The Toxic Law of Jante: Smashing Society’s Pressures and Embracing Your Unique Self 

Ep 11 – Edited Audio [00:00:00] In this episode, I am doing what I can to help us all kill the law of Jante, one and for all. I want you to be the talented, fabulous, glamorous, amazing person that you are, without fear, without shame, and without guilt, and show your weirdness to everyone. Enjoy the episode. [00:01:00] Every time when Peter and I were traveling around Scandinavia, doing talks and inspiring people to go to personal development events, for example, Tony Robbins events in London, we very often talked about the young to law or the law of young and that was many people’s reasons or excuse for not being who they really are, and to keep themselves down. And the yantre law, the law of yantre consists of 10 rules and I’ll read them up to you, if you haven’t heard about them before, please just feel how they feel in the body and if I’m getting emotional, it’s because I just Really can’t stand these kind of rules. And I think we spent so much time holding ourself back. And the reason why I wanted to talk about this in a podcast is because I really want us together to kill this whole concept [00:02:00] of the AL Law, and that’s what I’m going to talk more about in this episode. Okay? So I’m going to read all the 10 rules. and just feel how they feel in your body. You’re not to think you are anything special. You’re not to think you are as good as we are. You’re not to think you’re smarter than we are. You’re not to imagine yourself better than we are. You’re not to think you know more than we do. You are not to think you are more important than we are. You’re not to think you are good at anything. You’re not to laugh at us. You’re not to think anyone cares about you. You’re not to think you can teach us anything. So the first thing that I notice about these rules [00:03:00] is that there is a very big gap between the we and the you. It’s like there’s a group of people that kind of owns the rules for everything and nobody else can come and tell them what to do or even teach them anything. And I think this is a basic flaw of A lot of societies is the thinking of us and the others. And I know for myself, I spent a lot of time kind of trying to identify with my group of friends or my family, and therefore kind of putting myself in that group, or outside that other group, for example, in my in my class, there were two groups of girls. And when I went to the high school, there were two groups of girls in my class, and I was kind of not part of any of them. And this whole idea of being like in a group or being out of the group, being allowed to be a part of the cool gang or not being [00:04:00] allowed to be a part of the cool gang creates a lot of problems for us. And I know for myself, I just used so much time kind of trying to figure out if I was in or out, or is I if I belonged or not. And of course, there’s there’s this, this very basic need of humans to belong to the group, because biologically, it would be dangerous if we weren’t belonging to the group. So That kind of is the first concept that is very much a problem with these kind of rules. And the second thing is, of course, what it actually says. You heard me said in, in earlier episodes that humans compare ourselves too much to others. And I think this, this whole concept of Jante is Of course, keeping us down a lot as a society, because this is about not being allowed to be who you are. This is [00:05:00] about not showing other people who you are. This is about trying not to be weird. This is about trying not to stand out, trying not to be too loud, trying not to be too tall, trying not to take up too much space. And I know this. First hand, as a person that was counting kind of minutes, if we were four people together, if I had spoken for like 25 percent of the time, one fourth of the time, I shut up, because I felt like I’d taken up enough space and there were rules to that, as if somebody else was counting. And I couldn’t take up more space than kind of my space. What was truly interesting was that when Peter Ecke and I traveled in Denmark, in Norway, in Sweden, Everyone was familiar with the Law of Jante, and also everyone felt like it was the rules that they were living by. It was the rules that were set for their society. There was a certain kind of limit to how self confident you could be, [00:06:00] how much you could brag about yourself, how much you could be self assured or kind of put yourself out there. However, when we got to Iceland and we started talking about the Law of Jante, the Icelandic people hadn’t even heard about it. And they were like, no, there’s no such concept. And I think it’s super interesting because for me as a Norwegian, I kind of grew up with this. We learned about these, these rules in school. And of course they are fiction rules. Like they are really not real, but they are based on the feeling of how a lot of people live. in the Scandinavian society. So when we came to Iceland, they are more like the Americans, they’re more like self confident, more adventurous, not as afraid of putting their head or voice out. And for us, that was truly, truly, truly interesting. I know other places in the world, there are similar concepts like the tall puppy syndrome, for example, in [00:07:00] Australia or New Zealand, where you, you kind of, if you have some kind of success, you should definitely not brag about it. You have to keep yourself kind of quiet because otherwise people will start looking at you and so I know there are some truly egoistic self centered, narcissistic people in this world. But for most people, these rules aren’t doing us any good. These rules are limiting us from seeing our own potential, allowing us to see our own potential, and to putting that potential out in the world. I am 100 percent confident