TOP S2 E19 | Judgement

 

Welcome back to another episode of the Origination Point Podcast with Bill de la Cruz! In this episode, Bill discusses the impact of COVID-19 and how it has affected us as individuals. Enjoy the podcast and be sure to subscribe and share with a friend!

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Hope And Healing

How It All Started

I started this show a number of years ago to talk about the origination point of things like biases, stereotypes, and judgments, and not just how they originated, but thinking about how they impact how we see each other and are seen by other people. As we have been in a period of social unrest, the pandemic, the politicizing of wearing masks, and the politics of division in our country, I’ve come to realize that what people called normalcy a couple of months ago has completely changed pretty much everyone all over the world. When you add economic unsurety, racial unrest, and a country that’s divided, it makes for a very challenging time.

It took me a few months to even think about, “What do I want to say about all this?” I’ve been immersed in the work of creating connections with people for most of my career. The first few months from March 2020, April through May, I was literally in some ways paralyzed because all my work dried up. I had to figure out how to reinvent myself and think about how do I deliver what I used to do in front of people over a screen. How can that even be effective?

For me, this inner self-reflection caused me to retreat. I retreated back into what was most close to me, my family and very close friends. I started to think, “What is going on here? What is happening in our world and this disruption of 2020 that everyone has experienced?” That phrase, “Hindsight is 20/20,” is interesting. Hopefully, we’ll all be able to sit back and say, “2020 was quite the lens to look at life through.”

As I sit here and am coming out of some of the most challenging times for me, I have to reflect on a lot of things. The first thing I want to reflect on is talking about what we consider normal. The idea of that is interesting because what normal is is essentially a pattern of behaviors or things that we do throughout our day that become normal. Everyone’s normal is different. It doesn’t matter how close you are to another person unless you’re with them 24/7 doing exactly the same things that they are. It’s quite interesting to talk about both the individual normal and the collective normal. How do they or how do they not fit together?

From an individual perspective, when I think about my normal is a pattern of behaviors that I’ve done most days, weeks, or months. Any disruption in that normalcy causes trauma because it causes me to be outside of what I consider to be a regular day. When the pandemic hit, normalcy for everyone around the world pretty much changed. I even remember sitting here in the United States as I watched it travel across China, Europe, and then Spain, thinking and wondering, “How is this going to affect us?” I never thought about how it would affect me because I didn’t think it was until it did.

The way that it affected me is that my work as a belonging and inclusion consultant pretty much stopped in February and early March 2020 because most of my clients had contracted with me to do in-person work. As the states were shutting down and people were told to stay home and work from home, I found that for a few months, I had no work. When I didn’t have work for the first few weeks, maybe even a month or more, I was paralyzed and I didn’t do much of anything. I binge-watched TV, probably overate, didn’t work out enough, and didn’t take care of myself.

It was hard because not only had I lost the normalcy of the patterns of behavior and actions I took every day, I couldn’t create any new ones. I couldn’t even reach out and hang out with people that I had a relationship with because we were all supposed to be quarantining. When all of that happened, I didn’t know what to do. For a little while, I did nothing. As nothing continued to grow, I realized that I couldn’t keep going like this because I had to live a life and pay my bills. I had to figure out how am I going to work and engage in a community that was completely shut off from each other because we wanted to be safe and didn’t want to make each other sick.

That’s why I didn’t do any episodes since then because I have so much in my head and I had it all jumbled up and didn’t know where to start. Hopefully, what I’m sharing with you will be cohesive and something that will support your own growth. At any rate, I’m at a place now where it’s time to share. I want to start by talking about trauma.

Trauma: The Byproduct Of Normalcy Disruption

One of the byproducts that I’ve seen of disruption of normalcy is trauma. Trauma is so much of an emotional charge that it overloads the body’s capacity to deal with it. Any type of highly stressful or emotionally charged experience can create trauma. Being laid off or fired from your job creates trauma. Not being able to pay your rent creates trauma. Not knowing how to feed yourself or your children creates trauma. All of these things happened because of things outside of my control. I didn’t plan around a pandemic or none of my life was planned around a pandemic. I had to figure out how do I adapt to a culture where there are no models for it. I have never experienced this and most of the people in my life haven’t experienced this.

