Episode 7 – Everyone’s Got One: Dag Hammarskjöld and the Art of Handling Opinions

In this episode of Decoding the Unicorn: The Podcast, I'll explore the quiet strength of Dag Hammarskjöld in the face of mass opinion—especially from the media. How do you stay true to your inner compass when the world is loud with critique? Dag’s life offers a masterclass.

We can take inspiration from how Dag handled being both revered and reviled, often in the same breath. He knew how to discern which opinions mattered—and which didn’t. This episode isn’t just about Dag, though. It’s about you.

How do you deal with other people’s judgments, unsolicited advice, or internet chatter? What does it mean to live with integrity when everyone feels entitled to weigh in?


🦄 As always, we'll seek to decode the unicorn—not to place him on a pedestal, but to learn how he walked the path with grace under pressure.

#DagHammarskjöld #Leadership #IntrovertLeadership #Opinions #MediaCriticism #QuietStrength #DecodingTheUnicorn #INFJLeaders #DecodingTheUnicornPodcast #EthicalLeadership #UNHistory #LiveWithIntegrity

Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Opinions, HSPs, Dag Hammarskjold, UN Secretary General, media impact, selective caring, beta reader feedback, genre mismatch, public figure criticism, emotional resilience, trustworthy opinions, frenemies, opinion triage, self-care, podcast episode.

Welcome to the Decoding the Unicorn Podcast. Here's your host, Sara Causey.

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. Welcome to episode seven of decoding the unicorn the podcast. In today's episode, I want to talk about opinions. We all have them, and on planet Earth, we all have to deal with them. Some are better than others, some are nicer than others, and some can be downright cruel, especially for HSPs, there are times when we might hear something and think, Oh, my God, could you maybe not have been Simon Cowell circa 2008 Could you maybe have been a little bit nicer in your delivery? So how do we deal with the opinions of others without putting ourselves in a fortress, without sealing ourselves off or trying to play hard? I just don't care. Forget everybody else, nobody matters. Where's the right balance so that we're not being traumatized by other people's opinions, and we're not being dependent on the good opinion of others, especially if we know that we're doing the right thing, surprisingly or unsurprisingly, depending on whether or not you've read my book yet, Dag Hammarskjöld's life and legacy holds important lessons on this very topic. So if you've ever wondered, where's the right balance, how can I care? But not too much, where's the sweet spot? This episode is for you. Stay tuned.

Psst. Just a brief interruption to your regularly scheduled programming to ask if you've purchased your copy of decoding the unicorn, a new look, a dog hammer, should it's perfect for anyone interested in history the Cold War or intriguing biographies. You can find it on Amazon today. Now on with the show.

