227. How We Choose to Show Up: Transform Your Life Through Meaningful Connection w/ Marci Axelrod

We all matter, and how we choose to show up makes a difference in our lives and the lives of others. Marci Axelrod shares her research on the three levels of showing up and how our presence creates ripples through others.

• The influence of health-focused parents who taught her that everyone matters
• How developing a stutter at age 6 sparked her interest in how people show up
• The three levels of showing up: barely there, just showing up, truly showing up
• How our brain chemistry changes based on our level of presence
• The three roles we always occupy: individual self, situational role, member of society
• The ripple effect of our presence—influencing people up to three degrees of separation
• How emotional intelligence relates to truly showing up for others
• Practical ways to practice moving up the show-up continuum daily

Choose how you show up. Get the book "How We Choose to Show Up" on Amazon and connect at choosetoshowup.com.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome to Mindset Cafe with Marci Axelrod
• 2:11 Childhood Influences: Parents Who Truly Showed Up
• 9:42 The Three Levels of Showing Up
• 15:20 The Neuroscience of Presence
• 21:05 The Ripple Effect of Our Presence
• 27:42 Creating Your Legacy Through Conscious Choice
• 36:03 Daily Practices for Truly Showing Up

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:20

What is up guys? Welcome to another episode of the Mindset Cafe podcast. Today I'm honored to welcome Marci Axelrod. She is a bestselling author. She is a TEDx speaker and a management consultant. Her book how we Choose to Show Up reveals how shifting from just showing up to truly showing up can transform leadership, relationships and success.

Speaker 1: 0:43

With over 20 years of research, marci has really blended neuroscience, psychology and behavioral economics to help people and business unlock their full potential. She's worked with the global brands HP, sap and Cisco, and their insights have been featured in Forbes and Psychology Today. So today she'll share some of that in some of her story of just how she got to do TEDx, all the kind of stuff diving into her personal development, diving into, you know, her career paths and pivots, and all those kinds of things. Cause, at the end of the day, I believe that you know, we learn from other people's journeys and we relate to other people and we can adapt the lessons that they've learned and the choices that they've made and apply it to our own lives. So, without further ado, marci, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come on.

Speaker 2: 1:33

Devin. What an honor. And you said so many things just now that relate to the truth, about showing up, so we are going to dive into what you said, but I'm going to let you start on the chance you have questions or start with something in particular.

Speaker 1: 1:50

No, definitely. I mean. I like to start off with your backstory, right, you know your childhood, your, you know your parents, all that kind of stuff to give some context to you know some of the mindset shifts and some of the skills maybe that were developed early on. So what was that like for you?

Speaker 2: 2:05

Oh yeah, so you want the two minute version, the five minute version, what do you want?

Speaker 1: 2:10

I want the version you want to dive into.

Speaker 2: 2:13

So first, you are so right. I mean you said beforehand that other people's journeys impact us and you know 1000% showing up is really about that, because how we show up to the world is how the world shows up to us. So my backstory of my parents I'll tell you how they showed up to myself and to the world so they did each day is they were extremely focused on what does this person need to be healthy? The discussions at the dinner table at my house were about things like heart attacks, but the phrase was myocardial infarction right, and my father would talk about the day that he had a young girl on his table and a table for him back in the 70s at Mass General Hospital, which is the teaching hospital of Harvard, is an MRI scanner or a CT scanner. You didn't want to be on that table, mri scanner or a CT scanner. You didn't want to be on that table. And he literally had kings and queens and executives and janitors and children, and with everyone who showed up on his table, he said MJ for Marcy, jill, mj. He said they're scared, no one wants to be there and it doesn't matter who you are or what you've supposedly achieved. Everyone's the same and my job is the same. My job is to help figure out and diagnose what's going on With my mother.

Speaker 2: 4:00

She always felt that if she figured out when a child was five that there was something developing that was going to change their life, that was going to kind of become a bad health outcome, she needed to figure it out as quickly and as early as possible because it's going to change the trajectory of that person's life. So what did I take away from all this? Oh and, by the way, my father worked 100 hours a week. If I wanted to spend time with him, I had to go to the Mass General Hospital with him on Saturday just to be with him.

