Tag: Self-Discovery

A Wholehearted Emotion Revolution

My last blog post was all about the importance of unpacking our family and emotional baggage — and the remarkable opportunity we have to involve four living generations in doing just that. This post is going to start by unpacking how we got here.

It is all about this moment in time where there is a growing, diverse community of people who are committed to personal growth and emotional health. Some are far along on their journey, others are just beginning and there are many smack dab in the middle. No matter where we are in our journey, we are all reaching both forward and backward – asking for more help and guidance AND offering encouragement and resources.

We did not get here by accident or all at once. We got here because of collective yearning and learning.

Over the past two decades social sciences handed off the baton to neuroscience to help us better understand what was really happening in our brains, in our nervous systems and neurobiology, and through epigenetics. Incredible discoveries were made that brought us tremendous breakthroughs in our understanding and treatment of trauma, cognitive and mental health disorders, the connection between stress and physical health and so much more. So many fields merged together to reverse engineer what we got wrong.

Ironically it was about this same time that Brene Brown started her deep diving research into shame and vulnerability. Imagine how serendipitous this was?

Of course, no one wanted to talk about shame and vulnerability – those subjects were taboo and cloaked in secrecy. That should have been our first clue she was really on to something. Brene told a hilarious story of how she could shut down a conversation with a seat mate on a plane in under 30 seconds by revealing she was a researcher – of shame and vulnerability.

Flash forward to today and those very topics open up a two hour stimulating conversation between three strangers on a plane, who share vulnerabilities as readily as Biscoff cookies, and become fast friends by the end of the flight, swapping contact information and favorite personal growth resources. (Read my recent blog post Leapfrog for that story)

That is just one shining example of how far we’ve come….and how long it has actually taken. Two decades, multidisciplines and a growing longing we were all feeling but couldn’t quite put our finger on.

Brene started her shame and vulnerability research in 2001, right before 9-11. As devastating as that massive tragedy was, there was an also a collective unity that emerged from it, at least for a while.

A decade later, in 2010, Dr. Bruce Perry published his book, Born for Love, where he warned us about our growing empathy poverty. He was shedding a light in the correlation between an infant’s environment in the first year of life and their ability to emotionally regulate in adulthood. He was sounding the alarm for where we were headed if we did not offer safety, comfort and stability for our children. If you were to go back and read that book today, you would be amazed at the amplified realities of his dire predictions for all of us, and especially for our youth. Back in 2010, we had no clue the negative impacts social media and our political polarization would be having on our mental health and empathy poverty.

Also in 2010, Brene Brown’s infamous Ted Talk on vulnerability went viral. It still stands as one of the most viewed Ted Talks in history. It turns out vulnerability wasn’t such a taboo subject after all. It just took Brene’s courage to put it all out there for us. We may not have recognized that this was a massive “me too” movement as well. It was evident that at a very grassroots level, we were longing for answers to questions no one was asking.

In August of 2010, Brene released her book “Gifts of Imperfection” and invited us to join that grassroots “wholehearted” revolution by finding the courage to tell our truth stories. Mostly she was encouraging us to stop saying (and believing) we were OK when in fact, we were not. She grounded her research in the truth that we were born worthy of love, connection and belonging.

The very same message that Dr. Bruce Perry was also telling us.

Over the coming years, Brene would publish more books including Rising Strong, Braving the Wilderness, Dare to Lead, and Atlas of the Heart. Dr. Bruce Perry co-authored What Happened to You? with Oprah Winfrey. Dr. Dan Siegel published Whole Brain Child, No Drama Discipline, Brainstorm: The Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain and the Power of Showing Up(with Tina Payne Bryson and most recently he released Interconnected. Dr. Mark Brackett published Permission to Feel: Unlocking the Power of Emotions to Help Our kids, Ourselves and Our Society Thrive.

Rick Rubin, the renowned music producer and author of The Creative Act: A Way of Being, has a compelling way to make us stand up and take notice of what was happening in this grassroots wholehearted revolution. When an idea’s time has come, it will find a way to make itself known.

The seeds of this wholehearted, emotion revolution were scattered far and wide. They began to take hold not only in the research but within us. The self-help section of our favorite bookstores began to swell – from psychology and neuroscience, to the enneagram, to Untamed by Glennon Doyle and Clarity & Connection by yung pueblo (just to name a few).

Brene’s Netflix documentary, Call to Courage was released in April, 2019, where she invited us to choose courage over comfort in a present day culture that had us divided and disconnected. We should have buckled our seatbelts.

Less than a year later, just as Brene launched her two dynamic podcasts, Dare to Lead and Unlocking Us, the global pandemic was unfolding — and isolating us even more. Perhaps we were listening more intentionally to Brene’s guests and the deeper conversations because they were resonating on many levels.

What we had all been feeling individually for decades, was now also being felt collectively. It was becoming crystal clear that we are not only hard-wired for connection, we are inextricably inter-connected through school, the workplace, grocery store, supply chains etc.

Suddenly the topic of our emotional health was popping up everywhere. What once had only been discussed in the self-help and psychological arenas, was being mainstreamed into business podcasts, education, physical and cognitive medical fields. A magnifying glass was handed to us to see the impacts of emotional health on our children and teenagers; on all of us. Brene Brown confided in her sister series of her podcast that the pandemic puts strains on marriages and parenting we’d never experienced before. We were never meant to withstand long stretches of uncertainty without revealing our vulnerability and need for connection.

The wholehearted revolution that was afoot back win 2010, had been growing slowly. All revolutions take time to build momentum. Surely the global pandemic accelerated the swiftness of of this “wholehearted, emotion revolution.”

Dr. Mark Brackett, author of Permission to Feel, was one of Brene’s podcast guests and he shared so honestly what many already knew to be true: “The mental well being of our children and adults is shockingly poor. We have a crisis on our hands and its victims are our children.”

The warnings that Dr. Bruce Perry had offered in his 2010 book, Born for Love, stressed the importance of our community and relational scaffolding for our children. This wisdom could no longer be lost on us.

There has been a giant step forward and a big pivot in the right direction as we step back out into our new normal and begin reinventing ourselves from the inside out. The books and podcasts that are emerging now are speaking directly to the corrective actions we must take.

We must integrate our emotions in our brains and our experiences. We must unpack family and emotional baggage to stop the trauma cycles and give us space for better quality lives and health. We need to scaffold each other, especially our children, and cultivate growth mindsets. We need to shed the armor that we believed protected our vulnerability and discard outgrown behavioral patterns. We can build life skills, resource ourselves better, and rediscover our empathy and common humanity.

Brene Brown published Atlas of the Heart which helps us expand our understanding of 87 emotions and experiences. It is a family reference guide that supports us in helping our children and partners integrate their emotions.

Kristin Neff released Fierce Self Compassion (How Women can Harness Kindness to Speak Up, Claim Their Power and Thrive) which encourages us to treat ourselves as kindly and compassionately as we would a dear friend; and to break free from limiting gender stereotypes that has us all suppressing our emotions in harmful ways.

Dr. Gabor Mate published his phenomenal book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture (a groundbreaking investigation into the causes of illness and a pathway to healing and better emotional health). His insights into how generational trauma get passed down through our family systems point directly to the need for us to unpack family and emotional baggage.

Dr. Peter Attia very recently released his incredible book Outlive, where he drives home the point that our emotional health is the most integral component of our lives. We can be physically health and emotionally unhealthy and we will be miserable. And in turn, we will make our families miserable. He unpacks the reasons why we’ve long heard the phrase “hurting people hurt people.”

Dacher Keltner, a renowned expert in emotional science, just released his book, Awe: the New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. It is the final chapter of his book, aptly entitled Epiphany, that really brings home the lessons that we have been learning over these past two decades. Dacher Keltner reflects on the work of Charles Darwin whose thinking about the evolutionary science of emotion was shaped as he cared for his 10-year old daughter Annie until her death. Dacher offers that we mimic nature as we move through our evolution (and emotional revolution); there is a decaying (shedding the old that no longer serves us), a composting (extracting the lessons and nutrients we need) and then a regrowth (which is where we are now).

We now possess better insights, research, tools and collective commitment than we have ever had before in this emotion revolution. Young people are hungry for mentors and author Arthur Brooks encourages the older generation to rediscover their purpose by stepping into that role. It is an exciting time to be alive — and be an active participant in such a healthy change.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

The Baggage We Should Be Unpacking

It’s no surprise that we all have family and emotional baggage that has never been unpacked – mostly because it feels like opening Pandora’s box. Who would ever want to do that?

What if we were to reframe it as exploring a treasure chest instead? The clues to unanswered questions; the keys to unlock some of our hidden assets; a mystery solved; a weathered, yellowing journal of unknown and revelational history.

We are fearful of what we might discover in our family and emotional baggage. Many of us don’t care to relive the painful memories we stashed in there decades ago. But we are not the same as we were then – we are older, have had more life experiences under our belt and have more nuanced perspectives. Maybe we can unpack the baggage and clear up much needed space for a lighter way of being.

We are not alone when it comes to complex family histories and generational patterns. We are all in the midst of a big unraveling of old societal conditioning, gender stereotyping and poor parenting models. As Maya Angelou espouses “when you know better, you do better.” Thanks to the major breakthroughs in neuroscience, psychology and emotional science, we now have much better resources and tools available to us for personal growth, self-awareness, relationships and parenting.

In fact, it is these very breakthroughs that provide an entirely different framework for hard conversations and more productive dialogue about the elephant in the room –debilitating family dynamics.

If we wait until parents or grandparents pass away, we miss asking the questions we would like answered. Have you ever sifted through cardboard boxes of old photos and had no idea who the relatives were or the stories that went with each photographic memory? It is just like that with family baggage. So many secrets boxed up and sealed tight. If family members are courageous enough to enter into these challenging conversations with honesty and a desire to learn, it will jettison that cumbersome family baggage.

Just look around at all the complex family dynamics the next time you attend a graduation, wedding, family reunion or holiday gathering. You can readily spot familiar family patterns, passed down from one generation to the next, taking its toll on our younger generations; families dealing with the same adversities, just a different cast of characters.

The baggage may be invisible, but its impacts are as apparent as blue eyes, tall stature, the shape of a mouth or nose and even personality traits.

No generation is immune from common life events including genetic health issues, divorce, co-parenting, behavioral issues, co-dependency, estrangements, blended families, addiction, mental health issues and trauma. Hard things happen in life. We can, and must, stop making them harder than they need to be.