I want to give a little bit of backstory before we go too far into this episode, Dag was named UN Secretary General in april of 1953 prior to that, he had been working inside the Swedish government for years. He did have a number of diplomatic and international assignments, but in some respects, he was cloistered away inside of Sweden, and when he exploded on to the world stage, oh, people had opinions, they had editorials, they had articles for days and days and days. And as Dag's career went on, there were times that one day he might be king of the world. We love Dag, Dag's amazing, and then a few days later, it's the we hate dag committee. Dag is terrible. He's a tyrant. He's using the UN for his own gain. He's evil. And then a week after that, it might be Dag is the most wonderful person on earth. All over again, it really was like a roller coaster, and it shows you the folly of trying to put too much trust in the opinions of others. Now I want to segue just for a second. It's a related segue, but I want to read just a short portion from decoding the unicorn. This is under the tab Decoding Dag Leadership with Humility. Humility was a core principle for Dag Hammarskjöld. He didn't personally enjoy the company of aggressive, arrogant people, and he endeavored not to behave that way himself. True leadership was not about self promotion and chest puffing. Long before Dag became Secretary General, his father, Hjalmar told him that it was important not to become dependent on the praise of the press or to fold under the weight of their criticism, doing the right thing was always paramount. So now I want to tie in what happened to Hjalmar. He was Sweden's Prime Minister during World War One. There were shortages, there was rationing. It was wartime, and Sweden kept a neutral stance. During World War One, there were some shipments that got delayed, some cargo that was damaged, and there were actually some shipments of food that just never actually made it too sweetened. And as Harry Truman always says, The buck stops here. He was always very clear that whatever decisions I make in this office, I have to take responsibility for and because Hjalmar was the Prime Minister when these things were going on, the buck stopped with him, and he was given the pejorative nickname Hungerskjold because of the rationing, because of the shortages, there was very much this. It's all Hjalmar Hammarskjöld's fault. Let's blame him. And unfortunately, Dag was a child and really an innocent bystander when all of this was going on, but the kids at school, they heard what their parents were saying at home, they heard the nasty insults, and decided to take that those things to school and torment Dag with them. So you have this sweet, wonderful bookworm. Child who suddenly becomes the school pariah and is bullied, in some cases, physically assaulted, not only verbally insulted and emotionally abused, but physically abused as well by some of his peers because they heard what their parents were saying about Hjalmar and Dag learned early on in life that the media, the press these pejorative nicknames, they can have a real impact on somebody's life, not not only their life, but the lives of their family members as well. And it inspired this conversation between Dag and his father, of you cannot be dependent on the praise of the media. The Media at the press, they're fickle. Love you one day, hate you. The next, you're king of the world on top of the mountain, and then you're ponds down. And it can happen like that. So he really instilled in Dag that worrying too much about the opinions of others is a fool's paradise. You have to do what you know to be morally and ethically the right thing to do, worrying about the media or your peers or gossip, whatever it is, it's not going to get you anywhere that you ultimately want to go. Now let's bring this into modern times. We think I have to worry about what my boss says, because if I don't, then I might get fired. I have to worry about my spouse and their opinions, because if I'm not in their favor, then we might get a divorce. I have to worry about my parents, and then I have to worry about my children, and then I have to worry about my siblings. They have to worry about what the neighbors think, and then people in church. And it's like, eventually it just gets to a point where it's like, how many opinions are you filtering in? If you really had to worry about the opinions of all of these individuals around you, you would go crazy. There's what, like 8 billion people on the planet at this point, not all of them are going to like you. Some of them are just going to just they're not going to go there. They don't like you as a person, or they don't like your work, and we have to be able to make peace with that, and I will use myself as an example. I always like to do this. I don't ever want it to sound like I'm taking somebody else's inventory, and I'm unwilling to take my own. I had been working with a beta reader recently. I'm not going to get into what it was for, because I don't want to expose anybody. I just this was one of those moments as an author, as a as someone who's passionate about their craft, as well as being an introvert and an HSP, this was like knife to the heart territory. I had hired this person to do some beta reading for me in the early stages of something not Dag related. And I was like, Okay, I'm really proud of this. I feel really good about this. And I feel like at this point it's like, 90 to 95% done, and probably sorry that hair is bothering me, so 90 to 95% done, and probably just some tweaks, some minor things, before we really put the spit polish on it and it gets published. And, you know, I look back through the correspondence, and I really don't know where things went haywire for sure, and I'm not going to make any accusations, but I feel like it was very clear about the genre, about the way that I write and the message that I wanted to convey. And it seemed like this individual was on board with that. They understood the genre, and they were interested in doing the reading, but then the report that I got back was like, awful. I mean, I asked it was like Simon Cowell in the early days of American Idol, when he would be like, when you sing, you sound haunted. You look like you've been shut up in a bedroom for a decade and haven't seen the sun, you look like a Nosferatu. You look like a bush baby, you know, you just skewer people. And so I was like, Oh my God, what? Well, I was not prepared for it. I was prepared for, you know, five to 10% tweaking, but not scrape the earth and start over again, because I just absolutely did not resonate with the story. And it's like, okay, well, you didn't, maybe you don't like what we would call the cozy genre, which I've had to just own it and understand what as I explore my craft, and I get better as a writer, and I know myself better as a writer and a creator like that's the space I so typically play in. I'm not looking to do a lot of blood, guts and gore. I'm not