54. The Duality of Life: Why You’re Meant to Feel it All and How to Not Avoid the Hard Stuff

Dr. Vanessa Calderón: Hello friends, welcome back to the podcast. I'm so thrilled that you're here. I want to start by just asking all of you for a huge favor. If you have been listening and you have been enjoying this podcast, please Give us a rating and a review. ⁓ It really, really, helps other people find us. That's how the algorithm works. And so if you are listening to this on a platform where you can do a rating and a review, please do that. Thank you for taking the time to do that. And I would love to hear there are any topics specifically that you want me to cover. I doing these episodes. I spend a lot of time ⁓ diving deep into the research and making sure bringing you something that you can actually use. ⁓ So if are listening and there's a problem you've been struggling with, something you really want solved, send me DM. I'm at Vanessa Calderon MD. hang out on Instagram. send me a quick DM. Let me know what you want me to cover. And I would love to cover that for you. And you just want to say hi, send me a DM. ⁓ I love to know what's been helping you. So if any of these episodes have been really resonating with you, feel free share. ⁓ Let me And of course, ⁓ share this with your friends, family, cousins, uncle, aunts, anyone who you think would benefit because ⁓ The more people we have walking the planet that are conscious, that are awake, that are living intentional purposeful lives, better planet we will have. All right, sweet friends, let us jump in. talking today about a concept that I think is so important to come back to over and over again, especially when life feels really hard. Like when really struggling and a lot of pain, I think this is a really important topic to get into. ⁓ So I'm talk about the concept today, which is ⁓ the importance duality in life. And then I'm going to talk I mean by that, how this shows up for us specifically, for those of you listening to this podcast episode and what we can start doing to really allow ourselves to live in the both and in the duality of life. So I'm going to start today a quick story with you. So I, if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you know, I lost my mom two years ago it sucked. It was really, really, really, really, really hard. My mom is, was this incredible human being was just a huge light in this world, And man, she was, ⁓ was larger than life. She incredible. She was really a legend. And ⁓ her last three days on earth she still here, She was on home on hospice and we had family coming, family and friends coming from all over the United States and Mexico coming to say their last goodbyes and talk to her. And it was hard. I was there with her those three days. By her bedside, I wouldn't leave her side. One of my love languages is quality time. ⁓ So. So I was there with her by her bedside the entire time. People would come in and out and I wouldn't leave because if she needed anything, I wanted to make sure she had it. She needed more pain medicine and she needed to be changed if she needed water. didn't want her to need anything. really hard. I had a lot of grief. ⁓ And I experienced this incredible amount of, I don't know, was like joy maybe? ⁓ I was listening to people because I was sitting by her bedside the entire time. There were people from all walks of life coming to sit next to my mom to say thank you for the relationship she had with them. There was a woman who came in who said, I don't know if you remember me, Olivia, I came to this country, she came from Guatemala and I don't know how she met my mom, she was like, I was pregnant and I didn't have any family here and I went into labor and you stayed with me at the hospital the entire time and held my hand so I wouldn't have to be alone. ⁓ my mom, that's the kind of stuff she did. And then there was ⁓ one of her best friends from high school that came in and by her side and started thanking her for always making sure she had enough money to eat. Her friend said, you know, when we were in high school, ⁓ you always had extra change or a few extra dollars and I never had enough and you always made sure to give me your extra money if I ever needed anything so that I would never go hungry. getting to all those stories. ⁓ And I mean, the list goes on and on. started taking notes when I, when I heard them sharing, cause I wanted to remember these stories forever. So I was experiencing this tremendous amount of grief. I'm you know, I knew I'm a physician. I know that my mom's on. hospice and I know that she's going to die soon I can see all the signs and at the same time I get to hear these beautiful stories and I was experiencing a tremendous amount of grief and joy at the same time I realized holy smokes this ⁓ this it this is the human experience the human experience that ⁓ you can't have your entire human experience if you're not open to feel everything. I had to feel that level of grief because without it I wouldn't have been able to feel the amount of love. Like I had so much deep love and admiration for my mother of course on the other side of that labyrinth of love and admiration comes grief when they're not around. It's the concept of ⁓ you have ⁓ light the shadow. You can't know what hot is if you don't know what cold is. And that the