Today, we have the rare opportunity to involve four living generations — grandparents, parents, siblings and grandchildren — to do the work necessary to break generational trauma and address dysfunctional behavioral patterns. It may be the first time ever that we also have evidence and impetus to come together to do this multi-generational unpacking of emotional and behavioral baggage.

A good starting point would be to collectively acknowledge that the old ways of parenting and dealing with emotions are primary root causes of ongoing family dysfunction and our growing emotional health crisis. We got it wrong and now we need to be actively involved in turning the tide on that old paradigm. Just acknowledging this truth can lift the fog of shame, guilt and blame. These conversations are long overdue and we don’t want our grandchildren being burdened by the weight of unhealthy, unproductive family secrets. We can stop spreading harmful patterns and limiting beliefs from one generation to the next.

When we can overlay the new template for parenting and emotional health onto our past experiences, we gain clarity where once there was only murky confusion. There are a lot of stories embedded in our family history that are horribly inaccurate. Imagine discovering this and realizing that we’d been making incorrect assumptions and judging others when we really could have been showing up and offering each other support and emotional scaffolding.

Yes we are afraid to have those hard conversations, mostly because we are feeling very strong negative emotions arise in us each time we even think about it. It would be analogous to refusing to go to the doctor for a suspicious lump. We can no longer afford to let our fear and anxiety prevent us from learning and discovery.

The biggest challenge in having these hard conversations and unpacking family baggage together is the massive entanglement of old, unprocessed emotions, traumas and false narratives about each other. The only way we can do this work is to become very skillful in interpersonal and emotional skills.

If we are going to do a deep dive into the dark, deep waters of our generational family history, we want a seasoned, skillful dive master and tools to help us see clearly, cut those falsehoods that keep us tethered, and avoid getting re-snagged on past trauma. Emotional triggers, limiting beliefs, fixed mindsets and jagged remains of adversities are hard to navigate without compassion, empathy and powerful listening skills.

For the record, we may have attempted to do this in the past, but all we really had to guide us was “hindsight”. While hindsight can shine a light on our regrets and help us own the consequences and outcomes of our choices, it often leaves us at a dead end. Problem identified, but no meaningful path to healing and prevention.

In 2009, Dr. Dan Siegel introduced a new concept for personal growth and self-awareness. He was planting the seed of what would become “other awareness”. But there was no way for us to get to “other awarenesss” without knowing ourselves deeply. Dr. Siegel called his revolutionary personal transformation concept “mindsight”. Mindsight picks up where hindsight stopped. No more dead ends.

Dr. Siegel framed “mindsight” this way: It is a powerful lens through which we can understand our inner emotional lives with more clarity, integrate our brain and our emotions, and enhance our relationships with others.

Mindsight is how we put our own oxygen mask on first. There is no way that we can be of meaningful value in helping others on their emotional health journey if we ourselves haven’t done our own work. Full stop.

In my previous blog post, “Learning What We Need to Teach”, I shared the steps and the benefits of Dr. Siegel’s concept of mindsight and whole brain parenting. Doing the hard work and committing to a lifetime of personal growth is not for the faint of heart. But as we often say with physical fitness, “no pain, no gain”.

Dr. Siegel encourages us to use this “mindsight” lens to go back and look at our own childhood to discover how our experiences and our caregivers shaped us. Imagine being able to do this – AND have conversations with siblings, parents and grandparents about those experiences that would provide context and nuance, not to mention long overdue accountability and the possibility of repair.

Do you know what your emotional triggers are? Are you aware of the limiting beliefs that were baked into your inner critic when you were a child? Are you still having meltdowns like a two year old when big emotions consume you? Do you expect more emotional regulation and better coping skills from your partner, kids or friends than you can muster in stressful situations?

These are the warning signs of compromised emotional health. If we do not attend to our emotional health, two things will happen — (1) our physical health and quality of life will also be compromised and may even go into serious decline; (2) we will pass down to our children similar unhealthy emotional patterns. Ignoring our emotional health has perpetuated the multigenerational family dysfunction since the dawn of time.

When Dr. Dan Siegel introduced mindsight in 2009, he was an advance scout for what has now broken wide open into the mainstream of our lives. Over the past two decades, multi disciplines have merged and reverse engineered what we need to do in order to address our growing mental health crises.

We need to undo and unlearn all the things we got wrong about parenting, about emotions and about relationships.

It has taken several decades, a ton of research, and more family heartaches and brokenness than we can imagine to bring us to this moment in our collective evolution. We are now able to visibly see and feel why we need to commit to this work when we look at our children and grandchildren. Not only do they deserve better, we are motivated by our hearts to take this work seriously.

In the past, each generation entered adulthood and parenthood with a strong desire to do better than the prior generation. Good intentions, but faulty information and poor diagnostic tools. We labeled kids, rather than naming emotions. We unplugged their first love language (emotions) as soon as they learned to talk and express themselves. We had blindspots and blurred life maps. We unconsciously repeated the same old patterns and reactions from which we recoiled or hid from as kids. We numbed our pain rather than extracting it and healing.

The reverse engineering that neuroscience, psychology, epigenetics, neurobiology, emotional science and social sciences have done is now extending a call to action that cannot be ignored. This call to action is meant for all of us — all 4 generations to become involved. We need to do some serious excavation work on generational baggage.

We each need to make our own emotional health a priority. We need to plug it back into the core foundation of a meaningful, satisfying and rewarding life. We need to upgrade our default systems that were never integrated in childhood. Plug those emotions into our operating systems and get more skillful at regulating them, learning from them and growing because of them. We need to unpack emotional and family baggage that is putting more obstacles in our way than we realize.

We do not have to wait until we are at the master class level to dive into teaching our kids and helping our partners. We can learn together. In fact, our children and grandchildren are the best teachers in the world. If we can step back and ask ourselves, “what did I need when I was their age?” we will instinctively know how to meet the moment. Instead of asking “what’s the matter?” we can pivot and learn by asking them “What matters most?”

This blog post is the first of a new series I’ll be sharing about the life-changing benefits of personal growth and self-awareness not only for our own quality of life, but for all of our relationships. Let’s explore how we got here, what is fresh and new for our emotional health, what we are discovering about the connection between fixed mindsets and limiting beliefs, better ways to help kids through divorce and blended families how we can improve the education system from preschool to college and so much more.

There is an “emotion revolution” rising from the ashes of old parenting models, lack of emotional regulation into our human operating system, and the hard lessons learned through a global pandemic. Are you in?

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

DR. PETER ATTIA is the renowned resource on Longevity — and now he is the front-running force for this emotion revolution. Watch his relatable reels on Instagram, listen to his interviews on YouTube for his book launch. Read his book, Outlive to learn why our emotional health is the most integral component for our quality of life. Listen to his podcast, the Drive.

Gummies of Wisdom – Playing LeapFrog

It is truly remarkable how much we can learn about others and ourselves through storytelling. When we share our life stories with each other, we often find unexpected common threads — and we make discoveries that support our own learning and growth.

This is like playing leapfrog — where some part of our story or experience connects with someone else’s and our shared understanding gets ignited and amplified in the most enlightening ways.

We can each unpack the details of our experiences, the lessons learned, resources we found helpful, what our biggest challenges were and how we faced them.

Storytelling can turn strangers into friends in just one conversation or deepen a decades old relationship with revelational new insights. We come to understand that common, similar life events unfold for each of us and yet it is our personal experiences, resources, and interpretations that create the textured, contextualized unique stories of our lives.

The script doesn’t really change that much. What changes are our stories.

I recently sat with two strangers on a flight from Houston to Phoenix; an energetic, engaging young man probably in his late 30’s who is a husband, a father and an entrepreneur; and a soulful, inspiring woman in her 50’s who is an integral part of PacificHelps.org (a non profit organization founded by her husband to provide education and renewable energy to the Pacific Islands) Over the course of that flight, we talked and listened to each other’s stories with a sense of wonder and awe. So many similarities in our stories yet the backdrop, the cast of characters and the obstacles were vividly different. We connected through a working knowledge of the basic life plot — growing up, finding jobs, getting married, having children, marriage difficulties, divorce, remarriage, life threatening illnesses and financial challenges. So much common ground. We laughed, we empathized, we marveled. The human spirit really is undaunting.

The script and the plot doesn’t change much. But each of our stories were uniquely different at the same time. I viewed our stories through the lens of a 71 year old, excited for what the future holds for both of them because of what they have learned from their personal experiences and how they are proactively embracing their continual self discovery and personal growth.

In that young man, I can see my own grown children who are now in the throes of parenthood but so much better prepared and skillful than all the generations before them. At 71, I can look both ways now — I can look back at what we got wrong in old parenting models and I can also look forward to what is possible with vastly improved parenting and emotional skills.

The conversations and insights that the three of us shared about parenting and emotions would have never happened when I was in my late 30’s or early 40’s.

The ease with which we shared things about our own childhoods that shaped us and then later dropped us into our own self-discovery journey was nothing short of incredible. My generation stuffed our skeletons into closets. Today’s younger generation of enlightened parents are doing their personal growth work early to break generational chains of dysfunction and hand-me-down behavioral patterns.

We’ve come a long way since Dr. Spock. These parents are leaning on Brene Brown, neuroscience, whole brain parenting, the enneagram, Drs. Dan Siegel, Andrew Huberman and Peter Attia. Yes, I was in seventh heaven – both my seat mates were quite familiar with the same resources that I have discovered in the last decade. They are proactively putting into practice what they are learning — for themselves and for their children.

Moreover, they are incorporating greater relationship skills into their marriages, parenting and co-parenting. There has been a huge paradigm shift from unhealthy, contentious fallouts from divorce that often caused a lot of trauma for children, to an intentional focus on providing children of divorce the relational scaffolding they need and deserve. Joint custody is being anchored in healthy, respectful, cooperative co-parenting.

A few years ago, I had started to connect the dots about the intersecting of so many of my favorite resources for personal growth and self discovery — I blogged about it. Researchers, authors and podcasters began to reference each other in their books, and invited each other as guests on their podcasts. I noticed that the topics of the human need for connection, emotional regulation, parenting and relationship skills were being discussed even on tech, business and news platforms. I could feel that the very subjects I was passionate about were becoming mainstreamed.

And now, here I was, on a plane with two strangers and we were talking, laughing, sharing about all of it as easily as we once might have discussed the latest movie or hottest trend. It was one of those compelling “aha” moments that Dacher Keltner describes in his newest book, Awe. I got goosebumps – often. There were just so many similarities in parts of vastly different stories.

