Podcasts about externalize

In this episode of Authentically ADHD, host Carmen explores the neuroscience behind ADHD and executive functions—those critical mental processes essential for managing daily life tasks. Executive functions are described humorously as the "backstage crew" of the brain, responsible for working memory, planning, emotional regulation, inhibition, time management, and flexibility, largely governed by the prefrontal cortex.Carmen explains that in ADHD brains, this control center operates differently—not broken, just wired uniquely. Scientific research highlights reduced activity and delayed maturation in the ADHD brain's prefrontal cortex, impacting motivation, memory, and time perception. She emphasizes this difference isn't laziness but a genuine neurological divergence.Common struggles for ADHDers include task initiation, emotional dysregulation, impulsivity, organization, and follow-through. Each challenge is backed by neuroscience, explaining phenomena like "neurological inertia" preventing task initiation and hyper-reactive emotional responses due to amygdala sensitivity.The episode provides seven ADHD-friendly coping strategies:* Break tasks into smaller pieces for manageable wins.* Use visual timers to combat time blindness.* Externalize your brain with organizational tools.* Create dopamine routines by pairing boring tasks with rewards.* Incorporate physical activity to boost dopamine and executive function.* Try body doubling to enhance accountability and focus.* Practice self-compassion to counteract shame and enhance motivation.Carmen concludes with a supportive message: ADHD isn't a defect, but a different brain wiring deserving of understanding, compassion, and tailored strategies.Linktree:https://linktr.ee/carmen_iraceJoin Focused: https://ihaveadhdllc.ontralink.com/t?orid=29951&opid=1Show Notes: https://www.canva.com/design/DAGkcF-oJ0c/QlnFe1TUeai81KEgL_O7Lw/view?utm_content=DAGkcF-oJ0c&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link2&utm_source=uniquelinks&utlId=h5d32038d67 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit carmenauthenticallyadhd.substack.com/subscribe

Do you ever feel like you’re holding it all together—barely? This episode of The Encourager Podcast dives into the invisible mental load that women often carry and how to lighten it without letting everything crash. Rebekah shares: A personal story of a stressful May launch (hello, Maycember!) Why invisible tasks like remembering school forms and food preferences matter 3 key strategies to reduce the load: Externalize it with a brain dump Delegate & automate Use pre-decided rhythms to save mental energy

I'm Josh Kopel, a Michelin-awarded restaurateur and the creator of the Restaurant Scaling System. I've spent decades in the industry, building, scaling, and coaching restaurants to become more profitable and sustainable. On this show, I cut through the noise to give you real, actionable strategies that help independent restaurant owners run smarter, more successful businesses.In this episode, I break down why the old-school mentality of treating your team like “family” is actually holding you back. Look, I love my people, but a real family won't fire you for showing up late. A restaurant, on the other hand? It's a business. And if we want to build sustainable, profitable businesses, we need to stop running our teams on emotions and start leading with clarity, accountability, and mutual investment. I'll walk you through the leadership shifts that changed everything for me—how setting clear expectations, constantly recruiting, and focusing on performance over sentiment will transform your restaurant from a revolving door into a powerhouse of talent. If you're tired of losing good people and constantly hiring, this one's for you.Takeaways80% of restaurants barely break even.If you can't keep people, the problem might not be them.Great restaurants aren't a family. They're a high-performance team.A players do not elevate the performance of B and C players.People don't leave places that invest in them.We need to be recruiting all the time, not just when we're desperate.Set clear expectations from day one.Externalize the rules and accountability.Lead from the front and invest in your team's goals.Build relationships with potential hires before you need them.Chapters00:00 Introduction to Restaurant Profitability Challenges02:15 The Leadership Problem in Restaurants03:44 Building a High-Performance Team06:40 Mutual Investment in Employee Growth09:34 The Importance of Constant RecruitmentIf you've got a marketing or profitability related question for me, email me directly at josh@joshkopel.com and include Office Hours in the subject line. If you'd like to scale the profitability of your restaurant in only 5 days, sign up for our FREE 5 Day Restaurant Profitability Challenge by visiting https://joshkopel.com.

ODD welcomes back Turkish artist Ugur Project with the fantastic Love Groove EP.