in my belief that Humans have so much more potential than we actually live. I’m 100 percent sure that you’re listening right now. You have much more potential than you’re actually putting out in the world. And if you are from Scandinavia or if you recognize yourself in this fear of like being too much or being too loud or taking up too much [00:08:00] space, it is about time we just kill that law once and for all. The truth for humans is that firstly, as I talked about before, we cannot be compared. Like, it’s just mathematically invalid to try to compare humans because we are so different because we have so many different personalities and skills and traits and physical attributes and it’s not possible to compare them. And secondly, we are all unique. We are all unique. I remember a few years back where I gave a physical speech to a group of pretty successful female entrepreneurs. And I asked them, like, do you feel more weird than most people think you are? Or do you feel more weird than you’re letting other people see? And all of them said yes. So this is truly, of course, very [00:09:00] basic proof, but it is proof that all humans, we kind of have more craziness to us. We have more individuality to us. We have more things to us that we are kind of trying to hold back, or we’re trying to censor because for some reason we’re afraid that other people will judge us. My goal for this episode is just to make you super, super conscious about where do you hold yourself back? What parts of your life? Where aren’t you speaking as engaged as you could? where aren’t you screaming as loud as you want to? Where aren’t you kind of, what do you call it, pumping your foot? and set your foot down when you need to. When are you not showing your vulnerability? Because this isn’t only about strength and taking up space. This is about not showing our vulnerability, not being able to ask for help, not being able to receive [00:10:00] help, not being able to, there’s so many things that we’re limiting ourselves from when we have these kind of rules incorporated. And it’s not like one person took these rules on and chose to live by them. It is just the way we are raised. And it is in our blood. And it is in our, I want to say it’s in our genes. And I really think that every person has to do this job individually, of getting rid of all these fears and all these limiting beliefs. Because even if we believe in it or not, for example, when I read these rules, I, of course, understand that these are like, they’re just ridiculous. Like this. There’s nothing It’s real in it. However, I still felt for so big part of my life that I was living by these rules, and I was judging myself by these rules, and I was judged by other people from these rules, and I think many people have [00:11:00] that feeling, even without it being true. Like, even without other people judging us, we kind of self judge, and we are afraid of other people judging us, and that’s why we’re limiting ourselves. So there is, like, really, really important progress, I think, we’re going through a phase right now in humanity. where every individual that is taking responsibility to get rid of trauma, rid of limiting beliefs, rid of things like the Law of Jante, when every person is taking individual responsibility for that, my true belief is that we are making the world a better place. So when you’re starting to see this pattern, In your life, if there’s somewhere where you feel like you maybe should have said something, or you wanted to say something, or you wanted to be a bit weird, I can use myself like singing songs on the stage as an example, because for me, [00:12:00] that going on stage and actually taking up space. Singing or performing a song when I know that there are better play better people in the audience is horrifying. And that’s why I’m doing it because I’m challenging myself. I really have a feeling that I want to sing that I need to create music that I want to write songs and I want to perform. And I somehow want to uplift people with it, but I’m not 100 percent confident yet that I can do it. But still, even if I know there are better people. more professional, more rehearsed, like better trained people there. I sometimes go up on stage and I take that microphone to challenge myself and to go for what I want. And what is amazing is when other people start to love you and support you following your dreams. passion or your dream, even if you aren’t good yet. And I just want to remind everyone, [00:13:00] sometimes we think and we strive for perfection before we even have started practicing. Like, there’s no way I can be as good as playing the guitar, as confident singing in the microphone, as these people that have done it for 20 years already. I haven’t practiced much and therefore I have no chance of kind of getting there and the only way for me to get good at it is to actually go for it, even if I’m not the greatest at that. And what is also amazing is one of my singing songwriting friends that is saying now to me, Maria, everyone has their own unique voice, like don’t compare yourself to others. And I’m like, yeah, I’m telling my clients that all the time. So at some areas in our life, we do have the confidence to speak out, we do have the confidence to take up space, we do have the confidence to, to not talk ourselves down when we do things. And then when we go to other [00:14:00] places, other areas, other fields in our life, where we aren’t as confident, we haven’t had as much practice, we get into the same self doubts and the same inner inner critics. And I feel like a lot of us right now, we are in this process of releasing all those fears and in the process of challenging ourselves to confront our limiting beliefs and to confront the things that are keeping us. safe and confront the things that are preventing us from doing