I got Julia Roberts-ed a few Saturdays ago.

I walked into a fancy jewelry boutique to revive a few battered favorites: an earring missing its pearl and a necklace with a busted clasp. The place dripped with sparkle. Think velvet displays, floor-to-ceiling windows, and staff who look as if they moonlight on fashion runways.

Seconds later, I found myself replaying the iconic Pretty Woman scene where snooty shop assistants freeze out Vivian Ward.

I presented my orphaned pearl earring and busted necklace. The attendant, a young man in a razor-sharp suit, eyebrows set to “condescension,” inspected my pieces like they might bite him. He peered down at them with the sort of look you can only pull off if you own a monocle.

“Can you fix the earring?” I asked.

He glanced once. “No problem.”

Then I showed him the necklace.

He recoiled as if I’d handed him a used tissue.

He lifted my necklace with tweezers and inspected it with his monocle.

“This necklace is not gold,” he declared.

“It is,” I replied. “Nine-karat, to be exact.” I could already feel Vivian’s sting.

Gold in My Blood, Facts in My Pocket

I grew up in South Africa, a place where gold prices run in the family DNA. We could quote the value of a troy ounce before we could drive. Everybody had a cousin who worked in the mines. We knew gold’s malleability (how thin it hammers) and its ductility (how far it stretches). It’s about fifty miles of wire from a single ounce if you are interested.

I could have given a TED-style lesson, but monocle-man cut me off.

“We start at ten karats in this country,” he sniffed, then vanished to “consult a technician.”

He returned moments later with the verdict. “We don’t service anything under ten karats.”

Quick primer: twenty-four karat is pure gold, but it’s soft. Mix in sturdier metals, lower the karat, and you get jewelry that can survive everyday wear and tear. Practical, affordable, and apparently beneath this establishment that worships eighteen karat or above.

My inner Vivian flared. I imagined marching out. Except my earring was held hostage behind the counter.

So I smiled the tight smile of someone plotting a blistering Google review. That would be my equivalent to Julia Roberts’ classic line: “Big mistake. Huge.” 

Cosmic Humor at the Garden Center

Next stop that Saturday, a nursery for two cheerful plants. Sunshine poured down, but it was wasted on me. I was plotting my retaliation review, opening it with the famous Maya Angelou quote: “People never forget how you made them feel.”

Then a burgundy-plumed plant caught my eye. Its label? Dragon’s Breath.

I laughed out loud. I had no choice.

As a coach, I branded myself as “The Dragon Whisperer.” Life just sent me a flaming red wink. “Hey, Risa, notice the status game you’re playing?”

I help people tame, train, and fly their inner dragons. Yet here I was, fire-breathing over a clerk’s judgment. Maya’s quote is beautiful, and I use it often to remind myself to treat others with kindness. Yet it leaves out one key piece I teach every day.

Other People Never Cause Our Feelings

Other people cannot make us feel anything. Our thoughts about what they say and do create our emotions.

The clerk’s words stung because I turned them into a story about my worth and about what wearing nine-karat gold might say about me. I worried that nine-karat jewelry loudly broadcasted “not good enough.”

Those thoughts brewed shame and humiliation.

It’s a universal law: feelings follow thoughts. Always. Swap the thought, change the feeling. That is how you get access to your interior alchemy.

Good news: I don’t have to buy a story that makes me feel awful. Neither do you. Eleanor Roosevelt nailed it: “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”
And yes, that also applies when the person handing out the inferiority slips is you.

I learned an old lesson again that Saturday. Exit the status game as soon as you spot it. One Dragon’s Breath laugh will do. Karats do not measure human worth.

The jeweler may never have noticed that I didn’t return to do business with them, but I was the one who had to live in the mini-empire of shame I was building in my head. Thank goodness I could dismantle it before it minted another golden Krugerrand. That is the real treasure.