One of the byproducts of the disruption of normalcy is trauma. Trauma is so much of an emotional charge that it overloads the body's capacity to deal with it. Share on X

For all of you who are reading this, the real question is, how are you processing your own trauma? Are you even aware of the impact that it’s having on you? Do you have emotional highs and lows? Do you find yourself getting angry at the drop of a hat? Do you find yourself in arguments that you might look at later and think how nonsensical they were?

The idea of trauma is when your emotional being gets overloaded with energy and can’t process it anymore, then it goes inward. When it goes inward, it starts to eat away at our self-confidence, self-awareness, or ability to be fully functioning. When you take away the things that you did during the day regarding going out for coffee, going for a walk, working out or the things that allowed you to move through and release this energy if those were gone, then now you’re holding onto it and it’s building up.

For folks who also have any level of anxiety, depression, or things that are already part of their being, adding this added level of trauma creates so much energy that it could overwhelm anybody. It’s important for all of us to be aware that everyone is going through some level of trauma. I feel very blessed that I haven’t had to worry about not being able to pay my mortgage or not knowing how I’m going to eat. Many people in my community don’t have that same luxury.

It makes me want to do something and yet I have to be careful because I only have so much energy as well. I need to make sure that if I’m supporting people, I can follow through regardless of what it is that I’m doing. As I had to reinvent myself, I realized that this is all about adaptability. We are in a time where being flexible and adaptable is the only way we’re going to get through this. Everything that I used to do doesn’t exist in the same way.

I’m thinking about how I look at this through the lens of creating a life versus normalcy because every day I am doing something different or I’m doing what I used to do differently. I’m having to adapt and be flexible as I move through my days because nothing’s normal. Even working on a Zoom call is not normal. It’s something that I’m adjusting to and doing. If I find balance in it, then it becomes something that I do.

Rather than looking at it as the new normal, I’m going to look at it as these are the behaviors that I’m doing now, knowing that they may change tomorrow and something may come up and I can’t do the things that are normal. The way for me to process that is to let go of this idea of normal and look at being flexible, life is fluid, and I have to be adaptable.

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The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World

Even the idea of adaptability is an interesting concept because a gentleman named Ron Heifetz wrote a book on adaptive leadership. In that book, he talks about two types of problems. He talks about technical problems and adaptive problems. Technical problems are things that we have the answer for. As hard as it was to go from going to an office or working with a group of people in a building, when we all switch to Zoom, WebEx, Google Hangouts, Microsoft Teams, or whatever medium we use.

We all had to shift into something that was more technical because even though we weren’t familiar with those ways of communicating and meeting, we had the answer for it. We could figure out how to hook up our computers and get our cameras working and get a Zoom or a WebEx account and figure out how to turn our camera on and be able to communicate with people and then use breakout rooms or whiteboards. Technical problems are things that we have the answer for.

Adaptive problems are different because no one has the answer, and I will submit to you that no one has the answer about how to get through this pandemic that we’re in. No one has the answer for the economic unsurety that many people are living through now with more and more layoffs and unemployment claims. I certainly know that nobody has the answer to social unrest around race and being Black in America.

The Most Adaptive Time

We are in the most adaptive time that I’ve ever experienced in my life. What I have learned about adaptability is it is ambiguous and unpredictable because when we’re in an adaptive mode, we’re constantly asking questions and we’re constantly getting new information. In an adaptive mode, the importance of having broader conversations is important because the premise, from my perspective, is that the answers are out there. I used to say the answers are in the room. Although I’m not in rooms that much anymore, I’ll say the answers are out there in our communities.

No one has the answer to adaptive problems, and we are in the most adaptive time that we've ever experienced in our lives. Share on X

It’s just we don’t always have the conversation that elicits the engagement that can help us move through it because we’re stuck in this divisive nature that we’re in or this politics of divisiveness where we have misconceptions or different perceptions. We spend most of our energy trying to get the other person to change or realize that my point of view is the correct one. From an adaptive perspective, the dialogue has to increase and you have to bring people from all sides of the issue. From the people who are the true believers to the most skeptical have to be in the room for the conversations, whether we’re talking about a pandemic, wearing masks, an election, or racial unrest. There is a lot of talent, energy, and passion for people to take action.

Only for many people, the action that we’re taking is divisive. It’s about changing someone’s point of view because we believe that ours is correct. From my perspective, this work of engaging our humanity and creating connections, and deepening our relationships are more about accepting that there are multiple perspectives. I can appreciate and accept someone’s perspective even if I don’t agree with them.