Speaker 2: 4:32

So what I learned I learned? Number one we matter. We all matter. I learned number two how you choose to show up makes the difference, because if you show up and you're tired and because you didn't invest in your sleep or your health or processing stress or whatever it was, you're going to degrade the future of someone else's life, not just your own. And I learned that we have a choice. Now, when you ask yourself well, how does that lead to? Okay, the book how we Choose to Show Up.

Speaker 1: 5:11

It's a pretty direct line. No, I mean, I think it is so true because and actually I want to get your take on this, because when you said, you know we degrade- someone else's life. Right Now maybe I'm mistaken Are you talking about the experience, or experiences of someone else's life? What do you mean by degrade someone else's life? What does that?

Speaker 2: 5:36

say so as physicians. If my parents showed up and they missed something, if my father didn't quite read the scan in as acutely a way as he would have had he been, you know, let's say not stressed, not rushed, well slept had my mother. I mean, she was always worried about missing something. You know, if a child shows up and you know what she would say to me is what's common is common, right, but what's not, you really have to dive into and maybe rule that out. So what I'm saying is how we choose to show up flows through others and let's say it's, it's just a mere hello. How are you, are we showing up with an openness, with a care to absorb? What are they saying? Let's look at how their whole like. Is his head kind of hung to the side because he's just worn out and tired? How is he? How we show up to others changes, how they show up to us and when we show up with an openness and with the care. This is part of truly showing up, which is level three, in which I'll show you and I'm going to have charts Devin that I'm going to send you so that people can see I took showing up and I made it simple, like there are three levels One is barely there, Two is just showing up and three is truly showing up. And I link it through what does it mean for the hemispheres of our brain? What does it mean for the attention system we bring online? What does it mean for the cortisol and adrenaline and what is it? So I link through the science and biology of what it means to be barely there, versus just showing up, versus truly showing up. It literally changes everything about our lives. It changes our sense of meaning, how engaged we are, whether we can actually learn, because when you're just showing up, guess what the world is just showing up for you. You're engaging a left hemisphere attention system. Thank you, dr Ian McGill-Christ, for explaining this Left hemisphere attention system and Devin what's actually going on is you're just checking the box, you're just getting stuff done right, because when we lived out in the wild, we needed to do two things and that's why we have two parts of our brain.

Speaker 2: 8:03

We had to feed ourselves left hemisphere and we had to not be eaten by something else, and one brain couldn't do that. So we have two parts, but the one that says feed ourselves, it says that's a rabbit out there and it's a rabbit. No, I don't care if it just had little rabbit babies and it's over there and it's a mother rabbit I shouldn't kill. I don't care, I'm going to get it, I'm going to zero in, I'm going to break. Nothing else shows up now. Nothing else matters, just that one little thing. And my attention system is like this and it's fractured and it is broken and it's about power over and control.

Speaker 2: 8:42

And when you show up like that, devin, how do you think the world shows up? How do you think your gym shows up to someone? They're just showing up to get it done. They're not really thinking about their health or their future of their lives or like a skill they really want to build. That's part of their identity. The way your gym shows up. Okay, there's a barbell over there, there's a space over there. No, it isn't. Wow, look at this community supporting space that Devin and his team created. I like being here. I'm going to go say hi to that person. Hey, I saw you last time. How are your reps going? You know your gym experience and the brand and all of that. Everything shows up different. Someone's workout is going to be different If they're using the right attention system, the truly show up system then, they're left.

Speaker 2: 9:32

One is get it done mode and one is this is meaningful. All right, I'm going to pause there because I have, like, mixed a whole bunch of concepts, but you know it's big. That's what I mean when I say you can degrade someone's experience with how you show up or you can elevate someone's experience with how you show up.

Speaker 1: 9:49

No, exactly that's. That's what I meant, like I didn't when you were asking. When you said degrade someone's life, I was asking, you know, kind of if it meant by the experience too, cause this is something. I had a conversation with my barber, who's actually a really good friend of mine and he was actually one of my clients, you know, and you know, there was a day I showed up to to get a haircut and I'm I'm the kind of person where me and him have that kind of relationship where we can talk about anything. When I showed up that day, he just started off you know, oh man, I'm so tired and this and that like for like five, ten minutes and I was like bro, I was like I hope you don't talk to everyone like this. And then he, he like stopped. And then I was like and then the other barbers, like there's like three other ones listening to what I was saying and I was like dude. I was like I know me and you are boys Like I'm, you can tell, you can talk to me like this, I'm cool with it.

