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Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Restoring Civility With Peter Montoya    [INTRODUCTION] [00:00:02] PF: Welcome to Episode 347 of Live Happy Now. As we continue celebrating March as the month of happiness, we're taking on civil war. I'm your host, Paula Felps, and this week, I am so excited to be talking to Peter Montoya, a speaker, thought leader and author who is truly committed to helping restore our civility. His latest book, The Second Civil War: A Citizen's Guide to Healing our Fractured Nation looks at the challenges we're facing as a society, how technology and media consumption, increase our anxiety, and what each of us can do to help stop that conflict. Today, we're talking about all those things, as well as talking about what he's creating, to help replace social media with civil media. [INTERVIEW] [00:00:45] PF: Peter, thank you so much for coming back on Live Happy Now. [00:00:49] PM: Paula, I'm thrilled to be here. You are one of my favorite hosts, I love your show. [00:00:55] PF: Oh, thank you so much. And we love it when you come and talk to us, because you always have such great new information for us, and as you know, as part of happiness month, we are looking at the theme of unity and that's why we talk to you. Because a lot of people were hopeful that this year was going to be one of like more unity, more civility, and that doesn't seem to be the case. What's keeping us so divided? [00:01:20] PM: We are inherently very, very tribal creatures. And that is our default mechanism. So, when I say tribal, we find various different ways of creating cohesive groups, and also creating out others or outside groups. We do this around national lines, political lines, religious lines, racial lines. So, racism is part of tribalism. Company around company boundaries, around sports teams, and even the cliques inside schools. We are tribal, tribal creatures, and that is our default. That's what we automatically go to. And over the course of our lives, we have become enculturated, into being cooperative with people who are not of our immediate tribe, which is actually somewhat of a miracle. It really is. So, look at all the ways we've been enculturated. So, when we first went to school in fifth grade, even before for fifth grade, before we’re five and went to kindergarten, we watch Sesame Street, and Sesame Street had different colored Muppets and people all cooperating and talking about sharing with the kindergarten. And we're talking about toll that everyone is the same. We live in a free country of equal rights, and we share with one another. We're all taught that everyone's the same and then we went to a church. And we're told to love thy neighbor as you love the Lord. I love everybody. The same with everyone else. And then we were taught the Pledge of Allegiance and how we all have the same allegiance to this flag, this country, and we all are all the same. This message is repeatedly beat into our heads over the course of our lifetimes. And so that's why it's such a miracle that we actually cooperate. So, there are uncontacted tribes still exist down in South America and other places in the world. And 30% of people die by violence, 30% of people die by human to human violence in those uncontacted cultures, and as the same number as it was 5,000 years ago, or 10,000 years ago, when we're still hunter gatherers. So, the fact that only 1% of people die in this country by violence is a miracle. The way we cooperate is a miracle. [00:03:55] PF: That's outstanding, because we don't think of that as being very cooperative right now. Because, we've had differences for a long time. These differences have always existed for us. But right now, there's so much more exposed and there's so much more of a, you have to be on a side. Are you vaccinated? Are you unvaccinated? Are you Republican or are you Democrat? I was talking to a friend who had lived in a purple state and she said, it used to be it didn't matter. She said now, people want to know where you stand. And so, why is that? Why is that bubbled up and become such a touch point of conflict for us? [00:04:36] PM: So, I've done a great – well, I'm an entrepreneur, and I've also been hired to go out and do leadership training. And now this is going to sound like a tangent, but please stay with me. I've oftentimes gone into companies which are falling apart and everyone's fighting and everyone's angry with one another. I go talk to the sales team, I talk to the customer service people, to the operations people. I talk to the engineering team. And what I do when I go out there is I find about all the things are good about the company. All the things are good about the products. Where are all the places that they agree upon, and it's like they agree on 80% or 90% of the things, and then I bring everyone together, and we talk about all the things we agree upon. The shared mission, the shared vision, the shared values, a shared culture. We talk about the things that we actually agree upon, and then once we're in agreement on that, then we say, “Okay, well, here are the couple things we need to fix.” I do not go in there and go to the sales team and go, “Oh, my God, have you heard what customer said about you? They said, you are the worst people in the world. And you are the devil and you're trying to bring down the company from the inside.” And when you watch the news, that is all they do. They spend 90% of their time vilifying another segment of the country. So, if you are consuming any news, and that means social media, podcasts, radio, cable TV, and 90% of the time is spent vilifying another person or another group, that media company is abusing you. They are manipulating you, so they can extract money from you. And how they do that is by getting your attention. They call fear mongering. They get you nice and riled up. Therefore, you watch their show more, you consume more other advertising, and those companies make more money, and they know it. So, this is not some secret conspiracy, like everyone doesn't know what the game is. That is the game. And if you hate half of America, you are a pawn in somebody else's chessboard. [00:06:47] PF: That was so well said, because let's talk for a minute about what it's doing to our communities, to our families, like whatever level you want to take it at. I've seen, there's so much conflict, even within families now over things they shouldn't be fighting about that, shouldn't be that big a deal because it doesn't – at the end of the day does not really affect them personally. [00:07:08] PM: You're absolutely right. It doesn't matter that much. So, Paula, I don't think you're as old as I am. But you might remember news in the television landscape in the 1980s. In the 1980s, drama was drama and news was news. We had three or four major news networks get Tom Brokaw, and Peter Jenning. And they all pride themselves on telling the truth. And being first those were the two major attributes. And then we also had these TV shows that got us to exercise our kind of ancient Greek archetypes, they were called Dallas and Dynasty. And news was news and drama was drama. We as human beings have a desire for both. We need more information. Because information we're taught basically, we believe we're very, very information hungry, because we want to keep safe. We want to survive. That’s how we're wired. And we also like drama. So, we also like these arc types of good and evil that also plays in our minds. And what happened in the 1990s and in the 2000s, and up until now, is that news and drama basically merged. Politics has become almost like a religion for us. And when we're watching cable news, or watching TV or listening to podcasts, what is happening is these media companies or personalities are creating these very ancient using the ancient archives in our brains of almost like gods and deities. And they are the almost like the Oracles who are helping you tell the future. And then you have the soldiers on this metaphorical battlefield, who are either fighting and thrusting or losing and being taken off the battlefield. And we're exercising this very, very naturally in our brains while watching the news. [00:08:57] PF: That's interesting, because nobody – I suspect that nobody listening to this has ever thought of it that way. [00:09:04] PM: So, when we go home, we used to watch Saturday Night Live, we used to watch the Oscars, we used to watch football. We used to talk about movies, we used to talk about everything else, but because now we're consuming so much media, that is the landscape that most people are now entrenched in, so it's all they think about and it seems really important. I mean, oh, my God, it’s going to be the end of the world. We're fighting for the soul of our country. The country is on the brink of extinction. I mean, it sounds absolutely horrifying to us. So obviously, it's the most important thing you need to talk about. And then we're incredibly tribal and we sit down at Thanksgiving dinner. And we you know, start saying, “Well, I heard that the election was stolen. I heard it was the safest and the most secure election in history.” And all we're doing is battling different tribal talking points. That's all we're doing. And the second hour I hear the wrong phrase come out of your mouth, let it be black lives matter or all lives matter, my ancient brain goes into fight or flight mode, even though you're my sister, my best friend, a coworker, and my little midbrain starts firing. As far as I'm concerned, I'm supposed to pick up a spear and kill you. Now, I've been enculturated well enough not to do that. [00:10:23] PF: You might throw the gravy ball. [00:10:26] PM : Right, exactly. Or scream or throw beer catch can at you. [00:10:32] PF: How do we change this? How do we get back to a civil discourse instead of a civil war? [00:10:36] PM: Great question. First of all, I stopped consuming media. I don't watch any media anymore. I only consume long form media. That means podcasts, documentaries, books, long articles. And they're usually happening well after the fact what actually happened. So, I only heard about that awful, terrible extraction from Afghanistan and heard stories about people falling off airplanes. But I'll probably wait a year until a book comes out which interviews all the people and I will spend an hour and a half or two hours watching a documentary, versus watching 20 minutes of news every single night that gets me all anxious and angry and upset in on trigger. I mean, that's what's happened. You go to dinner or lunch, and it seems like you're having a casual conversation. And before you know it, we're all triggered and all riled up. We talk about these very tribalistic issues. So, the first thing is, is you take yourself off the battlefield. That is the easiest thing and you do that by stopping consuming all the short form media that's making you anxious, angry and outraged. [00:11:41] PF: That's great. And what do we do when we are in environments with people who believe differently and who feel compelled to share those beliefs? And we know, we know that saying, no, but, or anything like that is going to start a war. But it's very difficult for people. I've talked with people who it's like, I knew I shouldn't have said anything, but like, because they, say I feel just as strongly as this other person does with a differing opinion, and it's hard to listen and listen and listen and not share your opinion. So, how do you take care of all this? Because that's where our problems are coming from. [00:12:22] PM: So, Paula, what you are going to do the next time you're in that scenario is you're going to access your wise mind. And your wise mind knows the following is you cannot change anybody's mind with facts. Absolutely cannot change anybody's minds with facts. The only way to change somebody else's mind is by a relationship, which means repeated long-term exposure to somebody and talking about things that are not in politics and non-religious. We're doing things we used to do, whether we’re playing games or board games, video games, hiking, camping, boating, shooting guns, whatever you do. But the only way to “change” somebody else's mind is through relationship. And next time you're in that moment, and you see it have compassion for this person who is actually genuinely hurting, and realize that when somebody is expressing their fear and anxiety about the future of the country, understand that they are sincerely in pain. And for anybody who has studied any kind of meditation, they are what the Buddhists call suffering, have compassion for them in where they are, and your job is just to love them and be in relationship with them. Because I promise you bring up the cudgel of facts, does not work. [00:13:44] PF: Right. And we see that time and time again and things end very badly. It hurts relationships, sometimes irreparably. [BREAK] I'll be right back with more on my talk with Peter Montoya about unity and civility. But right now, we've got another way that you can bring people together and that is through puzzles. I’ve got KC Johnson, our fabulous ecommerce marketing manager and we discovered Unidragon puzzles. KC, tell me what you love most about these these puzzles or wooden puzzles, for one. They're very different. It's not your average jigsaw puzzle. So, tell me what you thought about them. [00:14:19] KCJ: Yeah, they're not your average jigsaw puzzle. I love these. The colors are so vibrant. They have puzzles just in unique shapes. They have different animals like lion, tiger, elephants. [00:14:33] PF: Don't forget the wolf. [00:14:35] KCJ: Don't forget the wolf. I can't forget the wolf. Yeah, they’ve got wolves. They've got everything. And what I particularly love is that you can send gifts to your loved ones. And by gift, I mean, you can choose any puzzle and send it to your friends anywhere in the world. And it's super easy. Their website is very user friendly. I highly recommend it. It brings people together. There's so many just like mental health benefits to it as well. [00:14:58] PF: Absolutely. So, we're going to give our listeners a break on the price by ordering, they can go to unidragon.com and enter the code live happy now and get 10% off. Again, that is unidragon.com, enter the code live happy now get 10% off. And now let's get back to talking with Peter Montoya. [INTERVIEW CONTINUED] [00:15:18] PF: Let's talk about some tools that people can use to have a more civil discourse when these things are coming up. And sometimes it's at work, it can be at home, it can be with relatives. What are some of the things, what kind of conversations we need to start having, so that we can have more civil discourse and more unity? [00:15:38] PM: That’s a great question. I've got a bunch of questions that I have memorized. And they are, you know, just human. So, here's some of the questions that I use when someone starts to go political. I'll usually just go nod and go, “Oh, my gosh, yeah, I can see why you're really concerned about that.” And then I'll ask them a question. “What did you learn about your partner going through the pandemic?” [00:16:02] PF: Oh, wow. [00:16:00] PM: What did you learn about your relationship going through the pandemic? Here's another question. What made you smile today? What made you smile today? What was the most meaningful thing that happened to you in the last 24 hours? What are you most excited about that's coming up in your life? What is the most important thing, a tangible thing to you in the world? What's the most important thing to you in the world? Those are some of the questions that I have memorized at the tip of my tongue. I use those things freely and give them away, because they're really effective at making as human beings. [00:16:45] PF: That's fantastic, because everyone likes to feel included, and everyone wants to talk about themselves. And so, when you give them that opportunity and take their focus off of what's riling them up, I imagine there's an incredible physiological change going on with them. [00:17:03] PM: Absolutely. And you're connecting with them again. Because the truth is, this these studies are in my book, The Second Civil War: A Citizen’s Guide to Healing our Fractured Nation is my book. It's the first political self-help book. And one of the things that's in there, a whole bunch of charts, where they actually go and poll Americans on different issues, Republicans and Democrats. They asked the questions about gun control. Abortion, which is a really sticky issue. They ask questions about immigration and thoughts on the police. And guess what? On issue after issue 70% to 80% of Americans agree on even the most controversial issues. One of the questions is, should guns be more regulated? Yes or no? 70% to 80% of both Democrats and Republicans say yes. Now, you would think well, no Peter, that'd be 50/50. It would be half and half, or 100% of Democrats and 0% Republicans. It's not. It's 70% to 80% on both sides. But what we've been taught is by looking at the news is they only show the extremes of each of the other parties. They don't show the broad middle. They don't show all the stuff we agree on, they concentrate on the differences. So, walk into any conversation you're having here, looking for the 80% of agreement, versus the 5% of the most volatile issues you could possibly talk about, which is the news of war. The news of the day that people are both, just so you know, I really don't believe there are very few people who have original thoughts and that includes me. I don't think any of my thoughts are original. I’m always called a cryptonesiac. That means I consume so much information, I don't know where it came from. And then I spout all the information as if it's my own. And so, 90% of the time, most people are only spouting opinions, or catchphrases, or talking points that they heard from their “pastor”, which is their media source. And what their pastor or their media source told them is now cocked in their brain. And when they have a conversation, they bring out what they've been told, and all we're doing is repeating somebody else's thought. Very few people have really original thoughts. [00:19:23] PF: And as soon as someone disagrees with us, we dig in and go deeper into that thought. [00:19:29] PM: Because we're tribal. Our default mechanism is to look for people who are different than us, and then to expel them, shun them, or shame them out of the tribe. That is what our default settings do. [00:19:41] PF: So, as you've been studying this, you do so much research and look at what we're doing, do you have optimism that we're going to heal this divide? That we're going to come back together? And if so, please tell us how because not everyone shares that optimism. [00:19:58] PM: Yeah, I do. So, when the printing press was back in the 1400s, there was 30 years of global chaos. After the printing press was created, everyone thought all the intellectual thought leaders, the day basically thought, “Oh, my gosh, well, now the masses will be educated. We're going to make sure that everyone's able to read and write. We can disseminate human information.” And that was true. But also, what happened was massive misinformation was spread. All of a sudden people, one person was able to spread to many thousands, hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands of people misinformation. And after that there was massive war, massive political upheaval, and it took about 30 years for society to figure out the ethics, the stopgap measures, the measurements to put in place to get things kind of stabilized against, they could use this amazing information transfer responsibly. So, the first step of all problem solving of all leadership is to agree upon a common set of facts. And what has happened between the confluence of social media and cable media is now we've had massive misinformation, and it only takes 5% of all information, that is misinformation, to completely disrupt cooperation. That's it. [00:21:17] PF: Wow. [00:21:18] PM: So, if 5% is misinformation, of the available information, that's enough to disrupt cooperation. Basically, I would look at Facebook, its invention in 2014, as being the kind of the starting gun as to when like the start of the printing press. So, that was basically 14, 15 years ago, we're about 15 years away from solving this problem. And I really believe that a civil media, which is a different category than a social media platform, will be the solution to that. And that's what I'm doing, is building a civil media platform, which we think will eliminate bots, and trolls, dramatically reduce misinformation, so that we can all agree again on a common set of facts, so that we can then cooperate. [00:22:08] PF: Tell me more about what you're building, because I've looked at your site, and it is pretty fascinating. And I guess first, this is going to be a multiple part question, because I want you to tell us what it is you're building, and then how it's going to alter our experience with what we now call social media. [00:22:26] PM: Yeah, great question. So, that lends us to what we believe is what we're doing is we're creating a new category of media called civil media. And social media means a couple of things. Number one, nobody – you don't know who you're talking to. So, people use pseudonyms, they’re anonymous, and in which case, they have no reputational risk, which means that people behave on social media in very uncivil ways. There are the people who use their own names, their own pictures, and among their own friends, who usually behave the best. And if you want to see the most uncivil behavior, you look at platforms like HN or 4N, where everyone was anonymous, and you will find the most hateful, vile, disgusting, inhuman, uncivil behavior possible. So, we think we can introduce civility again, which means people will be kind and respectful, because, people will be who they say they are. They will have reputational risk. Their identities will be verified. And the second thing