Hey everyone. Welcome to Trail Talks, the podcast where we talk about growth, the messy, the beautiful, the funny, and everything in between. I'm Kelly Kruger. Your host and founder of Kelly Michelle Coaching where we specialize in mindset, emotional intelligence, life and leadership. And joining me again, ladies and gentlemen, watch out. There's a new Catwoman in town. You may have seen her roaming around Ibor. My co-host, my good friend, my fellow Misfit leadership trainer and founder of Leading People LLC, the one and only Terra Stinnett. Welcome to episode three. We are back. Yeah. You liked that? You liked that intro. I did. Yeah. You didn't believe I was a really Catwoman, so I sent you that video. Huh? I yeah. Yeah. That was, uh, yeah. That was awesome. I, I, I believed you though. I do believe you would be Catwoman. I know, I know. I was like, I'm sending this to her. I don't care. Yeah, no, it was, pretty epic. How are we feeling today? Thankful and excited. Thankful and excited. Okay. And you were like the co-host, right? Like at first it was maybe a couple episodes and now you're just like coming back and you're just Yeah. To kick me off. I'm here. Yeah. Yeah. This is it. I love it. I love it. The people love us, I think. Uh, yes. Yeah. Very, very grateful. We are always nervous, so just know that we are always nervous, but we're not gonna say nervous today. Well, we just did, but very grateful. So, my first shout out, I have a shout out'cause I just spent a couple days with exceptional team of managers from Aspen Dental, Jessie Shaara, Missy, Tiffany, Devin, Megan, and Amanda. That was awesome. That workshop. That was incredible. Yeah. Yeah, it was fun. Great professionals. Cups were filled. Energy was high, and hearts and minds were wide open. Just an amazing group of people. They also came up with their walkup songs. I like to ask people like what their walkup song is, like, their own theme song. Yeah. So I wanna here's a few of'em. Tiffany Blues by Fallout Boy. How will I know by Whitney Houston? I mean, how can you ever be in a bad mood with that song? Like, oh, exactly. I was listening to that on the Way Home. Danza Karu. Do you know that one? Oh, that no idea. That gets you moving, that gets you moving Uptown Funk, which is a classic Try everything by Shakira, Nueva by Bad Bunny. I mean, maybe he'll do that one during the Super Bowl halftime show. Yeah. And Mente, I mean, just a great, great. Playlist by them. So thank you ladies. Such an honor and Aspen dentals, clients, patients, and doctors all hit the jackpot with you. You're awesome. Before we dive in to today's episode, like 120 downloads, we're moving on up. It's crazy. Two episodes you would think we had like 10. I, I, I can't believe it. It's been three weeks. Three weeks and 120 downloads. Incredible. I didn't hear from Carlos if we were still rated in the Czech Republic, but that's okay. 120 downloads first two episodes. I mean, we are just humbled and just have goosebumps thinking about it. The gratitude we feel, is unreal and people have been reaching out and we wanna, give them a shout out too. So, Christina Loving Trail talks, limiting beliefs, hits, keep moving this train forward. I'm on board. Love that one. Rachel. I love the podcast. Makes me wanna do better and be better. Friends from high school inspired to grow, reflect let's see, Nikki, Kelly, Jen, Erica, just everybody. Thanks for the encouragement. Another Christina took us on a walk, and she'll have the notebook ready next time. And so, oh, I mean, just incredible. Some people even said they listened to it a few times. Really? Yes. They went back and listened because like they were texting me. What was that book you, you were talking about? What was a quote that you guys said again, I gotta go back and listen to the podcast, so I've been getting really great feedback on my end too. Oh my God. I can't believe it. Who would've ever thought either? I never even thought we'd do a podcast. And here we are, we're on our third one. No excited. Just, keep listening so much to explore so many topics. And yeah, tell your friends, give us a rating. We're gonna shift gears probably. We're gonna do another episode this weekend as we lean into Veteran's Day, and we're gonna start having guests on and we're gonna shift a little bit into some leadership discussions. So, we're very excited and just keep listening, please, even if it's one person that, you know, we help. Just have a better day than that's what it's all about. So, thank you so much, and we're gonna go video soon. Yes, you're wild for that. But you know what that means. I actually gotta do my hair. You don't have to. Well yeah, we're gonna go video soon. Maybe even this weekend. Who knows? But it'll be soon when we're ready. Alright, so today we're gonna talk about one of the most powerful shifts you can make, and that is learning to pause between stimulus and response. So we're gonna talk about the power of the pause. What do you think? I love it. Power of the pause is very important. Reaction versus response. Yes. Yeah. So that's where we start. We talk about the definition of react versus respond and