Do you know how it feels when you have a really great customer service experience? When you feel like someone has paid attention, gone the extra mile, and earnestly appreciated your business? Well that is exactly what this conversation felt like to me — it was a standout. The positive impact that personal growth work has on our ability to make meaningful connections was not lost on me.

I thought a lot about LeapFrog when I got off that plane. That remarkable two hour conversation had made lasting impressions on each of us. We each left with new resources to check out and inspiring stories to reflect on.

What struck me most was how much space we had created to really hear and engage with others by learning from our experiences. We were not so mired in our problems (and phones) that we missed this golden opportunity. Rich conversations like this are some of the best educational experiences we can get. We gain new perspectives and insights, are reinforced and encouraged about the path we are on, and we build good connections on common ground.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

THE MAN WHO INVENTED HAPPINESS SCIENCE: MARTIN SELIGMAN https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-happiness-lab-with-dr-laurie-santos/id1474245040?i=1000609532345

Who Really Pulls the Emotional Trigger?

I’m guessing that you know exactly how it feels when you’re emotionally triggered by something — it seemingly comes out of nowhere, sparks intense negative feelings and abruptly makes you defensive.

We get flooded with adrenaline and cortisol when we are triggered which only amplifies what we are feeling. The conundrum with emotional triggers is that they pull us back into the past while we are also experiencing the very present moment. It’s no wonder we are completely off-kilter when we are emotionally triggered.

It’s human nature to blame someone else for pulling our emotional trigger but the truth of the matter is that our emotional triggers are internal; they are ours alone. No one else is pulling that trigger. Most of the time, no one else even knows that we have a strong emotional trigger that has just been engaged. What they do imagine is that we are over-reacting, have lost control or lost our minds.

Many of our emotional triggers are rooted in our childhood, when we had very little agency. Unbeknownst to us, those strong negative emotions that we felt as kids (but were not acknowledged by our parents and caregivers) got lodged into our brains and imprinted with readily accessible information. So when we “feel” a similar experience even as an adult, our brain pulls out that file and reminds us we aren’t feeling safe. An emotional trigger is a red alert warning.

Give some thought to experiences that cause you to become emotionally triggered. What are you really feeling when a strong, uncomfortable, emotional reaction grabs you? Are you feeling misunderstood, abandoned, unwanted, unloveable, or treated unfairly?

These are all very common feelings for young children, especially if we were punished or banished for expressing them. Those experiences got bookmarked in our brains and we developed a sensitivity to be on the lookout for repeated events like this in the future. We were our most vulnerable when we imprinted these experiences. So it stands to reason, that we will become emotionally triggered when we are feeling vulnerable, insecure or irrelevant as adults.

An emotional trigger is defined as having a strong, uncomfortable reaction to a stimulus that wouldn’t ordinarily cause that response. With this framework, it is easy to see that when we are feeling emotionally balanced, a snarky comment or a misunderstanding doesn’t cause us a problem. We aren’t triggered because we have our emotional act together; we can remain flexible and resilient.

Now give some thought to past adult experiences where you were emotionally triggered — and see if you can recognize that you were feeling pretty vulnerable in those moments. Were you overly tired, consumed by anxiety or overwhelm; were you feeling invisible, under-appreciated? We are most prone to getting triggered when our emotional reserves are low. It’s really no different than our being more susceptible to catching a cold when we are physically run down.

The best defense is a good offense. This is a very good strategy to employ for both handling and overcoming emotional triggers. In his book, Permission to Feel, Dr. Mark Brackett explains that when it comes to being triggered by our emotions, we have to “take responsibility for our actions rather than shift the blame elsewhere. ”

“It may not feel like a choice, but it surely is — we decide how we will respond to life’s provocations. Don’t want to explode in rage when your child is disrespectful? Come up with a better way to respond. Clearly the old way, matching nastiness for nastiness, doesn’t work.” –Dr. Mark Brackett, author of Permission to Feel

We don’t judge ourselves when we are physically run down and know we might be more likely to catch a cold. We make a mental note to get more sleep, stay hydrated and wash our hands more often. The best defense is a good offense.

We can take this same approach when we are emotionally depleted. We can make a mental note that we will be more susceptible to knee jerk reactions than skillful responses. We might even make an announcement to our family members that we just don’t have the emotional bandwidth to deal with unnecessary drama. Again, the best defense is a good offense.

We should be normalizing the fact that regardless of our age, we are all humans with similar emotional needs and changing emotional capacities. This is really invaluable to be teaching our children. Dr. Brackett shares that when we try to shield our children from this reality, it has an unintended result. Children will have a hard time acknowledging adults’ feelings, let alone respecting them.

Emotional triggers are an integral part of our self discovery process. They help us identify what is most important to us and what our current needs are. Once identified, we can free ourselves from the “strong, uncomfortable emotional reaction” to something that really shouldn’t set us off. Instead, we can be more skillful with our emotional regulation and more clear about our needs.

If we are on overload because we have been caregiving on steroids all day, one unintended disrespectful remark from a friend or family member is likely to cause us a twitching trigger finger. Dr. Brackett reminds us that we can take preventive measures for moments like this.

When we offer ourselves some self-compassion, we are acknowledging that we are on overload and are susceptible to losing our cool. We can remind ourselves that if we weren’t so physically and emotionally drained, we would not overreact to an insensitive comment. If we weren’t so worried out, we might even have the dexterity to banter about it.

Does the comment hurt? Of course it does. Let’s not dismiss that either.

But here’s the pivot. An emotional trigger never really addresses our true needs. It gets in the way of expressing ourselves in a way that can be heard and taken to heart. Others just react to our “overreaction” and our basic need is lost in the smokescreen. It’s hard to hear a whispered “I could use a little help here” when there’s a lot of yelling or threatening going on.

Have you ever noticed that emotional triggers can also set off a chain reaction? It is not unusual to hear phrases like “you never listen” or “you always do this”. A lot of baggage is often attached to our emotional triggers, so it’s easy to tap into all those previous experiences and dredge up old grievances. Whatever small incident has set off the emotional trigger now cascades into something much bigger.

Instead of being able to focus and attend to one small and manageable issue, we are now knee deep in triage for a major emotional pileup. It’s hard to assess which issue was the catalyst and which one requires immediate attention. All too often, the one small incident that set off an emotional trigger gets lost and never addressed. But it does get baked into that old imprint of the childhood emotional trigger; logged as yet another example in the bulging file.

In a recent blog post entitled Learning What We Need to Teach, I shared how important it is for us parents and grandparents to be the emotional “training wheels” for our children. The best preventative measures for our children is to integrate their emotions into their experiences; to help them name and process them as they are unfolding. The more we are able to do this in real time with our children, the less likely it is that they will enter adulthood with a lot of challenging emotional triggers of their own.

By now, you probably don’t really need a bigger impetus to get serious about attending to your own emotional triggers, but there is something important that you should bear in mind. Our children’s developing brains take a long time to fully develop and integrate. We protect those little noggins with helmets, but we often overlook the impact our emotional reactions are having. Dr. Mark Brackett writes extensively about this in his book Permission to Feel. In the chapter entitled “Emotions at Home” he devotes a lot of time to emotional triggers; and especially how parents get triggered by their kids’ reactions and behaviors.

He reminds us that when we get “triggered” by our kids, our compassion switch gets turned off. We’ve all experienced this – and we’ve often quickly regretted how we did not show up so great in those moments. We can take comfort in Dr. Dan Siegel’s teachings that “rupture and repair” is normal in human relationships and can actually strengthen our bonds with our children, as long as we apologize quickly and sincerely; with a promise to do better in the future.

Which is why Dr. Mark Brackett urges us to get serious about attending to our emotional triggers before they become a chronic reality. Extreme emotional reactions, over the course of time, can actually alter the brain structure of our children. The effects of frequent extreme emotional reactions can cause our children to have emotional regulation issues of their own and a lot of complexities in their adult relationships and quality of life.

“A child’s brain is still plastic, meaning that the structure is always changing. The minute parents start regulating their emotions better, their children’s brains will change to reflect that. If parents start regulating their emotions now, and help their children to regulate theirs, then there’s hope.” — Dr. Mark Brackett, Author of Permission to Feel.

Emotional triggers are a by-product of the old parenting models that did not integrate our emotions into our developing brains when we were kids. When we do our own self-discovery work and identify why and how we get triggered, we are detangling ourselves from the past and owning our agency as adults. We accept that we have choices in how we respond to the things in life that provoke us.

The stuff that initially provokes us is usually pretty minor in the bigger scheme of things. But we can make a mountain out of a molehill with our over-sized reactions. We can meet these moments with greater emotional regulation and dexterity. It will be so much healthier for all our brains — and so much more beneficial for our families.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

Better Out Than In

We have often heard the lament “hurting people hurt people”. That simple phrase resonates for many of us who have experienced being hurt deeply by the people we were trying to love; or whom we believed should unconditionally love us.

Where we become stymied is that we are not sure who to attend to — the hurting people or the hurt people. As a result, we haven’t effectively helped either. The problem just keeps perpetuating.

A few months ago, I wrote a Daily Gummy of Wisdom putting a twist on that old lament. It was “healing people heal people.” This insight came from personal experience as well as from stories I heard shared in my book club, with family and friends and most recently from strangers in a poetry writing class I am taking.

I do marvel at the healing that begins to take place when just one person makes space to listen to another’s story without judgement and most especially when they listen carefully enough to discover a knowing connection. This is precisely why support groups can have such a profound helping impact. There is a foundational promise that we can speak without interruption, that we can pour it all out — and that others will listen with all their human instincts. Everyone that is under that tent has had a similar life event that brought them in. The event is the catalyst for connection; for it is connection that heals.

Our stories and our hurts are better out than in.

I offered the metaphor of a splinter in my last post entitled Feeling Our Way Forward. If we ignore a splinter embedded in our skin, it never stops hurting. It can even fester and get infected as our body wants to eject this foreign object. We can go about our normal days, but every time we bump it, it is painful and serves as a reminder that we need to attend to it. It is the anticipatory pain of extraction that becomes an obstacle; and for some outrageous reason we think it will magically go away if we ignore it. We will not have to experience that brief extraction pain. But day in and day out, we come to discover that this is not true. And if someone else bumps our tender, painful finger, we blame them for their carelessness. That embedded splinter is also taking away our joy — even our ability to feel the softness of a consoling pet.