looking to do graphic scenes. You know, this is a G rated podcast about Dag, so I'm keeping it super clean here, but you know, G rated PG at the most kind of stuff. I just don't write things that are hardcore and nasty and graphic. That's just not me. I don't I'm not saying that those things should be censored. People have the First Amendment. They have a right to free speech. They can make whatever the heck they want. I'm just saying for. Me as a writer, that's not really what I produce. It doesn't feel organic to me. It feels like if I tried to write something that was smutty or super hardcore violent, I would be, like, forcing myself to do it, because I just That's not me. That's not what I produce. And so it seemed to me, as well as Jarvis, my AI assistant, because I'm like, I don't get this feedback. You know, look at the chain of information, and then look at this feedback, and then you tell me what you think. And we both independently arrived at the conclusion that this individual just didn't get the genre, didn't like the style. Perhaps this person was looking for, like, I don't know, Game of Thrones or something like that, where there's dragons and explosions and people are all involved with one another, and there are plots and there are murders. And I'm like, okay, but no, like, I've written what's supposed to be this inspirational novella. And I don't know precisely what this individual was expecting, but it was a total mismatch. There was a misalignment. So does it mean that my story is bad? No. Does it mean that the person was bad? No. It means that the person's opinions are not going to be taken very seriously by me, because that person is not my reader. This is why knowledge of the self, something else that dag was so hip to so that meant so much to him. It's so important because it's like, well, I don't need to change who I am to please a random stranger, somebody who took the job when they shouldn't have, somebody who may, I don't know, maybe possibly misrepresented the types of genres that they like to read, maybe misrepresented their skill set a pinch bit. I don't know it's possible. I'm not going to filter that that criticism in very highly. I don't need to take that opinion and freak out about it. Now, that's easier said than done, especially when we're married to our work, we love what we're doing, and you know, we have that highly sensitive person thing going for us. It's like, oh, but I wanted you to like it. I wanted you to feel good about what I was sending. But the reality is, as I said, there's 8 billion people. Not everybody is going to like what you do, and not everybody in the world is going to be your appropriate audience, whatever work it is that you're doing, whatever passion it is that you're following, it's not meant for everybody, and that's okay. It really is. And when we think about what Dag went through being on the world stage and having people nitpick him all the time, I mean, just the other day, in doing the research and the writing for my next project, Simply Dag, I stumbled upon this magazine article, and I wanted to just get in a time machine, go back in time and smack that reporter right across the face. I mean, it was so mean, because the article starts off being kind of nice, like, oh, Dag. Is wonderful. And he's always doing this work inside the UN and his colleagues have such awesome things to say about him, but he's gotten old and paunchy. I mean, literally, that's what it said, old and paunchy. And I'm like, No, you didn't. Oh as mad. I'm still mad thinking about it right now, I'm just like, yeah, I could go back in time. If I had the DeLorean, I would just Back to the Future stuff, and that reporter would not like the hell cat I'm trying to keep it clean. Would not, would not like the individual that they encountered. On the other side, I can just say that, but there's an awesome email that I received from Clark Kegley, and he has what he calls the selective caring framework. So it's not about saying I don't care and forget everybody else and nobody matters and and really trying to be like super tough. It's about saying I'm going to decide, I'm going to curate, I'm going to be intentional about where I place my care and whose opinion really matters to me. Because not all opinions are created equal. You know, I've said Your work is not going to be for everybody, and that's okay. Well, the opposite, like the the other side of the table is true too. I may read something else and go, This just seems like smut. It seems like somebody sat down with an AI programming and wrote something nasty in an afternoon and called it good. And it doesn't resonate for me, but the guy down the street might love it and say, This is awesome. This is literature. It's okay. So what Clark calls the selective caring framework is you really decide whose opinions get through your firewall. And you may only have a handful of people, maybe two or three, maybe five or six. Six whose judgment that you trust. They have proven themselves to be trustworthy. They have good judgment. They're managing their own lives in a way that you respect, and you know that they've got your back. They're not frenemies. I would say, if you're going to set up this, this firewall and then be super intentional about who you let behind it. You want to make sure that you're not allowing frenemies to get into the mix. People will say, That's a great idea. I think you should go for it. And then they sit back in the background and gossip and laugh and snicker. It reminds me of this scene in Murnau's Faust, where Mephistopheles goads Faust into murdering Gretchen's brother, Valentine, and then Mephistopheles runs through the street screaming, murder, murder, to get everybody's attention, and he's just laughing like emiliannings does such an amazing job in that role, because he's just cackling and laughing. And he looks really evil, really evil. That's what I think of with frenemies. Like I'm going to goad you into doing something that I know is going to hurt you, and then I'm going to sit back and cackle and laugh at your misery. Make sure that whenever you're establishing your circle of trust, you're not letting frenemies in these need to be people that you respect. They respect you and they're trustworthy. Notice, I'm also not saying mass media, even if you're a public figure, even if you are running a company, you're a major CEO, or you're the head of some transnational organization, I would not put the mass media in my circle of trust, as I've said, they can love you today, hate you tomorrow, and you may not even know which end is up. One of the things that Clark says in this email that I absolutely love is, and I quote here, don't take criticism from people. You wouldn't take advice from so like in my situation with the beta reader and the misalignment, would I take life advice from that person, no, no. After reading the notes and the so called criticisms, I was just like, I don't even know. Like, What is even happening right now. So if this person