Trigger Warning: Proceed only if you are comfortable with potentially sensitive topics.This is not psychological advice, service, or prescriptive treatment for anxiety or depression. The content related to descriptions of depression, anxiety, or despair may be upsetting or triggering, but are clearly not exhaustive. If you should feel symptoms of depression and/or anxiety, please seek professional mental health services, or contact (in Kitsap County) Kitsap Mobile Crisis Team at  1-888-910-0416. The line is staffed by professionals who are trained to determine the level of crisis services needed. Depending on the need, this may include dispatching the KMHS Mobile Crisis Outreach Team for emergency assessment. Danielle  (00:26):Welcome to the Rise podcast, conversations on faith, race, justice, gender, and spirituality. This is a part two of our season five opener, which was review and recap of the past year, and also engaging some questions around humanity, the election, and how do we see our neighbor? We are going to be hearing from a couple of organizers who have been in my county, Kitsap County for more than a decade. You're going to hear some of their experiences, some of what they've gone through, as well as a few other folks who are giving their response to the questions we posed last week. I've been doing a lot of listening. This isn't an endorsement for any candidate. This isn't a psychological advice, and this isn't a prescription for how you should vote. Voting is a right. It's something we can participate in. It's a way to participate in our system.  A lot of folks are swinging wildly between two pendulums. There's the thought of my vote doesn't matter and I'm not going to vote, or I'm going to vote for X person as a protest vote. These are all of your rights. You have the right to do. So. I've been thinking a lot about change and what does change mean? How do we want to see change come about, and what does long-term change really look like? I can't speak from an electoral politics standpoint because I'm not an elected official and I don't plan to be anytime soon. I can speak as a person, a mother, a wife, a partner, a colleague, a friend, and a community member. And what I can say is people powered movements are what I have seen from the ground up, bring change in communities. This isn't unlike what happens in our bodies from a psychological experience in my own body. Change doesn't come from merely thinking about it. It comes from the ground up in my body. It comes from addressing the feelings, paying attention to my body, and becoming a more integrated person. I would challenge all of us to look around and what are the people powered movements for social change that we desire, and what are the ways our body is talking to us and how if we listen, will it inform us where we stand on many of these different issues?  This brings me to another sensitive topic. The topic of how we are feeling, how we are doing in the sociopolitical climate. We're living in these United States. I can say that for myself in my own experience, my anxiety is heightened overall and feelings that I can keep at bay with regular normal coping mechanisms such as exercise. It takes me a little bit more and I have to offer myself a lot more grace in the process. I encourage you no matter where you are, to engage these topics with grace towards your own self, towards your neighbor, towards your family, and towards whoever's in your proximity. We won't get things done overnight. That's not how change works. Change is a process. It is for us as individuals, and it is for us as a collective society. So hang in there. If you need help, get the help you need.  Maybe it's a mental health counselor, maybe it's a spiritual advisor. Maybe it's your pastor, maybe it's your friend. Maybe it's someone in your community that you look up to, like a mentor, or maybe you just need to sit down with your friends and have a good old fashioned dinner and drinks and put your phones away. Whatever the help you need is, it's important that you seek out that help and that support. The goal isn't to be perfect. It isn't to be fixed. The goal is to be in our process and getting what we need so each day we can show up for ourselves and those in our community. We're going to jump into the conversation and voices from across the country. We are all different and we're not meant to be the same. I hope you find pieces of you in each of their stories.  Speaker 2 (04:37):Hi, this is Raquel Jarek and I'm coming to you from Bloomington, Minnesota, which is a suburb in the Minneapolis area. I teach astronomy for work to college students in downtown Minneapolis and am an aerospace engineer and was raised in a very Christian home. And I'm still a practicing Christian in many ways, and I make space for people with different political views in all kinds of moments in my life. I do it at my work with students because I have a variety of people in my classes. I'm actually challenging them to vote and to even investigate the two major political candidates for president on what they view of science and space and how they would support NASA or space exploration. And I get to know my students pretty well in person, especially not as much with my online students, but I want to make space and have a comfortable room where people can share a little bit of how they feel, but also not be offensive to people with a variety of opinions in the room.  Speaker 2 (05:44):And then there's a variety of opinions in my family on my side of the family and my in-laws and which candidates they support and which parties they affiliate with. I want to be a person who is about supporting different opinions and being able to be loving and welcoming to anyone in any opinion. And sometimes that can be difficult when people have conflicting views in the room. I think you might need to keep the conversation more surface level and fun and in smaller conversations maybe you can dive into what they think more. But that can be really challenging to go deep with people who are very opposite opinions. At the same time, I like to have challenging conversations about politics and religion, and I think being open to those conversations whenever those topics come up is good. And then also just remember to be kind. And I think that's definitely easier to do in person than online or in a social media space, but that face-to-face contact does bring out more humanity and more kindness in people. So I hope that helps and that people can make more time and space to treat others kindly and hear opinions. Thanks.  Danielle (07:04):What were you going to say about the election?  