that we put in place is what's called trust score. And trust score is not created by a computer. The trust score is created the same way we create a trust score in the real world, and that is through your friend group. So, in the minds of every one of your friends, Paula, your friends go, “Is Paula a good person or a bad person? Do I trust Paula or not?” And we more or less have digitized that, such that it's not any one person who is basically saying your civil or uncivil, but a whole web, a whole collection, we built a very complicated algorithm that helps compute this trust score. And the higher your trust score, the more your content is amplified, and the lower your trust scores, the lower is amplified. I believe in freedom of speech. And if somebody wants to be a hateful, vile racist, and they want to spout racist epithets, they are free to do so in the privacy of their own living room. They just don't deserve necessarily to be on the front page of the newspaper or get primetime on any news channel. And the same thing with a social media platform, we just don't have to amplify people who are not trusted. So, between the trust score and identity verification, we think we can bring back kindness and respect. And the second thing that makes a civil media platform different is that not only emphasizes communication, but more importantly, cooperative action. And so, we are building tools that will help people, leaders, unifiers, gather people who care about causes to either give their time, their money or resources to solve problems. My heart has broken this last year at least twice as I've heard about pandemic outbreaks in India and 5,000 people were dying a day in the streets because they didn't have hospital bed. I heard the stories I shared earlier about in Afghanistan, people falling off airplanes, and I thought, “Oh, my God, this is horrible. What can I do?” And there was no button for me to push. There's nothing for me to do. I didn't know where to go. And so, what a civil media platform does is not only shares the information, but provides the tools for the organizations and the people who are on the ground, looking for support to solve the problems. So, the job of our civil media platform is to perpetuate the survival of our species by getting the right people, capital, and resources to the people who need it most. [00:26:01] PF: And you're really dialing down all the hate talk and acrimony that's going on right now. And as people are in that environment, how is it going to change in the real world? Like as we spend less time in these street fights of social media, and more time in like a genuinely nurturing, supportive environment, whether that's online or at home or in real world, how is that going to start rippling out? [00:26:30] PM: Oh, gosh. That’s a great question. I think about that, the answer, the question and the answer every single day. So, the goal of social media companies is to keep you on their platforms as much as possible. The average human being, or the average social media user spends 2 hours and 25 minutes a day on social media. They scroll through 325 feet of feed, which is the same height as the Statue of Liberty. And we think that social media is at its worst, when it's keeping you from having real world interactions with people sitting right next to you, or lying next to you in bed. That's when social media is at its worst. When civil media is at its best, it facilitates real world interactions. We are an incredibly social creature. We need the connection or the approval of other people. And so, what on Urth, which is the name of our platform, Urth, urtch.cc is about is about facilitating real world interactions, and actually minimizing the time they spend on our platform. [00:27:38] PF: That's excellent. So, you have a beta version coming up? [00:27:43] PM: Yep. Beta version should be out in early 2023. It's a big plot platform. It's a big product. [00:27:49] PF: Yeah. So, what do we do until then? Because we can't wait to get civil until then. So, what is it we need to be doing? We can't change others and we shouldn't try. So, what is it that we should be doing to promote more unity, and create our own community? Let's start there. [00:28:07] PM: I attended my first personal development course back when I 18 years old, or maybe 19 in 1987, that'll tell you how old I am. Well, I remember the following message. They told me this, 30 some years ago. They said, if you're in a relationship, you can't change the other person. The only thing you can do is change yourself. And I've heard that message and I remember that message from 35 years ago, and that is the absolute truth. For anybody who's been married, and said, “Well, my partner's broken”, and they've tried to fix their spouse, or their boyfriend or their girlfriend or their partner, you will learn very, very quickly, you cannot change them. However, if you change yourself, it changes the relationship. So, when you accept them wholeheartedly, you reduce your anxiety. You are healthy of mind, body, and spirit, and you bring yourself to that relationship, you will notice the relationship changes. You've never tried to change somebody else. You only change yourself. [00:29:13] PF: And for people that say, “But I don't need to change. They do.” Because that's the common response, right? [00:29:22] PM: Yeah, I'm done. I fully evolve. [00:29:28] PF: So, what’s our, like prescriptions, doctor? How do we start doing that? How do we start taking a step back, taking a breath, and coexisting more peacefully? [00:29:39] PM: Yeah. I think probably the first thing is to realize, and I've asked people that question before in training rooms, who here is perfect, and there's usually 10% of the hands that go up, and they kind of laugh when they're saying it. But there's a secret to that. When they actually are raising their hand, they actually believe it's true. And they're kind of joking about it, but no, that’s what they think. They really do think that they are perfect. And it is a trap that some people – I’m sorry, all of us to a certain degree fall into is that we think if we're perfect, we'll be more lovable. And it's exactly the opposite. The more “perfect” you are, the less likely you are to change. The more inflexible you are, the more righteous you are, the more intolerable you are, the less likely people want to be around you. So, thinking that you don't need to change or grow is a trap of the ego. And it is the best way to keep yourself lonely, isolated, and suffering. So, the first realization is, nobody is perfect. We are not a done. There's not ultimately who we are, there is a process of what we are, we are all in process. We are all in a journey. And as soon as you not only know that, like you heard me say it, but you know it into the fiber of your being that you are a process, that you are imperfect, and you'll never be done growing, and the best way to have connection with other people is humility and authenticity, not putting up this phony facade that you're perfect, the better off you will be and the less suffering you will have. [00:31:22] PF: I like it. Peter, thank you for breaking things down for us today. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. You always have so much wisdom to impart on us and I really appreciate you coming in and talking with me today. [00:31:35] PM: Paula, I could talk to you every day all day. [00:31:38] PF: we should do that. [END OF INTERVIEW] [00:31:45] PF: That was Peter Montoya, giving us some great advice on how to help create a more civil world. If you'd like to learn more about Peter, follow him online, learn about the New Earth civil media platform, or check out his latest book, just visit our website at livehappy.com and click on the podcast tab. And remember to check out those amazing puzzles at unidragon.com and get a 10% discount by entering the code live happy now. That is all we have time for today. We'll meet you back here again next week for an all new episode. And until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every, day a happy one [END]

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: How Social Media Influences Your Happiness With Jessie Kanzer    [INTRODUCTION] [00:00:02] PF: Welcome to Episode 355 of Live Happy Now. Throughout the month of March, we're celebrating the International Day of Happiness, and a whole month of happy acts. As part of this year's celebration, we're looking at the theme of unity. I'm your host, Paula Felps. This week, I'm joined by Jessie Kanzer, author of Don't Just Sit There, DO NOTHING. Much of Jessie's work looks at social media and how we can become more mindful about it to minimize its negative impact. Sit back, and let's hear what Jessie has to say. [INTERVIEW] [00:00:36] PF: Jessie, welcome to Live Happy Now. [00:00:38] JK: Thank you so much, Paula. [00:00:41] PF: This is the perfect time to talk to you, not just because your new book is out, but because we are doing this whole month celebrating the International Day of Happiness on March 20th, and really doing a whole month of happy acts. Our theme this year is unity. Anytime we have a discussion about unity and conflict, it seems that social media comes up. This is something that you talk about. I wanted to talk today about how it affects the way we feel about ourselves and the world around us. To kick it off, you talk about why this one thing called social media is so powerful. [00:01:15] JK: Yes, and I do talk a lot about it. Because, like you said, it's so prevalent. Before we talk about what's wrong with it, let's just acknowledge what a big part of our life has become. In fact, in my book, Don't Just Sit There, DO NOTHING, I have a chapter called Stop the Thumb, which you can interpret it as you will, but it's about stopping that scrolling thumb that never stops itself. I do think that it's easier said than done. You could easily just tell people, just get off social media. I've heard that so many times. Just get off of it. Realistically speaking, for a lot of us, for creatives, like myself, for podcasts, there's a lot of need for social media, for the businesses and for the positive information we're trying to spread. We can't just get off social media, because that's where we now reach people, because that's where people are. It's not as easy anymore to just say get off of it, or cancel your accounts. Because for a lot of people, that's not something you can do. Our livelihood has begun to depend on social media as well. What's happened is, the lines have blurred between – There used to be clear cut marketing, clear cut advertising. That would be the commercial on TV, or the radio spot that played. Now, it's not quite so. We are on Instagram, on Facebook, on TikTok, seemingly just entertaining ourselves, or scrolling through what our friends are doing, etc. We are also being advertised to all the time. What I don't love, to start with social media, there's no longer a line between what's just content for you to consume and what's actually content that is trying to influence your behavior. [00:03:10] PF: Yeah. It can quickly change the way that you think and the way that you perceive things. If you've liked certain things, the algorithms are going to send material to you, and it can take you down a rabbit hole. It can start changing the way you view society, the way you view yourself, the way you view your neighbors. [00:03:29] JK: Yes. I don't know if you have watched the film Social Dilemma. I remember watching it last year. It's scary, right? I think that I actually wish everyone in the world would have watched it. Because what I now understand and what helps me a lot is knowing that this construct exists to learn me, to stay there as long as possible. That it is addictive to me, not because there's something wrong with me, but because it was formulated to be addictive. Once you realize that, you can at least start to forgive yourself a little for the time you're spending that you lose on social media without realizing, because we've all found ourselves in those holes that you mentioned. You're like, “Why have I just been on here for 20 minutes, half an hour?” [00:04:15] PF: I know it lift your head up and you're like, “What just happened to me?” [00:04:18] JK: Yeah. It was formulated to do that. That's what it's formulated to do. Like you said, it does – Unfortunately, the way the algorithm works is it picks up on what you're there looking at and what you're doing. It'll send you more and more and more of that. If we look at politics, we know what happens. What happens is we end up in echo chambers, where we just hear what we already believe, and then we become more and more convinced. It doesn't matter if it's truth or not truth, because it becomes our truth. [00:04:48] PF: Yeah, and one thing that's happened in this time of isolation and more people are working remotely and we're not interacting, so we don't have that time where we call it the water cooler, but where you’re grabbing a cup of coffee in the break room and you're talking to someone who has a different opinion, you had more balance, I feel. There was more of a balance of input of ideologies and just thoughts, and whether or not you agreed with them, you're hearing different opinions. [00:05:15] JK: I think that when you're speaking with a person, an actual person face-to-face, they don't become this demon that sometimes people become on social media. We're just people. For some reason, the screen of anonymity that Twitter, for example, can provide where just somebody's name, and it's not their real name; some name that they chose for their account. They can say pretty nasty things. They could say whatever they want. They wouldn't say that to you in real life, face-to-face. [00:05:46] PF: Oh, yeah. Getting on Twitter feels like going into a street fight. I'm like, “I need a helmet and a shield.” It's tough. [00:05:55] JK: Yeah. Then on the other hand, you have Instagram, which has been shown to be very detrimental to young people. I, myself as someone who struggled with an eating disorder as a teenager, and then in my early 20s, I really, really caution parents to pay a lot of attention to what their kids are consuming. It's hard. I'm not saying it's easy to always be on them. I know. I mean, my kids are only five and seven. Already, sometimes I look over, what is she watching? It's not easy, but I think it's super important. Because as we understood, Instagram will keep providing for you the content that you're looking at. If you're a young girl, and you're becoming obsessed with your body image, you will keep seeing things that will keep making you feel more insecure, and maybe take you down a rabbit hole of years of less than a healthy existence. That's what happened to me just from teen mags. I can imagine that being the age of social media is more challenging. [00:06:55] PF: Absolutely. As we've acknowledged, civility is a big issue. It is a big issue, even in the real world now. On social media, it is amplified. One thing I really want to talk with you is how can we start using our social media to become unified, rather than divided? By unified, I don't mean that we just find all these people who think the same way we do and it's, we're right, and they're wrong. How do we bridge that? [00:07:25] JK: I have a couple of suggestions. [00:07:27] PF: I was hoping you would. [00:07:30] JK: Yeah. With how we can create healthier relationships. Because, again, like I said, for a lot of us, just quitting social media altogether is not an option. I believe that learning how to live with something is the most, the strongest act that we can do for ourselves as someone. I struggled at an early age with bulimia. Now, I see similarities here because, well, in order to get over bulimia, you have to get over the behavior of binging on food. but you can't get rid of eating food as a whole, because we need food to live. What you need to do is actually change your entire relationship with food into a healthy relationship, and it takes time. Doing the same thing with social media, it's not going to happen overnight. One thing, for me, my social media is very healing. I made the algorithm work for me. When I go on my Instagram feed, I'm really posting and looking for spiritual insight, upliftment, information on well-being. The more I was paying attention to that and not allowing myself to go down the rabbit hole of what's Kim Kardashian doing, or what's whoever else, I just decided, this was my focus time to make it work for me. I would go on for short periods of time, I would post something, whether it be a quote from Don't Just Sit There, DO NOTHING, or maybe a little discussion about what's going on right now and some positive take on that. Then I would look for people, again, who weren't necessarily exactly my opinion, but people who were putting something positive out into the world. I follow, for example, podcasts that are positive podcasts, that are uplifting podcasts. The more I did that, I would also concurrently unfollow stuff that would trigger me. Anything I saw, which I realized was just putting more drama out into my feed, I would just unfollow. Simply, I would follow what lifted me up, unfollow what brought me down. Just paying attention and creating an awareness of how any post makes you feel is very important. If we can bring in mindfulness, which is a practice that can be brought into anything, like mindfulness can be brought into, even into social media. [00:10:02] PF: Yeah, that's good. I'm glad you brought that up, because I was going to ask you, what role mindfulness plays when you're managing your social media. [00:10:09] JK: I practice mindfulness. I try to practice mindfulness all day, every day. I mean, obviously, I'm not perfect. I'm human, but I try to be mindful when I'm folding my kids’ laundry, and when I'm trying to get them out and rush them out in the morning to their bus. I try to bring in a little mindfulness there, so that what mindfulness is, is being in the present and being connected to exactly what you're doing right now. We know that. I know that your audience knows that. You know what? It can be brought to, once you bring mindfulness into what you're doing on social media, you take yourself out of that dynamic that was set up, which was just to have you be a user. Let's remember that we're called users in the social media world. Not consumers, users. Okay, you pay attention, you go a little slower. First of all, you slow down that thumb. You go a little slower. You pause, every time you see something and you ask yourself, “Is this something I want to see more of?” If not, simply unfollow. Not that hard. Just unfollow. Something I want to see more of, press a like. What happens is slowly, your feed starts to look like yourself. My feed, if you looked at it, would be like, “Oh, I get who Jessie is. She's into the whole woo-woo world, she’s a wellness fanatic.” I think, that if everyone can do that, it will not be this alienating place anymore. I mean, for me, so I have a whole community on social media. My mentor, Laura Day, she's an intuitive. She holds morning meetings, where we just gather and we work on something positive for ourselves, and it's a short thing. You were talking about unity. I thought it's really interesting, because I found this community. She calls us the circle. These folks are just there. They're there. If I post something, they're there with some support. Like for my book launch, they're there with their positive affirmations, or helping to spread the word. In my experience, I now feel that I have unity in social media. [00:12:17] PF: That's amazing. Because so few people feel that way right now. [00:12:22] JK: Absolutely. That's why this is something. I discuss this in detail in the book, in the Stop the Thumb chapter. It's about, first of all, becoming mindful about what we consume. Also, this is an important one, be the change you want to see. You become mindful about what you post. [SPONSOR MESSAGE] [00:12:43] PF: I'm going to be right back with more of my conversation with Jessie. I wanted to take a moment to talk about one great alternative to social media. If you're looking to stop the mindless scrolling, how about putting your hands to use doing puzzles? Puzzles are a great gadget-free way to give your brain a break. We recently discovered Unidragon Puzzles, which you really need to see to believe. These gorgeous wooden puzzles are works of art that feature nature scenes, animals, Mandalas, and so much more. If you're looking to kick your social media habit, or at least rein it in, I can't think of a better way to do it than by spending time with these puzzles. Right now, you can get 10% off your order when you visit unidragon.com enter the code Live Happy Now. That's unidragon.com, and the code is Live Happy Now. Now, let's get back to my conversation with Jessie Kanzer and learn more about how to handle our social media habits. [INTERVIEW CONTINUED] [00:13:40] PF: I'm glad we're talking about this. Because there's something that you said that completely changed the way I was posting. That was, paying attention to your ego, and why I'm posting this. The fact that hey, I'm showing somebody I was having this great time, but how does this affect how somebody else feels? Can you pick that up? Because that is just beautiful insight that I needed to know. [00:14:05] JK: Of course. Paula, we're not, again, we're not perfect. Sometimes, I just have this freaking cute picture of the kids. I got to put it up and I just can't – You know what? The intention behind what you post is everything. Because if I just think this is the cutest, funniest thing in the world and I post it, often I get back, that made my day. I think, the intention behind what we post is very important. We all have an ego. It's okay that we have an ego. It’s okay that sometimes we want to show how well we're doing. It's all fine. We need to go back and remember that every time we post about what we have, somebody else is reminded, what they don't have. I remember this a lot during the days of everyone getting