Hey, everybody, it's Eric from the one you Feed, and I am back with another mini episode. Today. I want to talk about something that's known as Solomon's paradox. King Solomon, who most of us know from the Bible, was considered to be extremely wise and have extremely great judgment. It said that during his reign people would travel great distances to seek his counsel. But it's also true that his personal life was a shambles of bad decision and uncontrolled passions.
He kept hundreds of pagan wives and concubines, He loved money and was constantly boastful. He neglected to teach his son, who grew up to be an incompetent tyrant. All these misjudgments and poor decisions contributed to the eventual demise of his kingdom. There's a psychological scientist named Ego or Grossman, and he came up with this idea of Solomon's paradox. And the paradox is we can know a great deal
about what to do in life. We can give great advice to other people, but it is extremely difficult for us to very often see things in ourselves or to give ourselves the same advice. There's a cartoon I love that has a cow sitting in a doctor's office and the doctor says, I think we can fix that ringing in your ears. And the cow is sitting there with a big cowbell around his neck. And it's funny because the things that can be right in front of us, things that we know so well, we often can apply
to ourselves. I did an interview recently with Dr Stephen Hayes. I'm not sure when it will come out. He's the founder of ACT. It's Acceptance and Commitment therapy. He suffers from tonitus, which is the ringing in the ears, and Acceptance and Commitment therapy, which I can't wait to share
that episode with you guys because it's so good. Is all about accepting what is happening and not learning it dominate and Dr Hayes says that he spent years fighting the tonitus, having it drive him crazy until he actually then turned and applied the therapy his life's work to it. And still it took him a long time to do it. So it's very difficult for us to see ourselves to
get through this. Solomon's paradox. One thing that Dr Grossman found when he was discovering and writing about Solomon's paradox. He got a group of people together and what he would do is present them with a scenario like you find out that your partner is unfaithful. So one group gets that scenario, another group gets you find out that your best friend's partner is unfaithful. And the reasoning and the different approaches and and the wisdom really came from
that group that saw it as their friends issue. So then he repeated the experiment and tried to take people and say, it's your situation, but I want you to think about it in the third person. And what he found was that the people that were able to step outside themselves, that were able to put on that even though it's my issue, I'm going to think of it as if it's another person. It really helped increase the
wisdom of their reasoning. The people who are able to distance themselves from that situation, they reason much more wisely about relationship conflicts in general than did those who were immersed in their own feelings. So this points to two things.
One is that idea of trying to get some distance from our own thoughts, from trying to step outside and look at it from a different perspective, look at things from the perspective of look at your life as if you were someone else looking at it, And it also speaks to the power and the need for a community or people to help you look at the world. This is where a coach can be so valuable by This is where having friends that you can share things with
is so valuable. But getting some distance and perspective from your own emotional issues is really hard to do, but really worth doing, and so it's important that we try and give ourselves that perspective very often when we're looking at our life and in decisions in general, having as many different perspectives as possible is often very helpful. Looking at things from the window of how I feel about this in ten days, ten months, ten years. That's one
type of perspective. The other is this this third person type of perspective where you step outside yourself and you look at your life as if it was a friend of yours life and all these things help us to make better decisions, to handle our situations better. But again, this Solomon's paradox is a real thing, and it's really so it's really hard to see things and ourselves that other people can see in it. So it's important to give ourselves that perspective and give other people the opportunity
to give us that perspective. If you're interested in learning more about the one you feed coaching program, you can go to one you feed dot net slash coaching and you can learn more about the program there. And thank you so much for listening. Another episode out on Tuesday. We'll talk with you soon. Byem