That is not always easy because some of the things that I hear go against my belief systems or my values, but I still have to sit in that and think about, “What’s the question that I want to ask? What is the piece of understanding that I’m missing from this person’s perspective? More specifically, what are the judgment, stereotypes, and assumptions I’m making about what’s going on here? Am I truly present at the moment or am I operating from a story that I’m making up in my head about what’s happening at the moment?”

When we talk about the ability to be adaptable, we’re talking about the ability to be open, have critical self-reflection, ask questions, and accept that there are multiple ways of viewing the world. This idea of this division that we’re now caught up in goes all the way from our high-level leaders in this country all the way into our communities, workplaces, churches, schools, and community groups. It’s because leadership sets the standard. The standard of leadership in this country is very divided. It’s no surprise to me that that division permeates all the way down into our communities.

As I think about this divisiveness that’s happening and I understand that we’re an adaptable time, I keep wondering, “What is the thing that we need to do? What is the message that we need to get? What are the lessons that are being shared here?” It’s as if the whole planet is in a reset saying, “Human beings, you can’t keep going like this. You can’t keep treating each other like you’ve been treating each other. You can’t keep treating the planet like you’ve been treating it. We have to sit down and talk.”

Human beings can't keep treating each other and the planet like they have. We have to sit down and talk. Share on X

It’s interesting that we’ve had to spend months with a mask over our mouths. It’s almost like a message to stop talking and listen, stop talking and pay attention, or just stop talking and see what is around us and experience what’s happening in our country and in our world now. It affects all of us. To sit and try to blame a person, a group, or whatever it is that you’re choosing to push away from you doesn’t support our ability to move through this together. All it’s doing is saying, “This is someone else’s fault. I’m a good,” whatever descriptor you want after that.

We’re All In This Together

What I’m realizing is that we are all in this together. That’s a phrase that people use over and over again. The reality is that when I see us working together, we’re not working together. We’re working for our own gain. We’re not looking at the collective or the community and seeing what’s at stake here right now than this time that we’re in. It’s so much bigger than an election and a pandemic. Our whole societal structure is being challenged right now. We’re all being asked to look at how I engage in the community. How do I show up in a way that embraces differences? That’s what we’re asking and talking about.

When we’re talking about healing from trauma and regaining patterns of behavior, that can at least give people some security that not everything is gone. Many things will never go back to the same way they were. I don’t think we’ll ever do work the same way we did with everyone going to buildings because most businesses have seen that their businesses can still function with people working from home.

The most challenging part is our educational system because that’s affecting children. There’s no national conversation about what’s happening in education in many states. It’s either too restrictive, too loose or people aren’t given an opportunity to adapt and see, “How do we have school and live with a pandemic at the same time?” Sometimes even these ideas of moving forward with something like that create conflict with somebody else because their perspective is, “If I go back to work, my life is at stake.”

The mindsets and the narratives that we have in so many ways are driving what we’re doing. Each one of these things, trauma, the loss of normalcy, and the divisive nature, are all pieces that are wrapped up in our inability to adapt. This idea of being adaptable is key if we’re going to move through this. If you’re going to engage in a conversation with somebody and you’re reading this, talk about your struggles with adaptation or how you recreate a life when the normal things you used to do were no longer there. What did you feel? What did you think? What did you do to placate yourself? For me, I ate too much, drank too much, watched too much TV, and just sat around whenever I could and got lazy.

To adapt to that means I have to do the opposite. I have to exercise more, go outside, care for myself, be aware of what I’m thinking, and understand that my narrative drives my behavior and actions. There were some times when I had this, “This is hopeless,” narrative. “I’ll never get through this. I don’t even know what to do. I don’t know how to do it.”

When I had that narrative in my head, my actions followed it where I didn’t do anything or have no motivation. I decided that there was a certain point in these last few months where I’m going to give up. Even though I knew I couldn’t because I had obligations and things to do for whatever period of time, it went up and down and maybe lasted for months. I would get into these patterns of doing nothing.

Finally, I had some breakthroughs when I facilitated a race conversation on Zoom and it went pretty well. I then had one where I facilitated another conversation about normalizing the bias conversation. I started to make more connections with people. After a few months of doing this, I’ve realized that creating connections and staying in relationships with people even over Zoom is possible.

In some ways, it’s expanded my reach because I’ve been able to work with people all across the world sitting in my home office. It’s thinking about your own level of adaptability and most importantly, what’s driving your actions. What’s the mindset you have that’s getting you the results that you have? If you want different results, how do you shift your thinking?