Sarah  (07:08):Oh, I'm just feeling stressed about how close this election is. And it's just sort of extraordinary to me that given the many, many flaws in the Trump offering that people would still vote for him, that he's clearly mentally impaired and authoritarian, happy with dictators, mean-spirited and more of a mafia boss than a presidential candidate. And it's just extraordinary to me that, and I've always known people like that existed. It's just extraordinary to me that so many people would be planning to vote for him. So I am feeling a little stressed this morning,  Speaker 1 (07:55):Pam, I saw you nod your head.  Speaker 4 (07:58):Oh, I agree with everything that Sarah said. I have the same I deep, deep apprehensions and anxiety, and I think we're living in a landscape of anxiety just on the edge of a nation that at least half of it wants to go over that edge and pull the other half down with them. And it's really frightening. It's real. And I think I'm also frightened by people who are putting their heads in the sand. That's their response either out of just inconvenience or their terror response. So we're in a situation,  Speaker 1 (09:04):I agree. I feel that. I feel it come out in so many different ways. So for instance, as a licensed mental health therapist, something gets said like it was this last week where the former president is at a rally comments on anatomy. It gets blasted across the airwaves. And then what I notice that happens across my workspace is that people are triggered in their family relationships. They're triggered in with community. They're on heightened alert with a neighbor. I noticed this is last week we had two different really random requests. One was to adjust our fence because of the view. And if you know my yard, I live way out in the country, no one's looking. The second thing that happened to us was like, your car is parked at an odd angle sort of thing. So can we switch it around? I wasn't home. I got the message. And immediately when the message popped up, I felt so much anxiety and I was trying to talk myself off the ledge. I'm like, you can move this car, Danielle, when you go home, you can move this. This is fixable. You can come back from this. But the way I understand it is there's all my cup of navigating anxiety and uncertainties already up to here. So if my car's crooked somewhere, I'm freaking out.  Speaker 4 (10:44):I think that's happening all over the place. I mean, we saw an example yesterday afternoon with that involved pizza and chicken and people being much deeper issues and wounds being triggered by that, and we just have to take care of each other. I think we really, my priority is number one for the foreseeable future is public safety and how do we take care of each other when a lot of us can't call the people in the system that are supposed to give us support when they're not there, or they are part of what is creating problems and cruelty and insensitivity. So I mean, that's the only thing that's on my mind right now is public safety.  Speaker 1 (12:16):Sarah, thank you, Pam. Sarah, what comes to mind? We're kind of discussing the nature of political dialogue in our current climate. What do you see at stake if we do not vote?  Speaker 3 (12:31):Yeah, so that's what I've been thinking a lot about because I know there's a lot of people feeling that as a principled matter, they don't want to participate in voting, especially when the Biden administration has not been taking the ethical stand. We would like them to take on Gaza, for example. That's kind of a particularly heightened one, and it's really hard to feel like by voting somehow you're participating, you're condoning genocide. So I really get that and struggle with that myself. And here's where I come down is that I don't feel like any presidential candidate since I've started voting, which was a very long time ago, that any presidential candidate, except for when McGovern was voting, was running to get us out of Vietnam War, that there's been a presidential candidate that I was voting for with enthusiasm, we vote strategically. And that's one of the things the working family party is so good at.  Speaker 3 (13:35):They say we're voting strategically. We're voting to build power so that we as a movement can get things done. That doesn't mean the person who's running for president or any other office is our leader. We're not getting behind them as like, okay, all our loyalty is to this individual. We're voting strategically because this person in office is more likely to, number one, give us the space to build a social movement that can actually build power. And number two, to be swayed by the social movement to care when people show up and protest and people gone strike. And when people's movements do what they do so well, they care enough to then be willing to change policies. And so that's the way I feel about it. I don't feel like we have to believe that Kamala Harris and Tim Waltz are the people that we believe are the most, are everything we would hope for.  Speaker 3 (14:33):We just have to say, will this person allow social movements that care about poor people, that care about immigrants, they care about the environment, will they allow those social movements to progress? And we desperately need that progress. And on the other hand, if we end up with somebody like Trump, I mean, I think part of the appeal of Trump in the beginning, I mean when he ran the first time around, I think the appeal for a lot of people was they were just so angry at the system as it is that voting for Trump was throwing a bomb into the middle of government and seeing what landed because they didn't want to continue the status quo. And that felt more satisfying. Well, we kind of know what that looked like. We know who got hurt there. And we know also that this time around he has less to lose.  Speaker 3 (15:25):He doesn't have another term to run for, so he doesn't have to placate anybody. There is no group of people that he has to be concerned about except for the people who give him money and give him power. And so that's what the entire government will be oriented around is giving Donald Trump lots of flattery, lots of power and lots of money. And we know what that looks like in Russia because that's kind of what happened when the Berlin wall fell, is that they kind of sold off the whole government to a bunch of rich people, and it became just thoroughly corrupt. It's not like we don't have corruption now we do, but just wait until the whole government is privatized and Elon Musk owns this chunk and Peter tha owns this chunk, and it's like the rest of you, we don't care because we've got AI to do your job. Anyway,  Speaker 1 (16:24):Pam, thoughts or response?  