how we get there. So react is knee jerk, immediate unconscious. Something happens. And we react to it with our emotions. So when we go back, let's go back to neuroscience, right? Mm-hmm. And, and how the brain works. We've got our limbic system and that is like Grand Central Station for emotions. That's where all our, emotions take place that is developed when we're born. So everything that we're exposed to, like we talked about a little bit last week, everything that we're exposed to limbic system is sensing, right? Yeah. And so if you're only exposed to seeing certain things growing up then that's what you're exposed to. It's so that's how you react with your emotional part of the brain. Which is your limbic system, and then you have your prefrontal cortex, which is where you do your logical reasoning, analyzing your highest level of thinking. Yeah, and it's very intentional. Very intentional, yeah. Yeah. Very thoughtful, very intentional, conscious, objective, thinking. Your prefrontal cortex isn't fully developed until you're in your mid twenties. So, yeah, so it makes sense, right? I'm like, I was gonna say, a lot of things are making sense right now. Yeah. So it makes sense that pre mid twenties, we just probably reacted to things without doing our highest level of thinking. And there's still those moments that we have where we use our emotions, we reuse our limbic system. Yeah, and I was thinking earlier when, I was brushing up on my reaction versus response, I was like, you know, this all is linked together because. What we've been discussing, right? We talked about survival mode last week. We talked about survival mode, but how it relates to your beliefs and how your brain keeps you safe by what you believe. This week we're talking survival mode, but with behaviors due to our mm-hmm. Emotional reaction to things. And you know, the brain is just a freaking complicated thing, like just making shit up along the way, like calm down. Well, it's complic. It's ever, it's, it's the supercomputer in between our ears. That is so important to know how it works. Under stress, we have these moments that we wish we could take back that something happens and we react versus respond. And those two words, when we say react, and it's the immediate unconscious knee jerk. We are simply taking that limbic system and the memories within the limbic system, like the hippocampus too, right? That's part of it. Mm-hmm. And reacting what we've seen. That's why it's react. Well then when we look at respond, which is conscious decision, highest level of thinking, prefrontal cortex, when we look at that and we say respond. We're gonna say respond, like, what thought am I going to sponsor right now?, We take ourselves away from the situation and look at it objectively with facts. Mm-hmm. Right? So when you take yourself away from it, remove the emotions, look at the facts, then you could say, okay, I'm going to respond. How do I wanna respond? And that could be One second, five seconds, 10 seconds. Right? So react versus respond. And when we react it's usually using a lot of emotions, which can be anger and lashing out at somebody. And also when you do that, you are giving away your power, which is the power of the pause, You keep your freaking power. Right? Right. So, when you are reacting with all those emotions, you're giving somebody all your power away. And so under stress, when that something happens where you react blood flow shifts away from the prefrontal cortex toward the amygdala. Which literally shuts down, rational analysis. So that's why we or anybody just, we tend to react defensively instead of thoughtfully when their stress and tension rises. Yeah. And certain, stressors and triggers will cause that reaction. Mm-hmm. So what makes you react is gonna be completely different than me and what makes me react. And I think, I guess the question would be how do you know that you're reacting and not responding? Because just'cause reacting doesn't mean that it's such a bad outcome, or we're justifying our reaction. So in our mind it's like, okay. I did this because they did. I did X, Y, and Z because they did this to me, and you're justifying your reaction. Well, one way that I noticed that I reacted incorrectly, it wasn't because of the outcome of the situation. It wasn't because I lost a friend or a boyfriend, or I lost my job. It was the shame, the guilt that you get after you've become reactive. That's how you know,, you didn't respond well, you reacted. Yeah, there are situations, When we talk about react versus respond and how you wanna respond versus react we're talking about situations that require a response, that require you to use your highest level of thinking, that require you to use your prefrontal cortex and not all your emotions. There are many situations where something happens and you are to react. Like you are to use that fast thinking and react. And that's that fight or flight. That's that limbic system where the limbic system is fight, flight, freeze feed, fornicate. There's going to be situations where you have to be safe. But the situations that we're talking about are situations