TOP S2 E19 | Judgement
Judgement: If you want different results, shift your thinking. It’s thinking about your own level of adaptability and, most importantly, what’s driving your actions.

 

For a number of years in my career, I’ve worked doing my best to understand the human change process. How do we go through change? How do we process through challenging times like the ones that we’re in now? How do we adapt? What are the things that we’re thinking when we’re in higher states of trauma or emotion? It’s been fascinating because there are so many ways as human beings that we’re alike when we’re processing trauma that we get stuck on a few little differences and don’t see our connections with each other.

One of the things I’ve learned through my own growth as a human being and through supporting others is that our narratives are driving our behaviors. The things and the ways that we think drive the results that we get. In organizational culture, in a lot of development work, we spend a lot of time attempting to change people’s behaviors. Take a behavior that wasn’t having the impact that you want, try a new one, and see what happens.

The challenge of that approach is that if we don’t work on our narrative or our mindset, the mind will always overrule the behavior. If I learn a tool that will help me to grow and it’s just a practical application that has nothing to do with changing my thinking, then my chances of successfully implementing that practice go down. It’s because I don’t have the strength in my being from my brain, narrative, and mindset to say that this will create the change I desire. “It’s just a practice that somebody told me. It’s something I learned on the internet. Meditate for five minutes a day and your world will change. Do yoga and you will be more flexible. Work out and it’ll affect you this way.”

What I’m saying is do all those things and also do some skill and muscle-building around the narrative or mindset that causes you to want those practices. If I’m doing my yoga practice, I have to remember that it’s more effective if I put myself in the mindset of this is for my growth, for my healing, and for me to stretch and be flexible, and even thinking about how do I take that mindset from my yoga practice into my personal life? When I’m meditating, it’s about deep reflection and not from the point of having to even be conscious of everyone in my thoughts, but more from the perspective of being aware that I have these thoughts. Can I stay in that deep place of meditation and silence while these thoughts are continually processing through my brain?

As I meditate more frequently, then do the thoughts become less frequent or more frequent? When I’m working out, do I have a mindset that I’m doing this because I have to because if I don’t, I’m going to get unhealthy? Do I have the mindset that I’m doing this because I want to and I get joy from my workouts? Part of what I want you to consider thinking about is how does your mindset drive the actions and the outcomes that you’re getting? If your mindset is one of divisiveness, “I’m going to change people’s minds,” or, “They’re wrong if they don’t think like me,” then chances are the results that you’ll get is you’ll attract people like you into your life.

It’s not a question of good or bad or right or wrong because even those are judgments and those are subjective judgments based on the person’s perception. The important measurement is to look at the impact. What’s the impact of that behavior connected to that mindset is having in your life? If the impact doesn’t match the intent, then what do you need to do differently? Again, that’s a concept that I can take into my personal life.

It's not a question of good or bad or right or wrong, because even those are subjective judgments based on the person's perception. The important measurement is to look at the impact. Share on X

I did a workshop a few days ago and I got a call from one of the organizers who said, “Thank you for doing that, but it was completely off-point. That’s not what we talked about. It was upsetting. I don’t think it went very well.” I was surprised because I thought I nailed it pretty well. In the course of the conversation, I realized that what this person’s intent was in terms of what they wanted me to do was not what I heard. I heard them say something different. I had to take a step back and start to think about it. What did I hear from this person that was so different than what they experienced?

As I used critical self-reflection, I started to think about, they said that they wanted bias training, but what I heard is, “I want you to work on this incident that came up.” When I worked on the incident, it didn’t meet the needs of this particular planning person in terms of the whole bias conversation. I’m telling you that story because the way I had to process it was I had to talk to them and I had to own it and accept it and say, “There was a misstep and it was mine because I realized when I got off track, I never got back in and asked for clarity. I didn’t check back in and say, “Is this what your expectations are?” I didn’t even ask for the outcomes.”

I had to own it and I owned it. I apologized and said, “Are there ways that we can move forward?” This person said they would get back to me. The idea of connecting your mindset and your narratives to your actions, when you couple that with critical self-reflection, it enables us to be able to deeply look at what the intention that I had and what was the impact. If the impact doesn’t match, then what do I need to do differently? In this case, the impact that I received in feedback did not match the intent that I had.