Speaker 4 (16:28):Yeah, no, I think all of that is right on. We sort of can oscillate between the most local level, the national level, and global politics. So we're part of a very extraordinary zeitgeist of authoritarianism popping up in multiple countries. And I heard a podcast a week or so ago talking about authoritarianism in other countries, and they pointed out, and especially in Europe, that there very, very forceful, very strong, very loud, very visible, but they are not the majority in those countries. And I think because we see and hear more about authoritarianism on a daily basis and the ratcheting up of the horrible violent rhetoric that we can easily feel like we are the minority. And I don't know that we're a big majority. And I think that there's a lot of qualifications to what constitutes authoritarianism because it is not that it's not here already. When we talk about voting for democracy, this is about losing our democracy. Well, that's a very relative term. I mean, the country was not founded democratically, this country was taken. I think that's why we have such a hard time dealing with Palestine. If we have to acknowledge colonization and genocide and all of the injustices there, we might have to then look at our own situation and history. So I mean, again, it just travels back and forth between the different levels. And here in sbo, hobo is proud of its colonization and it's just terrified of losing a grip. So I think we are in an identity crisis. You can't imagine.  Speaker 3 (19:28):Yeah, I think that's right. And I think a lot of that identity, I think a lot of it is where racism really flowers is people are afraid that they lose their privilege and entitlement of being white, and then they're willing to listen to and be convinced by really horrible racist ideas. And I think part of that is also this crisis of a sense of belonging that people have been, the social institutions that used to keep us connected have withered away in so many different ways. And then during Covid, we were so isolated, and then people just got this, it's a psychological trauma of a kind to be that isolated. And so without a sense of belonging, instead of turning to one another and saying, let's figure out how we rebuild our community in ways that are real and authentic and empowering, people are turning against each other because that's sort of the reptilian brain taking over and saying fight or flight, and I'm going to fight these other, and that's going to give me a sense of belonging because then I'll be part of this little group that all is fighting against the other. So I do feel like it's an incredibly dangerous time. And I also feel like at a local level, there are solutions that are about building that sense of belonging that are within our reach.  Speaker 1 (21:12):Yeah, one thing I think from a psychological perspective is often we're like toddlers or babies. We do this process of, we do split a split, what's good, what's bad? And we're dependent on a caregiver to make meaning of the world for us so we can understand those splits and we can become hopefully an integrated adult that's able to manage the good and the bad feelings. And I think an more general term, which it's going to shortcut some understanding here, it's far more nuanced than what I'm saying, but we have a collective split. And in that collective split, for instance, when a toddler can't get their bad feelings out, if you've ever seen a toddler rage, they rage about a candy wrapper, they rage about, I can't get it. X. And what does that toddler need? Yes, they need the physical containment, the love and the care and support. They need boundaries.  Speaker 1 (22:20):Then they need a parent to talk to them, even if they can't understand it either through touch or interaction or play or verbally to make sense of why they had those big feelings to normalize the big feelings. So the toddler can say, oh, I'm not weird because I had these big feelings and here's where I can put them. Here's how I can process them. And in a sense, Trump I think has capitalized on the splitting of our collective conscious. And he said, you have bad feelings and let's put 'em over here. Let's find someone to blame. So this becomes, let's externalize our bad feelings about maybe what we're coming to realize. It gets centered around a critical race theory or it gets centered around Haitian immigrants. Let's put all of our bad feelings, the things we haven't been taught to metabolize as a society and let's throw 'em over here into these people.  Speaker 1 (23:19):And because there's a lot of folks that are listening to this rhetoric, it feels good not to have to deal with our own bad feelings about ourselves. I'm just going to be honest. When I feel shame about myself, I feel horrible. I do not like that. And sometimes I deal with it well, and sometimes I don't. But I depend on other figures in my life to bring that shame to them and say like, oh, what do I do about this? I feel bad. And how do I make amends? Or maybe I can't make amends. And if you can't make amends, you also have to deal with that. So I think these authoritarians capitalize on the psychological collective consciousness of a society that doesn't often know what to do with the bad feelings. Think about Germany, think about Israel, think about, I'm trying to think about what we've done in Mexico and South America with corporations, and now all of a sudden people migrating north.  Speaker 1 (24:24):Now they're bad. So what do we do with that construction of consciousness? And I agree, Sarah, really the only way to take a piece of that elephant is to start with your friend or your neighbor and to vote for people that seem to have more space for us to organize or to continue to make meaning with our neighbor that may be very aggressive and hostile to us. I mean, the mistake is on the other side, if I vote for this radical person, they're going to eliminate that bad neighbor somehow because they're not actually trying to convert the person they think is bad. They're trying to get rid of them, expel them permanently. And what I think I'm looking for is something, what SMA talks about, resum is where do we, and I think what you guys are saying is where's that space where we may know we don't like someone, but where there's actually space to figure it out. And with an authoritarian, there's never going to be that space. They're dependent on the hate.  Speaker 4 (25:32):That's right. Go ahead, Pam. And then people want to think that if Trump just doesn't get elected, we'll be okay. We will have dodged the literal bullet in many cases. But that's not true because like you're saying, Danielle, it's the divestment of our own intolerable parts. For whatever reason, they are intolerable to us onto the others, and our system is constructed such that we have to have others. Capitalism has to have others, we have to have racism. That's what makes it work so well for the people that it works well for. I think we need a national intervention, and I think that's what we're going toward in a dark sense.  