Eventually we face the truth — that splinter is indeed better out than in. Yes, the extraction does hurt. We may even feel some residual discomfort as though it is still embedded in our skin, but the healing is already starting. Our body is busy attending to the healing process and relieved that it is no longer doing a daily triage on something we refused to address.

A piercing splinter is an apt metaphor for our emotional wounds. Our emotions are better out than in.

In his book, Permission to Feel, emotional scientist Marc Brackett, makes this incredibly clear:

“The irony, though, is that when we ignore our feelings, or suppress them, they only become stronger. The really powerful emotions build up inside us, like a dark force that inevitably poisons everything we do, whether we like it or not. Hurt feelings don’t vanish on their own. They don’t heal themselves. If we don’t express our emotions, they pile up like a debt that will eventually come due.” – excepted from Permission to Feel, pg.13, Author – Marc Brackett, Ph.D.

Every single book I have read in recent months about emotional health, parenting, longevity and health span cites this one compelling factor: We got emotions all wrong and we only started to understand this in the 1980’s.

Just think about that — up until a few decades ago, we just kept ignoring and dismissing emotions all together. And even now, with more research, we are too slow to respond and integrate.

So let’s circle back to the lament that “hurting people hurt people” and take action to attend to both the hurting and the hurt. The escalating emotional and mental health crisis is proof positive that we can no longer ignore our emotional splinters. Everyone deserves to be attended with compassion, non-judgment and assistance to pull the hurting out.

We cannot address what we do not not know, yet there is growing evidence that not integrating our emotions was a huge mistake — a catacylsmic snowball rolling down debris-covered hill.

Remember when you were a kid and there was just a small dusting of snow on the ground, but you just had to make a snowman. You’d start with a tiny snowball and begin rolling it around the yard. As the fresh snow clung to that baseball sized snowball, it grew in size. It left behind a little swath cleared of snow, revealing green grass, brown decaying leaves and broken twigs. And that growing snowball — well it was mostly snow but it also had a lot of those decaying leaves and broken twigs projecting from it. That is what has been happening from one generation to the next with all our unprocessed emotions — they were the decaying leaves and broken twigs that got passed along with eye and skin color. The snowball full of emotional projectiles.

Unprocessed and unexpressed emotions have piled up; we are still carrying and paying the overdue debts of our ancestors.

I recently published a blog post “Learning What We Need to Teach.” That post was inspired by the work of Dr. Dan Siegel who wrote The Power of Showing Up, Whole Brain Parenting and No Drama Discipline. One of the fastest ways that we can implement real change is to teach our children that emotions are an integral part of who they are and how they learn about life. We need to teach them a vast and nuanced emotional vocabulary. We are the training wheels for this integration of big unwieldy and at times, scary, emotions for our children and their developing brains. But we cannot teach what we ourselves don’t know. It would be like us suddenly trying to teach our kids to speak a foreign language fluently. We might only know a few familiar phrases in Spanish or French. We are hardly skillful.

Can you imagine what it feels like for a small child to have big emotions wash all over her, out of the blue? My young granddaughter was standing in the bathtub, trembling with crocodile tears running down her cheeks. She was so angry at her brother and was yelling at him. She also had enough self awareness to recognize that her voice had changed and that scared her – what was happening? Her changing voice took precedence over her anger. In that moment, my granddaughter was feeling a natural and normal chain reaction that happens when emotions hit us.

That present moment is a teaching opportunity.

Her anger was simply an emotion that told her something wasn’t right. Her brother had not been respectful about her bathtub toys. Her anger was legitimate. Her anger caused her body and developing brain to react. Her heart was racing, the tears were flowing, her voice was amplified. All that happened in a split second. She was caught in an emotional vortex — angry at her brother and she was scaring herself with her own voice; one she didn’t recognize or like. “What is happening to me?” she asked me. “Why is my voice changing?”

Being the training wheels for these moments is a game-changer for everyone. It is how we integrate emotional awareness.

Step 1 of being the training wheels is to remain calm. We co-regulate each other and if we can show up calmly for our kids when they are overcome with emotions, it is soothing. Their heart rate will slow, their labored breathing will return to baseline, the tension in their tiny bodies will release. When we are initially learning how to be the “training wheels” this first step will seem like it takes an eternity. That’s just an illusion however. It actually takes much less time than we realize.

It is when we respond to our child’s normal and right-sized “out of control” emotional chain reaction with our abnormal, outsized adult emotional reaction that things escalate and can become unwieldy. Step one — stay calm. You are a first responder.

Step 2 is naming the emotions that our child is feeling. Name them to tame them. This is how we organically build our child’s emotional vocabulary. It not only helps them to have this valuable reference point for self-identification of their own emotions, it builds connection and empathy with others. If a sibling expresses “I am so angry right now” a child instinctively knows what anger feels like to them. They can relate.

At the risk of losing the flow of this lesson in “training wheels”, I will pull a strong thread from what we know is so helpful in support groups. It is empathy. It is being able to listen to someone’s story and have a basic human understanding of what they must feel like, using our experiences as the connector.

So when we help our children label their emotions, we are giving them context from their own emotional experience to be able to relate to others. They will intuitively know what anger or envy feels like. We are building their emotional vocabulary and cultivating their ability to help themselves and others in emotional discomfort.

I’m guessing that it is beginning to feel pretty obvious right now that if we had been raised this way, with a deep appreciation for our emotions and tools to help us express and manage them, our own lives would have been greatly improved. Stick with me — there’s more.

Back to training wheels – Step 3. Normalizing the emotions is powerful. Emotions are neither right nor wrong. They are simply a form of information. Anger is nothing more than a newsflash that something is important to us.

Even if that something important is just a few bathtub toys, it matters. It matters to my granddaughter who was very clear about what was important to her in advance. Anger was just a normal and appropriate reaction.

As for her voice changing, she just needed to be reassured that this too was natural. That our voice does change when we are angry and it won’t last. You should have seen the look of relief that washed over her precious face at that breaking news. Did you know that it feels very scary to small children when emotions are coursing through their little bodies. Of course they are worried that they are changing and just like imagining a monster under the bed, they are fearful that it is for real and forever.

Step 4 of being emotional integration training wheels for our children is helping them become aware that emotions often come packaged with other feelings. Anger can be accompanied by disappointment, confusion, envy, a sense of unfairness. Just as we would double check that there are no little fragments remaining from a splinter we removed, we should do the same for our emotions. Invite some exploration of the accompanying emotions. We are often deeply touched by what we learn when we really listen to our distressed child.

For the record, this is even more amplified for our teenagers. It is only when we become more skillful listeners that our adolescences open up to share what is under the surface. Be patient, don’t lecture or fix — just listen.

The bottom line is that so many of us grew up without an understanding of the integral role our emotions play in helping us build lives that are strong, healthy, supportive, connected, resilient and meaningful. We blamed emotions for getting in the way of our living a good life. If we could just ignore them, turn them off, shut them down, then we would be happy.

If we had only known that our emotions were the very first and most integral part of our human experience, we would not be awash in shame, blame, loneliness, judgment, dissatisfaction, addictions and estrangements. Emotions didn’t cause these issues — in fact, they are both the prevention and the cure.

I watch my grandchildren today – who are being raised with integration of their emotions into their developing brains and I marvel at their self-awareness, their growing confidence and resilience and most impressively their emotional navigational skills. They are so attuned to their emotions that they can anticipate when a situation might arise where they feel their “jealousy rising”. Rather than ignore it, they name and come up with a plan to address it. From birthday celebrations, to board game competitions, they can hold both their own feelings of envy and a stronger desire to pour joy on each other.

Just the other day, my granddaughter told me that sometimes she really prefers to stay in her mood for a while. She is not afraid to be with her strong emotions and to really feel how they show up in her body, and how long it takes for them to fade. Can you imagine having that much enlightened engagement with your feelings when you were a kid? She is processing her moods, her feelings in real time – without self criticism or parental judgment.

Can you imagine having an inner voice that was trained in curiosity, non-judgment and self compassion? That is precisely what is happening for my granddaughter when she sits with her feelings; she is training her inner voice to be a supportive internal best friend.

Hurting people hurt people – and usually this is unintentional. We simply were not taught and shown by example how to use our emotions in the positive ways they were intended. Our emotional health impacts our quality of life, our physical and cognitive health and our ability to care for ourselves and others in vastly beneficial ways.

We literally pushed away what we needed the most — emotional awareness and emotional intelligence.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

LISTEN TO DOUG BOPST’S INCREDIBE PODCAST EPISODE WITH NEDRA GLVOER TAWWAB ABOUT PARENTING, FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS AND BOUNDARIES
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-adversity-advantage/id1496406333?i=1000613941394
LISTEN TO THE MAY 22, 2023, EPISODE OF THE HAPPINESS LAB WITH DR. LAURIE SANTOS & THE TEAM FROM SESAME STREET –INCLUDING ELMO — TO LEARN ABOUT HOW WE CAN HELP CHILDREN IDENTIFY & COPE WITH THEIR BIG EMOTIONS https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-happiness-lab-with-dr-laurie-santos/id1474245040?i=1000613543742

Feeling Our Way Forward

When I was a teenager, I stood in my grandmother’s sunlit kitchen watching this tiny spry woman skimming cream from the top of a quart glass milk bottle. The bottle was as weathered as she was, no longer crystal clear glass, but almost opaque from the innumerable times it had been filled at a dairy, topped with a cardboard stopper, packed in a crate, delivered in a truck, placed in a metal silver box on the front door step, retrieved before the sun rose, its contents separated — cream for coffee and milk for oatmeal. My grandmother was about to turn 68 — for the 5th time according to my calculations. She preferred to stay lodged at 68 rather than admit to entering her 7th decade.

This confounded me. I marveled at the fact that someone could live to their mid-70’s or beyond. (Remember I was only a young teen and even 40 seemed old to me at that time,) Yet what transfixed me even more was all the changes that my grandmother had seen in her lifetime. I was so eager to hear her stories, to find it incredulous that her electric refrigerator had once been an icebox! Imagine having ice delivered to your doorstep just as the familiar milk was now delivered. She drove a big black Buick now, but what was her first car or mode of transportation? And that black and white TV that was the focal point of her tiny living room — what was it like to experience a TV for the very first time?

