S4EP08: Journey Through 100 Episodes: Resilience, Growth, and Presence

What has our journey of 100 podcast episodes taught us about success, failure, and resilience? 

As we celebrate this significant milestone, we take you behind-the-scenes to share our experiences, growth, and the rich, life-changing lessons learned along the way. From the launch of the podcast and the evolution of our programs, to the overwhelming support from our ardent listeners, we've come a long way. 

As we reminisce about the dramatic changes over the past two and a half years, we stress the importance of persistence, even when the going gets tough. Discover how shifting perspectives and overcoming fear has helped us stay consistent with our podcast and maintain an unwavering commitment to our journey.

We explore the transformative power of embracing the present moment in our personal lives and how it has propelled the growth of our podcast and business. Finally, we take a moment to express our heartfelt gratitude to everyone who has stood by us, helped us navigate through the toughest times, and celebrated our victories. 

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:06

Hi and welcome to the Becoming Trauma-Informed podcast where we help you understand how your past painful experiences are affecting your current reality and how you can shift those so you can create your desired future. I'm Dr Lee, and both myself and our team at the Institute for Trauma and Psychological Safety are excited to support you on your journey. We talk about all the things on this podcast. No topic gets left uncovered. So extending a content warning to you before we get started if you notice yourself getting activated while listening, invitation to take care of yourself and to pause, skip ahead a bit or just check out another episode, let's dive in. Hey y'all, welcome to this week's episode. I am in tears because this week's episode has me very emotional, because it's our hundredth episode of the podcast. What it is just wild. It feels so wild to me that we have four seasons, we're in the middle of season four and we've done a hundred episodes of a podcast. If you told my teenage self that I would be that consistent, I would have laughed because I wouldn't have believed you. And I just want to reflect back a little bit on the podcast on these last several months. We're in the season of leadership and the last several episodes have been with guests. I wanted to do this one solo just because I wanted to just share some of the lessons that have come through for me in doing this podcast and in the last two and a half years we started this. The podcast really launched March 2021. So we're about yeah, is that right? 2020, 2021, 2020, 2020. I can't remember. I'm sitting here going how long has it been Right? No, yeah, march 2021, because it's been two years in like a few months. I was like why can't I math today? Anyway, it's been two and a half years and it feels like that, and so I want to just get into some of the things that are coming up. And actually, you know, a lot of the topics I'm going to touch on today are things that I have been vibing on, just like sharing and preaching, teaching, talking on, and are safe to be seen.

Speaker 1: 2:19

Pop up experience it's a 10 day experience that at the beginning of August, I went to our team and I said, hey, I want to do this. You know, middle August and we promoted it for like a couple of days and we've got almost 40 people in there. It has been phenomenal. It has been an experience for me that has really shown me Like I've seen the growth and I've seen the depth and the shifts that have happened inside of me over the last several years, and so, and really in like the last year, this last year.

Speaker 1: 2:49

You know there's a reason that season four is the season of leadership, because this last year has really been about how do I lead myself, how do I want to lead myself, who do I want to be and how do I lead others, how do I want to be in community and in relationship with others? And so, you know, I just kind of want to vibe on that today. Like I've got a couple of notes here, but I really kind of just want to pour out what's in. And you know, the first thing is is that a lot of people in my space are thinking about starting podcasts, and which I love. I love that so many people in my space who used to, who were taught like the only way that you're allowed to be or that you're going to be successful is to be a coach or to be somebody who provides advice or support to other people, like directly, by listening to them and asking them questions and doing those things, and like the reality of it is is that that is not the only way that we can help people and talking to people talking to people and not talking with people is such a valid way of helping other people. So there's a lot of people who are like, oh well, is it really helpful if people just listen in? And yes, and I've gotten, we have gotten so many messages over the last two years of people saying like, wow, this episode was so helpful. Or, oh my gosh, thank you so much for sharing that.

Speaker 1: 4:11

And I've had friends. Actually Shannon Madden, who was on last week, you know, she said, hey, like I listened to your podcast when I was going through a rough time and it like really got me through it. I had no idea she was listening right, and so this podcast has really shown me. You know, we have we're about to hit 20,000 downloads. We've probably hit 20,000 downloads by the time this goes to air. And also there's stats out there that say that only 10 to 30% of people download your podcast and other people just listen.

