Hi, this is steve again and thanks for joining me for this month's podcast for believe and big change. It's good to be with you all again as always, I hope again, your New Year's off to a good start and you're surviving uh the crazy weather that seems to be impacting our country these days. We're even getting it out here and uh southern California, so we definitely have a winter out here, probably not as harsh as some of you all are experiencing, but uh I certainly hope you're hanging in there and uh that your New Year continues to get off to a good start. And if you find yourself struggling a little bit, um give yourself a little break and maybe take a look at your expectations. That's what I need to do probably almost every single day and don't give up on yourselves. You do matter. And you are loved. What I want to talk about a little more today and a little more with a little more depth is we've talked about compassion and empathy and you know, for a while I lost it, I lost the ability to have access to that. Um I went through my version of a lot of stress. Some would call it trauma. Some people don't like that word. So you can call it a lot of stress. You can call it trauma, whatever works for you. My own version of pain and suffering and as I wrote in this month's blog, I'm not going to tell you that I can relate to your all's story and your pain and suffering perfectly. You know, some people have had a very rough, they've been physically, sexually emotionally abused all the above. That's obviously compromising and violating someone's boundaries victimized by all kinds of different sets of circumstances. So I can't tell you that I identify with every single bit of that. There's no perfect comparable situational analysis. I believe I worked to look for the similarities and what I can't identify with his pain. You know, I went through a pretty tough stretch about a decade ago, I went through a public divorce. It wasn't pretty uh I survived it. I went through a difficult time with the company, I was in charge of had a falling out with the board of directors and I was fired unceremoniously. You know, in some cases, I guess I I got off lucky, but I struggled with it and I was in a lot of pain and I suffered. And I went through this time where there's, there's a shame component of feeling less than someone less than you, less than a moment of situation less than the ability to run a company and guide it Well to the ego gets involved too. I'm greater than you for the moment with the situation. Either way I found out I was suffering so the pendulum would swing back and forth. My expectations went through the roof. And so did my drinking. So how do you bridge that gap unless it's a Hollywood movie. You know, that it wasn't a happy ending at the time. And there was a time where I had boundaries, healthy boundaries. I was reading up on one of my favorite authors Burn a Brown and she is quoted as saying the most compassionate people are the most boundary. It's interesting. She defines boundaries is what is okay and what is not okay. Sounds like respect to me. She also said that generosity cannot exist without boundaries. And the boundaries are the key to self love. So here I am. I've gone through this stressful situation, divorce, losing the job is stressful, especially when you believed it was your dream job and your life revolved around it right or wrong. Good, better and different depending on how you want to look at it. I got a lot out of it. I built a lot of self worth and when the stress came in and what I was talking to you about with the suffering and the pendulum swinging back and forth and the drinking increasing, I lost my boundaries and I lost access to having compassion and empathy for others I cared, but I didn't know how to feel it and I didn't know how to show it anymore. Why? Because I was thinking about me and my pain and my suffering and those shame voices that I thought I had been hearing and was hearing there were people that told me I was good enough in life and then I got this and there were people that told me that I wasn't good enough in life sometimes they were the same people eventually, as I fell into the depths of shame and alcoholism. Those weren't the voices of others I was hearing anymore. I thought they were those were my voice is living that over and over again of me telling myself that I wasn't enough. So not having access to compassion and empathy for myself, a part of my own self care and myself love, I lost that ability to have it for others. So I'm gonna talk a little bit about how I've worked to get that back because I see people that have difficulty, I think they care and I think we all have good hearts, you might think there's a few questionable cats out there and some social pasts and and whatnot. But I tend to believe in people for the most part and their ability to change if they want to and if they can allow access to it, and that's what I had to do. And so if you find yourself having difficulty beyond watching a feel good special on some show that makes you kind of tear up, which is good. That's showing you have access to something or listening to our national anthem. I tear up when I hear it. I'm very proud of our our country and and in in lieu of uh what some others may think, and I'm gonna leave that at that for now. And um you might, you know, you want to empathize with people and you want to be there, but you might find yourself there's some blockage, you don't know what to say, You freeze up when someone, it feels like someone's unloading on you with their story and their pain and their suffering. I know I I used to do it, I've done it in recent times, I'm still working on it. You know, I think when we can start to turn inward and start to have compassion and empathy for ourselves and self care, I think is a big part of that and start to love ourselves. We'll be able to to give it to others. We've got to give it to ourselves first. If we want to be there for other people instead of getting angry and frustrated with people when they open up about this stuff and they're really hurting and there are a lot of pain and it frustrates us, kind of makes us feel helpless because we all want to believe that we