I want to explain the intent and impact a little bit because, for me, this is what it means. Intent is aspirational. Intent is I go into an interaction with somebody, do a development workshop for somebody and my intention is before it even happens. That’s why it’s aspirational. I think about what I want to happen, what I want people to walk out with, and what experiences I’m going to provide so that people can create these connections.  

Impact is factual. The impact is what happened. In the workshop that I shared with you, the intention that I had did not match the impact. Part of shifting that was apologizing, realizing that I made a misstep, and owning it. Part of it is doing it and not judging or shaming or blaming myself. It’s realizing that I am an imperfect human being and I will never be perfect at this stuff called life. Somehow, I have to step out of berating myself by judging, shaming, or blaming myself when I make a misstep because I’m going to make them. That’s a process that is accessible to anyone.

A Mindset, A Thought, A Belief, And An Action

If you think about your mindset and follow it all the way through to the actions that you’re getting. You have a mindset, a thought, a belief, and an action. What are the actions? What are the results that you’re getting based on the narratives that you have? All of our mindsets have been impacted by this lack of normalcy also. We’re questioning and thinking about things in a way that we haven’t had to because we had all of our patterns of behavior and they were set and good.

It’s thinking about how to best move through a time when there’s a lot more unsurety than there is surety about what’s going to happen with the pandemic, racial unrest, an election, and divisive culture that we all live in. A lot of what I want to say is that I believe it’s possible for us to get through this and to get through it as a community. That’s why everyone doing their own work is so important. The idea of division is rooted in fear and loss.

In the last few months that I’ve worked, I’ve worked with hundreds of people. Regardless of what it is, the stories I hear can go into one of those categories, either fear or loss. I was having a conversation with a group of folks and they were talking about fear more from an external perspective that people are afraid of things outside of themselves. My experience with fear and people is more about how I get treated.

I’ll slip into the racial conversation to talk about fear. People are being asked to share their truth and then people share their truth. The person that they share it with either gets offended or hears something that doesn’t sound right, we then demean and denigrate each other, and then the conversation ends. We walk away even more upset because the person won’t talk to us now. Fear is not so much about making a mistake because in race work, bias work, and belonging and inclusion work, whatever you want to call it, I’m going to make mistakes or missteps.

If I make a misstep and somebody beats me up with it, then the chances of me wanting to go out and put myself out there are going to go down. I don’t want to get beat up for sharing my truth when somebody says, “Tell me your truth about race, gender, going to school, having a job,” or whatever it is. Again, if you think about your own self, how do fear and loss play out in your life? Everyone has suffered some form of loss in this lack of normalcy.

For some people, it’s to the very extreme of having family members who have lost their lives. You have this whole continuum of fear and loss. Rather than play oppression Olympics and decide who’s better or who’s worse, when do we get to a place of accepting that our fears and our loss are going to be as diverse as our humanity?

What’s needed is the ability for us to talk to each other or engage in dialogue that allows us to be vulnerable or expressive and touch each other through our hearts and not our heads. What I encourage us all to think about is, “What is my role in what’s happening? What’s the role that I’m playing? Am I being divisive or inclusive? Am I denigrating people or accepting them for who they are?”

TOP S2 E19 | Judgement
Judgement: What’s needed is for us to talk to each other or engage in dialogue that allows us to be vulnerable or expressive and touch each other through our hearts and not our heads.

 

The Idea Of Judgement

I want to go back a minute to the judgment piece because that plays a key role in what I asked. The idea of judgment is not about stopping judging because human beings were always judging. It would be impossible for me to stop doing that. What happens when I judge another person, though, is that I’m making up a story about them based on how I have categorized them. It could be by race, age, gender, body, language, accent, how they’re dressed, smell, and look. When we’re talking about judgment, we’re moving way beyond race.

As soon as I start judging you, I’m no longer present with you because judgment lives in my head. When I start judging you, I interact with you based on the story I’m making up about you versus the authentic interaction we’re having. It’s not that I judge less. It’s just that I’m more aware of when I slip into judgment. I constantly work on these practices of saying to myself, “You started judging that person. Can you let it go and come back and be present?” The only way we’re going to get through divisiveness is to be present for each other.

When you think about your own judgments, stereotypes, and own assumptions, all of those essentially are words that describe the fact that what you’re doing cognitively when you’re in those spaces is we’re making up stories about each other. We take those stories and they become truth, and then we act based on the stories. It goes back to what I said about what’s the narrative that’s driving your behaviors. The narratives, in some cases, are rooted in a judgment, a stereotype, a bias, or an assumption that we’re having about each other based on how we’re socialized or an interaction that I had with a small number of people from that group. I then extrapolate their behavior to everyone.