spectrum of the human experience. So I want you to imagine the human experience as this circle. half of the circle ⁓ ⁓ of the higher vibrational good feeling things that we feel joy and love and happiness. And other half are the things we don't want to feel. It's the grief and the sadness and the disappointment and the loss. But when think about the human experience, it's not just about making ⁓ one side and the other side smaller. because that's a lopsided experience and that wouldn't really give you the full experience. That would be really inauthentic. actual human experience is making that entire pie bigger. The more you're able to hold space for the stuff that doesn't feel good, the your life is able to feel the good stuff ⁓ and more profound and joyful ⁓ and your life will be. And that is the duality of life. That's the duality. The reason why we're talking about it today is because what I have seen happen is so many of us are walking this planet trying to avoid the hard stuff. trying to, we're creating programs and trying to sell people the fastest, easiest, you know, all of these things. And what we don't want, what I never want anyone to ever do is rob people of their life experience, of their human experience, of going through the dark to come out to the light. That's the win. That's the transformation. That's the breakthrough. That's what we need to hold space for. So what we're going to talk about today is what duality actually means, how it sort of stood the test of time, then how we can start practicing it now. OK, so let's jump in. So the of duality can sound a little philosophical. It can even sound a little abstract. but I am going to bring it down to earth because I want all of you to how this feels when it lives in your body, not conceptually, but your lived experience in coaching when you're holding space for your clients breakthroughs. Well, you yourself are going through something incredibly hard. That's duality. in a moment where you feel like a really big break happening for you, like maybe you experienced your first six figures you expected this huge triumph and instead you felt this like weird strange feeling of like loss, like wait a second that didn't make me feel better. duality. Or when you watch your children do something, like you watch your son do something incredible, maybe some athletic like feet or something, and it was so amazing. And then you come home and he's like yelling and screaming because he's a teenager. That's duality. that gap between, you know, the stuff that feels so good and the stuff that feels so hard between who you're becoming and who you have been is duality. So at its core, duality is the principle that opposing forces, light and dark, expansion and contraction, joy and grief, confidence and doubt, they are not enemies, that they are in fact part of the same thing, they're partners. And that each one of them defines the other. They're sort of ⁓ sides of the same coin, or if you think about a tension rod, they're balancing ⁓ forces each side. You cannot have one without the other. cannot know what it feels like to be deeply loved and seen ⁓ you've never known what it feels like to be invisible or to feel so lonely that it feels cold. You cannot lead others through transformation if you haven't genuinely transformed yourself. You know deep healing if you haven't felt the wound of pain, ⁓ of of trauma. So these ideas aren't new. This is not new aged. In fact, it's some of the oldest ideas humans have held on to over and over again that we've passed on from tradition to tradition to tradition. In the Hermetic tradition, a body of philosophical and spiritual teachings that traces its roots way back to ancient Egypt, there's this ancient text. It's called the Kabbalion. In fact, you can read it if you want. It's spelled K-Y. B-A-L-I-O-N. The teachings of the Kabbalian were published in like the 1900s, but the teachings themselves are much, much, much, much older than that. They're an ancient text. And there's one, there's seven core principles in the Kabbalian. of the principles is called the principle of polarity. And what it says. Everything is dual. Everything has poles. Everything has its pair of opposites. Like and unlike are the same. Opposites are identical in nature, but just different in degree. Identical in nature, but different in degree. It's like what Albert Einstein says. He says everything is relative. When you really think about that, that's one of his, you know, most basic sayings, but it's one of the most profound. Everything is relative. Relative to what? That's the question. Relative to what? So if you're outside and you're like, man, it's hot out here. Hot compared to what? It has to be relative. I've never loved someone this much. Like this is the most I've ever loved. How do you know that? Cause you know what it feels like to not love somebody. Everything is relative. So let that sit in there. Let that sit in the concept that opposites ⁓ identical in nature, but different in degree. Hot and cold could be opposites, but really they're just the same thing. Different in just difference in temperatures, different in degrees. confidence and self-doubt, same thing. Different points on the same pole. version of you that's certain of your calling ⁓ the version of you that lies awake at 2 a.m. wondering like, ⁓ in the