was trying to say, hey, I want to tell you how to manage your finances, or I want to tell you how to manage your love life, I'd be like, well, you can just scroll on, just get right on down the road. Clark also talks about what he calls an opinion triage. I think this idea is awesome as well. And so he talks about the red zone is opinions from people that they don't know you, they don't understand you, they they overtly don't like you, so anything they say is going to be tainted by this lens of I hate your guts and I want nothing to do with you. They can also be people who have demonstrated that they're not capable of running their own lives. So this, to use a practical example, it might be smooth that's trying to give you financial advice and tell you how to manage your budget, but they're in debt up to their eyeballs. They never have a spare Penny. Are you going to take life advice from them? No, probably not. But the same is true for other forms of criticism and just general opinion giving, if they don't know you, they don't get what you're doing. Like in my situation, we can come back to the beta reader. This person doesn't really get the cozy genre. Apparently, they want loud explosions. They don't want a slow burn. They don't want anything subtle or intellectual. They want big explosions. They want the door getting kicked down. They want R rated scenes. If you know what I'm getting at and it's like, I'm not here to offer you that, and your opinion on it doesn't doesn't matter. Go read somebody's work that delivers that to you, and maybe you'll have a better experience. And they will too. The yellow zone is what Clark calls feedback from people that you respect, but they're not in the inner circle, so you might want to hold for a minute, you know? And I'm thinking about my project management days a whole point. You might want to consider it a whole point. Okay, I'm going to stop think about what they're saying and weigh and measure it. Does it have some validity? Can I see a point? And by the way, Dag really understood that we can still learn things from people with whom we disagree. We can learn things from people that we don't like them personally and they don't like us personally. But we may be able to step back, you know, I'm thinking of his Swedish neutrality. We may be able to step back and say, Okay, I don't like this person, as a person, their general vibe rubs me the wrong way, but they've made a valid point. Even in the weird stuff that I got back from this person, there were a few points that I felt like were valid. There were a few things that could be tightened up and improved for clarity, that. I'm like, Okay, I see the point. So I think the yellow zone is like a whole point. Consider it. Don't let it destroy you. Don't let it completely throw the train off the tracks. But just say, Okay, I'm going to consider this, this person or this opinion, might have a point. And then what Clark calls the green zone is where you really sit down and give something your full attention. This is an opinion from the circle of trust. It's from somebody who knows you, who cares for you. You respect them. They respect you, and you want to really stop and think, does this person have a point? Are they offering me this opinion because they genuinely care. Maybe they can see that I'm getting ready to put myself in danger. I'm about to put my tender foot inside of a bear trap, and I need to stop. I really think that that system is amazing, and it's so incredibly helpful. He also further advises people to practice those discomfort, that uncomfortable situation we have, the discomfort of being rejected, and maybe do it in in some way at first, that's small, it's silly, it's inconsequential, so that if somebody's like, Well, I disagree with you. I think that's a stupid opinion. You can just kind of go, I'm going to brush that off my shoulders. It doesn't really matter to me anyway. I haven't decided to bear my soul to you. I've just given you a general opinion that, hey, it's not really that big of a deal to me anyway, and that that helps you to to have like exposure therapy. I want to be very careful about not saying toughen up and buck up and all that, because I feel like introverts and HSPs get told that all the time, introverts all the time, get told that they need to be more sociable, they need to be more extroverted, they need to get out more or and then HSPs, it's the same thing. You need to toughen up. You need a thicker skin. You're never going to make it in this world if you can't deal with everybody, and it's like, I don't have to deal with everybody, and not everybody has to deal with me. I like myself. I don't want to scrape my nerves with a brillo pad to try and prove something to you. That's ridiculous. I think Clark makes a good point practice when the stakes are small, and then that way, when you do get a bad report. Somebody says something negative, a person acts like a poopoo head. To you, you can just say it's not that important. It doesn't matter. I've been criticized before, and I lived, you know, we think about what public figures go through, what somebody like dag was experiencing. Imagine like let's really empathize for a second. Put yourself in his shoes. He's sitting there on a Sunday morning, reading the newspaper, having his breakfast, and he sees this article. Oh, Dag's great. All the colleagues say wonderful things about him, and then it's but he's old and punchy. He looked slim. He was a slim, attractive bachelor man when he took the role back in 53 but it's now 1960 and he's old and paunchy, he's got a gut, and he should probably start working out. Imagine being in that situation. I would feel horrible if somebody said that about me. Then I would just get really mad, and I would be like, Well, what do you weigh? Let's put you on a scale. You're out here body shaming everybody you know. Dag never had a gun in his life, and you're out here body shaming people. What's your problem, pal? As you can see, if I could get my hands on that DeLorean, that reporter, would be in serious trouble. But not all opinions are created equal, and we're not meant to care about the opinions of every single person that we're ever going to meet over the course of a lifetime. What yamar told to dag years ago still rings true. You cannot get dependent on praise and turn into a people pleaser, and you can't crumble every time that you're criticized. Either, you have to be your own person, stand by your values and stay true to yourself. And I really feel like Clark's system gives us a framework for that so that we can take it out of the theoretical or the philosophical and really be able to apply those techniques to our own lives. I hope that you enjoyed today's episode. If you did, please be sure to like, share and subscribe. If you're listening on YouTube, hit that subscribe button. If you're listening via audio, make sure that you leave a five star review for us, and I will see you next time.

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