an assistant at a workshop and we were about to finish up an activity. We needed people to circle up and stay together for three minutes, tops. However, one of the participants was on her way out of the room to use the restroom. I felt stress at trying to round up 60 people within the next 60 seconds, and a little annoyed that this person was leaving. “We’re about to finish up,” I told her in my “I’m trying to be really nice” voice. A flicker of irritation come over her face. She went back into the room.

Right behind her was one of my fellow assistants, also heading out the door. “Oh, we’re about to start,” I said to that assistant, again in my “I’m trying to be really nice” voice, though internally I was annoyed that she wasn’t helping.

“Well, I’m going to the bathroom!” she said, walking past me.

I sighed, went into the main room, and replayed what had just happened in my head. I hadn’t ordered anyone around, and I had used my nice voice, but people were still upset. Wasn’t I just enacting my assistant role?

This incident was a little microcosm of my life. I tried to shrug it off, but it continued to bother me.

Later that evening, when the workshop had wrapped and the assistants had gathered for our end-of-day meeting, I brought up what had happened. The assistant who had been leaving the room that afternoon said, “I was going to talk to you about that. It really upset me that you were blocking the door!”

Okay–now I was thoroughly confused. What was she talking about? Blocking the door–was she crazy? I was just doing my job as an assistant, rounding people up, wasn’t I? But then–gently but clearly–another assistant in the group shared that sometimes, they’d noticed that my demeanor seemed standoffish or brusque. I began to cry.

I told the group that I’d noticed a lifelong pattern where inexplicably, people had reacted to me in these ways. I didn’t understand why…and would give anything to know. And when my tears flowed, more than one person gently said that they were sharing feedback in an effort to help.

We closed our meeting that night and I headed home feeling utterly broken open and still lacking answers or understanding. I was embarrassed, completely confronted by a message that I couldn’t take in.

I was winding through a stretch of the Oakland Hills that overlooks the entire San Francisco Bay Area. The sun was getting low, casting a golden glow on everything, and I was crying and hitting my steering wheel because all of this ached so deeply in me.

And then: I got it.

My tears stopped in seconds, as I internalized it: my energy was stronger than my words. I hadn’t told anyone that they “shouldn’t” go to the bathroom–that would be crazy–but my energy had. The energy I carried had communicated my judgements that I was right and someone else’s behavior was wrong. In fact, my judgement had been so strong that it had left someone with the impression that I was–ludicrous as it sounds–blocking a door!

It was suddenly clear that the energy I held around negative judgements of others had been the cause of painful isolation–not simply having opinions. I replayed years of interactions in my head, of times when my word choices had been “I” statements and my tone of voice softened, yet the other party had still thought I was a jerk. I realized that in every single one of those interactions, without exception, I’d had strong judgements about the other person–what they should do, how they should be.

The “I’m trying to be really nice” voice would never override the energy of negative judgement.

During my life, some people had called me a bitch when they sensed my judgements. Others had been unable to identify what was “off” about our interactions and simply left the relationship.

But this was the first time I’d had understanding–within a group that genuinely cared, and genuinely wanted to help me shift anything that I was committed to shifting. This group saw beyond my actions and into the small, scared parts of me that used judgement as a form of control–they saw that I didn’t have practice in being any other way. They lovingly supported me in changing.

That is the power of love–a lifelong habit, shifted in literally one day.

I share this story hoping that everyone will recognize that when we don’t like a behavior in someone else, but we meet their behavior with more of the same–rejecting them, shouting them down, putting them down, hurting them back–we don’t actually effect change.

Not one person who ever called me a bitch ever had me thinking that I was in the wrong and needed to change. Instead, I would think: “How could I be the bitch? You’re the one doing the name calling!” Not one friend who stopped returning phone calls ever helped me to see the connection between my behavior and their leaving.

How many times have you seen or been a part of a group that gossips about someone else, and then someone says something to the effect of, “She needs to get a clue!” Guess what?

That person might have “inappropriate” tattooed on their face, and they’re still not going to understand what isn’t working about their behavior until they are met with kindness and compassion, and your willingness to help them shift.

That’s what my group of assistants gave me that day, and it changed my life. I began calling people that very night to share with them what I’d realized, and to apologize for any times they might have felt me carrying an energy of judgement about their choices.

The even bigger gift? Now I could work on the distracting drama of judging others, and turn the light inward–Where was I judging myself? Why was some scared part of me using judgement to control or isolate? There were opportunities to heal, here–big ones. And nothing beats being able to look yourself in the mirror and know that you’re stepping into a bigger space of integrity.

Kindness matters–in fact, it makes all the difference in the world.

The question put before each of us becomes how much we’re willing to choose kindness in those moments when it seems easier to simply reject. This isn’t just about relationships between people anymore, as we live in a world where, increasingly, violence begets violence. So if it were your personal challenge to treat kindness as a value, then I ask: Which of us will step up first, to change?

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Kate Swoboda is a life coach, teacher and writer living in the San Francisco Bay Area. In January 2011, she’ll be launching the Courageous Living Guides, a series of topical, downloadable e-programs combining the written word, exercises, videos and interviews focused on transforming fear and living big.