world am I doing with my life? Same person, just different positions. That framing can change so much about how we relate to hard things. I'm going to share with you a few other ancient texts that I think might support you in just like really letting this land in your body. Tao, ⁓ the Tao Ching attributed to the philosopher Lao Tzu ⁓ was written the sixth century BCE. ⁓ And it us the concept ⁓ of ⁓ and yin and yang. You guys have seen the black and white circles together. And in Western culture, we have sort flattened this into a logo. But the Taoist understanding is so much richer than that. if you think about the yin and yang, what you see is two things that are complementary to each other. They're not competing. They're complementary to each other. ⁓ each of them ⁓ a seed of the other. If you look at the yin and yang, you'll see it in the black. You'll see a tiny little hole that's white. And on the white, you'll see a tiny little circle that's black. Each contains a seed of the other. The growing season holds the seed of winter. The high enrollment month, for example, of your holds seed of the slow month. They each give rise to each other. They complete each other. And the is really clear. Resistance to this natural cycle, or trying to hold only the good. Again, like you see that the circle that analogy I gave you and ⁓ The right side being all the positive stuff, trying to only hold the good or only like grow the good and trying to avoid the hard really the root of suffering. The sage doesn't fight the current, they move with it, which is incidentally exactly what we tell her, ⁓ I tell all my coaching clients to do. Don't what's hard, learn from it, try to figure out what is it here to teach you? And this the thing that we most struggle to do ourselves. So if you were to, ⁓ Fast forward to let's say Western psychology and psychiatry. talk about the shadow side, the shadow aspect. And Carl Jung spent his life studying what's called the shadow, the parts of ourselves that we push away, that we deny, that we refuse to look at. In family systems, we call this parts work. And for us as leaders and as coaches, having a level of self-mastery really supports us in being better leaders and being better coaches and being better entrepreneurs. the shadow ⁓ has a very specific texture. It's the fear that we're not actually looking at, the fear that we're not actually qualified to do the work that we're doing, that we're imposters, for example. It be, you know, the envy of someone else that's doing similar work and they look like they're working faster. Why do they have it so easy? the ⁓ of shadow work is that the shadow doesn't disappear ⁓ when ignore it. Just because you're not looking at those fear parts that live inside of you or those shadow parts inside of you, ⁓ they go away. actually get stronger and they start leak out in ways that are very unintentional. when we ignore shadow sites, an entrepreneur, let's say you're a coach and you ⁓ are ignoring, a client you feel resentment towards because they keep canceling on you or they're showing up late ⁓ or they're just doing the work ⁓ that they're supposed be doing, they're not doing their part. And you keep ignoring it and you keep on, but then it'll leak in the ways that maybe you overreact. when the client does show up. maybe you're a leader that's ⁓ ⁓ yes, yes, yes, I'll do more, I'll do more. And starting to feel resentful. ⁓ And there's a boundary that was broken. Maybe it was because you tried to set this boundary, but you didn't respect your own boundary, but you keep trying to set it. And people keep pushing all over your boundaries. And you feeling really angry. That might be your shadow side leaking out. So what's really important here is to notice that shadow sites exist and they're not gonna go away just because we ignore them. We to ⁓ get know them. We get to be with them. We get to be present to the shadow sites that live inside of us. That is we bring in the light. ⁓ my gosh, in fact, Rumi, one of my favorite poets of all time, the Persian poet Rumi, he has this ⁓ line that I is just so beautiful, which is, The wound, the dark place, is the place where the light enters you. The wound is the place where the light enters you. when we get to know our shadow sides, all of our triggers, the things that really rub us the wrong way, when get to know those, not ignore them, but really know, don't waste a trigger, get to know what that's trying to teach you. That is how you grow. That is where you blossom. That's a bud waiting to happen. I had a teacher, was one of my trauma psychology teachers, and called all of those wounds buds. He said, that is where the rose buds, those beautiful, beautiful places that, you know, where we get to give back to the world, that's where they come from. So all these traditions that I just ⁓ shared with all these ancient traditions across thousands of years, across cultures, across disciplines, ⁓ are all to very similar truths. That the full experience of being human, being an entrepreneur, being a leader, being a parent, being a professional, being a coach. They all require you to experience all of life. Not the highlights that we want to share on Instagram, ⁓ of life. Okay, ⁓ I to... Tap in and go a little deeper here, specifically with all of you, with leaders, with entrepreneurs, with coaches. I