This work that I’m sharing with you, I have a hard time calling it work because it’s not work, it’s more around processes. It’s more around this self-reflection approach. It is to think about how my narratives drive the actions and outcomes I’m getting. In my own personal growth work, I found that question about how my narratives or thoughts drive the outcomes and the actions I am getting a great starting place in terms of looking through my behaviors?

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Finding the Origination Point: Understanding Our Biases to Create a More Peaceful World

In my book, Finding the Origination Point: Understanding Our Biases to Create a More Peaceful World, I put a worksheet in there that I did myself. It’s basically a self-assessment of my thoughts, behaviors and actions. There are four columns that start with my thought, then my behavior, then my action, and then my outcome. For example, my thought is, “People make me mad.” That was one of the thoughts I had growing up and supported my victim mentality. My behavior was I was standoffish and not willing to get to know other people. My action was interactions that did not go very well. The outcome was negative relationships.

This was a pattern of behavior that I replicated over and over again until I started to realize that if I wanted to change the outcome and my action, I had to start by changing my thoughts or my narratives. This work is about practice and it’s not about perfection. The reason I do this work is because I want to make the world a more humane place. That’s what drives me to do this show, write a book, talk to people, and dive deep into their emotional sharing. I want to do this through conversations and through connections. Even something like this quick self-assessment tool where you look at your thought, behavior, actions, and outcomes can support you in taking action.

When we’re doing personal growth work, taking personal action or taking steps like this is a very active thing to do. The beginning of this process always starts with self-actualization. That means taking action for yourself. This initial step is looking at what is creating barriers to successful relational interactions or however you define that. For me, it was that initial thought that people make me mad. I then had to go from there.

I’ll share one more with you so you can get an idea of how this works. My thought was judging other people. There were lots of judgments about everybody. My behavior was I didn’t allow people to get close and I think the worst of them. I make up stories about them based on the judgments. My actions are I didn’t expose or open myself to other people. I didn’t allow them to open themselves up to me. The outcome that I was getting was no trust in others or myself to build relationships.

The idea of this process that I’m asking you to do is all designed around understanding the power of narrative in terms of what we’re seeing in our lives. Right now, a lot of the narratives that we’re seeing are very divisive in our country, communities, workplaces, and schools. For me, the continuation of my own work is to think about how we figure out how to get back to the middle or that place of collaboration and acceptance and move away from thinking that we’re so divided. Even that’s a narrative that we use to perpetuate a sense of division between ourselves and other people.

When I think about the importance of this one process, I go to the America that we live in now, and we will not get through this division unless we’re willing to do our own work about understanding how our narratives or mindsets perpetuate the division that we have in many places in our country right now. I will remind us all that that which we want to create is within us. It’s upon us to resurface that part of ourselves that’s compassion and empathy, allowing us to sit in someone else’s story outside of judgment, blame, and shame.

Hindsight Is 2020

The last thing I want to share with you is I’ve been thinking about the phrase, “Hindsight is 20/20,” and I look at where we are in October 2020. I have to look critically at my own hindsight this 2020. What have I learned? How have I shown up and worked through the disruption of my own normalcy? How am I perpetuating the divisiveness around racial conversations? How am I creating bridges for myself and others to meet in the middle and have a real conversation?

As you go through these practices and think about where we are and what the message is around this huge reset that we’re seeing on our whole planet, one of them has to be for us to find compassion and empathy for each other and move off of us against them, and realize that we are in this together. This planet is something that we all have to take responsibility for. The beauty, compassion, empathy, and love that we want are within all of us, it’s about how we access it.

This planet is something that we all have to take responsibility for. The beauty, compassion, empathy, and love that we want are within all of us. It's about how we access it. Share on X

I’m going to leave you with that. I’m going to encourage you to create some practices, have a conversation with somebody, talk about what you’re feeling, mend a relationship, clean something up, and do something. Don’t just read this and then put it away until the next episode comes up. Go out and create a daily practice. Do your own self-assessment. Start to journal your narratives, judgments, or stereotypes and see what you find. Be compassionate and loving to yourself. I will talk to you again shortly. Take care, everybody. Thanks for reading.

 

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