Short Story Long: Life Lessons from Leaders, Coaches, and Entrepreneurs
Short Story Long shares life-changing stories of growth, resilience, and reinvention from leaders, coaches, and everyday people navigating pivotal turning points. Hosted by leadership coach Beki Fraser, each episode explores the moments that shaped someone's path and the lessons we can all learn.
Every other week, Beki follows up with a Skill Builder episode that breaks down insights from the previous story into practical tools, reflection prompts, and leadership actions.
Whether you're building a business, transitioning into a new career, or learning to lead with greater purpose, this podcast offers real stories and practical strategies to help you grow. New episodes every other week.
Short Story Long: Life Lessons from Leaders, Coaches, and Entrepreneurs
Beyond The Plan: Compassion And Power — Annie Paraison's Story
Have a story or inflection point to share? Tap here to message us — we’d love to hear it.
A quiet alarm in the body can be louder than any strategic plan. That’s where our conversation with Annie begins: the moment joy dimmed, restlessness rose, and an inner knowing said it was time to step away from nonprofit work and build something rooted in freedom, fairness, and love. From that leap came Love Before All, a practice that pairs self-regulation with compassion to create real, measurable change in people and the systems they live in.
We dig into the mechanics of that change. Annie walks us through how history and power shape institutions, why scarcity cultures persist, and how a relationship-first lens reframes leadership. We talk brain science in plain language: the amygdala’s threat response, somatic signals as data, and how a pause-and-breathe habit restores choice. She shares a grounding question that guides hard moments—what is the most loving thing to do now?—and a practical method for tough conversations: look for patterns, ask permission, lead with positive intent, and time it for trust.
Annie’s path from Haiti to New York adds a powerful through line of empathy and perspective-taking. That experience sharpened her ability to “put herself on a shelf,” meet others without judgment, and build bridges across difference. We connect this to culture change at scale: when individuals grow compassion from the inside out, teams regulate better, organizations collaborate more, and wellness becomes a shared priority. If belief can outrun truth, then let’s design beliefs that steady the nervous system, expand our options, and make room for facts to land.
You’ll leave with tools you can use today—how to notice somatic cues, interrupt reactivity, and deliver feedback without burning trust—as well as a bigger vision for how compassion can propagate across homes, schools, and workplaces. If you’re ready to integrate who you are with how you lead, press play, share this conversation with someone who needs it, and leave a review to help more listeners find the show.
To learn more about Annie Paraison, visit LoveBeforeAll.com
Connect with Beki on LinkedIn: Linkedin.com/in/BekiFraser
Learn more about her coaching: TheIntrovertedSkeptic.com
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Short Story Long is produced by Crowned Culture Media LLC
Because I think if we can master self-regulation skills, and then you add compassion, and I mean holistic compassion for yourself and for others, to that self-regulation skills, you start to have individuals who can think beyond their own well-being. And that's what the world needs right now. We need a world where we realize that when Becky wins, Annie wins. Because we're all interconnected.