think this community specifically is navigating something that makes really, really important and also harder to practice than almost anyone else. Because if think about it, our work is transformation. We're in the business of transformation. We're in business of getting people results to transform ⁓ or of teams. And when your entire brand is built around helping people break through, rise up, reach their next level, or really when you're leading these teams to else can we create, what else is possible, there's professional and also social pressure to appear ⁓ really put together or to appear transformed already. And to like that all the time, to have already done all the things that you're teaching, to be living proof that it works. And when you're not feeling that, when you're in a part of life where things feel hard, like when I was grieving my mom, me tell you, that was not really easy. So your business ⁓ for not doing well, when your teams are failing, when you don't feel like the version of yourself, like when you don't feel like you're being really successful, it's really hard for you to show up. And the shame doubled because ⁓ You're not just struggling. Now you're struggling in a field that is like professionally, you're supposed to be the person that's super successful. that is a trap. ⁓ it's a trap that's really worth naming incredibly directly because we don't want to ⁓ this inauthentic version of who we are. most us listening to this podcast, we want to live the wholeness of life. That we know we want that cognitively, but we're trying to only live on the right side, only the positive stuff. We always want to stay in momentum. We always want to be going. We always want to be succeeding. We'll tolerate the hard stuff only long enough to get the lesson from it, to keep going, to figure out like, I'm only going to do that because I know I'll be successful. here's what I'll tell you, that that's still avoidance. You're wrapping your pain in like wrapping your pain in a story of like, going to get me to where I want to go. It's still avoiding your pain. So ⁓ what I know to be true. That when we decided to come into human form, when our souls decided to come into human form, we did not sign a contract that said, I'll never, I'm never going to feel the hard stuff. I'm only here to do the good stuff. I'm only here to experience the good stuff. ⁓ ⁓ no. None of us signed a contract that said that. When we decided to come into human form, we decided to have a human experience. And guess what? We have a limbic system, we have an amygdala. That means we're going to have feelings, all of them. And we're going to have fear because we're biologically wired to have both. the to really experience all of life, again, it's not to avoid the bad stuff, it's to make space for all of it. to do your best to make space for all of it, not to resist it, but to make space for it. That is how we experience peace and that's how we experience larger, more profound life. It's really, really beautiful what's possible for us when we make space for all of it. Okay, I wanna get a little specific here and talk about some of the duality that I see happen for coaches specifically and leaders. and ⁓ in entrepreneurs because I think it's just really important to name these things. first ⁓ the duality ⁓ holding space for someone ⁓ you are also in a season where you need space held for you. So trained sometimes ⁓ professionally culturally to be the container for other people's pain, suffering, transformation. And that's a really beautiful sacred role as a physician, as an entrepreneur, as a coach, as a leader to be, you know, the mentor for someone. ⁓ also have to be maintained, my friends. If are perpetually giving, giving, giving, and you are not making space to also be held, to be loved, you are to start giving from a place of depletion and If you've been listening long enough, you know that that is not sustainable. You are no longer modeling transformation. You are now modeling excessive self-sacrifice. And martyrdom does not serve anybody. Martyrdom does not serve anyone. It will not serve you. You will be resentful at the end and you are not giving of your best self. And this is where we start seeing physicians risk go up. Like this is when you start getting sued because now you're getting tired and burnt out. You're going to make mistakes. and you're probably not your best at home with your kids. You're probably more short and exhausted. This is where compassion fatigue starts to set in your clients consciously or subconsciously are also going to start picking up on that. You are not your best self when you are not a holding space for yourself. When you need that space held, make for you to also be held when you need Create a community make sure that you're you're getting help space held for make sure you have a coach or some friends or someone you can go and talk to a mastermind you're a part All right. The second is the duality of visibility and vulnerability. I think this is really important because to grow a business nowadays, you got to show up. You have to show up on LinkedIn, on Instagram, on whatever all these places and you have to have and online presence. have to show You have to be consistent and you have to be a leader. You have to be public. And at the same time, it's really scary to do