Speaker 1: 10:36

But if someone else shows up like this, I was like bro, what, if, what, if this is their highlight of their day I was like you already know, I don't. I don't like getting haircuts, cause I have like I just don't like spending the time to get a haircut Right. But other people really value getting haircuts, like this is their spa time, right. And now if they show up to get a haircut and they're looking forward to seeing you, they're all excited. And you all of a sudden come at them with man, I'm so tired, I'm so busy, I'm so this, I'm so, and you're complaining. It's like now I'm like man, do you even want me to be here right now? And so then all of a sudden, he just kind of like stopped and the other two, the other two or three barbers were like dang that you know.

Speaker 1: 11:16

It kind of shifted their perspective a little bit and I and I had to tell him. I was like, remember, when we were personal training, I was like it didn't matter if I was tired or not. You would ask me yo, are you tired now? But no, I'm good. And then I would still have you know, I would still put on the mask of having energy, giving you what you know, everything I could, because that's the value that you deserve. Right, and at the same time, when you tell yourself you're good and you, and you start to say it over and over, you start to believe it yourself. Your subconscious doesn't know what's truth or what's a lie. But if you start telling yourself you're tired and you're telling other people you're tired, you start to feel more tired.

Speaker 2: 11:53

Oh, absolutely. And I'm going to show you something, because you just spoke about your self role, your situational role, right, as someone in the chair, the barber, or someone who's always someone who's going to truly show up for others. Right, your situational role and also your role is part of something larger. Right, you helped the barber to relate more broadly with everyone else who shows up. Right, we're always in those three roles. That's one of the truths about showing up. You can't escape it. You're an individual self. Right, you're always within a situation, even if you're just laying in bed alone. There's a bed there. You've made choices about when to get into bed. You've made choices about whether your sheets are dirty or clean. You've made choices about whether your bed is a sanctuary for sleep, where you can actually get, or clean. You've made choices about whether your bed is a sanctuary for sleep where you can actually get quality sleep. You've made all these choices. There's a situation going on that impacts beyond you. And then you've got this societal role, because we're always interconnected with what's going on. So when we show up, recognizing that we're in those three roles, we're far more likely to truly show up, to show care and to feel good about ourselves and to feel meaning.

Speaker 2: 13:20

Just showing up has our mirror facing us. This is the whole. It's all about me. I'm me, mine. It exists in what's called the ventromedial pre prefrontal cortex, and what I mean. This is a place of misery. This is the place where you feel disconnected from others. You're an Island that's out there. No one cares about you. It's all about you, and you know.

Speaker 2: 13:43

This is what showed up in that study where people were left alone with their own thoughts, but they could choose to shock themselves and, like 56% of men and almost as many women, literally chose to inflict pain on themselves instead of being alone with their own thoughts. You don't right, it's a dangerous place. This mirror facing us, this self right, don't go there alone. It's bad. Mirror facing us this self right, don't go there alone, it's bad. But when you start to turn your mirror outward and recognize how I show up, it impacts others through the situation.

Speaker 2: 14:14

That's our like moment, that's our point of contact, where our role as members of something beyond ourselves and as selves come together right, and it can be in the gym lifting a weight, or it can be hosting a podcast Right here, right now. Every decision that we've made Devin is because of society. The fact that we're choosing to do a podcast society tells us this is a good thing, we can get our, our thoughts out there. The fact that we're using tech because right, the fact that we're dressed a certain way, everything that we're doing is as a result of being a member of something beyond ourselves. So those are our three roles, and when we recede into just one of them the self role, which is the that's what happens when we are insecure, we're inauthentic, we're lonely, a lot of depression and anxiety as well comes up when we're just in our cell phone.