SPEAKER_01:Hi, I'm Becky. Welcome to Short Story Long. In this podcast, we discuss ways you can integrate who you are into how you lead. Today's guest is Annie Parison, a daughter, sister, aunt, fiance, and friend whose life and work are rooted in love, faith, and purpose. Grounded in hope and guided by faith, Annie is on a mission to inspire a world where freedom, love, justice, and a collective success take center stage. She's dedicated to fostering holistic well-being and empowering communities to embrace our interconnectedness as a source of strength and healing. Through her consulting agency, Love Before All, Annie is making that mission real. Transforming lives, organizations, and communities by helping people rewire their brains, shift their mindsets, and prioritize total wellness. Welcome to the podcast, Annie. It's great to have you here today. Thank you for having me, Becky. Do you know that we'll be talking today about a key inflection point in your life? And I guess what I'd love to do is just ask you to give a brief overview of what that inflection point really looks like, and then we can dig into it a little bit more.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I would have to share uh in 2019, I, well, most of my professional career has been in nonprofit. And in 2019, the grant program I was working for was coming to an end. And I had the opportunity to either stay on with the organization or figure out what was happening. What was really important about this period is I'm usually a planner. Like I plan my life three years, five years at a time, and I made the decision to leave without a plan. And and that's significant for me because I knew something, like my body was communicating something was something was going on. And that's the oh I mean it was so loud that it was like, I know you don't have a plan, but we can't we can no longer be here. And what here was is working in nonprofit, you tend to there's like a scarcity mindset that's pervasive in nonprofit world, and in that you start to see the cycles of oppression that is masked by good work. It is good work, it's just not dealing with the root of the problem. And that I think now that you know hindsight is 2020, I can name some of those things that were happening in my body. So I decided to leave my nonprofit work, my nonprofit world, and started a consulting agency a month before the pandemic hit. But I haven't looked back since. So here we are.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. Sometimes those are those inspired opportunities when you think, okay, so why not now? Right. And one of the things that you mentioned there too, in terms of being a planner and being really prepared for things most of the time. I think that actually speaks to a lot of people that to just make a split decision like that is a little unnerving. Talk to me a little bit about what led you to that place of that visceral feeling of, okay, I really I can't not do this next thing.
SPEAKER_00:It was two things. We talk about faith being a driving force. And when I say faith, I don't mean that in like a religious way. I mean faith in terms of there's this deep connection to source that once I started to listen to it, it it gets louder, and I have a better understanding or an inner knowing that this is the choice, this is the decision. So I don't have a lot of language to explain what that is, ex outside of using the words the inner knowing. Like my body kind of knows what the path is, and then I'm like, I'm trusting and I'm going. So faith in that in that way, where I I have a deep sense of belief in when these messages come, I'm just gonna follow them. There was that, and then there was also now I have language to explain the systemic oppression that tends to overshadow a lot of the things that we do when we don't originally know the history of like how things came to be. One of the reasons why I love history is history really gives you the foundation and the root of how something came to be. And then when you have the understanding of how it came to be, you can understand and who it was built for, you understand better what it was meant to do. And for me as a leader, that information is very helpful in helping me to see what's the most compassionate way to start shifting that to being more people-centric, whether it was built for those people or not.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that's powerful. And I'm wondering when you talk about that inner knowing and you talk about feeling it in your body. You know, I would imagine that that's unique for each person, like how they feel. And it can even be unique in terms of each circumstance. The way you felt it at that moment might be different than the next time you have an inner knowing. In that stage, can you talk to me a little bit about what that felt like, like where it was showing up somatically for you, so that someone who's listening can kind of relate to that level of it?
SPEAKER_00:I think it in 2019, like that year, it showed up in I'm naturally joyful. That's kind of one of the things that I'm known for. The joy just comes out of me. And I noticed that was simmering down. It and and I shouldn't say I noticed, I should say my supervisor noticed. She pulled me in the office and she said, I'm noticing your body language is different in meetings. You're not smiling as much as you used to. And I I've been fortunate to have been blessed with some really good managers. That conversation invited me to sort of explore more what was happening. So I will say a lot of it was unconscious. I there was like a a restlessness that was present. That conversation was a catalyst to like, okay, let's do some exploration because people are starting to notice. And then from from that, it turned into more of a I would walk into the office and I could I felt so uncomfortable. I I was like, ooh, this build coming into work was just so difficult, and and it felt like I was filled with something I couldn't identify, and I'm like, I don't even want to be here. And of course there were things that led to like all of these feelings, but that kind of is how it feels, where it's like, and there's no reason for it, right? It's like not, it's not like someone came up and did something.
SPEAKER_01:Said something, did something. Yeah, it's just you walking through that doorway in the morning, walking in for your day of work, and recognizing, wow, I feel like I just walked through a shield, and now I'm on the other side, and it just feels so much different on this side. You mentioned there that most of your career prior to that had been in the nonprofit kind of environment and everything. You know, as you think about the time that you had spent in that kind of work and maybe even in more formative times before you'd kind of gotten really deep into that work, what was it that drew you to that work?