Speaker 4 (26:49):But I would hope that we could start to get ourselves moving toward a national intervention and within a more positive framework. And how do we do that? How do we do that? You're talking about the hyper-local level and with neighbors and family. And at this point, I mean, some of our neighbors want to kill us, and that's not being hyperbolic. And we know that those sentiments are out there, but the sort of signs are being flashed everywhere to intimidate others rather than to put down those weapons, whatever form they take and sit down together to find some commonalities to just bring the temperature down. Right now, so many other people have been very alienated from numerous family members over these issues and can't not bring the issue of guns into this conversation because the weaponization of our society is a huge factor. I think it's a huge factor in why many politicians, political leaders don't step up more. I think it's why they don't confront the atrocities that are happening in front of us, whether it's in other countries or it's in our own backyard. I think the arming of America has really deformed our national character, and I think that's a large part of this identity crisis.  Speaker 3 (29:11):So yeah, I think what you said earlier about this being that the authoritarian, the group that really approves of that is a minority. And even when Trump won in 2016, he won by a minority of the popular vote. And we know the electoral college system is to blame there, but we are pretty clear that he doesn't have a majority and he still may win, but he doesn't have a majority. So I think it's really important to remember that there are the violent folks who are really in favor and really relish the idea of violence, but they are a relatively small minority way more than I would've hoped, but still. So then I think a lot of our challenge is how do we work with the people that are still in the middle? And I don't mean that they don't have opinions, it's that they are struggling with the nuances.  Speaker 3 (30:08):And I think there are a lot of those people, even though they're kind of hidden from the media, but they're struggling with the nuances, they're not sure who to vote for or whether to vote. And one of the things I keep seeing is Kamala Harris and other people asking for money, which I don't understand, they raise so much money already. And what I wish Kamala Harris would ask for is, I wish you would ask us for our vote, and I wish you would ask us to talk to somebody in our family or in our friendship circle who is struggling with knowing whether to vote or not or who to vote for and ask them for their vote. And I'm not talking about uncle, so-and-so who's clearly going to vote for Trump? What I'm talking about is the person who says, well, my vote doesn't matter. Or the person who says, I can't bring myself to vote for a candidate who hasn't stood up to what's going on in Gaza. And those are things that I sympathize with. I think there are people who have intelligence and real concern who are expressing those things. One of the things I just heard about is I don't, if you remember a while, a few elections back, there was a swap the vote thing going on where you could talk to somebody in a swing state  Speaker 3 (31:35):And say, Hey, I'll vote for a third party candidate, Jill Stein or Cornell West if you'll vote, given that you're in the swing state and your vote's going to really make a difference if you'll vote for Kamala Harris. So I'm getting ready to do that. I'm going to see if I can find one of my friends at Michigan who is struggling with that question around Gaza because I struggle with it too. And I think that Kamala Harris has shown she actually cares, even though we're not getting the kind of position we would like, I think she actually does care about human beings. I don't see any evidence of that from Trump. So I think we're better off if she wins in Gaza, we're better off with Gaza, and then we can continue our organizing work. So much of our work is really not about the elections.  Speaker 3 (32:27):It's about building the power of ordinary people through social movements. And that's what we need to be about. And that's also, I think the part besides the crisis of the other part of the crisis we're in is this crisis of inequality and hopelessness in a sense that no matter what I do, if I'm a young person, I may never be able to buy a house, or I may never be able to have children because I can't afford daycare. I mean, the death that people and people in the media, often the Democratic party often describe this as inflation and say, well, inflation is so much better, and therefore, why aren't you guys happy? It's like, well, I still can't afford a place to live. Why should I be happy? They're kind of not getting that. So the whole way our economy is functioning to pour huge amounts of money into the military industrial complex and into a whole new generation of nuclear weapons, and to allow the wealth to trickle up, not just trickle, but flow up to the top tiniest percentage and the rest of people to be struggling.  Speaker 3 (33:36):That whole way of organizing the economy I think is really important to remember how popular Bernie Sanders was when he was willing to call that out. And I think the Democratic Party was not having it. They kept him from actually winning the nomination, but he won enormous amounts of support. And some of those people were people that then turned around and voted for Trump. They wanted an outsider who was going to shake things up. I think we have to be ready to shake things up in terms of the economy in a way that's inclusive, that says we can have an economy that includes everyone, where everybody has an opportunity and not, we could have a better economy by deporting massive numbers of people. I think when you can have a political message, that's also an inclusive message and also a message of belonging, I think that's where we have an opportunity to actually combat this authoritarian bent.  Speaker 4 (34:36):I would add that we need more than messaging. We need action because the Democratic Party has been very good at messaging, inclusivity, the big tent, economic equity, healthcare. But then we look at what happens. And Sarah, you and I have been in this for decades, and we make just enough progress to keep the populace from exploding. I mean, one of the best educations, best parts of my political education was taking the training with cell deaf. Do you know them? Community Environmental Defense Fund? Yeah. Oh my God. So every election cycle, we hear the same songs. The Republicans say, well, we need to get the government out of our lives. We need to deregulate. We don't need these people. The government telling us what to do. We need to tell the government what to do. And then we hear the Democrats saying, yes, we need to make things equal and better for everybody, and we will be your guardians.  