My grandmother rarely stopped her never-ending forward momentum to pause and reflect on these wonders. She’d wave her wrinkled hand at me as though swatting at a fly, smile and tell me to set the table for breakfast. I do believe my grandmother possessed a lot of wisdom from all that she had witnessed and experienced in her seven decades, but she was reluctant to reflect. What’s done is done was her motto.

Now I am the grandmother in her seventh decade. My six year old grandson held my gaze as he marveled “Gigi, it’s amazing that you lived in the olden days and you are living in the here days now.” Unlike my grandmother, I am equally in awe and I melt at my grandson’s observation. I will be an open book for any questions that my grandchildren have about all that I have witnessed and experienced in my life.

The truth is that I am so grateful to not only witness, but to be actively engaged in the profound changes unfolding in my lifetime that will be transformational for generations to come.

My own personal growth journey, started about 8 years ago, had me unpacking nearly 6 decades of emotional baggage, rummaging through long-forgotten but pivotal events that occurred not only in my life, but in the lives and experiences of my family’s prior generations.

As I was steeped in this personal development work, I began to notice correlations and coalescence of the sciences, psychology, modern medicine and mental health along with Brene Brown’s research on shame and vulnerability, Kristin Neff’s work on self-compassion, and Carol Dweck’s work on growth mindset and neuroplasticity. Suddenly things were beginning to feel very inter-connected and the common denominator was emotions.

Did you know that we never really studied emotions until the late 1980’s? This startling revelation blew my mind.

For all the discoveries, advancements, inventions and societal changes we have witnessed for centuries, the most transformational evolutionary breakthroughs are happening in this very moment – and it has everything to do with integrating our emotions into our human operating system. Nothing could be more impactful for all of mankind.

My grandmother’s generation, like those that came before her, knew next to nothing about the integral value of our emotions. “Psychological science was firmly entrenched in a “cognitive revolution” reveals Dacher Keltner in his latest book, Awe.

“Within this framework (of cognitive science), every human experience, from moral condemnation to prejudice against people of color, originates in how our minds, like computer programs, process units of information in passionless ways. What was missing from this understanding of human nature was emotion. Passion, Gut Feeling. What Scottish philosopher David Hume famously called “the master of reason” and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman termed “System 1” thinking. — excerpted from Chapter 1 of Awe by Dasher Kellner (renowned expert in the science of human emotion)

That old saying that “hindsight is 20/20” really rings true as I reflect back on how emotions were banished from one generation to the next. Old parenting models reinforced that “cognitive revolution” so we just kept stuffing our skeletons in the closet, and filling our human basements and attics with old baggage and unhealed emotional wounds.

We compounded the problem when we banished emotions from our human operating system. All those unprocessed emotions and related traumas got passed along from one generation to the next into our genes. So not only did we grow up witnessing and then modeling dysfunctional behavioral patterns, we actually carried generational emotional baggage in our genes. We were predisposed to perpetuate dysfunctional patterns. Here are salient pivot points that we are learning about our genes and their generational impact:

Epigenetics is the study of how your behaviors and environment can cause changes that affect the way your genes work.

Unlike genetic changes, epigenetic changes are reversible and do not change your DNA sequence. But they can change how your body reads a DNA sequence.

Consider this: The first human disease to be linked to epigenetics was cancer, in 1983.

We are witnessing the big reveal right now — as our emotional health has hit the charts in revelatory ways. In just a little over three decades, we have advanced the ball on human evolution by recognizing that we got emotions all wrong.

Human beings are hard-wired for connection. The critical component of our motherboard that facilitates and integrates that lifelong need for connection is emotions.

Without this integral component, we have faulty, dysfunctional operating systems. Our immune systems malfunction and we get physically and cognitive sick. We have poor emotional regulation because we never got an owner’s manual. We struggle to make and keep relationships healthy and strong. We cannot teach our kids because we don’t know what we don’t know. They mirror us and we get mad, frustrated, discouraged and weary.

It should not be surprising at all that our teens are struggling with loneliness and depression. Imagine how many generations of unresolved emotions and trauma they are carrying in their genes. Technology and social media has exacerbated the problem as we become more socially disconnected while staring at our addictive screens instead of each other.

The bottom line is that we can all participate in this emotion revolution by embracing the need for integration of our emotions into our human operating system. We don’t think twice about upgrading our phones or devices. And when we get our children their first phone, we are not giving them a wall mounted rotary dial model. Why then would we have them operating on a partially installed top shelf brain/body/nervous system?

In prior blog posts, I have shared how inspirational it is to have prominent, respected younger men and women taking the lead by being so real and vulnerable in their podcasts, books, Ted Talks and social media platforms about their own emotional health journeys. There is a lot of generational baggage being unpacked these days to make room for a much healthier and more connected way of living.

Yes, it is incredibly sad to hear about the traumas and dysfunctional emotional underpinnings that people have endured. It is also not surprising to discover that these stories are not as uncommon as we think and have been the root cause of addictions, broken relationships, chronic and life threatening health issues and poor quality of life.

What I do know is that this is exactly how the healing begins and the evolution takes root. Unpacking unprocessed emotions is like having a splinter. We know it’s there. We can ignore it, but we will feel the pain every time we bump up against it…and over time it just might get infected. When we pull that splinter, we may still feel a little residual pain, but the reality is that the healing has already begun.

When my grandson tells me that it is amazing that I lived in the old days and I am here now, living in these present days, I can look at him and see him growing up in a world where he is a fully integrated human being, experiencing life with emotional meta vision and a self awareness that simply was not possible before. Oh yes, I have seen and experienced a lot in my lifetime, but just you wait — the best is yet to come.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

LISTEN TO THIS MARCH 3rd 2023 EPISODE WITH LEWISHOWES – Prepare to be amazed at what you learn from Lewis about the profound benefits of unpacking emotional baggage and trauma – and then helping others do the same. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-peter-attia-drive/id1400828889?i=1000602927831

Pop a Daily Gummy of Wisdom Supplement

I am so excited to announce the launch of a brand new initiative to support our emotional health and overall wellbeing. My Daily Gummy of Wisdom is intended to be an awareness supplement to help us all maintain our emotional fitness.

We take vitamins and supplements to support our physical and cognitive health, so why not have a little daily boost for our emotional health and overall quality of life?

If you are a regular follower of my blog, Inspired New Horizons, then you might really enjoy getting these small, and potent, daily supplements to help you stay in shape as you develop better life skills and emotional regulation.

My Daily Gummies of Wisdom incorporate my love of photography with my passion for sharing information about personal growth, awareness, parenting, life skills and emotional health.

Here’s a sample of today’s Daily Gummy of Wisdom:

Daily Gummy of Wisdom – Monday, May 8, 2023

Create a little buffer zone between you and your different roles and varied experiences throughout your day. It is a simple little practice that can make a big difference.

Think about all the hats your wear in a day – parent, spouse, child, co-worker, friend, customer, neighbor — the list is endless.

We often just jump from one role to the other without a reset or refresh. When this happens, we drag some residue from each role or experience into the new one. That residue might be sticky — like a strong unsettling emotion that adheres to everyone and everything we touch.

We wouldn’t let our child run around the house, into the car or out into the neighborhood with sticky hands. We’d take a minute or two to wash those little hands that are capable of leaving gooey fingerprints all over the place.

This is what a brief buffer zone can do for you — it’s a little hand washing for your emotional and experiential residue as you transition from one role to another, or from one task to a new one.

It doesn’t take much time to do this — and the benefits are enormous.

Before you leave the house in the morning, as you close the front door, take a deep breath and let go. You’ve done as much as you could and how you are off to work, taking the kids to school, or heading to an appointment. Let go and look forward. Howe do you want to enter the new experience and greet those you meet there?

When you return home, as you close your car door and make your way to the front door, repeat that process. Let go. You’ve done all you could out and about today. You are home now. You may have pressing things you want to share with your family, but pause before barging in. You have no idea how their own day unfolded. Mentally wash your sticky residue so can listen with good intention and focus when you are reunited with your family.

If your emotional or experiential residue hacks some of your attention, you. may miss the smallest yet most rewarding moments of your day. That absolute delight on your child’s face to see you, that “there’s no place like home” feeling that washes over you.

When we give ourselves a little transition “hand washing”, we are more attentive and less reactionary. We treat ourselves to being more fully present and organically take in more of the good we often miss in life.

HERE’S THE CALL TO ACTION: Sign up below to get my Daily Gummy of Wisdom popped right into your inbox each morning. It only takes a minute or two to read….is great food for thought and has a lovely slow release factor all day long. The Daily Gummy will increase your awareness, help you stay in alignment with your core values and foster all those better life skills you are honing.

We read a lot of worthless brain junk food in our social media feeds throughout the day. Why not trade a little of that mindless scrolling for one high quality daily supplement for your emotional fitness and overall wellbeing?

Sign up right here: Click this link: https://inspired-nehorizons.ck.page/3381cf137f

Gummies of Wisdom – Cultivating Awareness

Now that we are beginning to fully understand just how significant our emotional health is to our overall quality of life, we need to develop a game plan to attend to it, just as we do for our physical health, nutrition and sleep. Part of that plan should include daily maintenance for our emotional health. That is why I created my “daily gummies” of wisdom — a supplement to boost awareness for our emotional health.

My daily gummies of wisdom are simple little reminders to help keep our emotional health on our radar screen. In this post today, I’m sharing a few of those gummies that turn the spotlight on cultivating greater awareness throughout our busy days. We can really level up our emotional health game plan through both self-awareness and “other” awareness.

Before we dive in, here’s a little food for thought. Have you noticed how much easier it might be for you to “show up” as calm, thoughtful and clear-headed when you are at work or with friends than when you are at home with your loved ones? What is it that keeps us from having a meltdown, losing it or shutting down when we are in those settings? Ironic isn’t it that often our “best behavior” is doled out to those who have a lower priority in our relationship schema.

Are you fascinated by the fact that we actually do have this remarkable capacity to “show up” or “meet the moment” with a boatload of agency, but we are often unaware of it? Our unconscious auto-pilot rarely lets us screw up where our integrity and character matter at work or with peers. But somehow it fails us when we are with those we love the most.

Here’s the giant clue: It is all about awareness. At work, with friends, in public – we have a keen awareness of how we want to be presenting ourselves. We are instinctively anchored in our values and personal integrity. Simply put, we are anchored in our self-awareness.

But when we are at home, we want to get comfortable, to relax, to be our true selves and that means dialing down the bright spotlight of self awareness. We need a break from being on our best behavior – and we often rely on the foundation of our most meaningful relationships to just accept us as we are; unfiltered.