where. You should respond, you should think rationally before you respond. And that's just, and that's just removing the emotion. It could be you're allowed to be upset. You're allowed to grieve, you're allowed to be disappointed., You're allowed to feel that, but it's how you're communicating it. Yeah. And it goes back to noticing what that feeling is first. Yes. Yes. What is the feeling that makes you react in this manner? So for me it was what was the trigger? What are those things that trigger you to feel this way, that you don't like to feel this way? Like whether, I don't like to be sad, I don't like to be anxious. That's a feeling, and it causes me to react no matter what the situation is. It depends on what your trigger is, and you have to recognize that feeling first., We have triggers and that's all self-awareness. That's knowing what triggers you. And it's naming it. I know that I can give a, prime example. I think very, fast in general, I am a very quick thinker, so I always have to use that pause and I always have to. I catch myself and I always have to slow down. You were talking about earlier, this is a crazy story by the way, but what the hell, you were talking about earlier that sometimes you have to use that fast thinking. Mm-hmm. Well, myself and my friend Maddie, this is when I lived in Cincinnati. I lived in Dayton. We were going to Cincinnati to hang out and we had a hotel.'cause Dayton's an hour away. Right? Well, back in the day, Cincinnati was a little. It's crazy. It was on the first 48 every day. So, it was a little wild back then. And, I missed the turn, the exit and so we had to go through a really bad part of the neighborhood and I knew it was a bad part of the neighborhood. I lived in Cincinnati forever, but I'm like, we're in the car. No big deal. We go up here, we'll make a left. We get to the stop sign and there's a car in front of us. And don't you know, we ended up in a full, in the middle of a full blown shootout, and I'm not even joking. And they hopped out the car and they were in a full blown shootout. And so I had to put the car in reverse and drive backwards down the street. And my friend Maddie was in. Was in, I don't even know what F she was in because she had her seat laid all the way back and she was like crying, but I was like, it's okay, Maddie. I got this. And I just put it in reverse. I used that fast thinking, but I stayed so calm that it kept her calm in that situation. It was a hectic situation. But yeah, so I think like ahead, calm is what helped you get through it. But also using your survival part of the brain is also gonna help you get through some of those situations, but you wanna try to be as calm as possible. We don't make good decisions when we are stressed. We don't make good decisions when we are applying strong emotions to something. We wanna try to just name those emotions, understand why we're feeling what we're feeling, and then address it. So kind of step away from it. Yeah. Because when we stay calm, it helps ground other people as well. What do you think? Wanna take a detour? I'm ready for a detour. Detour. Let's do it. Alright. So baby boom. How was it? Oh, it did you watch it really good? I did watch it. It was good. To my surprise, you. Diane Kean is a bad bitch. A bad beat. Yeah. No, look she's awesome. Such a great movie. So, to prove that you watched it I have prepared trivia. Of course you did. Baby Boom trivia. Yeah. Gosh. Are you ready? I'm ready. I think they're easy questions. You, I don't trust you. Trust me. I, I just said, trust me. You said I don't trust you. Three questions. Who plays the lead role of JC Wyatt? What a great name. JC Gracie Wyatt In the movie, Ryan Keeton. Okay. Ding, ding, ding. C. Easy. Okay. All right. Number two. What is the name of the baby girl that JC Wyatt is left with to raise? I don't remember the name of the baby. Tara. What is the name of the baby? What is her name? I know it's a girl. Yeah. I don't know her name. I can't lie to you. I was too focused on Diane Keaton. And how much of a bad be she was? Elizabeth. Elizabeth. All right. Number three. Number three. All right. You're one in one here. What state. Does she move to, to raise Elizabeth? Is it Wisconsin? Minnesota? No. It's in the middle somewhere. It was far. No, well, it more east like northeast Maine. Close. I need a map. Vermont. Vermont. Vermont, Vermont. Yeah. Yeah. I just remember that house and like it kept breaking down. She spent all her money. Oh yeah. Yeah. God, it's so good. But she persevered. As a single mom. Grit. Yep. Yes. She had grit. Love it. And you know what got me? I'm sorry, I can't, now I gotta talk about it. You done brought it up. Yeah, go ahead. You know what got me is at the end when they tried to buy her baby food after they ran her out of there for being a single mom, they tried to buy her freaking baby food and she was like, Nope, I can do this on my own without your money. And they gave her the best deal you could think about, but I was so proud. I was like, yeah, f all of that stuff they're trying to give you man, just, they were terrible. Yeah. Those men working there were, but such a good