Speaker 2: 15:13

So that's what the barber was doing and it was like man, I'm tired. He wasn't recognizing maybe you don't want a tired barber to have scissors right by your head Like he was not in his situational role and what it looks like on the continuum. I'm going to show you this when you're just in your self role, you're way down here and barely there. Oh, my goodness, I've got a scissors by this guy's head. You know, I'm in now my sit situational role as well. What I'm doing is I start to notice and tune in and then feel with and then enact care, and that's what happens on the show up continuum as we go from barely there to truly showing up.

Speaker 2: 16:07

I will give you these slides. It's more in three roles and at one of three levels, at all times, and you can never not do it. You're always like it's like the invisible system that's all around us is showing up at one of the three levels and some ratio of the three roles at every moment.

Speaker 1: 16:30

No, I mean that is. I mean those charts really do help, and so, yeah, I would love those slides to be able to provide for the audience, so you guys will be able to check that out on the Mindset Cafe, instagram and I'll put it on some other stuff as well. But what got you into this whole research and development and writing a book? All about showing up like what was that spark for you that you really wanted to dive into this niche?

Speaker 2: 16:58

well, I lost the ability to speak when I was six. That's what it. That was my spark. So I started to stutter, and as a stutter, you're always a stutterer, so catch me when I'm exhausted or stressed and my throat will lock. So at age six, it was so unbelievably stressful because, like I wanted to raise my hand in class and you could see the teacher, marcy, and the other kids and everyone's like, oh my God, this is so stressful. So all of a sudden, myself mirror. It went like this, because it wasn't just me showing up, it was everybody showing up. It's like I can't do this to them, just trying to participate in class. So I started to notice others showing up and there's the bully and there's the scaredy cats and I'm like, wow, they're throwing their show up choices away. I couldn't stand it. Devin, here I am, I can't show up as I choose, but look at them, they can speak, but they're throwing out their choices.

Speaker 2: 18:01

And then, at age 12, my parents sent me to this rehabilitation hospital, supposedly to learn to speak. And there's these elders. They had strokes and they're learning to stand and feed themselves and it was traumatizing for me. I'm like, what am I doing here? At age 12 and I noticed, my god, these people they have. They have detailed plans in front of them and they have experts by their side helping them sit and sit. And I'm like, look, elders with wisdom, with detailed plans and with experts by their side are still struggling to show up as they choose.

Speaker 2: 18:39

And right then and there, at age 12, at that rehabilitation center, I said to myself there's got to be an easier way. Where's the blueprint? Where is the instruction book? There has to be a truth about how humans are designed to show up so we thrive. So I started to devour psychology and neuroscience and evolutionary biology and everything I could, and I said to myself my God, there is a model. There is a model. Look outside Nature. Nature truly shows up. And look at that tree. It looks like it's by itself, but it's not. It's interconnected with every tree on the planet, evidently under the soil. Because if you actually give it, this research was done. Vanessa Carlton I can give you her name for the show notes she dosed a tree with radiation and she found that the other side of the forest it had shared the radiation all the way through the roots, through the forest.

Speaker 2: 19:42

Anyway, everything in nature, it's in three roles. The tree is in three roles. It's an individual tree. It's part of a situation where, like right now, it's by a river, it has all the water that it wants, it has sunlight or not on a given day, it has a quality of air around it. It has. Maybe someone wants to cut it. There's a situation that it's in every moment and it's a member of something larger. It's a member of all those other trees there, but it's also a member of the this part of the world and the air and everything else. So, anyway, I realized the three roles and then I realized that you know there's a skill for each role. How do you do it well, how do you ground yourself, how do you ready yourself for your situations and how do you interconnect with society? So simple. So, anyway, that's the story of how it all came to be, as a result of my parents explaining you matter. You're going to have an impact on this planet, just like me and just like every human being.

Speaker 1: 20:44

So what roles I mean? Because one of the big things I think with, with mindset and we've talked about a few times on this show, you know, on on other episodes is emotional intelligence right. And and and emotional intelligence is a skill I believe right, and that can grow and you can become more emotionally resilient, more emotionally intelligent, and so forth in different areas. But how does that play a role into truly showing up?

Speaker 2: 21:14

Oh, absolutely. Mindfulness, EQ, everything, listening better, I mean situational awareness, everything. Everything shows up right. So everything factors in to showing up. So the answer is, as you move along the continuum from tuning in to well, first there's noticing, which is a more right hemispheric thing. So all of a sudden you've switched your attention system.