I will let you in on a game-changing secret. When we can learn to pivot and bring all that public persona awareness into our personal relationships, we will be leveling up our emotional health in dynamic and transformational ways. And yes, we can still relax at home, be at ease and be our true selves. In fact, our most valued relationships will become our treasured safe haven and major recharging station for life.

It is the “unfiltered” lack of awareness of both ourselves and our family members that is the problem. Change your filter, change your life. Keep your filters clean and working optimally.

As you read through my “gummies of wisdom” today, keep that distinction as the backdrop. Think about how you “show up” for a friend and how you “show up” for a spouse or child in a similar situation (or even how you show up for yourself).

My first gummy really sets the stage for amping up our awareness:

We human beings are truly marvelous creatures — we have a plethora of senses to help us navigate our lives — not just the 5 senses with which we are most familiar, but actually 8 senses!

We are all quite familiar with our first 5 senses: hearing, sight, smell, taste and touch.

Our 6th sense is is our interoception, the perception of our interior. Interoception is all the signals we get from our body — from our muscles, bones, hearts, lungs and intestines. These signals feel like a racing heart, tense shoulder muscles or a clenched jaw, butterflies in our stomach, or labored breathing.

(Think about how your body feels when you are having a major disagreement with your partner, or when your child is having a temper tantrum.)

Our 7th sense is our ability to be aware of mental activity — emotions, thoughts and memories. The real superpower we possess is not only the ability to be aware of our emotions, thoughts and memories but to choose how to engage with them.

We become much more discerning about how our mental activities are “informing” our behaviors and responses to life when we hone our “awareness” of emotions, thoughts and memories.

Our 8th sense is our “relational” sense – our sense of connection with people, pets, nature, the planet. This is the big distinctive pivot. This 8th sense is on high alert when we are at work, with friends, in public. But for some peculiar reason, it goes offline when we are with our loved ones.

Here is a personal story to shed more light on this very subject: My husband Skip and I were playing golf. He was a scratch golfer and loved the game, but on this particular Sunday afternoon, he was struggling. And the more he let those disgruntled feelings show, the worse he was playing and the less fun we were having together. I asked him if he would be behaving this way if he were playing with his work colleague, Charlene Davidson. He gave me a puzzled look and responded, “No, I would be on my best behavior.” I smiled at him and said “I deserve your best behavior.” You guessed it — it was an “aha” moment; and that pivot turned our day around in the most pleasant way.

This gummy about our 8 senses is a super supplement. It is that 8th sense of connection to others that jumpstarts a major awareness shift. Think about this the next time you are at home with your loved ones. Think about how hard you work to support, provide and care for them and about the sacrifices you are willing to make for them. Now enter that conversation, that disagreement or interaction from the portal of what that relationship truly means to you.

If we break apart the word “responsibility” it completes shifts our relationship with it. In the context that we often use the word “responsibility”, it can feel like a burden….something we must do (i.e. take responsibility). However, if we break the word apart and recognize its two distinct components, we can see clearly that our “ability” to chose our “responses” is rooted in our personal agency. We are not burdened, we are empowered.

Knee jerk reactions often leave us with consequences that aren’t reflective of our best selves. That’s why we feel guilt, shame or embarrassment. Knee jerk reactions set off a chain reaction that often involves our own personal discomfort, another’s hurt or discomfort, and accountability for rupture and repair. That’s a lot of time and energy that could have been used more productively.

“Response Ability” grounds us in our integrity and reminds us that we do have agency — that super power to choose. We not only choose to meet the moment calmly and more skillfully, we use our natural resources of time and energy wisely.

This gummy of wisdom fits like a puzzle piece with the first gummy about our 8 senses. Once again, it is another pivot that brings better results quickly. How we respond to a situation (rather than auto-pilot reacting) smooths out a lot of relationship bumps. Think of it like this — if we are paying attention to our driving when we are in heavy traffic, we ease on the brakes. If we are not paying attention, we may have to slam on the brakes suddenly. Our “response” ability is just like that.

With this gummy of wisdom, we are back to the “filters” we use. Think about filters like sunglasses or reading glasses. We slip them on when we want to protect our eyes or see something more clearly. It’s the same concept for the unconscious filters we are using for each situation and interaction we have.

So often, we are not consciously aware of all the filters we are using to take in a current situation. Our filters have been with us since childhood and they act just like water filtration systems to catch our 8 senses and our attention. If we haven’t cleaned those filters for decades, the old debris and outdated information that’s been accumulated traps the opportunity to take in new data.

Beginner”s mind is a concept often used in meditation, reminding us to be “unfiltered” and let all our thoughts flow — not to cling to them, or allow them to muddy up the waters of the present moment.

Beginner’s mind is also a tool we can use to hack our clogged filtering systems and begin to be with a current experience with a fresh clean slate.

There’s a bonus packed into this skill as well. The more we practice “beginner’s mind”, the cleaner and more current our unconscious filtering system becomes. Out with the old and in with the new!

Get into the habit of changing your inner filter and discover the magical difference it makes.

This last gummy is an invitation to spend a day discovering where you attention goes while you are busy engaged in life. We’ve all had that experience of pouring a cup of steaming hot coffee, and eagerly anticipating enjoying it fully. A few minutes later, our mug is empty and we don’t even remember drinking that coffee. Or we are driving to the grocery store and realize that our mind has wandered elsewhere and is not paying attention to the upcoming traffic jam.

The truth is that our attention is constantly activating our brain. We are “feeding” our brain all kinds of things throughout the day — and some of it is like junk food or junk mail. Do you want to be more discerning about what you activate in your brain?

If you answered yes, then start paying attention to your attention. In fact, play with your attention — it’s about the same experience as playing with a busy toddler who is always on the move. You wouldn’t let a toddler on their own for a day, but we often do just tat with our attention.

We let our attention run off and meander into all kinds of places while we are simultaneously driving a car, making dinner, playing a game with our kids, or talking on the phone with a friend. Start paying attention to your meandering attention. See if you can bring it back to the present moment. See if you can keep it focused for even a few minutes on the task at hand.

We can become very skillful at using our attention intentionally. This is so good for our brains and extremely helpful for our emotional health. Dr. Peter Attia, author of the longevity book, Outlive, reinforces the fact that we are most content and satisfied with our life – in the present moment.

Where attention goes, neural firing flows and neural connection grows. We are actually activating important parts of our brain with our focused attention. If we want to cultivate a growth mindset and keep our brains upgraded as often as we do our phones, we need to pay attention to how we are using and directing our attention.

By the way, there is a bonus feature to paying attention in our present moments. We become much more skillful at tapping in to all 8 of our senses. The salient qualities of our remarkable brains tend to come online and stay online in an integrated fashion.

The more we cultivate greater self-awareness, the more we are likely to equally grow our “other awareness”. This helps us tap into another awesome ability we have — the ability to “attune” to others. Think of this skill set like putting on your oxygen mask first. You attend to yourself and get grounded, calm and clear-minded. (A few deep breaths will fast track this practice). Then you attune to what your child or partner may be experiencing. We co-regulate each other, so if you can meet the moment with some empathy and understanding, chances are you will be offering what you instinctively know would feel helpful to you in a similar situation.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

Be sure to follow me on Instagram @inspirednewhorizons to get your daily gummy of wisdom. I distill lots of research into short supplements for your personal growth

Pivot Points

Dr. Dan Siegel invites us to go back and revisit our childhood memories to liberate ourselves from old narratives. I have found this process to be incredibly cathartic. Today, I pull the curtain back to learn what happened in a poignant scene written and produced by the much younger version of me. And then, I pivot….and discover the transforming benefits of accepting Dr. Seigel’s invitation.

The Bully in the Sandbox:

When I was just four years old, I attended a pre-school that was across the street from the second floor apartment my mom, dad and I lived in. I loved pre-school with a colorful round rug for story time or show and tell, the long table full of textured arts and crafts supplies, white school paste and fat waxy crayons. I especially loved the sandbox full of sand pails and assorted plastic scoops. I’d skip the swings and the merry go round at recess and head straight for that sandbox. I had an affinity for scoops (and I still do today).

There was a rough and tumble boy in our class, who was bigger in size than most of us and he didn’t mind letting us know he had the power to take whatever he wanted. For some reason, what he wanted most nearly every day for two weeks was the one colorful plastic scoop that I had chosen. He didn’t want to play with it; he simply wanted to disrupt my fun. Day in and day out, he’d grab my scoop and run away with it, laughing at my tears I was trying so hard to stop. (I never understood why the teacher did not put a stop to this, but I will assume she had her hands full blowing noses, pushing kids on swings and catching the the dizzy ones as they dismounted the merry go round).

One day, I could not longer tolerate the bullying or the volcanic eruption of my big emotions that had been pushed down for far too long. As that boy grabbed my bright red scoop, I jumped up from the sandbox, trembling and sobbing uncontrollably. I ran across the street and up the stairs to our apartment.

I did not find the refuge I was seeking at home or the comfort I needed from my mother. My mom was outraged that I had run away from school and she punished me. She made me sit alone on the stairs in the dark attic, the place in our house that scared me the most. Afraid, afraid to cry, silenced but needing to tell my full story — and all occurring in the dark — all by myself.

At the tender age of 4, the story I told myself was fairly complex which I will credit in part to my wild, creative imagination: keep your strong emotions to yourself, things can most definitely get worse, don’t ask for help, don’t rat out the bullies, take care of yourself, keep your needs and feelings in the dark.

This scenario is not at all unusual with the old parenting model in vogue at that time. As I revisit this childhood memory, now more informed and educated about a vastly improved parenting model, I am able to witness this scenario with compassion for both me — and my mom.

I never expected to discover that compassion would take the place of the anger and confusion I once had; an anger and confusion that lingered like a heavy fog between me and my mother for most of my life. That’s the reality of unhealthy attachment styles from childhood — they become a lifelong tug of war, longing for our needs to be met and afraid to express them.

This revelation became a profound pivot from a broken childhood narrative, to a place of deeper understanding, with more context, awareness and compassion. It is precisely why Dr. Dan Siegel wants us to do this work.

The healing, transformational value in this Pivot Point cannot be underestimated. I wish I had done it decades ago.