movie. I. So good. I'm so glad you watched it. Yeah, me too. You forced me, but I'm glad that you forced me. Oh yeah. Okay, so I won't bug you anymore about baby Boom, but for our listeners, please watch Good movie. What else? So we transitioned from Halloween and Yeah, so when I took Jordan trick or trick-or-treating, it was like every 10th house. Appreciate it was open for business. Yeah. It probably wasn't the best neighborhood, but I just drove to a neighborhood over here. And, so yeah, I was a little disappointed. I thought, I just think you should be open for business on Halloween. And it was probably like every 10th house. We just kept walking and walking. And when people are sitting outside, that means they're open for business. But we had pretty decent hall and oh my God, I cried every house. It, I was such a cry baby. Why were you crying? Well, I cry a lot but it. Like, I just, I'm just so proud of him. Aw. And like every house he walked up to, it was just a special moment and they just never get old. Like I love those moments and I'm like, oh my God, that's my kid. And this was like the first Halloween where it was just him and I trick or treating. So it was just really special. Yeah. It was, he's like, why are you crying, Bob? Oh, we're gonna drown in the puddle. You're crying so much. Yeah, my kid is interesting. He's an interesting character. When he went trick-or-treating on Halloween,'cause he went twice, but on Halloween, he would go up to the house and look in their bucket and if they didn't have the candy he wanted, he'd say, no thank you, and walk away. Oh. So we have, oh my God, a bag of candy of the same. Same types of candy, Reese cups, sour Patch kids. Airheads. Yeah. Oh, we gotta get our kids together. Oh my God. They would be a hoot. Yeah.'cause Jordan will spend five minutes looking through the bowl because he wants to make sure, like he's gonna get what he wants. Yeah. I'm like, yo, dude, come on. Yeah, so one November. Mariah Carey starting to thaw. Oh, yeah. You know, people have Christmas decorations, stores all I mean, I, when I went to my mom's this weekend when I was in Buffalo, my mom had like winter wonderland in her house. Was wasted. No time wasted. No time. Wow. Yeah. I usually wait till after Thanksgiving'cause I, I decorate for fall, not for Halloween. So I have to keep it up until after Thanksgiving. Yeah. Okay. Because it goes with the theme, yeah, we're in November, so we'll do some gratitude themes this month with the podcast. Yeah, that'd be good. Like Thanksgiving talk traditions about daylight savings. Oh god. We fell back. What is this to, what did this start? I, no, I think I looked it up and I lost my notes on that, but I actually looked it up, like, when did this start and will it ever end? I thought they voted on it or something. I thought this was like going to the courts or something to get rid of this. Yeah, I did too, because every night at 10:30 PM I'm ready for bed and I realize it's only 7:00 PM. In my mind it's 10 30. I'm like, it's time for bed. Let's go. No, it's seven. It does something to the psyche. It does something. I did read like I love the spring forward, right? We get light longer. Yeah. In the evening. It's great for the summer. It's awesome. Why can't they just keep it like that? And then I was reading for the fall back, if they were to keep it spring forward, it would be too dark in the morning or the kids at the bus stop or something. Yeah. Yeah. Did you read that too? Or did you just know that? Yeah. I must have read it a long time ago. I've heard that before. Oh. Yeah. But yeah. Yeah, of course. You like spring forward and the light because you're grateful for it at this point because it's been dark at 5:00 PM every day, and so you're just happy to have a little bit of daylight to do your, I don't know, chores or run some errands. Yeah. Yeah. I don't do chores, but No kidding. It's just life. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's, it really, yeah. It takes a little bit getting used to, and I'd rather have the light. I don't like this getting dark at 5:00 PM It's so weird. I used to like it before I had a kid when I could just come home from work and go to bed until the next day, but I'm old now. Can't do that. So, yeah. You are not old. Whatever. Okay. If you're old, then I'm really old. And I don't think I'm really seasoned. Yeah, so I, I think we've got Courtney coming up. We'll switch over to the trail, but we've got Courtney coming up. My buddy Courtney will talk like leadership stuff and I do. So I think that for the next episode, which is in a couple days and we're gonna be shifting to leadership and since we're gonna be rolling into Veteran's Day start thinking about what your favorite military movie is. Oh, okay. Okay. I can do that. I watched a lot of those. Okay, well, we'll find out. All right. Are we getting back on the trail? Yeah, let's give them some tools. All right, let's do it. All right. So we are out of this like animalistic state where we just react to everything and show all of our emotions, and we are using these great abilities we have and our prefrontal cortex to make very good