that. You're a human and it's really scary sometimes to show up. You don't want to get judged. You don't want to be in front of a camera. Maybe you don't think you look good or sound good. You don't know what to say. what if you're Second grade teacher sees you and thinks you're crazy. These are all the things I've heard from my clients are like, what if an old cousin shows up or an uncle or someone starts to judge All of a sudden, the pressure to perform starts to, you start like doubting and questioning like, holy smoke, should I be this public? And that's one of the most exhausting weights in the online entrepreneurial space. the concept of visibility and vulnerability. Like that is a duality. We get to be present online if we want to grow our businesses. we also want to be the most authentic version of ourselves. And that can feel really vulnerable. And that's the only way to do it. And able to recognize that those two things exist and that you're not the only one struggling with it, that it's a human experience, when you make space for that, it makes it a little bit easier. Okay. The third duality is the duality of mission and money. of us who came to this work, at least the people that are probably listening to this podcast and everybody that I work with, ⁓ here because we're mission driven people that want to make the world a better place. And we are service driven people. We're here because we want to help people feel better, do better, be better versions of themselves. And cannot do that. Like you need revenue to sustain that work. You need, if you're going to have an impact, you need a team. If you're going to have an impact, you need time. If you're going to have an impact, need resources. ⁓ when those two things rub up against each other, the concept of mission and money, when deciding on your pricing, for example, or launching, when something doesn't feel like aligned, or maybe you have a client that says they can't afford that, the tension real. And pretending that It is an attention pretending it isn't, you know, like doesn't make you more mission driven, pretending that you don't need the money. It doesn't make you more mission driven. It just means you're carrying the tension alone. just means that you're going to now be on a road to burnout. That is something ⁓ is really, really important. It's actually the entire reason I created the program called Resource Wealth, which by the way is amazing if you're interested. you're that wants to make a really big difference in this world and You want to be able to have the capacity to do that without burning out and you want to have a larger impact. really recommend you check it out. It's called resource 12. I'm going to run it again in the fall. I just finished the cohorts and I was hearing the stories ⁓ of the women went through the program the first time. And ⁓ I was tears I created the program for mission driven women that wanted to increase their capacity to hold wealth, to do more good in the world. And what I was hearing from these women is like, wow, now I realize that can ⁓ my money to do more good in the world. And now they feel free to ⁓ more wealth, to create more money, to make these choices that are really service to them and the people that they are serving. It is so powerful. So ⁓ duality is mission and money. And here's the about dualities. Dualities don't necessarily need to resolved immediately. It's just something we get to be aware of. It gives us a framework for holding them without collapsing, without thinking something's gone wrong. Because I think that's what usually happens with these dualities we notice both of these and it's ⁓ for us to hold both of those things as truths because the mind loves black and white thinking. And when we're holding two things that can be true at the same time, we have to make space for it. We have to say, okay, I can hold two truths at the same time, the certain the uncertain. Both things can be true. what this for you and for the people you lead? here's what I want mission-driven entrepreneur and leader to understand about the ripple effect of the work that we're doing when we make space for our own duality. When you, as a coach, as leader, when you've done this work of integrating your own duality, when you've sat with your own grief, with your own doubt, with your own shadow work, Something in your presence changes. Your clients feel it before you'll even say anything. There's a quality of steadiness that only comes from having walked the dark, having been in the dark and found your way back to the light. It can't be taught in a certification program. It can't be performed. It can't be earned. It's something you have to experience. It's part of life. It's part of your human experience. I was just thinking about this at the gym the other day. I'm in my mid-40s ⁓ my hormones have all started changing and I'm pretty to menopause. I've always an athlete. I've ⁓ exercised and worked out. And I've been someone that ⁓ I've always been really really fit. Besides the times that I gave birth kids, I've had four packs in my abs. So like I've always been really fit and strong. And what I was reflecting on is, wow, like things, it's, it's harder to keep that frame when you go through menopause because your hormones are changing, you have more cortisol, all these things start to