engaged in my own circle of friends. I remember this constant barrage. I had a lot of relationship difficulties at that time. I just remembered this barrage of engagement rings. It used to annoy me so much. If I look at it and why it annoyed me, of course, it's about what was missing in my own life, but also, was just – it felt so show-offy. I don't think that's what people are trying to do completely, but it's also the lack of bringing mindfulness into our post. It became what we're supposed to do. The second you get engaged, you post directly. [00:15:31] PF: I actually have a friend, who, when her son and daughter-in-law got married, the first thing the girl turned around, they kiss the bride, they turn around, they were announced as husband and wife and she yelled out, “Somebody change my Facebook status.” [00:15:43] JK: That’s really funny. That’s really funny. I get it. I get it. It's an exciting time. Boy, it felt like such a win for me, because I had such a long, barrage of heartbreaks. When I got married, I get it. Everything is okay when you put mindfulness into it, because at least you're aware, even if you're breaking that rule once or twice, you're aware, but you're not going to be sleepwalking anymore. That's really helpful. The other thing I say is, okay, fine. Once in a while, we want to post something that we did that was really fun, that was really beautiful, that we want to share. Remember to also, at least once in a while, share the vulnerabilities of your life, the stuff that maybe didn't go right. That's where actually, I found my sweet spot on social media, and maybe in my writing as a whole. I write a lot about my humiliations in life. I'm very, very open about all of the mistakes I made, because my goal is to help people feel less alone, if they are themselves finding that they're in this “loser spot” in their life, where they feel like a loser. I know what that feels like. I say, I try to hold on to the humility of a loser no matter where I am in life, because I really believe that if we open ourselves and show everyone the bad stuff, as well as the good stuff, we're doing a service to everyone else who may be struggling right now. [00:17:21] PF: Absolutely. I just love the way that because of you, I just do a little bit of a gut check before I post something now. It's like that. Okay, why am I doing this? Am I doing this for my own, because I want to show off, the fact that I got to drive this car? Or, am I doing it because I really want to share this experience? You know what? I'm leaving a lot of stuff off now. Because it's like, no, this was really not about uplifting someone else. It's about, “Hey, I got to do this really cool thing.” That’s how it feels. [00:17:51] JK: You know what, Paula? I love that you tell me that. That is so amazing to hear. Because, and again, if you do that gut check, and maybe you just saw a gorgeous sunset, and you want to post that, because you want to share the feeling of seeing this gorgeous sunset. Well, go ahead. That is a beautiful intention to have. It's not about, “Hey, look at me. What I get to see.” It's about, I want to share this with you. It's just about that small shift in intention that I think can connect us together. I try to balance. Obviously, I also promote stuff. I have to promote my book, because I want people to know about it. Again, I go back to the intention. I want to spread awareness about something I created out of love, because I want people to feel less alone, and I want people to have tools for healing. Then I say to myself, “That's okay to promote that, because I have an intention that's a loving intention in there.” [00:18:46] PF: Yeah. Once we get our own feeds under control, and we start curating what we're consuming, what do we do then about those posts? We cannot control what other people post. Sometimes it might be on our own page. How do we deal with those posts that immediately incite us? [00:19:03] JK: We take a deep breath. We pause and we delete. Seriously, or untag, or unfollow whatever you can do, but we don't engage. If it's something that is inciting you, I suggest you walk away from it. If it's something that you feel an hour later, or two hours later that you want to engage in, then go ahead, but from a commerce standpoint. Again, the intention of what you're bringing to this interaction is not that anger that you initially feel. It's not that triggered feeling. Maybe you're coming in to, because you feel that it's important to provide some truthful information. [00:19:41] PF: Well, a lot of times if we feel compelled to do that, and I've not done this, because I've seen what happens to people and it's a lot like a bunny rabbit walking in a herd of coyotes. It's like, someone feels compelled to explain like, “Look, this is why I feel differently.” They are pounced on and not – it doesn't stop and till they're a carcass pretty much. [00:20:03] JK: Yeah. I’ve seen that. [00:20:05] PF: Yeah. How do you do that? If it's someone, say, what's happening with a lot of people is someone they truly care about, whether it's a family, close friend, whatever, will say something that is so opposed to how they feel. That other person feels the need to – Like say, I might feel the need to say, “Look, that's really not where I'm coming from. This is why I think that way.” What's a better way to approach that? [00:20:26] JK: I would, in my personal experience, I probably would not. I would not engage in that in social media, on social media. If you feel strongly enough and if this person is in your life, there are other ways to connect with people. There's the telephone. I do find – [00:20:43] PF: Oh, is that still around? What? That thing? [00:20:45] JK: It's interesting. I find that the further removed we are from each other, right, so we're talking about the watercooler conversations. Then, you take that to a phone conversation, where you still hear each other's voice, and you can talk. Then you take that one step further removed, and maybe you're texting, and then a little further, and you're just posting something on social media for all to see. The further removed we get from each other as humans, the dirtier it can become. I don't see a need. Here's the thing. Yes, people post misinformation on social media. I say, and this is what the Daodejing has taught me; this is what I write about also in my book is, you cannot change the entire world. But in preserving your balance your sanity, in being the best you you can be, the changes that you provide for this world are going to be much bigger than you can imagine. Anything that is going to interfere with your well-being, don't do it. [00:21:50] PF: That's great advice. We know that, but we're not taking it. It's a weird time. One thing that you say – I know we're running out of time, but we've got to talk about this, because this is a great barometer. You say that people really need to pay attention to how they feel when they're on social media. We do not do that. Why is that so important? Then, what is it that we should be looking for? [00:22:14] JK: Yes. I think, we should pay attention to how we feel at all times. My joke of a title, Don't Just Sit There, DO NOTHING, the book is really, it's not about doing nothing, but it's about being able to disconnect from all of the messages, which because of social media, or just never-ending, to connect with our own inner voice. When we take the time to do that, when we connect with our own inner compass, we feel off. When we feel off, we know that we're off. In other words, I call it awareness. I say, your awareness is your superpower. The more you connect with your inner compass, the more you're able to feel when you're off. For me, honestly, when I get on social media, and I just started scrolling blindly, I'm often about 0.2 seconds. I realized that sometimes I do it anyway. I'm not saying that I'm perfect. The awareness is the superpower, because do I really want to be off 20 times a day? It helps us get that behavior under control, is by being aware and really being mindful of how we feel. What we should be looking for is a feeling of upliftment, connection, even neutrality, where you're just like, maybe you've learned something. The second you feel jealous, because jealousy is something that comes up a lot in social media, because people are posting from their egos. When the second you feel jealous, or you feel triggered, get off. Get off as soon as you can and do anything else. I even suggest to people, well, go turn on the TV. Even that is better than the way you get sucked in by the algorithms of social media. My other quick advice is to be mindful of the amount of time you spend. I say, if you've really gotten out of control, and you know when you have. We all know, do a timer, right before you enter your Instagram, enter your Facebook feed, press the timer, say five minutes. That's what I'm letting myself go on for. Then my one final piece of advice, which is really hard, but it's important. Don't sleep with your phone right next to your bed. [00:24:23] PF: Right. Yeah, that's super important. Because I know people that do that. I put mine on airplane mode at night. [00:24:30] JK: That’s really helpful. [00:24:30] PF: People are like, “What if something happens?” It's like, I will find out. I will find out later.” I will be rested and able to deal with it. [00:24:39] JK: Exactly. You'll be in your best shape. I tell people, so we cannot ignore the fact that we're all addicts when it comes to technology; social media, Google, etc. Google News, Apple news, whatever. We're all addict, because this is our first time in history where we're dealing with this kind of barrage of technology and information. Yeah, we're all addicted. We don't have to constantly put this source of addiction right in front of us. Somebody recovering from alcoholism would not sleep with a bottle of vodka right next to their bed. That's how we need to treat ourselves gently, but admit to ourselves that we're addicts, because we're human and we're dealing with machines created to lure us. [00:25:26] PF: That is so great, Jessie. Man, we could talk for hours, but they won't let us. This is terrific. You've given us so much to think about. Your book, we're going to tell people how they can find you, find your book, learn more about this. Thank you for the work that you're doing, and for spending time with me today to talk about this. This is such an important topic. [00:25:46] JK: It is such a pleasure for me, Paula, because my intention is to spread just a little bit of light. If we all do that, I think the world can change. [00:25:55] PF: I love it. [END OF INTERVIEW] [00:26:01] PF: That was Jessie Kanzer, talking about how to create a healthier relationship with your social media. If you'd like to learn more about Jessie, follow her on her very healthy social media channels, or pick up a book. Just visit our website at livehappy.com and click on the podcast tab. Remember to check out those amazing puzzles at unidragon.com and get a 10% discount by entering the code Live Happy Now. That is all we have time for today. We'll meet you back here again next week for an all-new episode. Until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one. [END]

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Embracing the Power of Sisterhood With Carin Rockind  [INTRODUCTION] [00:00:02] PF: Welcome to Episode 353 of Live Happy Now. This week, we’re celebrating women in a big way. I’m your host, Paula Felps. Today, I’m being joined by women’s happiness and life purpose expert, Carin Rockind, who many of you know from the PurposeGirl Podcast and courses. This year, she has once again put together an incredible online event for International Women’s Day, and she’s going to tell us more about why this day is so important, what her free live event is all about and what she hopes we all learn from it. It’s a lot to take in. So sit back and get ready to get excited. [INTERVIEW]   [00:00:37] CR: Carin, welcome back to Live Happy Now. [00:00:40] CR: Thank you. I’m so happy to be here, Paula. Thank you for having me. [00:00:44] PF: Well, it’s been about a year since we talked, and we had a great reason for talking last year. We have an equally great, perhaps an even greater reason this year. You’ve got the second year of – okay, you tell me about it. Don’t let me introduce it. You introduce it because I might screw it up. [00:01:02] CR: Well, we are gearing up for this second annual, The Women’s Day event. This is, as far as I know, the world’s largest event for International Women’s Day. We put it together – I was sitting there last year, 2021, after that year that everyone had had with the pandemic, and everyone was on lockdown last year no matter where they were in the world. People were – so many people lost jobs, women were disproportionately negatively impacted in terms of the majority of jobs lost were by women or women were taking on the majority of kind of the homeschooling duality that was happening. I was sitting there last January like, “I got to do something.” I thought, “I’m going to throw the world’s largest event for International Women’s Day.” [00:01:54] PF: It’s important to know that your timing, you had just had a baby. The timing wise, it’s not like you had all this spare time where you’re like, “Hey, I’ve got nothing else going on.” [00:02:05] CR: Right. I have my own women’s empowerment business, speaking, coaching podcasting, the whole thing and just thought, I want to do something, do something meaningful. And at the time, I think he was seven or eight months old. Actually, January, he would have been six months old by the time we did the event on March 8. And as far as I know, Paula, with your help and support at Live Happy Now and Live Happy in general, we had the world’s largest event. We had 2,500 women registered for the event, 25 speakers. We went from 8:00 AM in the morning until 8:00 PM live all day. What was so fun and women said, “Oh! I thought I would just come on for this one speaker. I thought I would just come on for my lunch break and I stayed all day, because it was just so incredible.” We’re gearing up for the second annual, either because I’m crazy. I might, you know, like what is wrong with my head? Or really, it’s because I am all about purposes, you know, right? My business is called PurposeGirl, and I’m all about my purpose, inspiring other women to live their purpose. And this is our time, I’m just feeling this huge shift right now to each and every one of us stepping into our own leadership, really getting clear on what is our legend to leave to the world? How do we live our own purpose? Knowing that that makes us such a more satisfied, resilient, optimistic, happy life. I’m like, “We’re doing it again, and we’re just going to do it as big or bigger.” The lineup of speakers is like, insane. When your listeners are listening to this, I’m hoping that you’re all listening for two things. One, obviously, we want you to attend. It’s free. It’s 12 hours. We’re going to go through everything. [00:03:51] PF: There’s no reason not to. [00:03:53] CR: There’s no reason not to, because you can join for a half hour of one keynote speaker. You could join for three hours. You could come in and out. Like my mom was in and out all day, last year. I want everyone listening to this to know that when you have a full body, yes, you get an idea, you have a dream. It’s like, “I would love to do that.” Maybe for someone, that’s singing on a stage or for someone else that’s writing a book or whatever it is. When you have the full body, yes, like I had around creating this event, I want you to know that it’s possible, and to just go do it. [00:04:25] PF: Oh, that’s fantastic. I think this event is so great, because all these women are doing it, and they’re doing so many different things. So really, it’s like going to this great buffet table where it’s like. Okay, well, that’s not for me, but oh my gosh, I can load up on this and this and this. Let’s talk about some of the speakers that you have and some of the things that are going to happen throughout this day. [00:04:50] CR: Yeah, I would love to. So yeah, I’m a huge fan and believe that like, the happy woman is the whole woman. It’s like every single aspect of ourselves, and the lineup is insane. So again, we are bringing you more than 25 speakers. We’re still getting a couple of yeses, and so figuring out who the last couple are. But what we do throughout the day, we have these power talks and power talk is like a keynote, but I’m interviewing someone like we’re doing here on a particular topic, right? My keynotes, I’m so excited, drumroll please, we can announce that one of the power talks is going to be by Regina Thomashauer. If you don’t know Regina Thomashauer, many people call her Mama Gena, aka Mama Gena. She is the New York Times bestselling author of Pussy: A Reclamation. Yes, I said the word pussy on the airwaves. A lot of us, like the first time I heard that word I went, “Ugh!” Like it just got me into the bones, like that’s a negative word. But her whole thing, and listen, it’s a New York Times bestselling book. Because she’s talking about women reclaiming their feminine power. Taking back a word that has been trashed and made into something weak and saying no. Instead, we’re going to own our bodies, we’re going to own our femininity, we’re going to own our power and we’re going to own that the deepest part of ourselves knows our truth. She herself is the survivor of abuse, of sexual abuse. She herself has been through a number of different traumas and talks about how she felt like she lost her power along the way in this book. She teaches, she has now taught tens of thousands, maybe – I’m going to take it back. Millions of women, because when I think about the classes that I’ve taken with her, I was in a classroom with 900 other women taking this class over three, four, five months, something like that. The way that she teaches you to own your whole body, and to come back into your power is unlike anything I have ever experienced. Because it’s not power like, “Err!”, what we’ve been taught how we’re supposed to be powerful in the world, but it’s power from within, and truly what are my desires. She teaches women to celebrate themselves. She teaches women to emote, right? She calls it ADA keys that we are allowed our full expression of emotion. Instead of sucking down when you’re angry, or you’re sad. She says the way that we can really heal and the way that we can be in our power is to own and then alchemize all of our emotions. She teaches you what to do with anger, what to do with grief and it’s so powerful. She’s a New York Times bestselling author for a reason. Thousands and thousands, millions of women have learned so much from her about your own sensuality, taking back your power and all parts of your body. She’s one of the power talks. Another power talk is another New York Times bestselling author, Kristine Carlson. Kris Carlson’s late husband, Richard wrote, Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff. When I was first getting into self-help, and all of that, that book was all the rage, right? [00:07:57] PF: Right.  [00:07:58] CR: Do you know that book? [00:07:59] PF: That was like the door opener. Yeah, absolutely. [00:08:00] CR: Yeah, it was. It was, don’t sweat the small stuff. And by the way, it’s all small stuff. Right? He wrote this book, and then together, they went on to write. Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff for Couples. She wrote, Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff for Women. They made a whole line kind of like Chicken Soup. They made a whole line of Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff. Then he tragically passed away, and she was left with this enormous grief, this enormous hole in her heart. What do I do now? Through her own healing process, and being what she calls broken open. she came to really create a whole new line of healing and empowerment with women around healing from grief. I specifically approached her. I actually approached her first to be the first speaker at the Women’s Day event. Because after what we’ve all been through for the last two years, we’re struck with grief, right? There’s so much anxiety, you and I have talked about this. [00:09:00] PF: Oh my gosh, yeah. It’s a huge topic. Everybody is dealing with grief and loss on some level. [00:09:07] CR: On some level and probably multiple levels, right? You yourself have been sick. You have loved ones who have passed, being isolated in your home not being with loved ones for the holidays. She was the first person I approached to be a speaker at the Women’s Day event because I feel like we’re all healing from grief right now and we all want to. [00:09:27] PF: That is wise. Yeah, that’s fantastic. [00:09:30] CR: Yeah. She’s going to be doing a power talk specifically on how do we heal now, what do we do with grief now, how do we become whole again after feeling like we’ve been broken open. And what based on that is our purpose what do we do? She’s incredible. Another keynote speaker or power talk is from someone who I know you have had on your show before, Valorie Burton. [00:09:54] PF: She is amazing. She is so fantastic. [00:09:58] CR: Ah! Is she ever. Valorie Burton, if you haven’t listened to the episode of Paula, go back and listen to it. She’s incredible. She has written I think 12 books. She had nearly a million copies of her books in circulation all around women’s happiness and women’s success. She has her master’s degree in positive psychology, the science of happiness, human flourishing, like I do, that’s where I met her. She is now sought after by the today’s show, to be like a frequent life coach for them and on a number of different shows. Her most recent book is about guilt. She and I are going to dive in during her power talk all around guilt and how we’ve been hanging on. Find me a woman that has not been experiencing or has experienced in the past guilt. [00:10:43] PF: Oh my gosh! Yeah. [00:10:45] CR: I just had this last night. My dad went into the hospital, my whole family is in Michigan, and I’m here in Pennsylvania and my sister was visiting. The whole family was there when he went into the hospital last night, and here I am in Pennsylvania. And just feeling guilty that I’m not there, I can’t help. I call my mom, “What can I do?” And it’s like, well, what can I do? I’m here. I’m not there. Feeling that amount of guilt. The same time, everything you just said, I do throw the world’s largest event for International Women’s Day. I do have my own podcast that you’re going to be on and running this whole business for women to be in their power and live their purpose and I have a baby. So I’ll have so many moments of guilt. Should I be with my child instead of working? When I’m with my child, should I be working because I’ve got clients who are counting on me? In the Women’s Day event, she’s going to help us navigate guilt. How do we let go of the guilt? [00:11:41] PF: Yeah. Because I think everyone deals with that, and we steal from ourselves. Because when we’re with our children, we’re thinking, “Oh my gosh! I’ve got to work on this, this and this, so we’re not giving them that full attention.” And then when we’re working too much, we’re thinking about what we should be giving the children. We’re not giving our work the kind of attention that would get it done quicker, and let us get back to what we need to be doing. It’s such a hamster wheel. [00:12:06] CR: Such a hamster wheel. That’s so well said, Paula. If we would just be doing the thing that were present for the thing that we actually need to be doing, we wouldn’t be – [00:12:16] PF: But it’s hard. [00:12:17] CR: It is very hard. Her most recent book is on that, on letting go of guilt. Of course, I’m like, “Val, please, please, please.” She’s so incredible. She already was speaking somewhere else on International Women’s Day. She’s like, “Oh my God! I would love to do this for you, Carin, but I can’t, because I’m already speaking.” I think I just had to ask her three different ways and find a creative way to do it. I’m like, “I’m not letting this go. You’re my gal.” Because it’s so – I run this event for free, which is just out of my pocket. I pay for extra staff and for all the work that needs to go into it. But I want to put on the best event possible, because it’s my purpose, right? These are the power talks. I have one more power talk that’s going to be coming on by someone who you totally need to have on your show, but she’s fairly new into this whole world, and so you probably haven’t heard of her yet. Her name is Jenni Rochelle, and she’s all about intimacy and connection. [00:13:17] PF: Oh, nice. [00:13:18] CR: Because we have been disconnected. [00:13:22] PF: We are so disconnected and we can’t – I’ve talked with people who are struggling to reconnect. They actually have anxiety about trying to connect with people, because we’ve gotten so bad at it from being locked in our homes. [00:13:34] CR: Yes. Before being locked in our homes, we were locked on our phone. [00:13:39] PF: Yeah, true. [00:13:41] CR: It’s like we didn’t even realize the precious commodity that we had in connection before. I was talking to her about what happens when we aren’t in intimacy, when we aren’t allowing that. She was saying, “We end up in resentment. We end up in anxiety. We end up in a place of holding grudges and of feeling alone.” So she and I, during her power talk are going to go really deep into intimacy and how do we create it. Because I was sharing with her one of the things that I’ve experienced. I was in an abusive relationship when I was 17. My very first love physically abused me. That was 30 years ago. I still hang on to some trust issues. [00:14:30] PF: Sure. That goes with it. [00:14:34] CR: It goes with it. John Gottman’s work around – who’s the world’s leading researcher, and in healthy marriages and healthy relationships. The work on leaning in, and I find myself really being scared to lean in. I still find it even though I’m married to a wonderful man. And when I was going through all this last night with my dad, I was starting to think, “Why isn’t my partner being more loving to me right?” And instead, it was like, “Wait! This is a moment to create intimacy and say, “Hon, I need a hug. Can we connect? Can you go get me froyo?” Which is what I actually did and he, “We have a big snowstorm, am I cleaning off the car?” there’s this opportunity and this need to connect and to find intimacy, even in the midst of a pandemic. She’s going to be coming on and she’s absolutely incredible. We’re covering intimacy and connection. We’re covering the mom guilt, the daughter guilt and we’re covering sexuality. Then beyond that, I have panels. [00:15:34] PF: But wait, there’s more. [00:15:34] CR: But wait, there’s more. [BREAK] [00:15:38] PF: I’m going to be right back with more of my conversation with Carin, but I wanted to pause for just a moment and talk about how you can make your world a safer place. The online world as we all know, can be an unpredictable one. And even though we’d like to think we’re always safe, that’s not always the case. As we spend more of our lives online, we find ourselves thinking twice before, say, clicking on a link or opening an email. Or we might be worried about getting scammed, hacked or fall in prey to malware or identity theft. The good news is, there’s great real time protection available for you and your family. When you use the browser extension, Guardio, you can do your thing online with complete confidence that every click is safe. You can run a free security scan right now to see what threats are on your browser. And then if you’re interested in their protection, you can get 20% off your plan when you sign up at guard.io/livehappynow. That’s guard.io/livehappynow. Now, let’s get back to my conversation with Carin and learn more about her upcoming International Women’s Day event and find out how you can be a part of it. [00:16:45] CR: Other aspects, there is an incredible panel on leadership. What does it mean to be a feminine leader? Yeah. Because when I know that your audience is a mix of gender identities, and obviously here, we’re talking about people who are female identified. But I’m going to make a case for feminine leadership, no matter your gender identity. That is, that feminine leadership isn’t – the word feminine has been truncated to mean, petal pink and smell like baby powder. No, no, no, that’s not what I’m talking about. [00:17:22] PF: Baby soft. Remember that? [00:17:23] CR: Exactly, right. Like the feminine care products that are in your drugstore, that’s not what I mean. What I mean is, the sides of leadership that are all about connection and humanity, compassion, the emotional intelligence, the trust, right? The creating a loving environment for those that you lead, the lack of hierarchy that it’s not that any one person is better than the other or higher than the other, but that we’re all in this together as a team. That’s what I’m talking about when we’re talking about feminine leadership. It’s the parts of ourselves that have been called the kind of soft skills. We just don’t want to call it soft skills, because those are like the actual hard skills. [00:18:08] PF: Exactly, yeah. [00:18:11] CR: Those are the harder skills to learn, to navigate. In all of us, some people might like the words masculine, feminine, some people might not. We replace it with whatever word you want, but the idea of us leading from love. There’s a panel coming together on how do we lead from a totally different place. The women that I’ve lined up to speak on really leading from the middle of the pack, as opposed to it needing to be this hierarchy. Because we’ve seen so many people abuse their power when they think of leadership in this power over way. We’re going to have a discussion about leadership. That’s internal leadership first, and then how do we lead from the middle of the pack, the back of the pack, the side of the pack and it’s going to be incredible. That panel, counter to that or not even counter but complementary to that. We have a beautiful parenting panel.   [00:19:05] PF: Oh, nice! [00:19:07] CR: Right. Now is the time. In fact, one of the women on the parenting panel, she’s an expert in teaching your kids how to study. Because we may go back down into lockdown and we may – people are dealing with different situations with their kids, and studying and homeschooling, and all of that, that none of us would have even thought was a thing two years ago. So she’s going to be teaching that. There’s going to be a parenting panel on how do we support our girls, our children in speaking up, speaking their voice. How do we navigate all of that? There’s going to be a life coaching panel, just me and three other coaches really diving into how do you go after your goals, how do you create what you want in life, how do you tenfold it. Everything that we know from life coaching. As well as throughout the day, we start off the day with a yoga class. That’s like a combination of yoga and movement. It’s called the feminine fire method. [00:20:04] PF: Oh, nice. It’s so incredible. It’s with this woman, Allison Verna Thompson. She combines yoga, Pilates, dance, salsa, so that you begin low and slow like meditating. And by the end, you are up on your feet, you are dancing, you are alive. There’s also going to be yoga with Shayla Stonechild toward the end of the day. She is the only indigenous woman to have ever been on the cover of Yoga Journal. She is going to be leading a yoga class. I mean, we have packed the day in this incredible, beautiful way. I’m going to be doing a keynote about purpose. How do you know what your purpose is? What is your purpose? What is the legend that you’re here to live? What are the steps to actually figure out, discover your purpose? How do you get the courage to go after it? How do you create, let’s say, someone wants to create their own example of the Women’s Day event or something like that? Or a podcast like you do, Paula? How do they do that? That’s going to be a big theme. In fact, the overarching theme is, Say it Sister. [00:21:08] PF: I love that. [00:21:10] CR: Because we’re at a point, I think in the world where it’s our time to speak, and to speak up, and speak up for the rights of all, speak up for your own vision, speak up for being paid the same. The UN has themed this year’s International Women’s Day as break the barrier. So we absolutely want to break the bounds, we want to break the barrier. I believe the way that we do that is to speak up, and to say it loudly and say it proudly. [00:21:41] PF: One thing I love about this event is, it encompasses all ages. Wherever you’re at, all the stages as well. [00:21:49] CR: Yes. [00:21:50] PF: It doesn’t matter if you are just starting out and trying to navigate your way through this world. Or if you’re a little bit farther along and you’re kind of like, “Ugh! Maybe your kids are grown and now you’re trying to figure out what do I do now?” That’s what I love about this. It doesn’t matter where you are, you can jump in and gain something from it. [00:22:06] CR: Yes. In fact, I love that you said that. There is a separate sensuality panel all around sensuality, intimacy. One of the women on that panel, Ken Wizner, she calls herself the menopause madam. Last year, I had a sensuality panel and I will be honest, racially diverse group, but age all around the same age. I said to Kim, “I need you on the panel next year because I want all women no matter where they are at their age and stage of life to know.” And on the life coaching panel, one of the women on it with me, her name is Amanda Hanson, and her whole thing is revolutionizing midlife. [00:22:43] PF: Love that. [00:22:44] CR: We don’t need midlife to look like it. We thought it looked on our mothers or our grandmothers. We get to define midlife as the best time in our life. I feel better at midlife at 47 than I ever have in my life.  [00:22:57] PF: Absolutely. [00:22:59] CR: It does encompass this whole range. We are such diverse women, even just within ourselves. The intersectionality, we’re not just any one thing. I’m 47, I’m going through perimenopause, and I’m postpartum, because I got a baby. We are all all of the above and we get to cover that. In fact, the event is free, it’s 100% free for anyone to attend. But I wanted to have a giveback component. We do make the recordings available for sale, and before the event, you can get all 12 hours of the recordings, the yoga classes, the movement classes, all the speakers, all the panels, all of it for only $97. What I’m doing with a portion of proceeds is donating it. I want us to be able to come together and to give back. I’ve chosen two different nonprofits. One that specifically goes to girls and speaking up and girls’ leadership. And one that is all about supporting women and their families all over the world, and that’s Women’s Campaign International. That creates training for women in Afghanistan, women in the Sudan, women in countries all over to teach these women how to have economic independence, how to create their own, you know, wealth and worth for their families. It’s really, like when we come together, there’s our own individual learning, and then there’s coming together for something greater. I’m so thrilled that the founder and chair of Women’s Campaign International, Marjorie Margolies, who is a former US House of Representatives, as well as a former news correspondent anchor for the Today’s Show, and NBC and a number of different outlets. As well as, she’s Chelsea Clinton’s mother-in-law. She’s going to be speaking at the event about Women’s Campaign International and the work that when we all come together, we can do for women all over the world. We really are covering the gamut here. [00:25:03] PF: You really are. It’s such a terrific day, it’s so much to take in. I’m so glad that you’re making it available after the fact. But what is it? Now you’re in your second year, you’ve got the little hindsight, and you put one of these together? What is it that you really hope at the end of the day, literally the end of the day, that people are walking away from this event feeling? [00:25:25] CR: Hmm, such a great question. I want every human that participates in the event to say, “I can do it too.” Whatever you see in any one speaker, panelist, the panel as a total or the event as a total. I really believe that this is our time to rise, and that the world has been waiting for us at this moment. That the things that we have been experiencing are very real. The challenges of a pandemic, and of the politics, and of racial justice and all that we as American society and the world have been experiencing and cocreating. All of that can leave us feeling just down, depressed, anxious, go back to bed, have as much ice cream. [00:26:22] PF: Or froyo.  [00:26:23] CR: Froyo, right? And then there’s this opportunity for every single one of us to say, “And what’s my part?” That each one of us was born with superhero powers, with strengths, with talents, with gifts. Each one of us has different passions, each one of us has a different way that we can change the world, that we can contribute, whether that is within our family, within our neighborhood, the world at large. That’s how we’re going to really – the world is going to change when every single one of us steps into that piece. What’s my part? Tara Davina is an incredible singer, she sings about rising up. She’s going to be singing during the event, like I want every single person who attends to see themselves in one of these incredible, incredible speakers, panelists, singers, and to say, “I can do that too.” Because we’re the ones we’ve been waiting for, right? Like no one’s coming along on a white horse. We’re the ones who can make ourselves our happiest, our most purposeful, our most alive, our most radiant self. The reason I’m obsessed with purpose is we know from all the research that when you live your purpose, you have high life satisfaction. You are resilient, you feel optimistic and you feel so proud of yourself and it’s an inner radiance. I want every single person who experiences this event to feel that and to have the tools, and the inspiration and the motivation to go do it. [00:27:58] PF: That is so excellent. I’m really excited for this to take place, and we’re going to tell them on the landing page, we’ll tell the listeners how to sign up, where they can go, give them all the details, make it super easy. [00:28:08] CR: And it is easy. It’s thewomensdayevent.com. Super, super, super easy. I love doing it in partnership with you Paula and with Live Happy. You have been such a great partner to us. We love telling everybody about Live Happy Now and your podcast because it’s incredible. [00:28:27] PF: We thank you for that.  [00:28:28] CR: Absolutely, absolutely. We love telling everyone about your podcast. We have your logo all over our event, because it’s a great partnership. [00:28:36] PF: Yeah, it’s a such a great fit and I’m really glad that we were able to connect again and make this happen. [00:28:41] CR: Me too. Thank you, Paula. [00:28:43] PF: Looking forward to the event. [00:28:45] CR: Me too. Thank you so much, sister. [END OF INTERVIEW] [00:28:52] PF: That was Carin Rockind talking about her upcoming International Women’s Day event. If you’d like to learn more about this free event, sign up for it or learn more about Carin and the work she’s doing. Just visit our website at livehappy.com and click on the podcast tab. That is all we have time for today. We’ll meet you back here again next week for an all-new episode. And until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one. [END]

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Celebrating Your Pets With Brittany Derrenbacher    [INTRODUCTION] [00:00:02] PF: Welcome to Episode 352 of Live Happy Now. There's a big holiday in February that's all about love, and it isn't Valentine's Day. This week, we're talking about National Love Your Pet Day. I'm your host, Paula Felps. And this week, I'm sitting down with Brittany Derrenbacher, a clinical mental health counseling intern and founder of Luna Bell's Moonbows, a special needs animal rescue. In celebration of National Love Your Pet Day on February 20th, Brittany is joining me to talk not only about what our pets do for us, but to look at how we can learn to celebrate them every day, and enrich our lives in the process. [INTERVIEW] [00:00:42] PF: Brittany, welcome back to Live Happy Now. [00:00:45] BD: Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I'm really happy to be back. [00:00:49] PF: Well, we have National Love Your Pet Day coming up. And of course, we thought of you, because you know pets, and you know how they work. And so I really wanted to talk to you about this, because we're all crazy about our pets. But they do so much for us that we don't even think about. So I wondered if you could talk, first of all, about some of the gifts that our pets are giving us that we're not even realizing. [00:01:11] BD: Yeah. I mean, I feel like this episode should really be called like the power of pets. [00:01:17] PF: Ooh, I like that. [00:01:18] BD: Yeah. Because I feel like the gifts that they give us are endless. I mean, really, we could sit here and talk about this for hours, because I think even if we were able to brainstorm through just an exhaustive list, I think there's still something that could be added to it daily, right? And I think it's most important first to talk about the joy that they give us. I think that is the most important gift that is so unique to animals, because it's that no strings attached kind of joy. And I think that there's like nothing that compares to that, right? I mean, the joy of coming home to our animals. And for those of us who work from home, I mean, I know for myself and probably for you, we’re super lucky that we get to spend time 24/7 with our pets and really soak up all the benefits. [00:02:09] PF: Yeah. [00:02:10] BD: But I think they also help us gain a sense of responsibility. So they're showing us this like unconditional love. And they're always there when we need them. So those are like kind of like the main things that you might think of when you think about, “Okay, well, what do pets give me on a daily basis?” Those are kind of the main things. But the unconditional love of a pet can do more than just keep us company, right? [00:02:35] PF: Yeah, it's a constant return on our investment, because it's giving us something emotionally. [00:02:41] BD: Right. Yeah. And that's really like where we get into – I kind of call it like the four benefits of pets in our lives. And it crosses a couple of different boundaries, but we have mental health, and mood boosting, grounding. And that is like connected to like outdoors. Physical health, which, of course is connected to exercise. And then socialization. So those are like the four main benefits I think that animals uniquely give us. [00:03:09] PF: That's cool. Can we dig into each of those just a little bit? [00:03:11] BD: Absolutely. Yeah. [00:03:13] PF: Because I noticed mental health is first. Because, as a therapist, I guess that is always going to be forefront for you. But I thought that's really cool, because we don't think about the mental health improvements we get from pets. [00:03:23] BD: Oh, yeah. I mean, it's estimated that 68% of US households have a pet. And I think that that number is growing, especially given the circumstances that we're in with COVID. I think a lot more people are bringing animals into their home that weren't able to do so before. So I love that you're having this conversation about the relationships that we have with our pets. And I think what better way to really honor the love for your pet than to have a day where we literally are talking about and spreading the message that owning a pet will change your life in more ways than just joy and love. And I really believe that the better we understand that human animal bond, the more we can use it to improve people's lives. So thinking of mental health, just off the top of my head, like interacting with animals has been shown to decrease levels of cortisol. So we're going to get kind of scientific here. [00:04:21] PF: We thought so. [00:04:21] BD: I know it’s your jam. You love that. But cortisol is the body's natural stress hormone. So just by virtue of interacting with our pets on a daily basis, we're decreasing that, which is awesome. But it's also really cool to know that if you sit there and pet your dog, your cat, whatever your pet is, for 15 minutes, that you're literally releasing all of the feel good hormones into your body. So you're sitting there. You're petting Morocco. You're petting Josie. 