SPEAKER_00:I want to say I fell in it by accident. I've always loved children. And once I decided I wasn't going to be a pediatrician because med school was not for me, I started teaching in early childhood. So I've taught infants, one-year-olds all the way up to kindergarten. And when I taught, it was at a nonprofit private school. And that's how I kind of fell into it. After college, I was like, I don't know what I want to do. Let's just get a job. And then I wanted to work with children, started teaching, and then fell in love with it. And from there, the passion, not just for early childhood, but for human well-being in general, because I realized quickly when adults are well, children are well. So that makes sense. Yeah. So it became like, oh, I love children, and if I could, I'd work with them and leave out the adults. But I quickly realized as a teacher, you can't love and set children up for success if you're not giving the ch the adults in their lives the skills that they need to properly support healthy brain and child development. And that's sort of kind of where the passion for it grew. And as I was in it, nonprofit world, they do great work. Often I think they are stuck in their own world, and we sometimes forget to involve the rest of the world, the rest of the sector that can actually lift up the work that we're doing and do it more holistically. And that is stemming from like everyone's looking for funding. So there's just a natural crabs in a barrel type of attitude where I have to get to it first instead of a which is, I think it's being lifted up more now because grants are kind of requiring more collaborations. So now there's more of an atmosphere to collaborate and come together and say, hey, there it we're solving this problem, and you're looking at it from this point of view, and I'm looking at it from this point of view, but we're serving the same population. But how can we come together to really do it more holistically?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, really kind of a coalition-building actuality in some regard where we don't have to fight over the dollars if we can share them to leverage our strengths individually, then collectively we provide a larger solution in that scenario. And yet it sounds like that as the years went on, there was this whole component for you where it still felt like scarcity. It still felt like a weight, and you weren't necessarily seeing it as you talked about it earlier in terms of what a system was built for, like who it was built for, and maybe there was some disconnects that were happening there for you as well. So as you reached this point at the end of 2019 or nearing the end of 2019, what were some of the things that were going on in your mind that had you thinking, do I stay or do I go?
SPEAKER_00:Two things. I wanted, I started to explore power at that time as well. And I think the idea was the best way for me to have all the power to move in my power is to own my own thing. And that's how Love Before All came to be in February of 2020. And also in the beginning, it was solely aimed at supporting individuals and organizations and like creating environments where wellness for everyone was prioritized. And then over the years it sort of grew into realizing that what would be well, in my point of view, would be most helpful is teaching people how to be in relationship. And it could be your relationship with your cell phone, your relationship with your spouse, your relationship with your neighbor, your relationship with strangers, your relationship with the country that's next to you. And we don't realize that we are governed by relationship in general. And once I realize that the consulting agency is sort of focusing more on relationship power and how much we can accomplish when we realize our relationship power and we've matched that with the skills to have harmonious and nurturing relationships, regardless of what we're in relationship with.
SPEAKER_01:You know, and what it makes me think of too is you'd said that you hadn't really had this long-term planning cycle to create this and envision what love before all would really stand for. What was your process through that whole period of time to say, okay, I have all these things I could do. And this is what I'm choosing to focus on with my power in this moment.
SPEAKER_00:I I don't know that I can pinpoint it. I think what comes to mind is I realize how entrenched we are in relationships. And I also realize, being in early childhood, that, and I say all the time, like, we don't we don't go to school to learn about emotions. We don't go to school to learn about self-regulation, we don't go to school to learn to balance our needs with the needs of the people we love, much less the people we don't even know. So once I started to see that also made me develop a love for brain science. Brain science, neuroscience, and I'm I wouldn't call myself a neuroscientist at all, but the more I learn about the brain, the more I come to realize that a lot of the things that we deal with are more biological than we realize. And once I can understand the biology, there's an empowerment in that for me. And then that also translated to some of the frameworks behind LBA, behind Love Before All. If people could understand their biology, maybe they'd be more empowered or more incentivized to start to lean into that. And that puts us one step closer to prioritizing wellness for everyone.