happen to your body. your, ⁓ your fat start to change that go around your abdomen. And I was just reflecting on how we these like young quote unquote wellness influencers. They're like 20 years old and they're telling you all these things you need to And I'm like, I am not interested in learning from a 20 year old influencer because it's actually not that hard in your 20s. It is hard in your 20s, but it's not that hard in your 20s compared to your ⁓ 50s to create health the body that you want to create. And so for me, want someone that's gone through it, that's had the experience and come out the other side. I want to learn from those people. That's what I want to from. I think about that. With every coach I've ever worked with, want to know that you have gone through the depths of what you're trying to teach me, that you've been there and that you've come out the other side and you can with me both from your academic experience, but from your lived experience. Because if you've never lived it, where are you sharing from? Are you just like repeating what somebody else said? ⁓ And I think that's true for ⁓ all areas life, but I do think for me, it's really important for transformational teachers or coaches. And I actually think that the people that are gonna, for us, have a really big impact, which is why mentors matter and our elders matters because they have a life experience that offers them so much more wisdom we could ever get from reading in a And your are gonna feel that. Your clients are gonna feel that. I had one of my clients recently tell me, was me a testimonial she said, ⁓ The one thing immediately that I knew as soon as I met you, I met her at a conference, said was, ⁓ it was your presence. I was like, huh, what do mean by that? She's like, you were so calm and confident and spoke so clearly. I was know, presence is something that you can't really articulate. It's a sense, it's a feeling that you get. And ⁓ that's experience. had she met me 15 years ago, I probably wouldn't have that same presence. But I've been through some stuff and I've come out the other side and so this is how I show up now because this is the life experience that I've had and I have not shied away from the pain and I have not shied away from the dark side. have gone to the depths of the dark because I have been so committed to my own healing, my own transformation, to me feeling joy because I that the more joy I feel, the more healed I am, the more I am from ⁓ the life the traumas, all of that. the more I will be able to give back to my people. And for me, here to live a life of service and that's what matters to me. ⁓ the more I can love myself, get to know myself, get to know ⁓ of me and love all of me and accept all of me, the I'll be able to ⁓ be for my people, to give to my people. And that's what matters to me. And that's it's so important for you because ⁓ the people lead, your patients, your clients, they're gonna feel that. When they sense that you are genuinely unafraid of the full range of the human experience, they're going to feel that themselves and it's going to give them permission to stop performing as well. They will no longer think they need to show up to you perfect. Nothing is ever wrong with them. No, they're going to see like, I had a shitty day today and I need to talk about it. And that is what we want. We want people to bring their real stuff. We want them to be vulnerable and authentic. We them to feel safe. We don't want them to show up thinking that they always need to feel fixed. Nope. We want the raw version because that's where actual transformation happens. remember one of my clients a long time ago said that one of the most impactful for us in our sessions was that ⁓ in very first session she had with me, she came and I a question. It was a group coaching program and I asked a question to the group and then she answered thinking she had all the right answers. Like she had watched modules and done all this stuff and ⁓ And then I had a follow-up about like, okay, so tell me about how you implemented that or how you integrated that. And she didn't have an answer for that. she was like, okay, that's when I learned that if I was going to actually ⁓ like be in this program and be successful, I had to do the work. It wasn't about showing up perfect with the right answer. It was about doing the work. And this, ⁓ friends, is why this concept of duality matters. Duality is not this personal growth luxury. For those of us in this work, it's sort of a professional responsibility because the depth of impact you can have is directly proportional to the depth you've been willing to go for yourself. I gave a talk at a conference and I said this thing that I didn't think was that big of a deal, but got quoted back to me a million times. So I'll share it with you, which is this, that when you choose to go deep, When you choose to grow personally, that is part of your service, your service to the world. Your growth, your death, that's part of your service to the world. It's not separate. It's not separate from your service. You growing, you feeling better, that's not separate from your service. That is your service to the world. just it. I cannot have my full life experience or my full capacity to serve. If I have an honored all of my experiences. And of course, we're all woven