15 minutes. You're releasing oxytocin, prolactin and serotonin all into your body just by petting your, dog which I feel like is so cool. [00:05:02] PF: Yeah, that's amazing. Because there's not other ways to get it that easily, I don't think. [00:05:09] BD: No, I don't think so either. And I think like just thinking about being able to pet your dog and really hokes your body into that relaxed state. This is also super helpful in lowering your blood pressure. So it’s cool to think of like our dogs and our cats can lower our blood pressure. And I also realized, too, that you asked about mental health, and I kind of tiptoed into physical health. But even if we're just thinking about stress, like stress is mental health, right? And so these animals that we used to associate in the past with keeping outdoors, right? Animals weren't really considered in the past to be in home companions to humans. And now we have this understanding that animals in our pets can provide so much more to us than just having this fun dog to run around within the yard. They live in our homes, and they literally are bringing so much into our lives and nurturing our mental health, our physical health, just our overall well-being on a daily basis. And so not only do pets have the potential to decrease our stress, but they can help improve, like we were just talking about, our heart health. Like that's incredible. [00:06:25] PF: Yeah. And I think about how many times a day I laugh because of my dogs. And we know that laughter is so important and so cathartic. We simply don't do it enough. And even on days when it doesn't feel like there's a lot of things in the outside world to laugh at, they're going to make me laugh. They are going to deliver joy no matter what else is going on. [00:06:46] BD: Yeah. And like that deep belly laugh too, right? [00:06:50] PF: Yeah. [00:06:50] BD: But that goes back to those feel good hormones. And that's something that we're experiencing on a daily basis with our pets that I think it's very easy to take for granted or just not even realize. [00:07:01] PF: Yeah. Yeah, that's true. And so what about grounding? Because grounding is something I love. It's so important, and we don't get enough of this. And can you talk a little bit about what it is and why it's so important for our physical and emotional well-being? [00:07:17] BD: Yeah. Well, I also love to talk about grounding, because I think mindfulness is kind of inherent in the work that I do. And it's what I always try to help my clients with. But I really love to talk about how pets are our teachers. I think about most of the life lessons that I've learned in my life, especially from just the animals in our rescue, they've all come from dogs. They've all come from the animals that I've met in my life. And especially in the compassion fatigue for animal care professionals work that I do, I really stressed the importance of what our animals can teach us. And I think that they model resiliency to us, to humans, in a way that no one else can. I mean, even if you just think of like Josie and Morocco's story. [00:08:02] PF: Right, right. [00:08:04] BD: Like the resilience behind your dogs, and just where they've come from, and who they are now, and how interesting, and amazing, and loving they are. So there's the resiliency in that. And I also think that they have this beautiful way of teaching as mindfulness that no book can really do or no like Buru can. But they teach us like the cheesy saying, like, “Every day is a gift,” right? That is like the ethos, especially for dogs. And I'm not minimizing cats, birds and all the other pets out there that people have. But like – [00:08:36] PF: Have the hate mail, please. [00:08:38] BD: Yeah, no hate mail. No. Cats are hilarious, because I think that they just have this way of like just navigating life. Doing exactly what they want to do with no shame. [00:08:49] PF: Right. They’ll just give you that look that's like, “You're not going to do anything about it.” [00:08:53] BD: Yeah. But, yeah, our pets teach us that living each day is a gift, and living our lives with loving presence. And I love thinking about that phrase, loving presence. Because I think animals know that the ultimate point of life is to enjoy it, right? Like that is why we're here. And I think playing with our pets can take our mind away from problems, take our mind away from daily stressors, and really place this in the here and now. And that is literally like mindfulness 101, the here and now, and embracing the sacred pause. Tara Brach talks a lot about the sacred pause. And I think just that idea that truly living in the moment is such a huge gift that they give us. [00:09:40] PF: Yeah. And sometimes we might get in the mindset of feeling like it's frivolous to go play. But there is something very essential about that kind of frivolity and that kind of bonding that's taking place when you are playing, and the kind of joy that it's bringing to you. [00:09:55] BD: Yeah. And even just thinking about that, like physical nature of that, too. Physically, our animals encourage us to move. They are often why we have a connection with the outdoors, which I do think connects to that idea of grounding too, being outside, having our feet on the earth and experiencing life outside of our home. And even on days that we don't want to move, right? Like we don't want to get out of bed. Life is too much. And I the past two years with COVID, it has been this way for a lot of people, just the idea of like waking up and having to face another day in the middle of a pandemic. But especially dogs, they make us move. [00:10:41] PF: Yeah. [inaudible 00:10:41]. [00:10:42] BD: Yeah, yeah. I have to get out of bed every morning. I have to take my dogs for a walk. They need that. They need that to live and to enjoy life. And they really motivate us to play and seek adventure. So going back to that cultivation of joy that you were talking about and playing. [00:11:02] PF: And then like you said, it forces us to be in nature. And even if your nature is in the city, and all you're seeing is a tree at some point. But that is so healthy. And that's so good for our mental health and our physical well-being to just get outside and be present in nature for even 10 or 15 minutes. [00:11:20] BD: Yeah. Stopping. Smelling the roses. [00:11:24] PF: Yeah. Picking up the poop. [00:11:25] BD: Yeah. Stopping, taking a pause with the fire hydrant, whatever you need to do to be connected to the outside world. But even just like hiking, going to the park, walking or running through the neighborhood. For me, specifically, I love to do dog agility, and maybe even traveling. Going somewhere long distance. Packing up your animals and getting out of town. And that is something that I think is an amazing, unique thing to be able to do. And, I think, also in thinking about this, this really promotes human socialization. I think – Yeah, like, we often talk about animal socialization, right? But animals equally give us that gift as well. And being able to go out and do things with your pets and meet other humans. I think, you, I love hearing you talk about all of the people that you've met through walking your dogs. [00:12:24] PF: Right, right. That's the thing. We've told people who had like, say, they moved to Nashville, and they have trouble meeting people. We’re like, “Get a dog.” You will meet everybody. You will meet more people than you actually want to meet, because it's such a draw. And I did. I've met so many people and made lasting friendships with them because I was out there walking Archie. And it's pretty incredible. [00:12:46] BD: Yeah, I love that story. And like, for me, for agility. I've met so many people. And I see it's predominantly women that are doing agility. And I think it creates this community. They all do competitions together. They will travel together doing things with their dogs, and they're just active, and happy, and laughing, and enjoying life vicariously through and with their animals. [00:13:13] PF: Yeah. I’d say what a tremendous way to walk through life is to – When you really recognize the value of that animal companion and can really cherish it and enjoy it. I'm going to be right back with more of my conversation with Brittany. But I wanted to talk for just a moment about how to make your world a safer place. The online world can be an unpredictable one. And while we'd like to think that we're always safe, that isn't necessarily the case. As we spend more of our lives online, we increasingly find ourselves thinking twice before clicking on a link or opening an email. Or we might be worried about getting scammed hacked, or even falling prey to malware or identity theft. The good news is, there's great real time protection available for you and your family. When you use the browser extension, Guardio, you can do your thing online with complete confidence that every click is safe. You can run a free security scan right now to see what threats are on your browser. And then if you're interested in their protection, it 20% off your plan when you sign up at guard.io/livehappynow. That's guard.io/livehappynow. And now, let's get back to my conversation with Brittany Derrenbacher and learn more about the many gifts our pets give to us. One thing that you do that I find so important is the work that you're doing with – You have an emotional support dog, and you're helping others deal with trauma with a pet. Can you talk about how that works and kind of some of the work that you're doing? [00:14:49] BD: Yeah. This is probably, like you said, my favorite topic to discuss, because I really get to see firsthand how much animals can help humans in a handful of supportive ways regarding mental health. I love to use animals in therapy. We have a lot of special needs dogs that I think uniquely are able to teach other people lessons and teach them like really cool things about being imperfectly perfect, right? [00:15:17] PF: Right. [00:15:19] BD: And there are therapy animals, emotional support dogs, service dogs, psychiatric service dogs, seeing eye dogs. Like I feel like I could go on and on. Like physical rehabilitation. Animals that visit hospitals to visit children that are recovering and going through chemo treatments for cancer. There are therapy dogs as crisis intervention after traumatic events. This is something that I'm really specifically interested in, because I think it's an incredible service that is available that most people don't know about. And that's that trained dog handler teams are called to sites of crisis and provide comfort, and provide stress relief, and emotional support for those that have been affected by natural disasters or mass shootings. For example, there's the Tree of Life synagogue shooting. They brought in a team of handlers and their dogs to provide support. This happened at Sandy Hook as well, and Virginia Tech massacre. But there's really some wonderful research surrounding this topic. And I think that a section of human animal interaction of the American Psychological Association is really doing an amazing job of presenting on these topics and bringing awareness of understanding about the human animal interaction. And I think, for us specifically, in the work that I do, going back to Violet, she is a 40-pound bulldog with hydrocephalus. [00:16:52] PF: Okay, tell us real quick what hydrocephalus is for people who don't know. [00:16:55] BD: Yeah. So hydrocephalus is literally water on the brain. And it is an accumulation of that fluid that has nowhere to go. And so you'll kind of see like a dome-shaped skull on the animal's head. And this is a condition that our rescue is very passionate about. It happens to humans as well. And a lot of times, dogs can have mild symptoms and live really long, beautiful lives. And sometimes it is a hospice situation where we give them the best life that they can for as long as possible. Violet has very mild hydrocephalus. So she is doing beautifully. She's not on any medication, and she is just absolutely wonderful. And again, like has that resiliency and is able to share such a beautiful story. But yeah, she visits nursing homes, senior memory care facilities, college campuses in the therapy room with me. And one of her favorite people to visit is a 101-year-old Holocaust survivor. [00:17:56] PF: Oh, that's so cool. [00:17:56] BD: Yeah, that is incredible. He loves it. I think he's able to really like tap into this childlike joy that he hasn't been able to experience in a long time. And one of the first stories that he told my husband, when Violet went to visit, was that it reminded him so much of his childhood dog. And so now, when Violet goes to visit, like it is expected, like, “Where's violet? When will she be here?” So yeah. [00:18:22] PF: That's fantastic. So we know that pets give us so much. Like they just give and give. And even when we don't treat them well, and we don't treat them as well as we should, they are still loving and they give to us. So when we're looking at Love Your Pet Day, what can we do to be better pet parents? How can we better return that kind of affection and meet the needs of our pets? [00:18:47] BD: I love that you asked this, because I think that we really owe it to our pets to give back to them as they give to us. That has really been like my goal in life, especially with rescue work, is to try to give back as much as possible to these animals. But I think it's also important to even just raise that as a question, right? Like we shouldn't just be asking what animals can do for us. We should also be asking what we can do in return for them. And I really do believe that the most important thing that we can do is constantly provide that love and stability. Patience. Patience is really key, right? [00:19:24] PF: Yeah. And not always easy. [00:19:25] BD: Yeah, exactly. And positive reinforcement. I also like to tell people, like give them their time. Stop rushing them on the walks. [00:19:35] PF: Yeah, this is a great topic. And that's something that you and I have talked about. And I want to dig into that a little bit more, because that is so important, and it's easy for us to forget. So like can you talk about that just a little bit? Like how can we learn to be more mindful of giving them their time and making those walks their time? [00:19:55] BD: Yeah. And I think that's where we can really embrace the tools that they teach us of mindfulness and being present, like taking that deep breath and saying, “Okay, I'm going to leave the house and really be in the here and now with my dog because this is their jam. This is literally what dogs are on this earth for, is to roam, and sniff, and explore, and enjoy their life.” And how many times do you – And I'm guilty of this. But how many times are you out and you see people really pulling their dogs along and they're trying to sniff the fire hydrant? They're trying to sniff the grass? And they're like, “Come on, come on, come on, let's go.” Imagine being in HomeGoods and you are in the pillow aisle, right? You're looking at those soft throws, and then someone's behind you like nudging you on like, “Come on, come on. Let's go, let's go. Hurry up. Hurry up. Hurry up.” Why would we want to do that and deprive our animals of that joy, and being able to do something that they're just like so excited and pumped to do? I mean, that is literally [inaudible 00:20:58]. [00:21:00] PF: Yeah, yeah, because I've tried to get really thoughtful in terms of when I don't take my phone with me when we go on walks anymore. And that makes a big difference. And when we were in Nashville, and we would see – At the dog park, like see people. And their dogs out there running around, and they're just on their phone. And it’s like, “Oh, my gosh, you're missing out on this whole opportunity to play and interact before you go lock your dog up in an apartment again.” So that's one thing. I've ditched the phone on the walks. And I really tried to take it. Like when they stop and are sniffing, it's like really use it a time to take a breath and really like start looking at my surroundings. Like let me be as inquisitive as they are about what does the air smell like today? And what is the sky doing? And it really makes a huge difference in resetting your day when you go back to your office. [00:21:50] BD: Oh, yeah. I mean, it's like literally doing a body scan in nature with your dog, right? And I love that you mentioned putting the phone away and just, again, incorporating that loving presence that we talked about earlier. I think, for me, uniquely, I'm often having the conversation on the other side with people because I specialize in pet loss grief. And I often am having conversations with people about what they wish they had done, and that they would do anything to be back in those moments with their animals. And so I think that's something that's important to keep in mind, too, is like really allowing ourselves to enjoy these moments when they're given to us and be present, and just connect with our animals, and just embrace the beauty of life, and not be stuck in a situation in the future where we are analyzing this should have, would have, could haves. [00:22:46] PF: Right. Yeah. Because I know some times we're given notice that we're losing a pet. And sometimes it happens very quickly. And I've had it go both ways. And I had one that I lost very quickly, and it was like, “Oh, my gosh, if I had known that was my last walk with her, I would have walked for an hour.” I just would not have stopped. [00:23:06] BD: Endlessly. Yeah. [00:23:07] PF: Yeah. And so I think that's a great mindset to have. Not that, “Oh, my pet is going to die.” But like I have to look at every moment I have, every chance I have to interact with them as a valuable one. [00:23:18] BD: Yeah. And I think like now there's science behind it, right? There're so many studies that have been done showing what animals can do for us, just reducing the loneliness and increasing the social support, boosting our moods. Literally saving lives in regards to depression and grief. And we are given an opportunity every day to embrace all of those unique gifts and qualities that animals can give us. And like why would we not embrace that and soak it up every chance? [00:23:50] PF: That's right. That's terrific. So yeah, so we have this one day where we'll talk about Love Your Pet Day. But I think it's a great practice to be able to enter every day as Love Your Pet Day. So what would be like your advice? How do we keep that top of mind so that we really do change that relationship with our pet? [00:24:12] BD: Yeah. I really think just embracing that animals don't ask for much in life, and are the gifts that keep on giving. And they also teach us to be better humans, right? They teach us to navigate life in a smarter, more beautiful way. And so just continuing to talk about how awesome life is with animals and how amazing the human animal bond is. That's what I love to talk about, is the bond that we have with our animals. It's just so incredible. And it's unlike anything in life. And even just having conversations like this where maybe someone will listen to this podcast and say, “You know what? I'm going to go to my nearest shelter, and I'm going to adopt a dog today, because I want to like live life with this kind of joy.” Like that is a unique gift. And that is a message worth spreading. [00:25:08] PF: That's excellent. Brittany, you always have so much to say about pets, and you're doing such incredible work with humans and animals. So we're going to, of course, have our landing page and let them learn more about you and where they can find out about some of the work that you're doing. But thank you. Thank you for coming back and talking pets with us. [00:25:25] BD: Yeah, thank you. [OUTRO] [00:25:30] PF: That was Britney Derrenbacher, talking about how pets benefit us and what we can do to enrich their lives. If you'd like to learn more about Brittany and the work that she's doing, just visit our website at livehappy.com and click on the podcast tab. That is all we have time for today. We'll meet you back here again next week for an all new episode. And until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one. [END]