decisions and respond versus react. So what tools can we give our listeners to help them respond versus react? Well, we already talked about the pause, right? Yeah. Just pause taking a second. Yep. We already talked about the powerful pause, which is what this episode's all about. You will get so much power back. You will keep your power if you just pause even just a few seconds. Yep. Then my favorite is practice objective observation. So state facts, not feelings. So just being logical in general, and removing the emotion and taking yourself way I do is I take myself out the situation, I look at the facts and I try to remove the emotion and that's how you look at things objectively. And that's really helpful for me. I think that's probably the thing that works the best. Yeah. And it's so tough, right? I'm not gonna sit here and say this is easy and we do this all the time. Practice makes progress. Like just start doing it. Just even 10 seconds. Remove yourself and think about are these facts or is this a story I am making up? Oh yes. I was gonna say, the storytelling we get, do. Oh, that's terrible. Yeah, I do. And I do, and I make up a lot of stories up here. Just, yeah, just look at it. Facts versus feelings. Keep your power. So the pause, naming the feeling, looking at it objectively. What else? Even just like. When you remove yourself from a situation, go for a walk, just get some fresh air. Just do some deep breathing for a few seconds. The grounding, the five senses, grounding is a good one. That's the five things you see, four things you touch, three things you hear two things you smell, one thing you taste. I think that's the order that even alone that takes what, like 30 seconds that removes you from that situation so you could start objectively thinking about it? Absolutely. I think, yeah. And just long-term like meditating and stuff, just that helps music. Yeah, just listening to a song or even singing helps. Car singing is the best stress relieve ever. Yes. Singing at the top of your lungs in the car. Can't beat it. There you go. But I was gonna say with the looking at things objectively, I even reached out to you not too long ago, Hey, can you take a look at this? Because I was having emotions about something from work and well, I wanted to know was I coming out of emotion or was this logical? Are these facts? Am I crazy? Can you take a look at this to tell me? Without emotion that, I'm either crazy or I'm not. So I have people that I reach out to sometimes. Yeah, absolutely. When I wanna check myself. Yep. Call a friend, find a mentor., Just get a different perspective. Your perspective is not the only perspective and your perspective is not always the right perspective. So getting somebody else's input helps. Sometimes that person could say, Hey, no, no, no. You're very emotional right now. Let's just look at this objectively. But for us in the moment, sometimes that's just tough to do, especially if we're not used to practicing that power of the pause. What else? We had two books that we were gonna rec recommend. The one, and I see this quote a lot on Facebook. It's, it, the book is Viktor Frankl. He wrote, man Search for Meaning. And the quote we see a lot so powerful is between stimulus and response. There is a space. And in that space lies our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. That's the freedom zone. Your prefrontal cortex is your freedom zone. That's where you have all your power. He was talking about something very deeply human, that even we can't control what happens to us, we can always choose how to respond to it. And then years later, Daniel Kahneman wrote Thinking Fast and slow, and he explains the two systems in our brain system. One is the fast emotional reactive brain used when appropriate. That's where we make like goal or gut decisions, impulsive decisions. And then system two is the slower, deliberate, reflective brain. That's where we respond. That's where we pause, analyze, choose. And that requires effort and attention. So two books there, man. Search for Meaning and thinking Fast and Slow. So when we talk about the power and the pause, it's that moment when we stop letting system one run the show and then give system two the mic. We move from reacting to responding from survival to self-leadership. All right friends, that's it for today's episode of Trail Talks. Remember, between stimulus and response lies your power. It's where you choose who you wanna be, how you wanna show up, and what kind of energy you bring into the world. So this week, practice the pause. When something or someone triggers you, breathe, step back. Give yourself that space to respond with intention instead of reaction. That's where growth lives. Thank you for walking this trail with us today. If this episode spoke with you, share it with a friend, leave a rating. Tag us on social media. We'd love to hear your biggest takeaway. I'm Kelly Kruger here with my partner in growth and good troublemaker Terra, Stinnett. And until next time, keep walking your trail. Keep doing the work, and keep growing through the messy, the beautiful, and everything in between. See ya.