SPEAKER_01:What strikes me as you say that is this whole idea of if we don't know what it's doing and how it's contributing to how we think, feel, behave, then we have no chance of making a choice because it's all unconscious. And once we start having that recognition that, oh, there's a thing that actually makes this go in the direction that it's going, and I can choose to interrupt it. Might be a little bit of a delayed thing, but I can choose to interrupt it. And so it becomes this whole thing I can start to notice the things, and then I can start to direct the things in order to go the where I want to go or where I would choose to go. And that had to be really important when you open your doors, February 2020, and you're like, yay, I'm all in. This is gonna be a great day. I'm focused, I know where I'm putting my energy. And then a couple of weeks later, it's like, oh, hey, world, we're gonna throw you a curveball. And you're in that situation. Talk to me a little bit about what your process was as all of that reality hit. Because I don't know about you, but for me, when the first announcements came out, I was like, oh yeah, we'll do this for like a month. It'll be fine, and then it'll be behind us. So wrong. And yet that's just where my head was, and I don't think I was alone in that.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. I want to say first, I lean on gratitude because I had just quit my job. So when COVID hit, I only had me to care for. And I continue to say this: I have never cared for myself as well as I did in the first couple of months of the pandemic. Because yes, I had just opened my uh consulting agency, and I was in a I was in a creation mode. In creation mode, I realized is where I thrive. Like I love the oh, we're building this. What's the mission? What's the vision? And which over the course of almost seven, six years now has changed multiple times because of course it needed to reflect the m metamorphosis that the organization has gone through. And when I say metamorphosis, it's not that the organization changed, it's that I started to get better language to clarify what it was that Love Before All was. And like now I'm remembering, I was sitting on a bed, I did the filing for the organization, and I went into creation mode. So in the first few months, I appreciated the the pause. It's because I feel like COVID just pressed pause for everyone. Yes. And I appreciated the pause to really deepen self-awareness. Well, the reason why I say I'm grateful is because of the pause, I didn't have anything but time to deepen self-awareness and really explore what it was that I wanted my impact on the world to be. So those first few months, I did a whole lot of nature walks, a whole lot of meditating, a whole lot of drafting and redrafting, completing a business plan that has changed over time. And it it was scary, you know, given the the times. And at the same time, it was a very meaningful and deeply spiritual time for me.
SPEAKER_01:That actually makes so much sense to me because there's just all of a sudden there's no other distraction. There's nothing else that's pulling at you. Well, I won't say there was no distraction because let's just say we were all kind of going, what's going on? What's happening right now? But at the same time, from what you're talking about, you know, there wasn't other kinds of things that were drawing your professional attention in a different way. And it was an opportunity for you to sit with that and not feel any kind of compulsion to do it faster than what you were doing. And naturally, I'm going to notice here that you still did some of the. Planning. It's just not before you made the decision. So your planner self still kicked in, but you made the decision to do it. And it sounds like resolved to I will sort this out and build a plan for myself because it's one of my superpowers. It's one of the things I do really well. And I will do that. And then I can move forward beyond that phase and action the plan. And I'm curious because, like you, mine evolved and changed. In fact, there was a whole series of questions that I had gone through probably every six months after I started my practice, where I kept on saying, do I still think this is true? Do I still feel like this is the focus area that I choose to have? And there were small, really minor adjustments, I would say, that would clarify, as you mentioned, with that. What kind of planning methodologies do you typically use? So if someone was at this stage right now and they were thinking, you know what, I want to do this, I want to start something myself. What helped you create that vision and mission for yourself?