together. So my willingness to feel hard things creates permission for other people to feel hard things too. that also makes space for me to feel an incredible amount of compassion. ⁓ I ⁓ not the level of amount of compassion I feel for closed head traumas until I ⁓ and had concussion myself. I'm already like incredibly compassionate and empathic. And as a physician, I feel like I'm incredibly compassionate and empathic. And my patient experience scores always say that over and over again. to think that I, after I had a concussion, like how much more compassionate I was able to be to my patients that came in with concussions, or after I became a parent, what better doctor I became to ⁓ parents young kids. Like it makes a big difference to have life experience. so ⁓ ⁓ of this is true, ⁓ ⁓ every tradition ⁓ we've ever encountered agrees that it's true, why is it that we keep trying to only live ⁓ the positive, on the one side? Especially for those of us who know better, for those of us who've read all the books and done all the courses, for those of us who teach this work. Well, there's two reasons. ⁓ I'm going to name them both here because I think it's important to give space to them. One of them is this, there's a relationship with hard that society wants to avoid. The coaching industry is making it worse. have to tell you, the online coaching world has a super complicated relationship with hard. does the entire world. ⁓ think about the books, four hour work week, or do this faster. Like those types of things sell. They make a lot of money because people want the easy way out. What's way that I can do it the easiest, the fastest? And here's the thing, there is no magic bullet. There is no like, know, I used to joke about this, but ⁓ I tell people that wanted to work with me, like, Hey, I don't have any magic beans over here. Like, I'm not just going to give you some Jack and the Beanstalk beans and you're going to be able to like magically transform. No, like you get to do the work. If you want to do the work, you get to do the work. There's no easy way. And the more you're willing to accept that. the deeper your transformation gets, the more you're willing to not avoid the hard, the uncomplicated, the more you're going to really grow in the world and life. think about it, okay, because ⁓ of things my coach says is success the worst teacher. And I totally agree because think about of the times that you have failed and you've chosen to get back up again. Every time you have a fail, every time you miss a shot, I think about basketball a lot because I used to coach my son's team I played basketball growing up. Every time you miss a shot, if you choose to get better, if you choose to stay in the game and you want to do well, you're going to learn how to stay, practice and practice your form. Get better at free throws, get better at three point shots. You're to learn what it takes. And that's same thing for entrepreneurship and for coaching and for leadership. ⁓ Every time fail, when you learn from your mistake, And you choose to learn, you're going to get better and better and better. It's those failures that teach you the best lessons. And I know that that's like what people talk about all the time, but nobody actually wants to experience the failure. We're still avoiding the failure. What we want to do is just make it easier, safer. What's the way that I can do it and not feel disappointed, not feel any of the hard stuff. Sorry. There's no way like the sooner you can get good with feeling the hard stuff. disappointment, the failure, the sooner you will be successful. Because that's it. Success is built on failures over and over and over again. And so I want you to just stick with that. Like, yes, I know society has this really wild relationship with the concept of hard, life is going to be hard. Be open to the fact that things are going to feel uncomfortable and hard and difficult. And the more that you can make space for that learning, the better your life will be because you're no longer going to be resistant to it. number two, of course, is resistance ⁓ this one is probably more personal and one lives in our nervous system. This is when a difficult emotion arises. A big one is disappointment. I would have to say in the ⁓ entrepreneurial it's disappointment or maybe even grief about your business that isn't growing fast enough. or disappointment that your lunch didn't go well or that you're not getting that client you this person that said they were going to sign with you hasn't followed up with you. ⁓ Whatever is, it causes uncomfortable feelings, disappointments, sadness, you feel like a failure, all those things. And so what do do? We try to avoid those feelings by pushing harder, working harder, pretending that those feelings aren't there. I don't know what you do to buffer your emotions. Maybe you go on Netflix and watch a bunch of Netflix or go eat a snack that's not healthy or you have a glass of wine. way, you try to avoid the emotion. And the short term, you avoid the emotion. But in long term, those emotions don't go anywhere. They don't go anywhere. And if you choose to stay in the game, whether it's the game of entrepreneurship, the game of leadership, the game of taking care of patients in the hospital, Whatever game you choose to play in life, if you want to be good