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Overcoming Toxic Positivity With Whitney Goodman [INTRODUCTION]   [00:00:02] PF: Welcome to Episode 348 of Live Happy Now. We all know that positivity is good for us, except when it isn't. And today's guest is going to teach us how to tell the difference. I'm your host, Paula Felps. And this week, I'm joined by Whitney Goodman, the radically honest psychotherapist and founder of the Collaborative Counseling Center in Miami. Whitney is the author of the new book, Toxic Positivity: Keeping It Real in a World Obsessed with Being Happy. She's here to talk about what toxic positivity is, what it does to us, and how to manage it in ourselves and others. So let's find out what she has to say. [INTERVIEW] [00:00:40] PF: Whitney, welcome to Live Happy Now. [00:00:42] WG: Thank you so much for having me. [00:00:44] PF: Well, this is a terrific topic for us, because it's something we're starting to hear a lot about. And it can be confusing because of course, we always think of positivity as being a good thing. I mean we are Live Happy. So of course, we love positivity. But your book gives so much great insight into toxic positivity. And to kick off the conversation, can you explain to us what toxic positivity is, and then tell us how it's different from healthy positivity? [00:01:15] WG: So toxic positivity denies an emotion and tells us that we should suppress it. And when we use toxic positivity, we're basically telling ourselves and other people that this emotion shouldn't exist, it's wrong. And that we can try really hard to eliminate it entirely. And I really look at toxic positivity as being the unrelenting pressure to be happy all the time no matter what the circumstances are. And when we compare that to healthy positivity, healthy positivity is when we're able to make space for reality and hope, right? So we can recognize the value of seeing the good, but allow people to arrive there at their own pace and to reach their own conclusions rather than sort of like pushing this on them. [00:02:05] PF: And you had your own journey with toxic positivity, which you described very well in your book. Well, when did you start see it becoming more prevalent in other people? [00:02:16] WG: So I think I didn't really realize what it was when I was experiencing it. Especially as women, I think we're used to being told like to smile and to be happy. And there's definitely a pressure to appear a certain way. And after I became a therapist, though, I noticed that a lot of my clients were complaining about this behind closed doors, but they felt like a very similar pressure to show up in the outside world. And I was like, “Wow, I'm not the only one that feels like this. Everybody else is kind of feeling like this is a little bit uncomfortable.” [00:02:50] PF: What do you think is driving that right now? Because I have a friend who's a therapist, and she said she has seen it so much in her practice. And I'm just seeing little things pop up about it here and there. So what's going on with making us aware of it and what's pushing it forward? [00:03:08] WG: I had an article that popped up on my phone today that said like, “10 ways to be happy during the pandemic.” And I was like, “Wow, what an ironic title.” And I think that really speaks to this whole thing that's going on that you're talking about. That we're under so much stress, especially over the last couple of years that it sort of feels like you have to be happy. Keep it all together so that you can keep working so that people won't be upset with you, so that you can be seen as like a good person. And it's becoming so overwhelming for people. I think everyone's really hitting their breaking point of like, “I just can't pretend anymore. It's too heavy.” [00:03:50] PF: And there's got to be some harm involved in faking it. We have all heard the whole thing about fake it till you make it. But there's also a real harm in suppressing or denying those emotions. Can you tell us what it's doing to us? Because you're seeing it in your office every day. [00:04:07] WG: Yeah, absolutely. And I talk about this a lot in the book that suppressing emotions does not work. They typically just intensify when we suppress them. And we see this reflected in the research that if I tell myself, “I can't be angry. I need to get rid of this feeling. I'm going to cover it up.” It just ends up coming out in another way and usually 10 times worse. And sometimes we're not aware of how that is happening. The other thing that happens is that it really makes our relationships very difficult, because if I don't feel comfortable sharing, then neither does anybody else. And we can't connect over a lot of these shared difficult experiences, which is really what makes relationships feel closer. And we end up feeling like alone and isolated in the end and often very like weird or messed up because we're having feelings that we don't see other people experiencing. [00:05:04] PF: And as you mentioned, the pandemic really did exacerbate things. And is part of that because people were at home. They're not feeling great. But then when they get on a zoom call, or they're talking to somebody, it's like, “Yeah, it's all good.” And they don't even have that one on one interaction that someone else can read that things aren't the way that they're saying they are. [00:05:26] WG: Exactly. And with the pandemic, I think one of the ways people coped was by trying to pretend that everything was normal. And this is denial. It's a coping skill, right? And especially a lot of like bosses and leaders that I heard from my own clients, like they were almost demanding that their workforce show up with a positive attitude, because it was too heavy for them to deal with the reality of what was actually going on. And we see this a lot, especially at work. [00:05:59] PF: Yeah, so let's address the leadership aspect of this for a minute. And then I want to talk about it from a parenting standpoint as well. But as a leader, what can you do to make sure that you're not forcing positivity upon your people, and that you're really hearing what they need? [00:06:15] WG: There's a lot of ways that I think we can deal with disruption, with people being upset in the workplace, complaints, things like that, that are really effective. So just showing genuine like interest in your employees’ lives is really important. Asking questions. Showing that you care about them more than just what they can provide for you. And showing empathy. There's a there's a lot of studies that show that people really recall when their boss has been sympathetic versus unsympathetic. And also, really emphasizing the meaningfulness and the importance of the work, people tend to perform better and feel better when there is some type of value within the work. And also just treating people with respect, trust, integrity, all of these really normal human things that I think sometimes get pushed to the wayside in favor of like productivity or numbers. [00:07:10] PF: And did that become more difficult for bosses during the time when you've got a lot – You've got remote workers now, and you're not doing that one on one interaction. So is it easier for them to kind of not see them as a human, but see them as a performance machine? [00:07:26] WG: Sure. And we have to remember that the bosses are also dealing with all the same things as their employees during this time. And I know, I felt that as a therapist, it was this weird moment of like I'm living through the same problem as my clients. And a boss might feel that with their employees that it's like they're under so much pressure as well. That it's hard to always be on. And I think the more humanity we show and feel like, “You know what? I'm scared. I'm dealing with this too,” the easier it is to connect. [00:07:57] PF: And so what about parents, because their kids might be going through the same thing. Or they might even unknowingly or unconsciously be promoting toxic positivity by saying, “Just cheer up. It'll be fine.” So how is it different when we're dealing with our children and helping them get through this? [00:08:14] WG: Yeah, there's such a cultural expectation of like, “I just want my kid to be happy,” right? Or all I care about is your happiness. And so we start instilling this in kids from a young age, and it makes sense. Like happy kids are easy kids. And so parents, I think, have to be careful to not overvalue one emotion, like happiness, and try to encourage kids to show a wide array of emotions and model those emotions themselves, because they all have value and meaning. If we felt happy all the time, we would get nothing done. And it really wouldn't be that great of a life, to be honest. [00:08:55] PF: What are some of the signs that we can see in ourselves that we might be falling into that toxic positivity trap. [00:09:02] WG: So some of the biggest examples are when you are trying to talk yourself out of feeling something, being upset about something. That's legitimate. And some examples of this would be like I shouldn't be over this by now. Or I should be happy. I should be grateful. I know I shouldn't complain about this. But it's like adding these caveats before we talk about something that is upsetting us, or that is a legitimate issue in our lives. [00:09:30] PF: So what should we be doing instead? [00:09:33] WG: So instead, I recommend that people try to really get to the root of what's going on and validate their emotions and also figure out what they need. So I talked about this in the book that we need to figure out if we need like validation or a kick in the butt, right? And sometimes we can over validate ourselves and get stuck. And then on the other end of the spectrum, we aren't giving ourselves any validation. We're just using toxic positivity and we don't get anywhere. So I recommend that people look at like, “Okay, what am I feeling? Where might this be coming from? Is there something that I need right now?” And that might mean more encouragement? It also might mean more rest? And that's going to differ depending on the situation. [00:10:18] PF: And how do we work through that? Do you suggest like they journal it? Or how do we unpack what we're actually feeling as opposed to what we should be feeling, or what we think we should be feeling? [00:10:30] WG: So whatever you're feeling, it’s just a response to either like incoming stimuli or something you've been more comfortable feeling. So I want people to kind of approach their feelings with just like a neutral view, right? There's not anything like good or bad. Then you can start to figure out like what is this like in my body? How do I experience this emotion? Then kind of look at where might this be coming from? And that requires us to take inventory of our day. And sometimes it's that we had an interaction with someone that set us off. It could also just be that like, “you didn't sleep well, last night, and you need to drink more water.” So trying to help people get in touch with like what do emotions feel like for them? How do they typically label them? And what are those emotions telling them? [00:11:23] PF: So it definitely just takes a little bit of getting still with yourself and really going inward, which a lot of people don't want to do right now. [00:11:30] WG: Exactly. And I don't blame them. It's really uncomfortable. It's hard. [00:11:36] PF: Yeah, yeah, it is a lot of hard work. And because we've been through so much, like as you noted in the last couple of years, I think there's a lot that we just were like, “Ugh! I am –” It's like that closet door that it's like you've put all your junk in and it's like everything's just going to come falling out and make a big mess. So I don’t want to do it. [00:11:53] WG: Exactly. And sometimes we do have to go into survival mode. There were points of the pandemic where I was advising people to do that. And it's not a time to unpack like your deepest traumas and emotions when you're in the middle of a crisis. It can be too much. But we also don't have to use toxic positivity to get through that. It's okay to say like, “I'm just surviving right now. I need to get through this. And I'm going to deal with whatever I'm feeling when I have the time and the space to do that.” [00:12:25] PF: Yeah, that's excellent advice. And obviously, sometimes, it's not just us. Like we can accept that for ourselves and say, “Alright, I am just going to do my bare minimum, and make it through this.” So what about when the people we're talking to are the ones with the toxic positivity? And first, you give some excellent examples of phrasing and responses that we might not recognize as toxic positivity. Can you talk about that? Some of the keywords, if you will, that are toxic responses, versus what we really need to hear? [00:13:00] WG: Yeah. So I think it's important to note that positivity becomes toxic when it's used with the wrong people at the wrong time and about the wrong topics. So some of these phrases can be okay in certain situations. But they become toxic when they're not helpful for those people. So some of them might be like, “Everything happens for a reason.” “You need to be positive to get through this.” Or “God will never give you more than you can handle,” can be a typical one for people, especially if they're not religious. So thinking about some of these phrases that we really hear very often, right? Or like, “Be grateful. It's not worse. At least it wasn't X.” We’re trying to put a positive spin on something that isn't positive. [00:13:49] PF: So how do you even respond when people do that? Because I know, I've been in those situations. And my response is usually just like stare at them with an open mouth. Like you did not just say that. After my father died, I came back from – I'd been off for about four days and went back to work. I was working at a newspaper at a time. And my lifestyle editor came up and said, “How was your time away?” And I said, “I was at my dad's funeral.” She goes, “Yeah, but it had to feel good to get out of the office.” [00:14:17] WG: Oh my gosh, yeah. [00:14:18] PF: And it's like, “No. That's not helping.” [00:14:21] WG: What a silver lining. Oh, my goodness. [00:14:24] PF: So how do people deal with when someone responds and it's not helping? [00:14:30] WG: I think it's important to decide what role this person plays in your life. So there have been times where people at like the grocery store say something like that to me, and I might be like, “Thanks,” and walk away. That's an option. If there are people that are close to you that you want to teach, I think it can be helpful to say, “I know you're really trying to help, and that is not a helpful thing to say.” Or to even respond and say, “Actually, it was really hard.” With your example, my dad passed away and it was a sad time even though I was out of the office. And really trying to like teach people what is helpful to you, especially those repeat offenders. You can say like, “When you say these things, it's not helpful. I would really appreciate if you could just listen to me or help me with dinner.” Giving people other suggestions. Because most of the time they think they're helping. That's the really like tricky thing about this. [00:15:27] PF: How do we kind of educate people to pull them out of that and really teach them what we need in terms of support? [00:15:34] WG: Yeah, I think that's the central message of my book, is that these people are not toxic. They're just kind of repeating the same thing over and over, like you said. And so we can teach people that it's okay to not feel happy all the time. That it's actually normal to have negative emotions. And also offer them concrete strategies to help us in the future. So for some people, that may mean, “It would really be great if you could give me a hug, or if you could cook dinner, or if I could just talk about the problem without getting any advice,” and try to be very deliberate and direct about the type of help that you need. Because if we don't tell people, we can't really expect them to know exactly what would be helpful to us. [00:16:21] PF: Right. And sometimes we don't know what we need. So what do we do at that point? Other than read your book, which then we find out. But when we're not really sure what we need, but we just know that I don't need you telling me I should feel better, you know? [00:16:37] WG: Yeah. And that's enough. If that's the one thing that you know in that moment, it's okay to say, “This really isn't helping me right now. And I don't know what kind of help I need right now. But when I figure it out, I'll let you know.” Because I know that overwhelming feeling when you're struggling of like, “Gosh! How am I supposed to figure out what I need and then tell someone.” And you might be in a place where you're not ready to do that. And so it's okay to just tell someone like, “Hey, this isn't helpful,” and stop there. And get to a place where you can kind of learn what might be helpful for you. And that takes time. [00:17:14] PF: And part of it is just releasing the feeling that you should feel a certain way. And one thing that you talked about that I found so interesting is the shame cycle. And I wanted you to talk about why does toxic positivity create a shame cycle? And what does that look like for people? [00:17:35] WG: Yeah. So whenever we use some of these things against ourselves that I talked about, like, “I know I should be grateful.” “I should be more positive.” “I shouldn't be feeling this way.” It creates a feeling of shame, because you're essentially gaslighting yourself. You're telling yourself like, “I know you're feeling this thing, but you shouldn't be feeling it. And I need you to stop right now.” And this makes us feel isolated, alone, and really unable to manage our own emotions. And so we kind of like retreat into ourselves with this shame. What would be more effective is if we could say like, “I'm having this feeling right now. It's legitimate. It's real. And I know that other people have felt like me, too. I know that this is okay to feel this way. And I'm going to get myself through it in the way that works for me, and that isn't harmful to me or to someone else.” [00:18:27] PF: What does it do if we stay in that cycle of shame? What is it emotionally and even physically do to us? [00:18:35] WG: Well, it's exhausting, right? If you constantly feel like you need to be performing, or then it makes you a bad person if you succumb to that negativity. You're always going to feel less than and like you're not doing enough. It also ties back in with the emotional suppression that we were talking about that it's likely going to start impacting your sleep. It can impact your relationships. It can impact your mood throughout the day. It leads to an increased likelihood for things like depression and anxiety. There's a lot of negative consequences to excessive emotional suppression and shaming yourself for feeling. [00:19:13] PF: So what's the quickest way that you advise someone to get out of that when they're doing that “I should” and they're throwing themselves into that spiral of shame? Do you have any tips for getting out of that quickly, kind of like jettison out your little escape hatch? [00:19:28] WG: Yeah. The most effective thing I think is using the word and. So if we use the example of you've just lost somebody, they've passed away, you can say something like, “I am feeling sad, and I have other people around me.” If you're really someone that's prone to going into that positive mindset or the toxic positivity, trying to name your feeling that you might typically classify as negative. Add the word and. And then you can say something good, or neutral, or positive about your life. And what that does is it allows us in our brain to recognize both the good and the distressing, and make room for both and not deny one in replacing the other. [00:20:16] PF: Yeah, that makes so much sense. And another thing that I really liked is you talk about complaining. And obviously, nobody wants to be around someone who complains all the time. But you have great news for people who like to complain. Because as you say, that there are certain benefits to complaining if it's done right. So this is a two part question, is one, we're going to talk about why it's beneficial. And then I'd like you to kind of school us on how to complain properly. [00:20:46] WG: Yeah, you're right. Complaining gets a bad reputation, right? But complaining does show you what is important. It can help create change in the world. It also helps you get feedback from other people, process your emotions. It's also one of the main ways that we gain sympathy, attention, or express dissatisfaction. So complaining has a lot of use, and eliminating it entirely would actually not be very helpful at all. But you're right, that we can get stuck in our complaining and make it very ineffective. So I recommend that when people are complaining, they use facts and logic. They know their ideal outcome, and they understand who has the ability to make that happen. And what the research shows us is that when we use those three criteria, complaining ends up being quite helpful and effective. [00:21:41] PF: That's awesome. Yeah, we should all write that down, like those three little things. So every time we start, it's like we can check it off. Make sure we're doing it right. Because I love that. I love that aspect of it. So I know that we're running out of time. But I've got a couple more things. One, I really want to talk about how do we learn to balance negativity and positivity. Because both of those things are important to have in our lives. And either other too much one or the other isn't good for us. So how do we learn to strike that balance? [00:22:14] WG: I think we really go back to that word and that I was just talking about and trying to allow ourselves to recognize both and make space for both. And also realizing what situations we might benefit from a little bit more positivity or that kick in the butt that I talked about, and what situations are really just hard, and there is no silver lining. I talk about like grief, infertility, parenting, all these really difficult topics where positivity might not be that helpful in some of the situations. And so recognizing in your life, like, “Is this a season where I just need to ride this out? Or is this a time where a different attitude might be helpful to me? [00:23:01] PF: That's really wise to look at it that way. And this book has so much great information. It's really very timely, and very thoughtful, very well written. And what is it that you hope that your readers take away when they put this book down for the final time? [00:23:20] WG: I hope that everyone who reads this book feels human after reading it, and that they're allowed to feel a wide variety of emotions. And I hope it gets people talking to each other about what they're going through, instead of hiding. [00:23:35] PF: Yeah, it definitely has the power to do that. As I said, it's something it's so well written and really takes us on this journey. So I appreciate that you wrote it. And I thank you for taking the time to sit down and talk with us about it today. [00:23:48] WG: Of course. Thank you so much. This is great. [OUTRO] [00:23:55] PF: That was Whitney Goodman, talking about toxic positivity. If you'd like to learn more about Whitney and her new book, Toxic Positivity: Keeping It Real in a World Obsessed with Being Happy, or follow her on social media, visit our website at livehappy.com and click on the podcast link. That is all we have time for today. We'll meet you back here again next week for an all new episode. And until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one. [END]