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. I think I turned that into a service for others too. And what it looked like is getting aligned is always first, is knowing what your values are. And I know there are a couple different ways you could figure that out. And the best way is really through interviewing the people who are closest to you, because they have information you don't. And also, once you have the information from the interviews, doing some sort of a d data analysis. Okay, mm-hmm. This from this person, yeah, I know. I don't know how well I'll I'll take that all the way. So you you pretty much use the information to really see what what aligns. And I think do going through the process for me, I realized freedom was a freedom, fairness, and love just kept coming, kept coming. And then through research and more self-development, I realized that I can package compassion. It's like, so how do we grow? Not just self-compassion, but compassion as a whole. And that sort of includes the freedom, the fairness, and the love. So we move from having these three sort of focus to just having one focus for level for all. And that's how do we focus on growing compassion from the inside out? And then you I it transformed to oh, I'm a unit of a community, I'm the unit of an organization. As I get well, the organization as a whole gets well. So the idea is to start by growing compassion within the individual, and then as each individual in the eck in the ecosystem grows their compassion, you start to see an influx of compassion in the ecosystem as a whole. And then from there, you take one ecosystem, and if that's duplicated in multiple ecosystems, that's when you start to see a whole shift in the world's capacity for compassion.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, the the phrase that it makes me think of is systems thinking. It's one of the things that I preach about, and I don't even just talk about it. I do, I preach about it. And because you you do not only affect yourself, right? And and it becomes what happens for you when you aren't smiling the same way or with the same frequency in those meetings and it was noticed, then that's a signal that something has changed for you. And and then you start to also recognize that it's affecting other people. And our emotions are contagious, right? Up, down, sideways, wherever we go. Our emotions are contagious. Our thoughts are contagious as well, even when they're not spoken out loud, as it turns out. And so it really becomes this process for us to recognize how as an individual we are actually part of the collective. And I guess I'm curious when you think about over the last several years, right, as you've had your practice, as it starts with that kernel of an idea and it expands from there. I guess what I'm wondering is how much more tuned in are you about the effect that you are having on other people as you demonstrate your own compassion from the inside out?
SPEAKER_00:That was being coming from a family where I had a lot of siblings and I was the second oldest, my default is to actually be compassionate to others. And I didn't always show myself that. I didn't always extend that to myself. I think over time and integrity be trying to be whole and extending myself the same beauty that I extend to others, compassion for myself grew over time, and what it looks like now is I prioritize pause silence, or even if the person can't respect the pause or the silence is saying, Hey, now is not the best time. So if I am comfortable, or I should say self-compassion invites me to honor how I'm feeling about the situation and not dismiss it because that's what I would dismiss it and try to make everything great for everyone. And I will say getting engaged and sharing space with my fiance has been the biggest teacher because I realized I don't I can't make things great and then go home and replenish myself because now this is home.
unknown:Right.
SPEAKER_00:So with that, I was offered an opportunity to really deepen self-compassion in a way that doesn't just honor the people around me. It also added a layer to the way that I approach the work too. And I started saying it's important to balance your needs and the needs of the collective. Because I'm starting to realize they're both equally important. And with that, what it looks like, my biggest friend is pause and breathe. You're triggered, pause and breathe, or you feel this was an injustice, pause and breathe. What pause and breathe does is when you're pausing, you want to ask for me one grounding question that always brings me back to the person that I want to be, not the person that I am. I always tell people, please judge me for the person that I want to be, not the person that I'm showing up as in the moment. And the person that I want to be is loving. So I'll ask myself, what's the most loving thing you can do in this moment? And the most loving thing for everyone, including me, sometimes is now is not a good time for this conversation. Or I understand this is an injustice towards me, but I sense emotions are high, and now is not a good time to bring it up. So let's hold this individual that is in front of me now, get them regulated, or offer them the support and skills they need to regulate, and then figure out a time to bring in when this happens for me. Here are the most helpful ways to deal with that. And I think that's been the biggest support, and this is where I'm I'm recognizing the wisdom in quietness and the wisdom in understanding yes, this needs to be said, but does it need to be said right now? And recognizing those differences I think are extremely important in keeping relationships harmonious and nurturing, and also instilling trust. Because people know I'm gonna hold you, but I'm also gonna teach you the best way to stay in a harmonious relationship with me.