Speaker 4 (36:23):And over these decades, we have seen some progress, but really not enough. I mean, when you're talking about Bernie Sanders, I'm thinking about when I was a delegate in Philadelphia, a national delegate at the Democratic Convention. And the last night of the convention, which was when Hillary was being, oh, she'd already been nominated but finalized, and I was the whip for the Sanders delegates in the Washington state contingent. And they sent being the Democratic Committee, national Committee, they put a detail of seven plain clothes. I've got pictures and everything of this plain clothes, secret service, FBIA, and then the local law enforcement figures armed to encircle me. We had delegates from other Bernie delegates from other states who were also organized to express our democratic voices. But I think our faith in the system really needs a deep examination, and we need other parties. And the electoral college is its own thing, but this identity crisis has so many dimensions to it that the work that we have in front of us is very broad. And I'm not sure that the public in general understands that. I think they think it's about electing someone, putting them there, and then back to business as usual. And we can't go on like this. So in a way, even though it's so painful, it's so frightening, and it's so awful. I we're at a turning point, and that's a good thing. Unfortunately it doesn't feel very good,  Speaker 4 (39:04):But we have to do it right.  Speaker 3 (39:12):Danielle, I can jump in, but I was, I'm curious about what you think.  Speaker 1 (39:15):Well, I think it brings back to what I was asking you all about how do we see change happening in our society, both long-term and short term? And which leads me back to hearing Resum talk last year and then reading and listening to his books and some of his just Instagram reels and him talking about we got here over 400 years, and it really didn't start then either. It started with disgruntled folks over in Europe thinking the best way to do something about that was to go live in another place and then conquer that place. So it started centuries before this. And wait, how long have we been out of Jim Crow? Can anybody tell me how many years technically zero. I mean, Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1950, what was it,  Speaker 3 (40:23):1967 I think, or 68. Okay.  Speaker 1 (40:28):I mean, just put that in context. You got four centuries and you got whatever drove those people to come here, grew up thinking these guys were the puritan citizens of the world that were looking for a new place. I really wasn't the case. So you got all of that, you honor, you immortalize Christopher Columbus who wrote prolifically and told stories prolifically about murder and rape and state sanctioned violence that set the tone. And this is a man we immortalized. So when I think about long-term, and I think about SMA talking about, he talks about each of us taking, when we begin to make a shift in our family, it being five generations out till that shift is maybe completed. So on some level, that makes me think we're all effed and on the other level, someone has to start it. We have to get going. And that's what I hear you all saying, like, okay, we have this huge dilemma. We are here, and I agree Sarah and Pam voting for the president. Again, you can get caught in that realm. If you vote for Trump, he's your savior. If you vote for Kamala, she's going to save us. Well, she's not going to save us.  Speaker 1 (42:05):Jill Stein can't save us, Cornell West, and I hope one of them are thinking they can, the alternatives to Trump. I fear maybe that narcissism is so deep that maybe there is some thought of that, but our people's movements, the things we do on our block and our street matter the most, and those have the potential to make long-term effects for my kids and short-term interventions, look at what happened in the school district here. I mean, they've gone back to using common threads and other things as a foundation because of what was set decades. Was that like two decades ago? Three decades? Two, yeah, two decades. But there is a sense that when you have someone severely corrupt and empowered and dictating tone, you literally can't get anywhere,  Speaker 3 (43:05):Right? Well, I think the time horizon question is really important. We do have hundreds of years of this history. We should remember that some of the people who came over came over because they were fleeing horrific conditions. I mean, you think about the Irish people who were trying to escape a famine, and you think about Jewish people trying to get away from pilgrims. I mean, it wasn't that everybody who came over to the US came over here because they thought they could kill a bunch of native people and therefore have a good life. I don't think that was the intent. What they did when they came over here varies tremendously. So I just think we want to keep the nuance in the story because part of the reason is because that's part of what we have to build on, is that today's refugees are not that different in many cases from the people who are escaping the Irish potato famine.  Speaker 3 (44:09):They're people who are suffering and looking for a way to survive and raise their families and work hard. And so we have that part of our story to build on too. So that's just one part. A second thing is that I think our social movements in the United States have gotten kind of swallowed up by the nonprofit industrial. We've thought we could get the changes we need and alleviate suffering by service providing within the current system. And part of the reason that that has been dominant within the nonprofit sector is because where the funding comes from, funding comes from very wealthy individuals and companies, not in all cases, but in a lot of cases want to or are willing to alleviate suffering, but they want to make sure the system stays intact, the system that continues to distribute wealth and power to a small sector of the population. Well, a social movement that is hobbled by having to stay within the existing mindset and the existing system can't be, can't take on the fundamental challenge of inequality and of extractive capitalism because it's too tied into it.  Speaker 3 (45:37):So social movements have got to become independent. And there are good examples out there. I've mentioned the working families party before. I'm not a member of it, but I'm a big admirer because they insist on independent power based on their membership. They will help a Democrat, for example, get elected, but then they'll hold that person accountable to their agenda and say, these are the things we will only endorse you if you do these, if you commit to these things, then they'll go out and work for 'em and help 'em get elected, and then they'll come back and say, did you do those things? And they'll check their record. So they're building a form of independent power. They're not the only one, but they're a good example of how, instead of just saying, okay, democratic Party will come out and we'll vote for your candidate. I mean voting, I think we should all vote. I think we should all vote. I think honestly, that we should vote to keep Trump out of power. And that means voting strategically, and that means voting for Harris.  