can help people. We want to help people just like in this country, something horrible happens. And we rally, we want to rally for people, sometimes we just don't know how we get stuck. I can definitely relate to that. And I believe that it will increase our our skill and our ability to listen to others, then we can start to identify. I mean, I wasn't beaten growing up, I wasn't sexually abused. You know, I had some emotional abuse and I caught some, some bad breaks along the way. I didn't have the ability to roll with them the way that I had hoped to, but I wasn't willing to ask for help. I decided to go it alone with the assistance of massive amounts of alcohol and it wasn't pretty for a while. So I decided to get some help and just start to, to open myself up again. And a big part of my daily surrender and acceptance is, I don't know, I don't have this figured out. I have to have some, some faith, some trust, some blind faith and then they say turn it over and have the ability to let go of things. It sounds so easy. It's so much easier said than done. When people say it's so cliche is to say, well you just gotta let go and let God, you've got to surrender. You've got to accept that you've got to turn it over. I mean when I used to hear that years ago, I was like, hey man, could you give me a road map? Well I found that road map and that access is in my heart, I had to start taking care of myself. So if you really want to be of service to others and help others and that can just be simply listening for a few minutes when it's sometimes tough to do or asking somebody how they're doing and being willing to listen to them for a few minutes. You might have to cut them off and have a boundary and say, hey, listen, it was really good to see you. You look good. I hope things get better for you, but you know, I need, I need to go, you know, do what you're capable of, but you know, give it, give it a shot. And one thing I wanted to share with you, uh, today is something that a lot of people struggle with and that is meditation. Did you know, meditation is the opposite of worrying. I read that somewhere by the way, just like I was quoting Burn a brown earlier. I read that somewhere. I often wonder if I've ever had an original thought or idea and that's okay if I haven't. Um, but I read that somewhere and it made a lot of sense to me. We all know how to worry. It's a learned behavior. Well if we know how to worry, can we do the opposite of worrying and just take a few minutes each day to be still with our thoughts and feelings. Now you hear that you're gonna go, what in the heck does that mean? How can I be still with my thoughts and feelings? What that means to me is, you know, you've got something on your mind an issue, you're in a relationship, Somebody's upset you, there's problem at work. You know, there's problems somewhere we believe it's a problem. I don't have any problems. Sometimes. I just have to take a little more time recognizing that it's an opportunity and the only barrier is typically me and me getting in my own way. So being still with our thoughts and feelings and just observing where that ego that I was talking about in that pendulum swinging to saying, well maybe I just didn't get the job done today or maybe I wasn't enough for this person. Maybe I just didn't say the right thing. Maybe I was a little hard on this person to, hey, that's their problem. That's not my problem. I don't own this, that's in their court. Well, to a degree that's true. But again, I believe we all want to help. So maybe just take a few minutes. Here's a thought for you. Sit still with those thoughts and feelings, Those emotions observe what the ego wants to do and observe the defense mechanisms to come up, take a few minutes, lie down, sit up, stand up, whatever is gonna support you and your body and and where you're feeling that day and then take a few minutes and and write it down. It's kind of cool to see what it'll do and how things will start to work out and play out and that we don't always have to act on the first thought. You know what they say. Sometimes think before you speak, think feel sit still before you act or before you press send on that text message or that email who's ever done that one? I got my hand straight up in the air. I've done it so many times, I've forgotten about it. So we've talked about compassion and empathy and connecting with others is listening. So you want that ability to be a better listener. If you don't have access to compassion and empathy, that means we're not taking care of us as it means I'm not taking care of myself. Self care is a huge part of that. If I don't take care of myself and you've heard it before, we're no good to others. We're just not that good. We can only fake it so long. So I just wanted to share that with you, give you something maybe to chew on a little bit and it'll also help us to and it helps me to not try to distract myself from my feelings because it can get real uncomfortable to not act on those thoughts and feelings. We feel like we got to do something, we gotta go, we gotta call somebody, we gotta do it now. We got to take action sometimes that inaction is okay and it can get real uncomfortable. Trust me, I've been working on some things the last couple of months and there's times I just wanna jump up and you know jump out of my chair and and go back to the gym again and avoid things and we tend to avoid conflict and run away from it, but we need connection, we need each other and that conflict can be very healthy when we're both taking care of ourselves and we have those boundaries and we have so much more access and so much more to offer to people. So that's it for this month. Um it's good to be with you all. Thanks again for all of your notes and for reaching out. It really does make a difference. We're equal, we do matter and were loved very much I believe. And um I look forward to speaking with you to the next time. So hang in there, good luck to you and uh again send those notes out to me and and let me know what you want to talk about and hear from me about. I'm very open to that. A lot of my focus is around uh shame, shame, resilience in recovery in some way, shape or form. God bless you.