SPEAKER_01:One of the things that that that makes me think of, even as a whole, too, is this idea of it it needs to be said, but it doesn't need to be said right now. One of the temptations or things that I've seen happen, I'll put it that way, because I don't necessarily know the cause inside of each of the people where I've witnessed it. Sometimes even myself, right? Like I even I didn't know why I was doing this. But okay, so I don't say it now. And then in the future I'm thinking, oh, it's okay. And I dismiss it and I set it aside. And I refer to this as a bonfire of matchsticks, where each time I dismiss it and set it aside, it's just another matchstick onto the, and all of a sudden one of them accidentally gets lit somehow and drops on. It's a poof. Yep. And the whole thing flares up, and the person's reaction is not aligned with the actual occurrence, right? Because it's all of this history that has built up. Because in that moment, they didn't go back then and address that thing that they held and recognized it was important to say but didn't say. What are the kinds of things that you think about in terms of what you've learned around managing that balance of sometimes we recognize I thought I needed to say it, and maybe I just don't need to, versus that rationalization of I really don't want to have to say it, so I'm going to tell myself I don't have to, so I don't.
SPEAKER_00:I think the first thing that comes to mind for me is patterns. If it's something is a one occurrence, a lot of times it's, I mean, you maybe you're hungry, you're tired, something happened. And I typically don't address one one-time occurrences. Once you can establish a pattern, though, and I would say three, two, some people can't make it to the third, but once I can identify three three separate occurrences that kind of form a pattern, then it's time for us to have a conversation. And and always ask too, because we can't just assume people care about how we feel. And or we hope. We hope. And that's why I always lead with a question. Is now a good time to address something with you? Because if they tell you no and you keep going, more than likely you're not gonna get anywhere anyway. And that's the wisdom in knowing when to say the thing. And sometimes my question is now a good time. I wait because I can kind of see when you're in a good mood, and I can know when you're not in a good mood. And when you're in a good mood is the best time to have these conversations, and also understanding, I think I lead with understanding the full humanity, and that's where the neuroscience of understanding behavior and emotions is helpful for me. I lead with like your humanity, I lead with positive intent. I know you didn't need and it in some I've had from clients, I get questions like, but what if it is malicious? And I'm like, but that doesn't help your emotional regulation. And if you're gonna make it up anyway, because to your point, you don't know what the others are thinking or feeling. And if you're gonna make it up, why not make it something that can help you self-regulate and honor the human being that is in front of you when you're having the conversation?
SPEAKER_01:I just have to laugh when you say that because I can't tell you how many times I've talked to my clients and said, all of our experiences, we've made up a story about what's going on for us. So why would we cling to the story that hurts the most? If anything can be true, make up something that makes it feel positive until you have data points, like real facts, not assumptions, not perceptions that are actually concretely like someone said, I don't like you, I did it because I wanted to hurt your feelings. And then to your point, it becomes this question of, but do I have to own their intent? Because that's actually not necessarily mine to carry. So if they wanted to hurt me, and then I don't let it hurt me because I'm able to process it, like, I don't know, I like to serve my revenge cold, and that'd be a really great way to do that, right?
SPEAKER_00:I I say the best revenge is the kind that where you're not affected, right? When you and this is where I tap into personal power often. And the personal power is for me, it's practice until you make it, right? When you say you don't like me, oh, it stings, it hurts because of course I'm joyful, everyone loves me. And then you let go of the idea that everyone has to love you. And once you let go of that idea, which takes time, because we talked about like somatic experiences, and they are very strong and real sometimes. And the reason why I say practice makes progress is because the more you practice letting go. And for me, when it's fairly new, it's something I may have to tell, like, girl, you have the power to see this differently. And I may have to say that to myself over a hundred times in an hour's time if I have to share space with this person who is, I just don't like you and I want to hurt your feelings. Oof. And it lives in your body for a while. So you continue to practice, you continue to practice, and then you realize one day you walk into a room and the person is in the room, and you don't that usual tense feeling you get in your body is no longer there. And you're like, oh, growth. There it is. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you. That one just floated right away, and now I don't need to worry about it anymore, right? And and we've talked about a couple of things that either deepened within your own practice of compassion and love in these spaces. What is another thing that you've noticed about yourself through this journey that now you've translated over to something that you share with your clients?