Speaker 1: 4:43

And so when you think about that my husband was actually adding up the hours he's like, babe, people have listened to you talk because all of your episodes are around, like if you average them all out, they're about 45 minutes to an hour. People have listened to you talk just from your podcast alone in for like years and I was like, whoa, that's kind of wild to think about, right, kind of wild to think about. And that is something that I've learned is that I really love talking to people. I really love talking to people. I really like helping them reframe their thoughts, shift their feelings, be more curious, be more open, be more accepting and tolerant both of themselves and others, be more connected with other people and be more in connection with ourselves. And so this podcast has just been such a beautiful way for me to really realize that that is what I feel, like I'm here to do, what I absolutely love to do, and safe to be seen has just been an extension on that, because it's the first time I've ever done a program or sold something where it's like, hey, I'm going to talk at you for 10 days straight and I'm going to go live when I want to go live and I'm going to say what I want to say and you get to listen and like, yeah, answer questions in the Facebook group and stuff, but like, this is not a coaching program, this is a you absorb program, I pour out, you soak it up program and I am just feeling so lit up by it.

Speaker 1: 6:11

So I'm realizing that's an identity, that's a part of me that I'm stepping into and there's been a lot of work around that. There's been a lot of work of stepping into, you know, at my core it lights me up to be a thought leader, to help people think differently, to shift people's mindsets, to help people shift their, their bodies and how they feel inside of themselves. That is a criminal crime for me. That is what I want to spend my time doing, and so that's been something that really owning that and letting that come forth. There's been a lot of work to do around that. There's been a lot of you know past painful experiences that have popped up. There's been a lot of trauma to work through. There's been a lot of boundaries to set. There's been a lot of really shifting and taking of responsibility for myself and also releasing responsibility.

Speaker 1: 6:58

In some places we talk about this and safe to be seen, but, like on day one is responsibilities, the ability to respond, and so when I say releasing responsibility, I don't mean that I'm releasing the ability to respond. I mean that like in that, in the, the societal sense of this is mine to control versus this is yours to control. I am really starting to go hey, this is mine and this is yours, and if you want help with yours, that's cool. I'm going to make sure that that works for me and I'm not going to offer it without making sure it also works for you. And so that is something that I've been really working through and, as as all of this has been unfolding, there's been a lot of stuff around disappointment and failure and judgment and being vulnerable that I've been working through, which is why safe to be seen actually came through, I think, as a program, because it was like look, you have to crystallize and externally process and consolidate into 10 days the last five years of what you have learned around being yourself, showing other people who you are, not being afraid to own your yeses and your nose, not being afraid to fail, not being afraid to succeed, not being afraid to disappoint other people, not being afraid to take responsibility, not being afraid when other people judge you or misunderstand you or abandon you or, you know, leave, they decide that they don't want to be in connection anymore or whatever people do like, can you just be cool with that? So all of that has been coming through and I can feel the shift like I can feel the shift happening, and there's also been a lot of really, really hard stuff. You know, I've talked about some of this in the podcast over the last several months, like money got tight, you know, business is doing well and the world got more expensive, right and there's been a lot of things that have just shifted for us from a business perspective that I really had to look at and again it caused me to look at my fears around failure and around disappointment, around judgment, around responsibility and around voter ability and around all of those things, all those things.

Speaker 1: 9:17

I'm actually recording this. This is our might. This will be the last podcast that gets recorded in this house that we've lived in for the last 11 years and it is our. I'm going to cry. Tonight is our last night sleep in this house. Tomorrow we move to our new house and that feels weird and good and also really sad and confusing.

Speaker 1: 9:38

And another thing that this podcast has given me is a way to actually share what's going on behind the scenes in my life with people in a way that is vulnerable and also in a way that actually feels safe to, because I can't see your face when you're hearing this stuff. I am talking to myself on a screen or talking to another person on a screen, and so it's a lot easier to just be like, okay, we're having a conversation with a friend or we're just we're just talking and, yes, people are going to hear this and, yes, like there's some wobbliness and a little bit of discomfort around the fact that, like you're talking about things that most people wouldn't admit, you are being vulnerable and visible about things in your business that most people do not talk about. People do not often talk about the hard. They'll talk about how hard it is, but then they'll talk about it only after things have gotten better. They don't talk about it while they're in the hard. They don't talk about, like, just a lot of the stuff that goes into really just being a human right now. And I think that that does a huge disservice for a lot of people because, yes, there's a lot of people recognizing and waking up too.

