Episode 116: How Mr. Rogers Can Teach You To Slow Down And Be Present
Today’s episode is about slowing down and being in the present moment. One of our greatest teachers of this concept is Mr. Rogers and so I thought it would be fitting to do an episode about Mr. Rogers’s effect and some of the ways he has taught me to be present.
Have you ever sat in a movie theater and been blown away by a single quote?
One little line just floats into your brain and holds on for dear life?
This happened to me last Thanksgiving watching the new movie about Mr. Rogers, It’s A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood, and I have been thinking about it ever since.
In the scene, Lloyd Vogel, a cynical journalist who has been assigned to do a profile on Mr. Rogers, is calling to set up their first meeting. He is shocked to have Fred Rogers answer the phone. Not his assistant, not his handler, Mr. Rogers himself. Lloyd, not wanting to waste the time of an important person, suggests they set another time to talk. Surely Mr. Rogers has more important things to do.
And here is what blew me away: In response to this suggestion, Mr. Rogers says, “What do you think is the most important thing in the world for me right now? To speak on the phone to Lloyd Vogel.”
When I heard this line I audibly gasped.
The quote got me thinking: How often do I miss conversations or important moments because, in my head, I am already moving on to the next thing? How often does my worrying about what comes next distract me from the important things that are happening right there in the present moment?
Almost all my clients have mentioned to me how hard the month of January can be. For a variety of reasons–the darkness, the packing up of the holidays for another year, the inundation of self-improvement New-Year-New-You messages–this time of year can be challenging.
This is why my goal this month is to give you different ways to think about this New-Year-New-You crap and reframe how you think of change and self-improvement.
Today’s episode is about slowing down and being in the present moment. One of our greatest teachers of this concept is Mr. Rogers and so I thought it would be fitting to do an episode about Mr. Rogers’s effect and some of the ways he has taught me to be present.
Listen to the full episode to find out:
How to use the Most Important Thing Test as a way to check in with ourselves and practice mindfulness
What the difference and similarities between mindfulness and meditation are
How the test helps us be gentle and stop mentally beating ourselves up
How to use the test to identify if something is even important
How when we don’t acknowledge our feelings we spend all of our time trying to ignore them
And how acknowledging our feelings is much easier than we are making it out to be
Some of the research and resources mentioned:
+ Read the Transcript
Have you ever sat in a movie theater and been blown away by one quote. One little line just floats into your brain and holds on for dear life. There were a couple of those times as I sat in a darkened movie theater on Thanksgiving watching It’s A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, the Mr. Rogers movie with Tom Hanks, that came out end of last year. But there is one that stands out the most and is something I still think about multiple times a day. Lloyd Vogel is a cynical journalist who has been assigned to do a profile on Mr. Rogers calls Mr. Rogers to set up their first meeting, and he is shocked that Fred Rogers answers the phone, Not his assistant, not his handler, Mister Rogers himself. And when Lloyd suggests they set another time to talk because he knows that Fred has more important things to do right then, Mr. Rogers says, “What do you think is the most important thing in the world for me right now? To speak on the phone to Lloyd Vogel.” I audibly gasped as I heard that line. Thinking to myself, how often do I miss those conversations or moments because I am so busy moving on to the next thing or in my head worrying about what comes next.
“You’re listening to The Happier Approach—the show that pulls back the curtain on the need to succeed, hustle, and achieve at the price of our inner peace and relationships. I’m your host, Nancy Jane Smith.”
I think I have told the story of this scene in It’s A Beautiful Day at least 30 times since we saw it, and I think about it at least once a day. It is one way I bring myself back to whatever it is I am doing. The most important thing I am doing is whatever I am doing right now. I call it the Most Important Thing Test.
Almost all my clients have mentioned to me how hard this month is. For a variety of reasons, the darkness of January, the packing up of the holidays for another year, and the inundation of New Year New You messages. My goal this month is to give you different ways to think about this new year, new you crap, to change how you think of change and self-improvement. I wanted to do an episode about slowing down and being in the present moment, and one of our greatest teachers of this concept is Mr. Rogers. So I thought it would be fitting to do an episode about Mr. Rogers’s effect and some of the ways he has taught me to be present.