Speaker 2: 21:43

Once you notice, tune in, feel with and enact care, once you notice, tune in, feel with and enact care, what happens is your body resets and you're more into your parasympathetic system, you're more interconnected and emotional intelligence shows up for you as you tune in and feel with and enact care. You tune in and feel with and enact care Because that ability to recognize and label emotions, to understand them right, to shift them from your body into a cognitive process with that label, which is what putting a word on it does what it's doing is it's calming you, it's resetting you, it's putting you into your rational mind from your kind of emotional body. So you're shifting from the limbic system into the prefrontal cortex. That's what it's doing. It's basically giving you authenticity and a recognition.

Speaker 2: 22:46

What am I feeling now and it's also giving you appropriate judgment about sharing that. You know, devin, right now I am feeling how you are receiving this information and it's telling me that it's really giving you something to think about, right, and you are letting, you are absorbing it, and I feel that from your countenance, from your expression, from how you're holding your head, from how you're nodding, from the frequency of your blinking, that is EQ and it's showing up for me right now because I'm in my fully show up system. Am I answering the relationship there?

Speaker 1: 23:32

No, definitely. And that makes that connection itself in how emotional intelligence, because I mean, I think I've in the past I've talked about emotional intelligence from a self point of view. What I mean by that is something happens, you react or you feel a certain way and you're so. Basically it's, it's an event happens, then there's a result right, which is you have control over, and then there's an outcome right, and the outcome can have an effect on someone else's life, right, so the event you have no control over you get into a car accident. You know, I say something to how you. You said something right, right, and so the the fact that I said it. You couldn't control that, I said it. But now your response right.

Speaker 1: 24:22

Right, you have control over that and your response has an outcome that can either affect me or the listener or something. Same thing for you. Know someone cuts you off in traffic. Right, you can stop them cutting you off, but now how you respond to that affects not only that driver but, also other drivers, and now you're the event in other people's lives, right?

Speaker 1: 24:44

So the fact that you mentioned like, like just you know how you're watching me listen and stuff, even it takes another step, even deeper. And I think it's so interesting too because I can I haven't thought about it in this way, but when I'm talking to someone, I can tell if they're actually listening and then, as a result, if I can tell they're not actually listening and let's say we're just having a general conversation, I start to tailor my conversation or taper my conversation off, because I know you're not listening anyways, right.

Speaker 2: 25:16

You are never not impacting people. You are always impacting people. And what you just said you just said, and it's a perfect example of your societal member role. You're responding to someone else's expression. If I seem like I'm not listening, of course you're going to change what you do. You want to know what else you're going to change or what else is changing in you. The chemistry of your body is shifting when you feel that someone's not listening, or is listening or is intermittently listening, which is what most of us do.

Speaker 1: 25:51

I call that just showing up, by the way, yeah, and I think that that was something I, that was something I had to work on, cause I mean I didn't know that I did it. But I'm not usually one for for small talk, like you know, in a group setting right with like friends and so forth, especially friends of friends, you know there's the oh, what do you do? And so that regular conversation and what used to happen until my wife and my sister-in-law told me that I did it, was that once the conversation kind of died off and the other person was kind of just you know, trying to continue the conversation or grasping at just random things to talk about, I would kind of just turn and just you know, be nodding my head and kind of like end the conversation. I was like, and then I was like, wow, that is so rude, like I didn't realize that I did that Right, and so obviously that was no, it's not because you're showing someone your truth.

Speaker 1: 26:47

Right. But at the same time I think I believe it was rude, because I could have also just ended like that OK, awesome, you know I'm going to go over here. You know I could have said that I'm ending the conversation instead of standing sideways, and now they're just talking to me and I'm not. I'm just nodding, I'm not listening anymore.

Speaker 2: 27:07

Yeah, I get that it's rude. It's higher integrity to end it, but what you were doing is just giving yourself kind of space to figure out how to end it most likely.