Speaker 1: 10:55

I'm not gonna just show the higher light reel, I'm gonna show the whole picture, but still there's like yeah, I'm gonna show you the whole movie, but I'm still gonna put filters on it. We're still gonna like script pieces and parts of it. It actually reminds me of my sister and I were watching shiny happy people, the Duggar documentary, and it reminds me of like the television reality shows, right, like they look real and we see drama and we see things, but like it's still kind of staged, they're still showing us what they wanna show us and I think that a lot of people are still doing that. They feel like, okay, well, I'm gonna show people the mess, but I'm also gonna control the way that the mess is seen. So it looks like like the story that gets told is a story I want to have told, versus like this is how it is.

Speaker 1: 11:42

And I think it's really important for people to know that, like you can run a successful business, you can have lots of clients, you can have lots of things going on and things can still get tight and things can still get hard and you can still have issues with team and you can have issues with your own personal health and your relationships and all of these things. And things can still be good, you can still be growing, you can still have amazing things happening and it can still be hard. You know, my husband and I, tlc we're talking last night and I was like, you know, this is just such a weird. This feels so weird because, like, there are parts of our life right now that are hard, like legit hard, and our relationship is so good. Our relationship with our kids has gotten so good. Our relationship with our parents is so good. Our relationship with our siblings is good.

Speaker 1: 12:34

We love the work we're doing. We love the humans that we're in connection with. We get to pick up our kids together on a random Wednesday and, you know, take them for ice cream after school at 2.45. We get to do all of these things that so many people don't get to do. I'm like, yes, things feel hard in some ways and also like, how cool is it that this is our new heart? How cool is it that this is our new heart, that we are figuring some stuff out, you know, financially, logistically, all of these things and we're not fighting, we're not screaming at each other. We're, you know, we're having really cool conversations, we are supporting one another. We have all of this support, like we have all of these resources for people that really love us and we feel like we can be ourselves in our house. We feel like we can be ourselves with each other. Our kids feel like that. They can do that. You know, that means a lot and that is something that when I started this podcast, we did not have. We did not have that. We were working on it, and we're working on it around the business. We're working on it around the finances, we're working on it around the kids, we're working on it around the team, like all the things. And to be able to reflect back and be like, wow, it's only been two and a half years and like this is where we're at. This is wild and I think I want the reason that that message is coming through is number one.