SPEAKER_00:I'm gonna say I can see the through line. And I'll say, like, a what huge transitions I can see through lines of how I ended up here in this moment in time. I I left Haiti when I was 13 and moved to New York. And at the time, I it wasn't my I'm 13, so it wasn't my choice to make the move.
SPEAKER_01:Right.
SPEAKER_00:And it was a very uncomfortable move because in Haiti they speak Creole and French. I'm moving to a country where I'm going to school and no one understands me for a long time. Um, and I went from being an A student to faltering a little bit when I first got here. But by the time I got to high school, I went back. But to that point, there was one experience that just sticks out in my mind. And I think uh we were meeting my mom and I were meeting with the guidance counselor. I'm freshly from Haiti to the United States, and the guidance counselor, I don't know, maybe they didn't realize that I understood what they were saying. I'm sitting in the room, it's like, oh, she's probably gonna have to repeat eighth grade because it doesn't look like she doesn't speak English, so she's gonna have to repeat eighth grade. What what I remember is being a high achieving child at the time that was a big fail, like repeating a grade, and I and I like that for me was like, oh no, this will never happen to me. And realizing that dedication to my work was alive in me then, like you know, when you look at hindsight, and that I think has been almost a motivation throughout my life, and for a while that I had to make sure it was like a healthy expression, I had to make sure that it was expressing itself in a healthy way because I didn't want to prove to the world that I could do it, because in that moment I wanted to prove to that gallant guidance counselor that that I could do it. I ended up being the valedictorian in my high school in in New York. So it's it it was one of these things that I realized they can be motivators, but for a while there was a exploration to make sure that there wasn't a negative impact of me needing to show the world that I could do it, that was acting out in the things that I created. But that was a really big one that I see play out because I think having lived in a third world country, there's a perspective taking that I can take that is almost a superpower for me. And in this, and the reason why I say that is I think that's the reason I can hold other people because I can step into your shoes simply by listening to you and really honoring who you are. And another piece of perspective taking is I can put Annie on a shelf for two seconds because I'm sitting with Becky and I'm building a relationship. And my from my relationship with you, I know this to be true for you, so I can put Annie on a shelf for a second and just be with you without projecting. And I think that's why we have a hard time in relationships. We we see a different experience as a threat to our experience, and what it is is it's just different. And another piece of perspective taking that I appreciate is how it expands me. So that now when I'm in certain situations, I don't just have my experiences to draw on, I can draw on Becky's experiences as well. So now there's an expansion that sorts of happen when you're open to taking a different perspective and genuinely doing it without judgment of the other person, with accepting fully that our different experiences, there's beauty in it.
SPEAKER_01:Yes. And and one of the things when you describe your experience there with a guidance counselor that occurs to me. I actually, it's it's so funny too. I have to mention that there was a parallel. I was the same age when I moved from one community to the next, was in with someone, I don't know if it was the principal, guidance counselor, whomever was there. And I was there with my dad, who wasn't a fighter, right? Like he was a peacekeeper. He was not a fighter. You got him angry, he was going to fight. But until then, he was a peacekeeper. And they weren't going to have me progress in mathematics. And, you know, they were like, oh no, she'll have to do this because she didn't have that. And he looked at them, no, I think you'll let her try. And I thought, wow, there's there's some advocacy. But the thing that it makes me think about, and I'm wondering if this is true for you at that time as well, is what a pivotal point in a young girl's life in terms of her recognizing her identity is existing. Exactly around that age and how much that imprints in terms of your experiences before that and after that. And really, kudos to you for the recognition of I could turn this into making it all about gaining that external validation all the time, or I could seek some awareness around this so that I'm actually building myself up based on the things that I have power over and the things that I actually care about. And these are the things that really matter to me. It makes me think of back to when you were talking about creating the values and really formulating that into something powerful. As you look at where your business is now and where it's going forward, because let's be real, we both know right now. I mean, I I don't know you super well, but I know you have a plan. This is what I've heard from you today is that you have a plan. What does that look like if you were to project five years out? What is it that you would love to accomplish?