Speaker 1: 27:20

Yeah, that's where a lot of that emotional intelligence goes in, and so I mean I love your explanation about it, because it does make a lot of sense to evaluate your emotional intelligence not just off of your own feelings, but your response of others and being able to interpret that and, you know, know your results from it. So I think that's so awesome. I do want to ask, though diving into the entrepreneurial side, diving into the professional side, how does your principles of just showing up apply to the workspace, in the workspace culture and a team dynamic, if that makes sense.

Speaker 2: 28:01

Oh, my goodness, yeah, so, so, yeah. So, just showing up level two is what 80% of us do 80% of the time. That is not where you want to live. 80% of the time, what you want to do is what I call truly showing up level three. So how does it relate, oh my word, how does it not relate? You know, when you show up and you're truly embodying all three roles, right, I'm myself, yeah, but I'm impacting the world at every moment, because everyone's sensing how I'm showing up, right, and I and I feel a responsibility right To impact the world in a positive way. What is, what does that do? Well, first, bam, you are deeply present. You are right here right now, and look at the intensity of your gaze. Right now, devin, that's how the world's gonna show up for you. So how does it impact your business? Oh my god, like people are like devin man, he's got game. I like this guy, I trust him, I'm gonna go to his gym. He right, he truly shows up for me. Okay, can I be any more clear?

Speaker 1: 29:04

I mean, but but how does it? How does it apply? Let's say, I'm not a business owner, right, and I'm a manager or I'm just an employee, and how does just showing up affect the actual team dynamic that the workforce?

Speaker 2: 29:19

So if you just show up okay, level two, just showing up what does that mean?

Speaker 2: 29:24

So you walk into a meeting, maybe you're bringing with it a little bit of apprehension, a little bit of imposter syndrome, a little bit of fear, a little bit of like I did so much work. Is the boss going to recognize and like, what is Joe over there going to do? Is he going to talk over me and like, try to like pound his chest and be like like the big one to make all the contribution? When you show up the way you typically do, okay, there's only so much authenticity and presence and inventiveness that comes with you, right, because like you were just doing something else, you've got a concern about this in your head and basically, like we come and go, our attention, we foreground things then and we kind of background them and then we're thinking about this. But when you truly show up, recognizing that people are sensing you right now, whether you want them to or not, and they're going to take that with them, you know we, we show up not just to others, we show up with, for and through others. I very often mentioned the work of Nicholas Christakis. He's up at Yale, he's a, he's a physician. There runs a behavioral lab and essentially he like he's the one who showed the people you're with most are 45% more likely to do what you do. And, by the way, an action isn't alone. There's a thought and an emotion with it. So think, feel and act. They will think, feel and act the way that you do. And then they go and spend time with a colleague at work who's now 25% more likely to do what you do. You've never met that person, but they're 25% more likely to do, to think, feel and act the way that you do because your friend Joe works with them. And then that person goes home to their son and their son is going to be standing in the hall in high school and maybe he's going to stand a certain way because he saw someone else stand a certain way. He saw you stand a certain way, right? So it goes through 45%, 25%, 10%.

Speaker 2: 31:26

So if you're in a meeting and you're not recognizing that you're impacting the world in your societal role and that it's showing up right here, at this contact point of the situation, right here, right now, you know it changes how you show up and you will hear different things, you will see different things, you will sense different things and therefore you will behave differently. And it's not just in your mind. This is called the mindset cafe, which I totally get. This is deeply embodied. The chemistry of your body is different when you recognize the truth about showing up, that you matter, that you're impacting the world, that you have a choice of how you show up, because you'll be more calm and you'll use your right hemispheric attention system more often.

Speaker 2: 32:24

What people say will be meaningful and what's going to happen. What actually happens in the neurons is that we make a connection that we wouldn't wouldn't have made. Ah, this is making me think about that and this and that person in here and maybe I can do this, maybe you should do that and you say different things. You have different thoughts. You're creative, you're generous, you're open, you anyway, and people notice it. So that's. I hope I've answered your question about how, like, how does it change how you show up in any situation? That's what happens. It's a very different way of living and life is meaningful and, frankly, you leave the legacy that you want when you truly show up more often.