Speaker 1: 14:12

Today I'm going to be talking about success in Save to Be Seen and that program. So if you're like, oh my gosh, I need to hear that, you can pop in the show notes and you can still hop in and get the recordings, and what I thought success was two and a half years ago versus what success is to me now is just a completely different thing. I think so many of us are past painful experiences and are conditioning. Teach us that success and failure are. You know, success is when things go well and failures when things go badly and like. Those aren't the definitions of success and failure, right? Failure is this is my favorite definition this is like my new favorite definition Failure is when you decide that the middle is the end, when you give up. Failure is when you decide that the middle is the end and you give up. And success is when you remember that you are still in the middle and you keep going right. So it actually doesn't have anything to do with whether or not things go the way you want them to or things don't go the way you want them to. It has everything to do with how you respond to what happens. Again, that responsibility it's okay, wow, things are hard right now. And also, how am I responding to that or that went unexpectedly? That was interesting. How do I feel about that? Let me feel my feelings around this, let me see what judgments come up. Let me just sit in it for a second and then like, okay, well, what do I want to do next? That's success, people who are successful in life, people who are consistent, right. Take the podcast, for example. The podcast we could have just ended it after season one. There were people listening. But there weren't a ton of people listening. We could have been like oh, this isn't really making a sales, this isn't really doing things. I'm so glad it's helping people and it's kind of fun. And also like is this working? No, it's not End it. There are podcasts that take off way quicker than ours has, that get thousands of downloads a week by this point, two and a half years in Ours isn't there yet. And like also, I don't care because number one, we're still in the middle. The question is do I enjoy doing this? Does this still feel like it's the right thing to do? Does this still feel aligned? If the answer is yes, keep going. It doesn't matter if it's working or not. Now you might want to ask yourself some questions around like, well, are there things we could shift? Are there things that we could do differently? And keep going right? I think so many times we stop and we aren't consistent because, well, there's a few reasons. One is we're afraid we're going to disappoint ourselves or we're going to disappoint others. We're afraid things are going to go unexpectedly and people aren't going to like it. They're going to judge it as bad. We're afraid we're going to fail, which is again that things don't go the way we think they will and we decide to be done, we decide to give up. That's failing. So we're afraid that we're going to fail. We're afraid that we're going to disappoint other people, that things are going to go unexpectedly bad. We're afraid that people are going to judge us. We're afraid that, you know, we're going to have to, like do more than we want to do. We're going to have to say yes to things we want to say no to and no to things we want to say yes to. We're afraid of all of these things and so, like we just stop. And if there's one thing that this podcast and this business and you know, starting an institute and like deciding to do some really really big things, there's one thing I've learned from all of this I have to remember I have to treat every day like it's the middle. So when stuff happens, when things go really well, I treat it like it's the middle. When things go really like not well, I treat it like it's the middle. And the other thing that I've started doing is really shifting my perspective from a time standpoint, and what I mean by that is I have started thinking a lot more long term and I've also started thinking a lot more short term. I used to be a very, very anxious person and I think I've talked about this on here, but you know anxiety people who who suffer with anxiety, right, not people who not anxious people, because I don't like to put it on as a character trait, it's not a character trait, it's a pattern. People who suffer, right, people who have pain and wish that the anxiety wasn't there. They live in the future, right, they're always worried about what's coming next. And people who suffer with depression, they live in the past, they're always thinking about bad things that have happened. And so this is why some people have just anxiety, Some people have just depression, some people have both. It is how has it? Have your past painful experiences taught you to live like? Where in time do you live? So anxiety is typically, like you know, in the near future and depression is a lot of times in the recent past. Sometimes it goes back further and sometimes anxiety goes ahead further and learning to be in the present and remember I'm in the middle and be like okay, I'm here right now. What is right now? Right, because really the future doesn't exist and really the past that doesn't exist anymore either. The only thing that exists, the only thing I have any impact over in the moment, is the moment, and so for a really long time and this is why I said my teenage self would have laughed if I said that I was doing 100 podcast episodes over two and a half years. She would have laughed because she wouldn't have felt like she could be that consistent, because she was always thinking about the future and she wasn't thinking about the current moment. Or she was thinking about the past and all of the times that we had failed, aka given up because we decided the middle was the end, all the times that things hadn't gone the way that we wanted them to, when we gave up or we stopped trying. She was thinking about those things instead of going. Actually, the way that we are consistent is by just being in the moment and going, okay, what's next, okay, what's next Okay. And then like popping forward to the future, six months to a year ahead, and going, okay, well, how do I want things to look then? How do I wanna feel then? Okay, I wanna feel more peaceful, I wanna feel like I have more time in my schedule. I wanna feel like I can devote more time to speaking and talking instead of coaching or doing other things. I wanna be able to spend more time with my family. I wanna feel peaceful. I wanna feel really secure financially. I wanna feel all these things Okay, great. Well, what do we do right now? What do we do right now and I've talked about this on the podcast before and I think again it bears repeating Like if your future self and your current self can get on board with one another, like if they can be moving in the same direction, and also if you can accept your past self and say, hey, thank you for making all those mistakes, thank you for failing all those times, because now we know, now we know, now we've learned, now we know, now we've learned. If all three of you your past self, your current self and your future self can be on the same page and