Let’s get back to the Most Important Thing Test. I have found this philosophy has helped me on two levels. One, when I am doing a task and my mind wanders, or I start beating myself up for not doing something else, I remind myself that whatever I am doing is the most important thing. I swear, every time I say this one phrase, a light bulb goes off in my head, my heart rate slows, and I take a deep breath and re-focus on what I am doing. I have experienced this while writing, at the grocery store, talking to my husband, spending time with family. Each time it brought me back to what I was doing and made that task 1000 times more fun—yes, even going to the grocery store. Because you know what, you are stuck at the grocery store, so you might as well immerse yourself in the experience. And fully being somewhere all in, completely present is amazingly better than being half in and half out.
The second way the Most Important Thing Test is valuable is it points out when you aren’t doing something important at all—for example, wasting time on social media or playing a game on your phone. There have been times that I am scrolling through social media, and I think, IS this the most important thing I am doing right now? Nope. Definitely not, and it helps me move on to something I would rather be spending my time on.
A 2-fold test. Helping you concentrate on one thing at a time and help you notice when you need to be moving on to another task.
At its root, what the Most Important Thing test is, is a way for you to check-in with yourself and practice mindfulness. Whenever I bring up the idea of mindfulness, the next question is inevitably, do you have a regular meditation practice? And my answer is no. If you have been following me over the years, you know I don’t have a regular meditation practice even though, yes, meditation is an amazing tool.
While we are on the topic of mindfulness and meditation, I want to clear up the difference and similarities between these 2 activities. And it starts with a Continuing Education Training I attended with Ronald Siegel, a psychologist, and renowned meditation expert. Not surprisingly, at one point, he had us practice meditation. I think it was only 15 minutes, and at the end of it, he asked how many people felt more stressed after the meditation. A few hesitant hands popped up around the crowd eventually as people looked around and saw they weren’t alone the more hands that popped up, and before long, almost every hand was up. And then he said something that made me gasp (just like the Mr. Rogers, Most Important thing quote) “meditation isn’t about reducing stress, meditation is about noticing your thoughts and building a relationship with yourself, so when you get stressed, you know your thought. How can it be stress-reducing if your thoughts are running around like a pile of puppies? The reason you meditate is to be able to recognize that your thoughts are a litter of puppies, they are constantly moving and jumping, and you don’t have to believe each and everyone.”
At that moment, I realized all my mini-mindfulness practices were doing the same thing, just in a different form. And that is why I love my mini-mindfulness practices because they give me that chance to see that my thoughts are like boxes on a conveyor belt, and I can choose to pick one up and obsess about it, or I can put it right back up on the conveyor belt and move on. The Most Important Thing test falls nicely into that mini-mindfulness idea, so when a thought comes in and interrupts my time with my nieces and nephews, I can say to myself, put it back up there because THIS is the most important thing right now.
Another mindfulness practice that Mr. Rogers celebrates is gratitude, my rule of gratitude is “always go deep, not wide.” And the practice that Mr. Rogers suggests was an amazing moment at the Daytime Emmy’s when he was given the Lifetime Achievement Award. During his acceptance speech, he stood up and said, “All of us have special ones who have loved us into being. Would you just take, along with me, ten seconds to think of the people who have helped you become who you are--ten seconds of silence.” And he stood there for 10 seconds in silence. I don’t know if you have ever stood still for 10 seconds staring at hundreds of people, but it is an incredible visual. This exercise is one I practice when I can’t sleep at night. I will lie in bed and name those who have helped shape me into who I am. I challenge myself to go as far back as I can and name as many people as I can. Inevitably when I practice this exercise, I feel not only appreciation but a sense of groundedness. Whenever you are feeling alone, overwhelmed, and like no one gets it, I encourage you to take 10 seconds and name all those who have loved you.
Ok, so back to the movie, It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, you know it is a good movie when there is more than one quote that permeates all the stuff in your brain and holds on for dear life. Near the end of the movie, Mr. Rogers says, “Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary.” Again I gasped in the theater. The truth to this message is bone-chilling; let me say it one more time:
Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary.”
So many of our worries, anxieties, fears become blown out of proportion because we are living in fear of mentioning them, but the minute we mention them, they become manageable. But for most of us, we let them swim around in our heads, thinking we are the only one in the world feeling this way and feeling more and more alone.
This idea of acknowledging our feelings is something I am going to be talking about more next month because it is the 2nd most important practice I have implemented to reduce my HFA (after mindfulness).