This storyline I created from the infamous “bully in a sandbox vignette” played out time and time again in my childhood and family dynamics; even more so when my two younger brothers came along. This how I became a shy but responsible “helper”, a fixer of other’s problems, stubborn (the popular nomenclature for the independent, never-ask for help type) and an enabler in a multi-layered, codependent family dynamic.

As Dr. Rick Hanson espouses “what helped us get through childhood often gets in the way in adulthood.” Those adaptive childhood patterns often looked like worthwhile attributes: reliable and dependable, independent and not needy, capable and hardworking, a resourceful problem solver. The problem was they came with side effects: resentment, feeling unappreciated or devalued, confused over a lack of reciprocity of all my efforts, frequent bouts of exhaustion and anxiety, distrustfulness.

A little sidenote here: the one I distrusted the most was me because I didn’t believe that my needs were important; in fact, most of the time I didn’t even know what my needs were. So I disregarded warning signs and many times blindly trusted others who were not looking out for my best interests. No wonder internally I felt so jumpy and uneasy. I just didn’t understand what those valid feelings were trying to tell me.

Ian Morgan Cron, a well-known expert on the enneagram wrote his book, The Story of You; An Enneagram Journey to Becoming the Real You inspired by his own real life transformation that came from examining his childhood. His pivot point for doing this work came when he was in the 12-step program and had just finished sharing his life story during an AA meeting. A recovered and wise elder pulled him aside afterward and asked him if it was possible that he was “living in the wrong story.” This became the impetus for Ian to fully examine his childhood experiences and learn what was holding him back; even getting in the way of what he truly wanted out of life. Not only did Ian craft a better story for himself, he became a best-selling author, psychotherapist, enneagram teacher and host of the wildly successful Typology podcast series.

Many people who are now renowned experts in their fields have similar stories. Peter Levine, Ph.D, says that research is “me-search”. Dr. Levine is the developer of Somatic Experiencing, a naturalistic and neurobiological approach to healing trauma, which he has developed over the last 50 years. Brene Brown has had a 20+ year career studying shame, vulnerability, authenticity and connection. She originally published her book, The Gifts of Imperfection in August 2010 and in 2020 she re-published it as the 10th anniversary edition. The sub-title of The Gifts of Imperfection is yet another invitation to liberate ourselves from childhood narratives: “Let Go of Who You Think You are Supposed To Be And Embrace Who You Are”

The reason we have a $13 billion self help industry today is rooted in that old dysfunctional parenting model. It stunted our personal growth. We became rootbound by unconscious limitations.

Pivot Point – Overlaying the Better Parenting Template on that childhood memory:

I found that a valuable step in this revisiting exercise is to overlay the whole brain parenting template over the same “bully in the sandbox” scene and reimagine it. This step really opened my eyes and heart. It is precisely what led me to feeling genuine compassion for both me and my mom. I had a much greater understanding of the dysfunctional dynamics and how we got so derailed.

I imagined my 4 year old self being comforted by my mother, my big emotions validated, and resting in the comforting safety of her warm lap til I was calm. I pictured us walking hand in hand back to my pre-school to discuss the bullying incident with my teacher and having a meaningful discussion; possibly even getting an apology from the boy and to learning why he might be behaving poorly. Is it possible that he needed attention and lacked the skills to play nicely with others? Was his home life also stunting his personal growth?

I imagined my mother reflecting at day’s end on the whole experience, feeling really good about herself and how she showed up – for me, herself, my classmate and our teacher.

Here are a few relevant takeaways from overlaying this new parenting template on old childhood memories:

One: This is how we can “reparent” ourselves and unhook from the emotional baggage of our past. Terry Real, founder of Relational Life Therapy, uses this effective “reparenting” skill when he is working with his clients to help release their painful past so they can effectively work on their present relationships with a marital partner and their own children. It is a remarkable experience to release old painful, fossilized emotions from childhood memories that we’ve held onto for far too long; and that often prevent us from seeing what’s right in front of us today.

Two: We readily recognize how much more skillful and grounded we would have been had we been “pre-loaded and practiced” in what healthy attachment styles look and feel like. This is a bit like having a crystal ball that allows us to see how these better relationship skills and tools would have positive impacts on our friendships, our work colleagues, our marriages and our own parenting. Most importantly, we would know ourselves well, and have strong core values to guide us.

Three: We become acutely aware of the valid role our emotions play in our lives. That old parenting model bypassed one of our most vital human operational systems — and the very one we needed most as young children. Our emotional operating system is the foundational component for our developing, complex brains. Being fully integrated with our emotions – being able to name them, to know how they feel in our bodies, to understand their relationship to meeting our core needs, to get the support we needed to be with our emotions — would be a lifetime game-changer.

Four: We can apply some reverse engineering to reconnecting with our most authentic self. While finding our “authentic self” seems like a cliche, the reality is that if our childhood needs for attachment were imperiled by our authenticity (our connection to what we truly feel), then naturally we “closed off” parts of our most genuine self. Perfectionism, rigid role identification, hyper vigilance, people pleasing, harmonizing, defensiveness — they all come from the tension between our need for attachment and our true authenticity. How many times have you wrestled with mixed emotions trying to determine which one was truly your inner GPS? Did you chose the path of least resistance (harmonizing or going along with something) even though inside you did not want to participate? When we gain greater clarity about our true and most authentic self, we become more at ease with ourselves and have greater emotional regulation dexterity and discernment.

The enneagram can be a valuable resource to help us reconnect to our authentic self and rediscover our unique gifts in healthy and productive ways. That tension between attachment and authenticity moved us to the unhealthy end of our enneagram spectrum. The uniquely best parts of ourself contorted into armor and obstacles, often taking us farther away from what we need and want the most. We can reclaim our natural born gifts and begin to use them as they were intended — to enrich our lives, to give us meaning and purpose.

The Launchpad for More Pivots:

Once I pulled the curtain back on that “origin” story of many of my adaptive behavioral patterns, I was curious about other parts of my adult history that might have played out quite differently with the whole brain parenting model. There were many.

I know that it is a familiar refrain to say that “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” or to say that “we wouldn’t be who we are today without all the choices and events that got us here” but I’d like to offer a different frame for those old platitudes.

What would our world would look and feel like today if so many of us had not been hiding our gifts and authenticity? If we had been skillful enough to use our emotional navigation to stand up for ourselves and others, one sandbox incident at a time. What if our emotions had been accepted as basic human programming and nurtured rather than labeled good or bad, right or wrong, male or female.

You know that familiar refrain that sends us straight to the self help section of our local bookstore: “hurting people hurt people” ? We hurt each other and ourselves all the time because we are so disconnected from our authentic self and we lack the awareness to see that we project our hurt onto others. We could stop this cycle in its tracks if we took the time to go back and reevaluate our childhood experiences and reclaim our authenticity.

Instead of “projecting” our pain, we can learn to “reflect” our similitaries and realities of being flawed, messy, deeply feeling, remarkable, amazing, complex human beings. No more judging or comparing; simply reflecting and sharing.

This pivot would be a game-changer.

Would we have less anxiety, pain and suffering, addictions, physical and mental health issues?

Would we be using our gifts, our time and energy in ways that give us great satisfaction, energize us, foster our resilience and help us see possibilities where we once saw only problems?

Here is an observation so noteworthy I don’t know how we have missed it: Have you noticed the vastly improved energy level of people who have freed themselves from their old stories? People who once were mired in their pain, sadness, limiting beliefs and even addiction are now some of our most dynamic motivational speakers. They energize us! They make us laugh, raise our spirits, help us see our potential, they listen to learn, empathize, normalize and encourage.

That is the tangible transformational magic of all this work.

Pay attention and you will discover that the people who have done this inner work are now using all their authenticity and natural born gifts in empowering, energetic and life enriching ways. Not just for themselves….but for everyone with whom they interact.

If you lean in a little closer, you will also discover that the continual learning and discovery process is amplified — both the teacher and the student sharing insights, experiences and emotions that perpetuate even deeper wisdoms.

Learning from a Master:

One of my most delightful experiences is to discover someone who has integrated all this practical, pragmatic data into a well-lived, well-loved, inspiring story of their own life. Not a psychologist or neuroscientist, not a trauma expert or shame researcher. It is in the magic of someone full of creativity, who followed their bliss and found success doing what they love.

Without further ado, I share with you someone who epitomizes the magic of living life most authentically — the legendary music producer, Rick Rubin, a savant of creativity. How remarkable is it that Rick Rubin let his love of magic tricks as a young boy infused his life journey with the endless wonders of possibility? He believes in that magic.

Rick Rubin has helped generations of musical artists discover their own unique gifts because he was patient, deeply sensitive and keenly attentive to being open to possibilities. He confesses to being somewhat exhaustive about endless possibilities.) His extensive list of clients include Johnny Cash, Tom Petty, Adele, Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Dixie Chicks and the Beastie Boys.

Rick recently published his first book entitled The Creative Act: A Way of Being. Here is a successful man, in his 60’s, who spent the past 7 to 8 years reflecting on his life, experiences, clients and creativity to write this book. He sums it all up this way:

“I set out to write a book about what to do to make a great work of art. Instead, it revealed itself to be a book on how to be.”

I’ve curated a few of Rick’s profound wisdoms from three podcasts where he was a recent guest. The fact that Rick was interviewed on three very diverse podcast platforms is a testimony to the fact that there is more integration in our lives than we realize. Rick was a guest of Andrew Huberman on The Huberman Lab (the neuroscience of creativity), of Malcolm Gladwell on Revisionist History (generating creative authenticity and finding your voice) and of Krista Tippet’s on the OnBeing Podcast (conversations on what it means to be human and finding meaning in life).

What I love about Rick’s insights is what he says he learned from writing his book — he declares he didn’t know all of this, he noticed it. He noticed the very things that are now being actively taught to us by neuroscience, social science, behavioral science and psychology — the whole ball of wax of self help modalities.

See if you can relate to what Rick noticed:

“We come into our lives as a blank slate. What we take in over the course of our lives is all that we are filled with. Our memories, emotions and subconscious are acting at all times. We never know where it is coming from (our reaction) and it doesn’t always make sense.”

“We need to get out of our own heads, what we were told, what we were taught — being free to experiment, to have fun and experiment and find a new way of doing something. Embrace it instead of thinking we are doing it the wrong way.”

“The fact is that man’s own baggage of beliefs — of thinking we know best — is what was holding man back. There is so much that we think we know that we don’t know. We need to remove the distracting information that we hold true – that is stopping us.”

“I think when you really listen to someone, they act differently. Most people are not used to being heard.”