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: The ‘FUN’damentals of Connecting With Scott Novis [INTRODUCTION] [00:00:02] PF: Welcome to Episode 347 of Live Happy Now. If you're looking to lead a healthier life this year, it's important to make sure you're getting your recommended daily allowance of fun. And today, we're going to tell you how to do that. I'm your host, Paula Felps, and this week, I'm joined by Scott Novis, a former Disney executive and founder of Bravous, a company that helps businesses improve employee experiences through live and virtual games. He's here today to talk about how he uses fun and games to create happier workplaces, and how you can use those same ideas to deepen connections and create more fun at home. [INTERVIEW] [00:00:39] PF: Scott, welcome to Live Happy Now. [00:00:41] SN: Hey, thanks for having me. [00:00:43] PF: We are excited to have you. This is going to be a really fun conversation, but also very meaningful, because you are all about those two things, really, connection, which is meaningful, and having fun. So, as we get started, tell us a little bit about what it is that you do? [00:01:00] SN: Well, it turns out those two things are related, very strongly related. What we do is, basically we help people play together, our experiences that I've done a lot of research into, particularly for adults, is how do we form friendships? And the way I like to think of it is that we want to host an event where you could make a friend. How do you do that? And so, a lot of, particularly with the number of companies that have gone to remote work, we're seeing people feeling more disconnected than ever. So, what we do is we host fun workshops that improve your culture and help you create healthier teams. [00:01:38] PF: Oh, that's fantastic. That's such a necessary component right now, because it is getting more and more difficult to connect. And it seems really odd that we live in a time where we can connect virtually with anyone, anywhere in the world, and we have never felt so disconnected. How do you start bridging that gap? [00:01:58] SN: That's a great question. So, some of it has to go back to the fundamentals, like how do we see connection? What is it and where's this coming from? And I love this great quote about loneliness is a sadness that comes from a lack of connection. So, we talked about people feeling disconnected, it's really kind of the sadness, like feeling alone. And what we've noticed is that, particularly in the remote work environment, because it's happening in my company. We went remote, like, “Okay, that's it.” COVID hit, everybody got home, got rid of the office, we're like, “This is great.” And then it was all tasks work all the time. The problem with that is, while we were productive for a while, one of my top employees left, and the thing that hit me in the face was none of this has anything to do with me, and it was that lack of personal interaction. I thought about the offices are like engineered to cause people to bump into each other. And the key psychology term that I've learned is called unstructured conversations. It's when we share, when we get to know each other, when we feel like somebody sees us and cares about us. And when we're just busy doing task work, you don't have those opportunities. So, we started setting out like, what do adults need for that environment? How do we create that environment online? What does it look like? And it was this awesome quote, my wife gave me the other day that said, “It's not enough to belong, you need to do things together, so your belonging has meaning.” Right? [00:03:31] PF: Yeah. [00:03:31] SN: So, you're like, well, we're doing housework, but are we really like working together? Here's the big thing, is it safe to fail? [00:03:42] PF: I love this because we did have the watercooler conversations, we had ways of interacting and we had micro moments. Barbara Fredrickson, in her book, Love 2.0 talks about the value of micro moments says, just walking to the cashier, talking to the person in the parking garage, talking to your coworker, just as you pass their cubicle office, whatever it is. And we took all that away and didn't think about what a void that was leaving. [00:04:10] SN: Huge. So, that gets down to like, how do you feel in a micro moment? You can’t, so you can just be yourself. You can relax. But in a work environment where it's task oriented, it's the number one thing and all the surveys of all the companies we've worked with, I'll go through, is your work meaningful? All these other things. And it was a yes, yes, yes. We've gotten really good at those things. They go, “What happens if you make a mistake?” Boom, it's like, “Oh, that's career ending. Nobody can make a mistake.” What happens in an environment like that is you can't be vulnerable. As Brené Brown said, “Vulnerability is the past connection flows along.” So, we need to create a space where you either can't fail, or it's utterly irrelevant, which is what play is about when we play and we can be open. And there's a really interesting thing about play. If I was going to teach you a class, all the science says that you're going to adapt your behavior to my expectations because I'm the teacher and you’re the student. We all got indoctrinated to that. We all went to school, we all grew up with that. But when we play, you can only be yourself. So, when people get together in teams, all of those impressions and that armor goes away, because you're so busy playing, you forget who you're trying to impress, you're just caught up in the moment. And that creates that openness, where people can participate. And so, we really try to focus on games that are either cooperative, collaborative, or really, really try to minimize competition, because competition, and this is probably where a lot of your listener stress comes from, is, we're so focused on excellence and competition and everything else. Well, that is kryptonite to vulnerability, that is kryptonite to openness. And so, we're trying, when we create our workshops in our programs, we do things where it's like, “Hey, we got to have a safe place for you to not worry about the outcome.” That's one of the reasons like we do a lot of stuff with video games, because like, who's going to take that seriously? [00:06:07] PF: Well, this is really an exceptional approach to things because as adults, we naturally start distancing from play. It just is something we decide. We're adults now we have to get serious. And, you know, I know in the past in live happy, we've talked about the importance of play and it's really difficult for a lot of adults to grasp how important that is because we think we're supposed to be serious or we think there's this amount of time for play. Okay, now, let's get back to work. So, tell me about your approach to it and how you've developed your programs for us to interact with one another in a fun way? [00:06:45] SN: I love it. Thank you. And I think for your audience, in particular, women have particular challenges in the workplace today, because they're hit with a couple of different things about expectations of like effortless perfection. So, you have this, I can't make a mistake. Play feels fruitless, I want to be taken as a serious person that can make a difference. And then you're supposed to be perfect. Where's the stress, right? So how do we do it? So first, like one of the number one thing, if your audience takes nothing else away from this would be try to form a fun committee at your office. I've heard it called different things, love enjoys, connection committees, I try to stay away from overly corporate names something just a little silly so people don't think they have to come in with a checklist and a bunch of stuff to do. But what we do is what's embodied in that is we want to create a safe space, where developing better relationships with the people we work with is a priority. And so, when we move that to the front, now, what we're moving ourselves into, and I find this is really effective for a lot of people, especially if they have a nurturing mentality, if they're oriented to taking care of others, the fun committee becomes about how do we help our people connect? What's magic about that is the first people's needs are going to be met by that committee, or the people that most need to connect, that's who's going to volunteer, that's who's going to want to be on it. If their needs are going to be met, because now they're actually spending time not working, but getting to connect with each other. The next layer of that is there's increasing numbers of tools. I could talk about each one, but like you're seeing Zoom is starting to do this now where they've added games to the Zoom calls. How about that? To companies like us where we do a complete turnkey service with professional commentators. Because look, even executives, sorry, you can't host your own trivia. It's too stressful for you, the employees. It's like there's all these complexities of instead of it being this fun things, it becomes this weird, stilted like, “Do I really want to reveal to my boss how ignorant I am about this stuff I don't care about?” Bringing in a host, it's about creating a safe space. The term is psychological safety. We want to create a space where it's safe for you to make a mistake. And we understand that adults need permission to play. They need time. You've got to give them space to sort of gradually walk their way in, it's a progression. Because it's risky. Do you know what everybody else is saying? Other people? Am I going to be judged? How's this going to go down? What's going to happen? And so, the committee is that great step, the best things that can happen because an organization is endorsing. We care. We care about our people. And honestly, it makes business sense, because people are not loyal to companies. They're the people that work with. The people have relationships with. [00:09:36] PF: What does a fun committee consist of? How do you pick one and who's going to be on it and what do they then do? [00:09:42] SN: Great question. So, we had to do this internally. Because we realized we were losing people like what's going on and it’s all about connection, like how do we miss this? So, we started asking our employees. Step one, survey your team, and you probably don't even have to survey them to know who are the extroverts? Who are the people that just love? Like at the water cooler? Or that imaginary water cooler? They would stay on the Zoom call for 10 extra minutes to find out your kid, your dog, what did you do this weekend? When you put the call out, you're going to find somebody who's going to be a champion for this because they're craving that interaction. And then the next step is making sure it's cross department across discipline, is if you're doing it for – if you’re a giant company, it's obviously probably too much. But you know, it goes pretty far, right? So, like our fun committee is from sales and operations and finance, it's about six people cut across the whole company and their focus, and I have a monthly meeting and their agenda is planning quarterly events that will bring the staff together and get them to engage and share. And again, our goal is to create these unstructured, unplanned conversations. So, we're all doing something together. But during that time, it's not so – we’re not trying to hit the dopamine, I got to check a box, get a task done. We're trying to create that environment where there's enough space for people to chat, and people to talk. One piece of advice I strongly encourage is get everybody a camera, got to have cameras. We need to see each other's eyes. And what's so different than Zoom and why we use games, we play games. So, we have a whole host of games that you don't need to install anything on your computer. They're super trivial to play, like, what we tell our people is like your mom has to be able to play this. Right? [00:11:34] PF: That simple or? [00:11:36] SN: Yeah, that's simple, because the game isn't – both, right? Is it's got to feel inclusive, like inclusivity is like our highest value, we say yes, you can play. So, the number one answer to the question is, can I play? Yes. We thought about it, we worked on it. So, your team that's doing this, like one of their next objectives as they're sort of planning events is to start thinking about how does everybody participate, and there's huge opportunity and room for growth, but there's already games and platforms out there. Some of them are a little silly and goofy, but that's okay. The more important thing is, and this is what's different than Zoom, and Zoom, we don't know where to look, and that's a weird thing for humans, like our capacity to see our eyes like we're the only animal scholar, white to the eyes. We watch each other's eyes to know what's important to look at. We're constantly broadcasting nonverbal cues back and forth. And in Zoom, everybody's looking in different directions. [00:12:33] PF: right. Mostly, they're looking at themselves to see like, “Oh my god, can you see that?” [00:12:37] SN: Oh, for sure. And there's a whole unhealthy narcissistic thing about that – when we play a game, I now am directing your attention at an activity, especially if it's a video game, because the graphics are going to fill your screen. And now you're doing something together and you're in sync. Once you get in sync, now the conversations become more natural, they become more, “Oh, alright.” Now, I'm lucky, I work at a video game company. Everybody in my company has a Nintendo Switch. So, we can play really cool games. We can play things like Overcooked or we can play Mario Kart. We could get into these things. The way I rationalize it is, I am in a video game company, and two, do you know what it costs to fly anybody anywhere today? [00:13:25] PF: This is a much, much more affordable way of connection. [00:13:31] SN: Yeah. It's like, “Hey, let's find a way to do this.” Like our tech support supports your game console. How cool is that? If you can’t get in the game, we'll get you in the game. [00:13:40] PF: Some leaders are saying, yes, I know, we've got to do this. We've got to bring people together. But playing games. Yes, it's important, but then we're going to cut it off. It's like, I've worked with a company that does something very similar. They have a monthly meeting. And it's like that one hour is fun. It's done. And so, what about that? How do you continue that keep that kind of mindset going? Where things are yes, we're working, but it does need to be playful, and it does need to be fun and we do need to have some sort of emotional release valve. [00:14:14] SN: So yeah, it's certainly the capstone is a hosted event, right? When you're doing an event, everybody’s like, “Yeah, we're playing, it's fun, we cut it off.” What we are big believers in is habits. One of the things we do at our company and big advocates is the standing Friday coffee meeting, make it if you can. We have basically a dedicated time for people to check in with each other and we're not – work comes up, but what we're trying to do is we've human connection through our communication channels. So, for example, we're a big Slack company. Two super important channels for us are people headlines and raise a hand and I, as an owner, love the raise a hand channel, because they're not like giving me suggestions. People are reasoning and going, “I need help, something's broken.” And it takes a lot of courage, that goes company wide. It takes a lot of courage to stand up in front of every gun, “Hey, there's a problem.” And our behavior is we're going to swarm it and fix it. The person's not the problem. There's a situation that's the problem. Then the person needs help. So, that becomes another way that we support each other. And then the flip side is the headlines channel, as like somebody did an outstanding job, employees can give shout outs that go across the whole company with all these cool reactions and things people do. We're now getting a flavor, a slice of what's happening, what we used to hear in the office like, it boils down to one word, intentionality. Offices were designed and engineered to create social interaction, the watercooler, open planning, yeah, we hated tubes. But what was going on? Those were unstructured conversations that we got to know people's preferences and what they were about and what they did. And so, what we're talking about is, these are some of the tasks that the fun committee can begin to look to be intentional saying, where else can we create opportunities for awareness and connection. So, people feel like, not only they belong, but they are doing something together. The fun activity is a great one. Weekly coffee, share time, and you know, it can be 15 to 20 minutes, it doesn't have to be a lot of time. It's that water cooler time, you can call your water cooler meeting, “Hey, we're having a water cooler meeting show up.” And I really encourage leaders make the time, because there's so much you can't hear through headphones. I mean, just through the work grind, through the meetings, meetings, meetings, meetings, like sometimes you just want to sit back and eavesdrop and listen to people talk to each other, how often do you actually get to hear people talk to each other anymore? [00:16:48] PF: Because when you are working remotely, it does feel like you're just checking off like, “Okay, I just got to get through my to-do list.” And you don't have that natural break in activity and little shift in your mindset that we received when we were working in an office. [00:17:03] SN: And here's the real risk, we're in the middle of the great resignation, is companies are now converting their entire work staff to Fiverr and Upwork employees. Because if I really spend no time with anybody else, and all I'm doing is task work, then I'm happy to do that task for a little more money and slightly better benefits somewhere else. I literally saw that play out is after we had kind of gone through this process and really work through it. Somebody came after our marketing director, super awesome. We'd love him, didn't want to believe. And it came down to the people, is like the team he had built and the connections he had, he just couldn't imagine doing that at the other company and he decided to stay with us. And that was just like, it was such a huge, like vote of confidence and everybody, was a lift for everybody like, wow, we we really do like each other like we really do get along, we really do believe in what we're doing. And how do you put a dollar value on that? I know what it cost me to lose that person in terms of salary and everything else. And if you took just that budget, go pick one of your key people and delete them. There's your budget, what are you going to spend to make sure that doesn't happen? I know that that's easy to say for me, because I can make a decision like that. But a really small level, one of the things that anyone can do, anyone can do is I think make the suggestion, form a fun committee. Do it on our own time, we're happy to do it during lunchtime, and think of other ways to create these channels for people to interact. Especially if you can have events where you get people doing activities and fun things even if they're not fun together. Sometimes even a bad experience could be like, “Hey, we talked about it. Don't do that. That was a dumb game.” We played some awful games. We have sampled a lot of stuff and there are somethings where – [00:18:56] PF: This isn’t working. [00:18:57] SN: They’re like, “What? What were they thinking? They’ve just stolen all of our life, we can’t get it back.” That's one of the resources we love to make available to your office is what's available out there and what they can do, and a playbook for forming the fun committee. [00:19:11] PF: So, I love what you say about like anyone could do it. Because not everyone who listens has a company or is in a position to be like, passing down, here's what we're going to do. So how do you do a grassroots fun committee? How can you start that, whether you're working remotely or working face to face right now? [00:19:28] SN: So, I have to speculate a little bit because in my company, actually, here's what happened. They brought it to me. Right? They're like, we need a fun committee. So, after that first experience for somebody left that felt totally disconnected, and we were all like looking at each other, it was one of my rank and file employees came and said we need a fun committee. We were in a video game business so they were like, “Yeah, fun of course.” We can't be in the fun business and not know what fun is. That would really hypocritical. But we ended up there. It's easy to get there for all the reasons you pointed out. So, bringing a proposal, so I'm an owner, this cost me nothing. It addresses a core concern in the business and the people that are really most affected by it are the people that want to be on this committee and do something about it. That was an easy, “Yes.” Sure, there's times where we've done a lot of things that we're afraid, there's times that come and ask for a budget, but it's always been, I go back to my rule of thumb, what would it cost me to fly one of my employees from Virginia, Kansas City, or Minneapolis to Phoenix for a face to face meeting? Okay, if I use that budget, I can engage my entire team, in a fun activity, done. Why is it so easy to buy plane tickets? We’ll buy plane tickets all day long, maybe it's because it's an expense category. But what about, hey, I'm going to use that expense to create connection. And the part I think