Speaker 1: 33:08

Well, that actually is going to transition us into the perfect next point, but I do want to say you elaborated a lot more beautifully something that you know I like to talk about as the ripple effect. Right, you have a ripple effect on other people's lives. So everything you do, how you, you know, show up has a ripple effect on others and obviously your ripple like when you drop a stone in the water the ripple gets lighter and lighter as it gets farther out, but it still impacts and that ripple can cause another ripple, and so forth. And so, even like we had talked about before, you know, we opened our gym and so forth. And so, even like we had talked about before, you know, we opened our gym, we launched the franchise and our whole goal and one of my personal core values is having a positive impact on as many lives as I can, while I can, and doing that through, like I'm having an impact on the franchisees lives, who's impacting their members lives, but indirectly I'm having that ripple effect on those members lives, right, and so that's the, that whole. You know, how you show up is how you know someone else will show up, and so forth, and so I love that.

Speaker 1: 34:09

But to transition to what you had just mentioned of what you're leaving, your legacy. It goes into our final question of Marcy's legacy wall, right? And so this, this is the question I like to give everyone. I don't like to give it ahead of time because I don't want you to think about it. I want the first thing that comes to mind. Everyone tries to think of these deep, you know, wants to think of this deep, you know, philosophical thing, and it's what is what comes first to mind is usually the best, one that resonates with the most amount of people. So on, on Marcy's legacy wall, right? It could be any message or any quote, right, that you've learned along your journey, right, that you would leave for the up and coming generations. What would that message be?

Speaker 2: 34:54

Choose how you show up.

Speaker 1: 34:59

I think that that is definitely clear. I felt like it was going to be something along those lines. It is like, as much as, as much as we talked about, you know, talked about today, it isn't even said enough to how important it is to truly show up right, because how you do one thing is how you do everything.

Speaker 1: 35:19

If you just, if you just show up, and I gave this uh, I don't even know how, how I thought of the analogy at the time. But I had a client show up one time to a workout and she was like isn't it, isn't it enough? I, you know, I showed up and I was like you could go to the library. I was like you can go to a library and not read. I was like, and then she's like, okay, I'm going to go go work out there, we go, you know, um, but so I mean, where can people get your book? Where can people connect with you at?

Speaker 2: 35:51

Yeah, so the book is on Amazon. It's a bestseller. If you're into Mel Robbins, she wrote. She wrote the uh, the little quote on the cover of the book. It's on Amazon, my website, choosetoshowupcom, and I would love to hear from people I collect show up stories. I feature them in my newsletters, in my posts. Yeah, and just two quick things, though, that I want to add to what you're saying.

Speaker 2: 36:21

You got to know the truth about showing up, because showing up isn't enough. You've got to understand you're in three roles. You're not just an individualized self, you're also a member of something beyond yourself right, that ripple effect. And it comes to life in your situation, in the right here, right now. So it matters. That's the truth about showing up.

Speaker 2: 36:44

You're at one of three levels at all times and you're bouncing around. You might start truly showing up, and then you get tired and grumpy and you need a break and you're just showing up, or you're barely there and you feel like grumbling at somebody. Don't Be responsible. Choose how you show up. Take a break, do some stretches, eat some food, drink some water, whatever. You need to move back up that continuum. So that's really important.

Speaker 2: 37:09

And then to practice this each day look at someone. Just look at them. It can be someone getting out of a car. Before you go into your office or do an errand or stop at the cafe, look at someone across the cafe. Just look at them. They're showing up, but how? And as you start to just look notice, wow, they look kind of stressed. Oh, my goodness, they're scratching their head. Do they have a headache? Yeah, I get headaches too. And as you look at them, you'll start to notice how they feel and what's going on with them and you'll start to move up that continuum. You'll shift from your left hemisphere into your right and what you'll find yourself doing is feeling with and enacting care. And when you do it for others and you practice each day, you'll start to do it more with yourself, in yourself.

Speaker 1: 38:07

That's awesome. So, guys, make sure you guys share this episode with a friend but, more importantly, make sure that you guys leave a review. Right, that does help grow the show and it helps other people show up for themselves and show up for others. So make sure you guys leave that review. But we appreciate you, guys and we'll see you guys on the next one. I stay on my grind. No time to be slackin'. I hustle harder. I go against the current Cause. I know my mind is rich to be collected.