at it, if you want to continue to grow and be the best version of yourself, going to have to stay in the game and you're going to have to stop avoiding your feelings. I a podcast episode. One of my earlier podcast episodes is called How Uncomfortable Feelings. Highly, highly, highly recommend it. One thing that's I think really important to know about feelings is we know because we've measured them that their energetic potentials, that their action potentials, so they're electricity that's moving from our limbic system ⁓ down the body to whatever part of the body that we're feeling it in and then it'll keep moving. And we again because we've measured it that it takes on average about 90 seconds to let it move through the body, okay? So there's in fact a neuroscientist, Bolt who did, Jill Bolt Taylor, who did a lot of research around this. she found was that ⁓ the action potential starts, the energetic, the electricity that starts moving through the body with an emotion, if we ⁓ into it, if we just say like, Ooh, I feel a disc, don't even label it. I feel pressure in my chest and keep breathing through it. About 90 seconds later, it gets weaker ⁓ weaker and the energy just keeps moving. Now, what keeps the emotion from moving, what keeps us kind of stuck in the emotion is when we tie a story to it. instead of saying, I feel pressure, I say, I feel disappointment or anger ⁓ whatever, whatever label we give it. And then we have a story on top of it. Now happening is we have the action potential moving through our body. We've labeled a story. Now the story's on top of it. So now we have ⁓ the appear of anger or sadness or disappointment. And that story starts another cycle of connecting the neurons, the thought and feeling neurons. so it cycles again and again. And so now the energy can't keep moving because you're creating more and more of it with your thoughts, your stories. And ⁓ the or the or the story or the judgment creates a more difficult, it creates the ⁓ energy that. the emotion of the energy to feel stuck in your body. what we want to do when you're feeling something uncomfortable, make space for it. Go listen to that episode I have on the ABCDs of emotions, how ⁓ feel heart emotions. It's a super simple process that really allows the emotions to move through your body without them getting stuck. Friends, that a lot of stuff that we just talked about. ⁓ So what it that ⁓ we to do moving forward? Okay, so I'm going to give you two practices. They're small, ⁓ but they're really And here's one, make space for duality. I want you to Just be open to knowing that the world is half good, half not so good. 50-50. Okay? So sometimes you're going to feel the good stuff. Sometimes you're going to feel the not so good stuff. That's the human experience. That's it. Let it be the human experience. ⁓ Know you cannot have deep love if you don't also experience grief sometimes. You can't have heartbreak if you didn't experience like a profound amount of love. You can't find connection if you aren't also lonely. You can't have one without the other. So make space for 50-50. You can even say to yourself when you're in the negative stuff like, right, well, life is 50-50. This is the negative stuff that I'm feeling. It's okay. There's stuff on the other side and nothing is permanent. It's not going to stay like that. It's going to keep moving. And the second thing I'll share is make space for the discomfort. When the discomfort arises, Let it move through your body. Just make space for it. Let it move through. Don't resist it. Don't push it away. Don't add a narrative to it like judgment, that'll just make it last longer. So just make space for it. so one last before we close up. This is more of a question for all of you. I, again, ⁓ you to about a time in your life when things felt really hard. Maybe it was a business venture that didn't work. Maybe it was a program that you launched that didn't Maybe it was a relationship that had to end, whatever it is. Think about that for a second. And now if you fast forward to the future and look back, I want you to ask yourself like, what did that make possible for me? What lesson did I learn from that? How did that make me stronger, better, a better teacher? And not in a toxic positivity way, not in a way that's gaslighting the fact that it was hard at the time. not that way at all, but in an honest way, because most of us can trace the depth of our current work directly back to something that was really hard or difficult for us. The things weren't detours, they were just the way. And that's duality at work. It's just the circle completing itself. All right, friends, ⁓ I'll leave with this. Duality is not a problem to solve. It's not a mindset block to clear. It's what we signed up for when we decided to come and come back into the human experience. When our souls came back into this body, it's part of what we signed up for. That's just it. for all of us that are deciding to be leaders, to be entrepreneurs, we're going to have to make space for all of life, the good and the bad. It's just part of it. And the sooner that we can see and agree that life is really just 50-50, there's always side of the other coin. There's always shadow and dark, light dark, light and shadow. The easier our life will be. right, sweet friends, I will see you next week. Adios.