For too many years, I swallowed my feelings, pushed them down, boxed them up, and threw away the key. I was the queen of “fine” everything is “fine,” acknowledging that I was scared and worse, telling someone else just wasn’t in my repertoire. I realized (I admit begrudgingly) that this behavior of not acknowledging my feelings was hurting me because I was skating on the surface of life.
When we don’t acknowledge our feelings, we spend all of our time trying to ignore them. We engage in people-pleasing, perfectionism, hustling, to-do list management, not to mention numbing on food, alcohol, and our phones, all in a way to keep our feelings down. As Mr. Rogers said, anything mentionable is manageable, so if we aren’t mentioning our feelings, we aren’t able to move through them and engage with them. If I don’t share that I am sad about a promotion I missed at work and just ‘soldier on,’ I won’t ever be able to figure out why I didn’t get the promotion, what steps I need to take next and how I can engage differently at work.
I see it all the time in my clients in Coach in Your Pocket, they will vox me sharing the stress of the day, and they are litanying off their stress, naming all the things that went wrong, they are worried about or disappointed in. But they don’t name ANY feelings. They just talk about the story as if they were giving a news report without any depth. Acknowledging our feelings gives our life dept. Mentioning our feelings allows them to be dealt with in a healthy way.
We make acknowledging our feelings so much harder than it needs to be. It really is as simple as labeling our feelings. If you work with me, you will frequently hear me say, “pull out the feelings sheet,” and label how you are feeling. It isn’t hard or time-consuming, but it is challenging. It feels uncomfortable. But for now, just start noticing your feeling and labeling them. Remember,
“Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary.”
The last thing I want to mention about Mr. Rogers is that he worked for it. In the movie, the journalist Lloyd asks Mr. Rogers’s wife what it is like to live with a Living Saint, and she replies, “I don’t like that term because it makes what he is unattainable,” she says. “And it’s not.” She goes on to detail how much work he puts in to “stay grounded” each day — praying, swimming, and reading scripture. He’s the nicest man in the world, and he works for it.
He works for it. I think the danger is we look at Mr. Rogers’ slow, present, deliberate, focused, empathetic style, and we think it is unattainable. It was something he was born with. When in fact, he worked at it, he made it a minute-to-minute practice. He was not perfect. He was not a living saint. He was human, just like all of us, doing the best we can with what we have. I hope you will implement some of these practices into your daily life. They are a game-changer, AND I definitely recommend you go see the movie It’s A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.
Helping people with High Functioning Anxiety is a personal mission for me. I have a special place in my heart for this struggle because it’s both something I dealt with unknowingly for years and because it silently affects so many people who think this is just how it is. But this isn’t how it is. The constant questioning, doubting, and rehearsing all while handling everything, checking stuff off the list, and “never letting them see you sweat.”
There is hope if you struggle with High Functioning Anxiety—it doesn’t have to be this way. You can reduce your anxiety and keep your edge. You can have less self-doubt and still get a ton done.
We have been sold the lie that our anxiety and our drive to succeed are the same thing. I have seen it in my clients over and over: when they learn how to quiet their anxiety, their passions and interests actually increase. They have new clarity that they never had before.
When I asked clients how they felt about their work via Coach in your Pocket, I was blown away. One of my clients illustrated how HFA affects all areas of our lives and that working with me via Voxer has improved all areas; She said,
“I started this work to feel less anxious. I had no idea how much it would improve my marriage, work, relationships with my kids, and health overall. I do less out-of-control emotional eating, have spoken up more at work, built a stronger connection with my spouse, and have learned how to react less emotionally to my kids.”
Over the course of the three-month program, we meet once a month for a face-to-face session via a secure video chat, and then throughout the entire three months, you have access to me anytime you are feeling anxious, having a Monger attack, celebrating a win, or just need to check-in, and I will respond to you during my office hours (Monday through Friday, 9am - 6pm EST).
I have been doing this work for over 20 years, and Coach in Your Pocket is the most effective and most life-changing work I have ever done. My clients are consistently blown away by how these daily check-ins combined with the monthly face-to-face video meetings create slow, lasting changes that reprogram their High Functioning Anxiety tendencies over time.
Working with me this way is an incredibly efficient and effective way to deal with your anxiety in the moment--without waiting for your next appointment.