“Music lets out our inner emotional life. Music has an emotional base to it – even without the words. We feel this energy. You can channel the energy and emotion you have.”

His insights on meditation: “Your life off the cushion changes — because you are building a new reality within yourself — an emotional musculature. You are more in tune with the present as you are experiencing it in this moment — and not the distractions that the world is bombarding us with….but a wider more open, and generous curation — we see more and take in more.”

What’s Ahead:

There’s so much overlap and integration happening in diverse fields and modalities for supporting our overall health, well being and authenticity. My upcoming blog posts will focus on connecting the dots on this ever evolving frontier.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

Rick Rubin: Magic, Everyday Mystery & Getting Creative, March 16, 2023 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/on-being-with-krista-tippett/id150892556?i=1000604535563

Check out the music of Patrick Droney and check out this recent YouTube video on his take on re-pair by going back in time to his childhood https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=runDxbTdQxQ

THE CREATIVE ACT: THE ART OF BEING by Rick Rubin

My Daily Gummies of Wisdom

I’m a huge fan of Laura Numeroff and her children’s book series “If You Give….” Her whimsical book, “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie” has often been my “go to” easy explanation for how our daily lives simply unfold in a series of unplanned, seemingly disjointed events; some are fun and creative, some are messy and disruptive; some are energizing and others exhaustive. At the end of the day, we take stock of what we got accomplished. Very often it was much more than we had intended and very little of what we thought we needed to do and upon reflection, full of spontaneous, present moments of life that matter most.

Using Laura’s books as a template for my own personal growth journey, I have begun to extract little nuggets of wisdom that unfold throughout an ordinary day. If I didn’t take the time to reflect on what transpired throughout the many interactions of my day, I might miss all those opportunities to “connect the dots” of the “before and after” pivots that are evolving as I am changing.

In July, 2021, I launched a new component to this blog website — Nuggets of Wisdom. My Nuggets of Wisdom posts were planned as a monthly compilation of witty, inspiring, educational and uplifting self-discovery insights that I was experiencing and witnessing. In true “If you give a mouse a cookie” fashion, this monthly collection began to organically shift to a daily practice. I combine my love of photography with my little “gummies” of wisdom — two of my favorite things rolled into one.

My photos and my creative writing came together unexpectedly and now, I simply cannot imagine a day without my daily “gummy”. While I take supplements to support my physical health, my daily gummy of personal growth nourishes my continued learning, keeps me invested in my practices, and has most definitely cultivated greater awareness of myself and others.

Here is one of my biggest take-aways from seven years of personal growth and self-discovery: We are changing every single day and often are completely unaware of it. When we make a commitment to a growth mindset, to stepping out of what is no longer working for us, to practice every day (even just a little), to have the courage and the drive to “show up” in healthier ways — amazing transformation organically takes root in us.

I am living proof of the results. I am not the same person I was when I started this personal growth life plan. I have observed it in the researchers, the experts, the teachers, therapists and coaches that educate me. What has touched my heart the most is the similar transformation I have witnessed in my family members and friends who are also doing their personal growth work. For this very reason, I am kicking off this blog post of “gummies” with this one: Be Yourself

Daily Gummy of Wisdom: Be Yourself

Be yourself. What does it feel like in your body when you are as open, as playful and overjoyed as this little guy?

Notice that he is “belly up”…..soft side showing. Arms outstretched to embrace the present moment, to be aware and grateful. He is smiling — from the inside out! Do you feel his invitation to connect? To play? To share his unabashed joy?

This little guy broke the script….he opted to spend today with a fresh perspective, leading with openness and vulnerability. Notice not only the difference in how he feels — notice your reaction to his change!

Normally, his protective armor and clever disguise that shows when he is walking around as usual sends out a warning sign: stay away, beware, leave me alone. Same old routine…..head down, seeing only a foot or two in front of and above him….plodding along, dragging his tender underbelly on dew-covered grass….headed back to the swamp. He’s missing out! and so are we!

That’s what protective armor and old behavioral patterns do — they keep us from breaking the script, breaking free, seeing and experiencing life from a fresh perspective — and most importantly, inviting “connection.” Connection to our true nature, to what brings us joy, ease and that blissful inner peace of being comfortable in our own skin, knowing who we truly are.

Own it….you intuitively know your bets parts of you. Show them — be yourself! Be like this little guy and surprise yourself and those around you. Soft belly up, heart open, stretching into your true self.

This little gummy reminds me not to “armor up” with old reactive patterns. I vividly recall a memory of being told “not to be my sunny self” when I was younger. Being a people pleaser at that time in my life, I complied. I turned down the dial on my authentic self and in doing so, I did not even feel like myself. Someone snapped my photo in that moment. When I saw that photo a week later, it was very evident from my facial expression and my body language that I was not my true, best self. I looked sad, demure, snuffed out. It took a photo to show me what should have been so obvious. Tamping down the best parts of myself — what made me feel so good, so energetic, so engaged — was a temporary fix for someone else’s fleeting need — but a reinforcement of a habit of hiding my most genuine self. This silly little ceramic alligator, laughing on his belly like a joyful child, is a strong mental image of what my best self looks and feels like.

It also serves as an important reminder to tease apart the cost of not being our authentic selves when we are hoping to meet the needs of others. Just because someone else was having a bad day and preferred to marinate in all that grumpiness, did not mean that I needed to do the same as a way to prove my support. A more skillful pivot is to stay grounded in who I am (my sunny self), while being supportive and listening to understand. The irony is that my genuine sunny self has deep empathy, kindness and patience; my armored self loses touch with those traits. They are blocked by resentment.

If I shut down my most authentic self, I cannot offer what would be most beneficial and supportive to another. We both lose.

Today if I feel resentment moving in like a hazy fog, I remember that my inner sunshine cuts the fog and lets me see more clearly. “Get back to home base” I will remind myself. “See things clearly and course correct; don’t jump ship (i.e. don’t abandon your true self).”

Daily Gummy of Wisdom: Practice Makes Us Skillful

This gummy of insight was inspired by Forrest Hanson, host of the Being Well Podcast, one of my favorite resources for all things personal growth, self help and mental well being.

I love this terminology of “practiced people” coined by Forrest Hanson. It puts the emphasis right where it needs to be — on the practice. And it tosses out that old cliche that “practice makes perfect” when comes to self-discovery and personal growth. We are definitely not striving to be perfect — we are “practicing” to be more skillful in our lives and relationships.

Rarely are there optimal circumstances for any of life’s obstacles — that’s why skillful matters more than striving for perfection. We are better served with flexility, resourcefulness and calmness. For example, no two drives to work are ever the same, right? There’s weather, traffic jams, the level of gas in the tank, the amount of time we have vs. the amount of time we need (you get the metaphor, right?). It’s the consistent practice in ever-changing driving situations that make us better (not perfect) drivers.

“Practiced people” still face the same emotions, the many thoughts, the challenges that everyone faces each day. They are, however, better resourced with tools and skills to support themselves in healthy ways. The pivot for them is the daily commitment to “practice” these skills and using these tools. They also “practice” core inner resources — self awareness, self compassion, emotional processing and regulation, and personal accountability.

Practiced people are great sources of support for each other – and for the novice just dipping their toes into self-discovery.

We can read books, listen to podcasts and even use current self help buzz phrases….but it is the practice that is the engine of real progress.

This gummy of wisdom actually came to me as I reflected on how my conversations with my own “practiced” friends have evolved over recent years. At the beginning of our engagement with personal growth, we felt like school kids poring over the material of a brand new subject. We’d read or listen to the textbook material, then call a friend and say “this makes no sense to me” or “what are you getting out of this?” Time would pass, we’d integrate what we could and often we’d find some new book, teacher or modality to explore on our own. Then we would happily share the new information with each other.

The gift of each of us being invested in this personal growth work was that we all wanted to get a passing grade and were willing to support each other to accomplish that. We’d laugh together when something finally clicked into place and made sense. We’d share our little hand drawn charts to help us remember key lessons or the clever images that served as cliff notes. We’d remind each other to use the new skills and tools, not just read about them.

We had a lot of heart to heart conversations, sharing parts of our stories that we had never told before. While it was often initially uncomfortable to be so honest not only with ourselves but with each other, we soon discovered that this got a lot easier and was so cathartic. As we unearthed old memories that needed to be processed, we leaned on each other to do the work. We uttered a lot of “me too’s”. We helped each other discard or reframe old narratives.

There has been a lot of encouragement and celebrating along the way as well. We know just how far we’ve all come and we love seeing how our personal transformation has brought out the best in us, how freely we laugh now, how we move through life more effortlessly with less resistance.

Yes, we do still deal with the same daily issues that everyone does, but we handle them more skillfully now, honoring and processing emotions in real time instead of decades later. We don’t hesitate to pick up the phone and ask for help if we need to rumble through tough problems. Honestly, we just ask better questions and do listen to understand more deeply than we once did; we do this for ourselves and we do this for others. Less armor, less defense mechanisms — more space, grace and generosity in believing we are all doing the best we can.

A few years ago, I had heard an incredible story of the invaluable role that older women played in a very rural community for young people who did not have easy access to mental health resources. The patience, compassion and the listening that these women offered to others proved to be as beneficial as a formal, professional counseling session for members of their community. It was the origin story of the Friendship Bench. Those older women were “practiced people”.

I have reflected on the concept of the Friendship Bench often coupled with the teachings of Dr. Bruce Perry about the importance of our relationship scaffolding – the very webbing we all need to support our basic needs and forward growth. We can all benefit from good conversations with “practiced people.”

An AHA Moment:

Even the long-time experts will be honest about the ongoing nature of personal growth work, about the times they have slipped up, got caught by strong emotions, and made mistakes. We love their candor and take heart in knowing that this is human nature. We learn from them that we can fix our mistakes, we can create stronger relationships through rupture and repair; we can even be more understanding of each other through our own personal growth work. It simply reinforces that we are working on being skillful, not perfect.

What’s fun about all this work is going back and re-reading books or our journal notes and realizing just how far we’ve come — and possibly discovering something new to learn; something we might not have been ready for when we first got started.

That’s what my daily gummies do for me — they not only reinforce what I have learned previously, they continue to foster greater awareness and help me see where there is room to grow.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

BEING WELL PODCAST: What We’ve Learned From 100 Experts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/being-well-with-forrest-hanson-and-dr-rick-hanson/id1120885936?i=1000602953967