Speaker 3 (46:34):But that doesn't have to be the focus of our work. The focus of our work should be on building independent power that then holds the candidates accountable to us and does a bunch more in terms of building power. But that's just one of the ways that we need to be building power, is by having the wherewithal to be able to hold candidates accountable to our agenda. I mean, one of the things I used to do when I was at Yes magazine is around election season, we would put together a people's agenda. And this was an agenda of what do ordinary people want? And we figured that out, not just by what we wanted, but what the polls were seeing. And we could find things like a majority of large majority of Americans wanted nationalized healthcare. There was a poll that actually asked them that, and it was way over 50%. Neither democratic nor Republican parties were willing to talk about that. And before Obamacare, when they were working under Clinton on healthcare reform, they excluded any of the single payer advocates from the room. They wouldn't even let them be in the conversation. So one thing after another or that people want reasonable gun control laws, they want reproductive freedoms. They want us to convert energy from fossil fuels to renewables. They wanted that for decades. I can tell you, I was doing this work 20 years ago and the polling numbers showed it. So we need to do more to say this is a people's agenda. This is a people's agenda locally who can represent us and carry this forward and statewide and nationally. This is what we, the people want,  Speaker 1 (48:23):Pam.  Speaker 4 (48:26):Yeah, and we need imagination. I think we're so conditioned to accept systems and there's structures that our default is just, oh, whatever that system says, this is how we do things. And Sarah's talking about movements that are outside largely of those systems, at least in terms of analyzing what works for us and what works against us. And of course, we can't be just isolated satellites. We exist within these systems. So it's the nuanced little travels back and forth. I think that will, well, we've seen it. I mean, take the school district. That was an enormous breakthrough. Huge. Huge. It works. Some of the tactics involved a lot of imagination.  Speaker 1 (49:56):Yeah, I was going to say that. I said, I think we have to realize and understand, I think you're naming this, that people are vastly ambivalent. And so both in the way we think, and I think the way our trauma has hit us as a society and personally, and so I think a lot of us want to engage new forms of organizing or being together as a community. And I think a lot of times at the same time, people aren't ready to do so. There's some comfort in doing it the old way. So I just think we're up against, we have to realize that we're in this complex social movement where we're both invited to understand and know where we came from. And like Sarah, you pointed out the nuance of how we got here. It's not just one story or the other story, but we're also comfortable, I think on both sides of the coin, whether you're liberal or conservative, there's a similarity and you're comfortable and holding that type binary.  Speaker 3 (51:06):You're comfortable, but you're also afraid, right? I mean, we get into the reptilian mindset because we feel so under attack, and then we go into our more simple way of thinking. And I think the other side that we need to be doing our best to work on is to soothe our own alarm and fear by supporting one another, but then by opening that up so that more and more people can have that sense of possibility and belonging and joy and celebration and all the things that can happen at a community level that start calming people's anxiety and giving them a sense of hope and giving them the sense that we as a community have possibilities and can exercise our imaginative power and can make things different because we actually can when we're together in a way that we really can't on our own.  Speaker 1 (52:07):Pam, now that we solve that problem,  Speaker 3 (52:17):Yay, let's go and vote.  Speaker 1 (52:24):I didn't. I mean, I think the temptation is to try to wrap it up, but we just can't, to be honest. This is a conversation that hopefully not just for a podcast, but hopefully it's ongoing with people in our actual proximity.  Speaker 4 (52:42):Well, for one thing, the election isn't going to be decided on November the fifth. I mean, this is probably going to be the longest election ever, at least in this country. So I think it's important to have our communities know that we are paying attention and we are present especially, I mean, did you see the day that, I think it was a couple days ago when Trump gave that rally and made all of those disgusting remarks about Arnold Palmer and so forth? The thing that I think really fueled him for that was that just before that rally, 49 of 67 county sheriffs in Pennsylvania met with him to endorse the Trump presidency. And so when we put that together with things like the pre-positioned fake electors and all of the mechanics that go into our electoral process, I think it's going to be a while. Until this is settled, the outcome is settled, and I think it's important for us to have a presence based in peace and non-violence and tolerance. And I think it's really going to test us.  Speaker 3 (54:52):I agree with you. I think it's going to be really tough in the swing states. I mean, luckily for Washington, I think we'll probably be less in the crosshairs, but I do agree it's going to be really tough. And four years ago, I was on the board of Free Speech tv. I'm still on the board, but I was doing a bunch of research for them to find local people in each of the swing states that they could interview to find out what was going on on the ground. Because I just felt like anybody who thinks that Trump is going to give way to peacefully to a victory on the other side is kidding themselves. He's made clear. He made clear then. But he really is made clear now, and I think because of January 6th, there's more awareness now that we really have to have some safeguards in place. I don't know that they're in place, but there's more awareness of that. So yeah, I think it's a really frightening prospect. And I agree with you, Pam, that being ready to hold each other up is going to be really important.  