SPEAKER_00:Right now, the vi and I say right now the vision, because the vision shifts. It always changes. But right now, actually, it's always been a version of this. It is using that framework to shift not just homes, because I love children, and wherever there are adults who are working with children, I'm there. Because I think when adults have the skills they need to be successful, they inherently just transfer those skills onto the children that they care for. But the vision is really to use those frameworks to offer skills for self-regulation. Because I think if we can master self-regulation skills, and then you add compassion, and I mean holistic compassion for yourself and for others, to that self-regulation skills, you start to have individuals who can think beyond their own well-being, and that's what the world needs right now. We need a world where we realize that when Becky wins, Annie wins because we're all interconnected. And the example I always use is COVID started in China, and yet somehow it shut the entire world down. And if there's anything that can show the connection between human beings as a whole, it's not a great example. Well, it's not a happy example, but it's a clear example of how of how connected we are and how it is important for us to really consider not just our well-being, but the well-being of everyone as a whole. And with that, those frameworks embedded into ecosystems where individual compassion increases so that ecosystems can start to shift and we can start to prioritize wellness in a way that uh catalyzes success for people as a whole.
SPEAKER_01:I I I agree. But if we imagine that instead of a virus, it would have been compassion and love that was spreading like that. Oh, yeah. The world would be a very happy place. Then it would be a great example, right? And and we would have a wonderful opportunity to really see how connected we really are and how much we can, we can challenge each other to do our best, but that actually lifts us all up when we're all contributing to that whole instead of kind of stripping away the humanity of each other and and really seeing each other as parts as opposed to the whole. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:I definitely lift up that it's hard because I was listening to a podcast the other day, and the sentence was people care more about what they believe than they care about what is true. And that's that's what I'm up. And then when I heard that, I was like, oh, that's what you're up against. You're up against people holding on to their beliefs more than they will hold on to the fact that the amygdala sees yelling as a trigger, as a threat, sees the fact that I think you're promoting this person over me because of my color. They don't see that those are very real biological facts that come into play in our relationships. And if you don't believe it, then you don't, to your point earlier, you're not gonna do anything about it. When it's unconscious, you're unaware that it is affecting your everyday life.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. And it it's one of the things that when I went through coach training, one of their foundations was actually, and I struggled so deeply with this one, though I I do accept that it's true. I just didn't like that it was, was that belief is more powerful than truth. And the idea there was we have all of these limiting beliefs. Those beliefs can actually shift from being limiters to becoming expanders. And so if we can consciously shift that, when we start to feel smaller, what we call in the in the practice that I use catabolic energy as opposed to anabolic energy, when we notice it pulling us down, then we can say, wow, there's a reason that that's happening. And even if we have an unconsciousness around something, we can actually flip that and go, this might be worth investigating. And when you were having those feelings and that restlessness and you couldn't put a name to it, it seems to me that that was one of those signs that you saw that said, we should inspect this a little bit more closely so that we can be a little bit more conscious about the direction that we're going with some of these things. I'm curious, Annie, if there's anything that we haven't talked about that you would be interested in discussing today.
SPEAKER_00:I think we did a pretty good job touching on most of everything.
SPEAKER_01:Well, I just want to tell you how much I've appreciated our conversation today. Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today, and I look forward to future conversations. Thank you so much. Appreciate the collaboration. If you have interest in connecting and learning more about today's guest, check out the show notes for ways to connect and follow up. Thanks for listening. If you found this episode helpful, share it with someone who could benefit from it. Until next time, I'm Becky Fraser, reminding you to integrate who you are with how you lead. Okay, bye.