some leaders struggle with, and maybe it's because this would be the biggest advice I give to the fun committee, because they did it for me, is the leader doesn't have to do anything, they just have to show up. So, that's where having somebody else has somebody else, why do we hire outside facilitators, it's really hard to be on the team and manage the team. And so, when you do these fun events, is you want to factor that in, is putting the burden on a team member to lead everybody, you can do it. But if you can find somebody outside the organization to do it, it pays bonuses, because people can just relax. They can just kick back and enjoy themselves. [00:21:33] PF: That's awesome. We know that play and fun is good for you. Can you address that a little bit? What does it do for us emotionally, and with our productivity? [00:21:43] SN: So, what I know about play is that it triggers internal motivation. So, we call intrinsic, not extrinsic. Dan Pink wrote a great book on it called Drive if you want to know more. But what play really allows us to do and it turns out, there's actual neural circuitry in our heads to facilitate play. So, this evolved for a very important reason. Play is the system where we find the boundaries of our capability. It really boils down to something Amy Edmondson talked about called impression management, is it's a natural outcome. We want to know what to do, we want to know how to do it. So, what happens when uncertainty hits us, and time pressure? We may not know what to do, and we may not be able to do it, but we clam up and we just get stiff, we choke. Play takes that pressure off and allows us to experiment and explore it. That's actually the space for most creativity flows from it. So, play lets us find the edge, lets us find the boundaries. Play lets us go would it be dumb if – well, let's try it. Where you get in that space is when you get back to play, it really engages that little thing in the back of your head that gets you all stressed out. Because well wait a minute, relax. There's nothing at stake here. Once we're in that relaxed space, our cognitive capacity shoots through the roof along with that our creative ability. We're able to think laterally. There are two types of intelligence and they're orthogonal. They're not related to each other. Linear, this is your classic school fix test. I think Ken Robbins talked about. There's one answer, it's in the back of the book. That's your linear intelligence. But in today's work environment where things change constantly, we need opening or that like, what else could this be? Where else could we go? There's not one answer, there's many answers. Play is the door we walk through to open up into our more divergent, as opposed to convergent intelligence. We're suffering from too much convergent intelligence is that we get tied in a little box, we can't get out of it and stressful. We go into play, we can diverge, and try lots of different things, and that carries over into the work we do. [00:24:08] PF: And this has so many great benefits for us, it helps our work. But it seems like this is something we could also use to bring our friends and family together. Like we could apply this same kind of mentality to connect with our loved ones that we're not seeing. So, how can we translate that into our personal space? [00:24:28] SN: Oh, 100%. I would tell you that what we found and it seems so silly, but it's real. Planning events is hard. And it sounds like, “Oh, we'll just get together.” But what you can do is take the leadership. So, one of the bonuses for like a fun committee is once you start researching what tools are out there to bring people together that do things together, you can take them home because they're not expensive. Some of them are free. And planning a call, setting up a call, and saying we're going to play a game together, we're going to do this together, we're going to structure something we can all share in, I think the big thing that is isn't obvious. Adults actually need permission to play and they get it from their peers. So, one of the other things that you can do is if you can make it safe for me to play, then I can make it safe for you to play. Setting that up being the host and leading that, my experience is people really appreciate it. It makes a huge difference for them and it creates the connections we're creating. [00:25:33] PF: This is terrific. I'm really excited that you're doing this. This is something that we can share with our listeners, I know that you're giving us a download to help them create a fun committee and understand how to do that. Scott as we wrap up, what do you wish for each person out there listening? [00:25:50] SN: The one thought I'd really like to leave your audience with is, you can make a difference, because you care about the people you work with. You can make a difference because you understand how important it is for people to play and get to know each other. You can make a difference because it only takes one person to stand up and be brave, you can make a difference. [END OF INTERVIEW] [00:26:20] PF: That was Scott Novis talking about how to improve your life by adding fun and games to the mix. If you'd like to learn more about Scott, download a free fun committee toolkit or follow him on social media. Just visit our website at livehappy.com and click on the podcast link. A reminder, we still have some great deals on our exclusive Live Happy merch. Through January 14, you can visit the Live Happy store and get 20% off everything in the store. Just enter the code happy2022. That is all we have time for today. We'll meet you back here again next week for an all new episode. And until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every, day a happy one [END]

 Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Creating a Pandemic of Love With Shelly Tygielski [INTRODUCTION] [00:00:03] PF: Welcome to Episode 344 of Live Happy Now. When the pandemic began last year, traditional ways of volunteering and helping others completely disappeared. But today's guest found a way to bring people together by creating a pandemic of her own. I'm your host, Paula Felps. And this week, I'm joined by Shelly Tygielski, a meditation teacher and mom, who started a movement from her kitchen table in March of 2020. As she read through her messages and emails about the ways people were being affected by COVID-19, she saw people filled with fears of losing their jobs, not having enough food, and not being able to pay their bills. But she also saw many people who wanted to help, and she came up with a plan to connect the people who need help with the people who were able to give help. Her efforts went viral, kicking off what became known as Pandemic of Love, a global grassroots mutual aid organization. By March of 2021, Pandemic of Love had matched more than 1.5 million people and had allowed donors to directly give $54 million to those in need. Shelly is here today to talk about how this movement caught fire, how it changed the lives of those who were able to help each other, how it's still thriving today, and how you can be a part of it. [INTERVIEW] [00:01:24] PF: Shelly, welcome to Live Happy Now. [00:01:26] ST: Thank you so much for having me. I'm so happy to be here today. [00:01:29] PF: Well, we have so much to talk about, because you got two big things that I’m really excited about. And so I wondered if, first, we can talk about Pandemic of Love. [00:01:40] ST: Okay. [00:01:41] PF: All right. Well, this is something that is so incredible. People say that 2020 was such a horrible year. And you really found a way to make something beautiful come out of it. So can you explain to us what pandemic of love is? [00:01:54] ST: Sure. So Pandemic of Love, in its simplest iteration, is a mutual aid community. It happens to be global in nature. And what mutual aid is, is it's basically a way for individuals within a community, whether it's a small community or a large one, to transact, and provide access and information to other individuals within that community so that people who are in need can have that need met by somebody who has that piece of the puzzle that they need, so to speak. And people who have excess are able to find people that they can give to. So it really creates this beautiful redistribution of wealth. And we see this in nature all the time, in natural ecosystems, whether it's in a rainforest, or coral reef system, etc., how there's the symbiotic relationships. And for some reason, humans, we used to do that really well when we had that clan mentality, when we were nomadic, when we sort of really communed with nature. But as we became more and more industrialized, as we moved to the suburbs, as we move to the cities, as we became technological creatures, we sort of started getting away from this reliance on one another. So mutual aid really is a fantastic way to get back to the basics, the reality that humans need each other. That we need each other to survive, and we always have. But that, really, in this age of our discussions around self-care, that human beings need something. They need to lean on each other in order to thrive, not just survive. So that's really the framing of it. [00:03:42] PF: Can you explain what it is and how it's set up? [00:03:45] ST: Yeah. So it's simple. There're two forms, if you go to the website, which is pandemicoflove.com. And there's two simple forms, give help, get help. That's it. It's that simple. So if you're in a position, if you're a person that is in a position to fill somebody's gas tank this month, or buy groceries for a week for a family of four, or make sure that somebody doesn't lose their heat this winter. If you're in that kind of a position where you have enough, or a little bit more than enough, and you're able to give, you click on the give help form. And we connect you to somebody that's most likely within your community, sometimes within your state. And if there's no micro community within your geographic area, then it might be somebody that's out of state. But basically, we connect you to somebody that has that very specific need that you've identified that you have the capacity to fill. And the beautiful part about Pandemic of Love is that there's no sort of middleman. In other words, our volunteers are over 4000 volunteers, don't connect you or take the funds and then distribute it to the person in need. But rather, we connect the individual in need and the individual that is willing to help them directly. So they have to have a conversation. They have to have a human connection. And I think that is really what resonated with a lot of people during the pandemic, especially when this organization started, because so many people, of course, wanted to be able to help. But the traditional ways of being able to volunteer were not available to us. And people just didn't know how they could help. But also, it was a time of disconnection. So the fact that we were able to connect people did really more than just pay people's bills. It helped to create friendships and reduce loneliness, and really allow a person who may have not been as affected by the socioeconomic impacts of the pandemic, walk a mile in somebody else's shoes that may be living just a few blocks from where they are, and really understand sort of the plight of many Americans and many people all over the world who are just really struggling to survive on a day to day basis. [00:05:58] PF: So how did you set it up and get it rolling? Because there were so many obstacles during that time. As you said, we weren't able to do the traditional methods of just going out and doing things. So how did you get this whole ball rolling? [00:06:14] ST: Well, I didn't overthink it. And that's really the key here. I think a lot of times we overthink things and prevent ourselves from actually ever launching or doing anything. I basically just looked to the people in my community. I didn't set out to say like, “Hey, I'm going to build this giant mutual aid community that's global. And we're going to do this.” No. I basically said, “Look, I know that there are people within my local community that have needs. And I know that there are people who have more than enough.” And so I really just want to connect the two of them. How can I do that most efficiently and not get in the way? And I thought, “Okay, I'll just create two simple Google Forms, which is what I did. And the forms, again, were give help and get help. And they just had very simple questions. And as the forum started to come in, I started to recruit volunteers, people who had extra time to give, to help to connect people, to read through the forms of the people in need and connect them in a very respectful manner to people who were able to fill that need, and make sure that that transaction took place. And what happened was, is that once I posted those two links, those two links went pun intended, but they went viral. And they went all around the world and came back. And people like Maria Shriver, and people like Kristen Bell, and just a lot of different influencers began to repost the links. And before I knew it, something that I had just started for the local community became a movement, a movement that is now in 280 communities around 16 countries, and that has connected over 2 million people, and that has transacted over $16 million amongst those people directly, which is pretty amazing. [00:08:00] PF: That’s incredible. [00:08:01] ST: Yeah. [00:08:02] PF: Why do you think it caught on so well? [00:08:05] ST: I definitely think timing was one part of it. I think the fact that I started this on March 14th, while people were still sort of scrambling to figure out like, “What is this? And how long is this going to happen? Are we going to be in lockdown for a week?” I was already in that mode of like organizing and mobilizing, because I had done it so many times before, post-natural disasters for my own community as a community organizer, after mass shootings, and so forth. So I already had sort of those tools in my toolbox. And so I think timing was a really big part of it. The fact that we were, if you will, first to market was huge. And I think that because it was like organized well. I think that my 20 plus years in the corporate world certainly did me some favors in terms of helping me figure out how to organize data, and efficiently connect people, and manage processes, and scale things, right? So that was certainly very helpful as well. [00:09:05] PF: Now, I know that you have a lot of stories from people who benefited from receiving. What about the people who were giving? What did it do to the people who are able to offer something during a time when we really needed to connect with one another? [00:09:21] ST: Well, I think it gives you a certain measure of gratitude and a reality check. Because I think so many of us spend most of our lives living in a bubble. We really get to this point where we want to just create a life of comfort for ourselves. And I don't mean necessarily comfort like in riches. But I mean, we just want to avoid, as human beings, as much discomfort as possible, right? And so we don't make the effort to say go into places that we may feel are not for us, or are beneath us, if you will, or that we wouldn't be welcome. Or we tell ourselves these narratives and these like stories about why we wouldn't want to have a difficult conversation with somebody or probe the neighboring community and understand like what is really going on there and how can we change the systems or effectuate change in those communities. And so I think that it gave people a lens into what other people's lives are really like, other people's lives that are in their ZIP code. And I think for many people, it was an eye opener. It was really just a shift. An opportunity to shift and to lean into the fact that, “Yes, I'm lucky. Yes, I should have an immense amount of gratitude. But also, I really need to be more aware about what is happening in my own community, and how I can actually, yes, effect change, and make the difference in the life of even one person.” And that is enough. If we all just did that every single day, we made a difference in the lives of just one person a day. The toll of that is huge. [00:11:06] PF: Yeah. What an incredible ripple effect it can have. And speaking of ripple effects, did you anticipate that it would still be going on this later? And that it's going to continue to go on? [00:11:18] ST: Yeah. Well, because I think that the way that we designed it was that we wanted to make sure that there are community leaders and that people are really building community. Like they're building connections with each other and creating true safety nets that can be long lasting. Typically speaking, mutual aid organizations tend to rise up like after natural disasters, and after like pandemics, obviously, but after like something harrowing happens within a community and then they sort of fizzle away. And the idea that we could possibly always have this notion and this beautiful system for giving and receiving without the stigma of feeling like we're lacking, or that we aren't enough, or that we have issues with asking for help, which are all associated with the culture that we live in. If we can kind of build that safety net within our own micro-communities, then yes, it could be something that is sustainable. So it has surprised me in a way that it went on this long. But I also recognize that people were finally receiving something and enabled to give something in a way that they weren't ever able to do it before with just the traditional structures that have been put in place for giving, like nonprofit organizations, or religious organizations, etc. [00:12:41] PF: And I know for myself, my giving shifted with the pandemic, because I really did feel that sense of I want to help people in my own backyard. I know on a level there's always been that need there. But this really magnified it for me. And so how has it changed entire communities for people to do that instead of maybe – Well, maybe they're still sending money to overseas or other causes that they support, but to really look at what's going on in their own community and realize how great the need is. How has that changed things? [00:13:14] ST: Well, there's a beautiful Buddhist proverb that says, “Tend to the area of the garden that you can reach.” [00:13:19] PF: Oh, I love that. [00:13:21] ST: And really, I think that's where it hits home for most people. They realize, “I'm so busy tending to gardens that are not even within my vicinity, and that I'm so busy also looking at what other people are doing in their own gardens, instead of looking at my own wilting garden. And if I could focus on making sure that the people within my ripples within my circles of influence are okay, that they have enough, that they have their needs met, that they are not struggling to survive, then everybody within my circle of influence can have the opportunity to thrive. [00:14:02] PF: That's such a fantastic mindset to adopt. And so where is it now? Where's Pandemic of Love at? And what are you seeing for the future? [00:14:11] ST: So Pandemic of Love is we have an incredible advisory board. We are still very active, as I said, in micro-communities around the world. And kind of where we're shifting on a macro level is we want to be just the experts, if you will, or the go-to for people about mutual aid. So what we're working on is creating these templates that are replicable and exportable, and sort of mutual aid in a box if you will, so that people could just come to our website and download very simple instructions and best practices and then be plugged into communities that can continue to share best practices, etc. And essentially just continue to build out what the mutual aid structure could look like if it existed in all of our communities. And if it was formalized, if it was institutionalized even within municipalities. Like just like we have a city hall, and a fire department, and a library. Wouldn't it be wonderful for every single community to also have a formalized or institutionalized mutual aid community in a way for people to be able to just give? [00:15:26] PF: That's terrific and a wonderful vision you have. That's so impressive that you're able to just unfold all this and let us walk into it and help one another. [00:15:34] ST: I mean, it's a collective vision, really. It really has been like this beautiful building block process. Again, it started with just the proverbial throwing a pebble in the water and seeing what kind of a ripple it can generate and the contribution of so many other pebbles that have been thrown into the water at the same time. So that's the beautiful part about this, is that we've been learning how to fly the plane as we're building it. [00:16:03] PF: And you're flying it very beautifully, and building it so well. So I know, yeah, we will put a landing page on this and let people know how they can participate and take them directly to your site so that they can do more with it. [00:16:16] ST: Thank you so much. I appreciate that. [OUTRO] [00:16:21] PF: That was Shelly Tygielski, talking about the movement she launched called Pandemic of Law. Next week, we're going beyond the Pandemic of Love movement and talking to Shelly about her new book, Sit Down to Rise Up: How Radical Self-Care Can Change the Community. If you'd like to learn more about Shelly, be part of Pandemic of Love, or follow her on social media. Visit our website at live happy.com and click on the podcast link. And if you still have some holiday shopping to do, we've got you covered. Visit our store at livehappy.com and check out our new Live Happy beanies and hoodies so you can give the gift of happiness to everyone on your list. We offer free shipping on orders of $75. And if you use the code LIVEHAPPYNOW, we’ll give you 10% off your entire order. That's all we have time for today. We'll meet you back here again next week for an all new episode. And until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one. [END]