what we really, really, really want. And I know my fear when I started doing self low and I started doing personal development when I started spending more time taking care of myself when I go up onto that stage and take my microphone and take up space. My fear was always to become like in egoistic. idiot that has no antennas, no empathy, and doesn’t understand when enough is enough. [00:15:00] And honestly, sometimes I think the world would be better if more of us had less of those antennas than us trying to limit ourselves all the time from doing anything that could be looked upon as weird or different or special or whatever. So when we work on freeing ourselves from the Law of Janta, because this is a personal project, of course, it’s a society project, but it starts with one and every single one of us actually looking at where do we hold ourselves back? And what do I want to do? Where is my passion? And how can I start practicing doing that in a good way? And the thing is, when we start doing that to ourselves, when we start being generous with ourselves, not being perfect, not being like super good at anything we haven’t practiced yet, we are also getting more generous with, with others. Because one of the things with this, this lovjante is that all of us [00:16:00] are super critical, not only towards ourselves, but also towards the others. And this is because. And this kind of mindset, this kind of mindset just keeps us limited. And we need to break through. We need to come out of this. And we start by being generous to ourselves. And when we’re more generous to ourselves, we’re also becoming more generous towards others. And that’s why we’re letting other people take up space. And sometimes I do super weird stuff. For example, I’ve been kind of singing. Off tone in the microphone quite a few times lately, and I could go away and be super embarrassed and think I would never do that again. Or I go away and I think, okay, so maybe that wasn’t like the best hit of that tone, but I tried, I practiced, I’m getting better, I’m getting more confident. And this is a hard process. It [00:17:00] requires us, it requires persistence and it requires self love and generosity. And we need to practice that every single day. I want to talk about a few of these rules from the Law of Jante because they’re just super ridiculous and because I want to be more specific on how can we actually prevent this from kind of running our lives. So the first rule is you, you’re not to think you’re anything special. And. I want to kind of just oppose that by saying we are all special, we are all very unique and we’re all very different. And that’s why we shouldn’t even compare. That’s why we shouldn’t even bother what the other people are doing. That’s kind of not true because of course we will because we care about each other. But there’s something about just being you, allowing you to be you and allowing you to feel you and allowing you to do you without comparing that to how other people do themselves. Then there’s this point of You’re [00:18:00] not to think you’re more important than we are. And I honestly think everyone is equally important. Like humans are equally important. And again, it all comes back to this comparison isn’t valid. So why should someone or anyone be more important or less important than others? You play your role. You have people in your life that cares about you. You have things that you are good at. You have interests that light you up. And that’s what you should focus on, not how you compare to others. and then this last point, you’re not to think you can teach us anything. I truly believe that everyone on this planet can teach something. Since we have that uniqueness, since we have that weirdness, since we have our own voice, our own way of doing things, our own passions, our own interests, we can all learn from each other. And this isn’t about thinking like that you have to be a teacher, because not everyone is thinking about them or wants to be, [00:19:00] take the role of being a teacher, but just being with each other, just seeing how we prioritize the things in our lives, just seeing how the things we care about. the things we do in our life. And when we allow ourselves to be that a bit more weird, a bit more special or a bit more unique and a bit more individual, we will learn so much about each other. I want to end this episode by reading a quote from Marianne Williamson. And Nelson Mandela used this in his speech when he got elected the president of South Africa. And Marianne mentions God in this. And if you don’t believe in God, just replace it with something that is similar for you. I think this is super, super powerful. And I think this illustrates the whole point. And this is the way to get rid of the law of in all of us. So here we go. Our deepest fear [00:20:00] is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us. It is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our [00:21:00] presence automatically liberates others. So this is what I want you to take away from this episode. When you let your own light shine, unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. And when you are liberated from your own fear, Your presence automatically liberates others. Isn’t that wonderful? Thank you so much for listening to this episode. To dig deeper, visit awesome. com forward slash scaling light. That’s A W E S M dot com forward slash scaling light. You’ll find show notes, resources and links. mentioned in this episode, as well as links to our socials. If you like what you heard, please rate and review us on the podcast platform of your choice. Your feedback is so important to help more entrepreneurs to discover this show. Our goal is to provide inspiration and we hope you’ll continue scaling alongside us. Thanks for your support and see you [00:22:00] next time.