you can live in the present moment and just occasionally pop forward and make sure things are cool with your future self and occasionally pop backwards and get advice or get hey, don't do this. From your past self. That shifts a lot. That's how you're consistent. That's how you do. 100 podcast episodes that's how you grow. We're gonna hit seven figures this year and revenue from our business in the last four and a half years Right, like that's nothing to sneeze at. This will be our. This already is our second multi-six figure year in a row, and the year before these two years was nearly multi-six figures Like that's a big deal. The way in which the podcast has 20,000 episodes is because that first year, when we did not have that as nearly as many downloads, we weren't like, oh my gosh, this is a failure to quit Staying in the present moment. What's next? Okay, one more episode. Okay, cool, one more guest. That like, if there's one thing you take away from this, if there's one lesson that I just like hope will just sink in for you. It is always the middle until it is the end. And if you keep living in the end or you keep going back to the beginning and being really mean to yourself about how you did things before, or worrying and freaking out about how you're going to do things later, you're missing the most impactful time you have, which is right now. All you have is right now, living in the moment, that ability to stop going forward and going. But what about tomorrow? Right, the other thing that's happened for me, and I've talked about this in a couple other places is like I've really just worked through the idea that I'm afraid to disappoint people anymore, that I'm afraid to not live up to people's expectations, like I've had conversations with people that I never thought I would have, where I disappointed them. We actually postponed the create conference until November 2024 because we needed to, and it disappointed some people and there was some mess that I had to clean up and that sucked. And also something really beautiful came through right after that decision and I will share that with y'all later. That's for a few episodes from now, but it's coming. And that experience of, yeah, I can disappoint people and also I don't have to keep making decisions to try to make people happy, because that's when I disappoint people the most. I am the least successful when I make decisions that are not aligned, when I am trying to make other people happy, when I am taking responsibility for other people's feelings, when I am afraid of judgment, when I am afraid of disappointment, when it feels too scary to be vulnerable and actually own what I want. So all of those things affect your ability to live in the present moment, because living in the present moment is also how do I feel, what do I think, what do I wanna do? And you might be asking okay, well, how is this related to trauma? Or how is this related Like why is this on this podcast? Well, because it's innately tied to trauma. It's innately tied to your past painful experiences. It is innately tied to how you see the world, and this is why trauma work is so dang important, because when you have trauma, you see the world differently. You have a lens that shifts how you feel, how you think, how you perceive, how you judge, how you act, how you live, how you are, who you are. And becoming trauma-informed, becoming aware of how our past painful experiences affect us in the present moment and then shift our future, like that is the core of this podcast. Again, if there's one message, it's do you understand that your past, your beginning, is affecting your middle and it's affecting how you see the end, or where you think the end even is, and can you, are you willing to uncover some of that? Are you willing to remember that that's not the truth? Are you willing to shed and discard the pieces and parts that aren't you, that you've put on, and are you willing to reclaim and recover those pieces and parts of yourself that you cut off a long time ago in the past, because they are part of your middle. They're still here with you. They need to be here with you. They need to be integrated and incorporated. They need to be loved and accepted in order for you to shift your future, in order for you to change how you're showing up in the middle. That is trauma work, and I don't see people talking about that, and that is also why I just feel really excited for the next 100 episodes of the podcast, because we get to shift this conversation around trauma and around how it affects us and what we do with it and why we work through it and what it means and all of these things. And so I still have a lot to say on this, and I have a lot of guests who have a lot to say on this. So there are some of you out there who have listened to all 100 episodes. I love you. If you only listened to one episode, I love you too. And for those of you who have, like, written with me from the start, and those of you who have gone back and listened to all of the episodes, if you have listened to all 100 episodes. Can you send us an email Because I want to do something for you, please, to say thank you. So, if you've listened to all 100 episodes, send us an email? Links in the show notes. If you just arrived here cool, great, so happy to have you Please go back and listen to anything that feels good for you. And I also want to say thank you if you've shared our podcast. So many of you have shared it. I appreciate that so much. We appreciate that more than you know. Some of you have decided to come in and work with us more closely because of the podcast. You know who you are. We love you so much. Thank you, and I just want to extend an invitation to you. If you're like, wow, I've been listening to this for a hot minute, or I've just arrived here and I think that this is a space that could actually really help me, like, please, reach out. We have so many ways that you can be connected now. We have so many things that you can do with us, from free to not free. And if there's somebody that you know that could really use that message today of this being the middle and not the end, please send this to them, because we all get to remember that right, the end is going to come for all of us and this isn't the end. So we get to live remembering that the end will happen and that it's not the end right now and decide what we want to do from that mindset. Thank you all so much. Just yeah, I feel like saying thank you one more time. I want to say thank you to this house for being a place that we recorded like a bazillion episodes, and I want to say thank you to my family and to my team and to every single person who has supported us. And here's to another hundred episodes. Let's do the dang thing and, yeah, I'll see y'all next week. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. Invitations to head to our show notes to check out the offers and connections we mentioned, or you can just head straight over to InstituteforTraumacom and hop in our email list so that you never miss any of the cool things that we're doing over at the Institute. Invitations to be well and to take care of yourself this week and we'll see you next time.