Speaker 5 (56:05):I feel like it's really hard not to villainize the people I come in contact with who vote the other way. The tension is really hard to hold. How do I take a strong stance for what I believe in without hating the people around me who disagree, especially if they hold contempt for me? And what I think a few months ago on a local neighborhood Facebook group, someone posted, she was asking a question of where she could get a yard sign for what's the non-majority party here? The post caught my eye and I debated whether I should check it out to see the 50 plus comments. But ultimately, my curiosity won and I scrolled through them to see insole after insole hurled at this woman, her gender, her intelligence, and even her spirituality all came under attack, all because she asked the question. Others told her she should have known better than to bring it up in the first place.  Speaker 5 (57:00):I have to confess, I thought the same thing. There have been moments I've considered putting a sign up in my own yard again for the party that is not the majority here, but when I consider the community challenges I've faced over the last few years, I shy away from doing it. I don't know if I could handle any more loss of community. I need people in my life. We all do. And there's not only the risk of losing potential neighborhood friends, there's also the risk of losing family. Last week as I pulled around to the back of my parents' home, the home where I grew up, I noticed a yard sign for the candidate I do not support, almost as if it was there just for me to see in a family that loves to talk about politics, as long as you agree, I am no longer invited, or do I desire to be a part of the conversations.  Speaker 5 (57:49):But the sign in the backyard, which couldn't be seen from the road was placed there only for family to see. It's a statement, a line in the sand. I tell my kids as they ask questions about the fact that me and their grandparents disagree that it's one of the greatest, most beautiful things about our country, that we get to have our own opinion on who we want to vote for, and that it's okay to disagree that we can love people who think differently than we do. I should probably also tell them at some point that sometimes that's really hard to do. It's hard for me to breathe and ground when the hair stands up on the back of my neck and I feel my fist clench when men at the kitchen and my office building laugh and told lies about the candidate I support knowing where I stand. It's hard to stay calm when my middle aged client throws out her party's buzzwords to test me, but I try to remember her humanity. I try to remember that her views are built by reporting that is insulated and circular, and that she's being told that she should be really afraid, and she is. And fear can make any of us want to fight. We're all only human.  Danielle (59:05):Thank you for listening to this episode of The Arise Podcast, conversations on Faith, race, justice, gender in the Church. I want to thank all of our contributors. They've done this as volunteers. I'm a volunteer. This has got started off all volunteer work and so appreciative of those who have joined our podcast. Please download, please subscribe, and please remember that we are part of the human race and to treat each other with kindness and respect.   Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.

Parshat Re'eh - Turn toward pain with this key awareness.Daily IG Reels @relationships_revisited

Join me and Jess May, an award-winning celebrant, as we talk about all things ceremony and ritual. We talk about why ceremony is so powerful especially during the different phases of a woman's life. We talk about what symbolism is and why it can be healing. We also talk about the beauty of having a living wake, which are celebrations of life held before death. This is a very different and highly interesting conversation which is guaranteed to pique your curiosity about the power of community and ceremony. Come on over and join us!Jess May's Links:https://www.jessmaysspecialdays.com/https://www.brighton-funerals.com/about/https://www.instagram.com/crazydiamondsfuneralqueen/Sally's Links:[Free] Relaxation Hypnosis Recording:  https://bit.ly/relaxationwithsallyHow to Create Phenomenal Self Esteem [£47]:  https://www.sallygarozzo.com/selfesteemMenopause Wellbeing Practitioner [£127] https://www.sallygarozzo.com/menoCold Water Therapy Practitioner [£127] https://www.sallygarozzo.com/coldTransformational 30 Day Rewire (Includes RTT) [£447]: https://www.sallygarozzo.com/rapid-transformational-therapistTransformational Trauma Informed Coaching [From £197]:  https://www.sallygarozzo.com/transformational-coaching Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/sallygarozzomindmentorLinkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sallygarozzo/Send me a voice clip via What's App - https://wa.me/message/FTARBMO7CRLEL1 Send me a direct messageSupport the Show.

If you have done your deep dive on ADHD, then you know that time blindness is a serious issue for us adults with ADHD. Today we are going to talk about the importance of externalizing time and I'll share my method for doing so. I'm curious, how do you externalize time for yourself? Let me know!  CLICK HERE to sign up for the new workshop "From Brain Dump to Blueprint" Sunday, August 18, 2024 @ 9:00am PSTCheck out the 8 Essential ADHD Big Brother Episodes, curated and ordered specifically to get you primed and ready to successfully manage your ADHD life! Find out the power of leveraging community-driven, gamified accountability. Try it with my 7-day money back no risk thingy-ma-bob!Click here to learn more about the ADHD Big Brother CommunityGoal Digger: The Long Term Goal Game Now Avaliable. Click here to get moving on your long-term goals!Interested in working with me One-One? One spot remaining. Learn more here

Do you struggle with chronic issues or self-doubt that prevent you from creating the life of your dreams? Today, on Unlimited Influence with David Snyder, you will learn how to establish a track record of success and master problems along the way. You can feel like you truly have a say in your life. Isn't it time to change the script and match your mindset with those outcomes? David gives you the blueprint to make it happen - and prove yourself wrong about how little power you really have. Standout Quotes: "Everything human beings do is in response to a feeling. It's either a feeling they want more or a feeling they want a lot less of." "Neuroscience tells us that modification is the difference that makes a difference. You don't have to believe what I say for it to work for you. Just do it and prove it to yourself one way or the other." "When you start analyzing the intensity level and organizing it, your consciousness dis-identifies from the problems—they're no longer something you are, they're something you're doing or have. And in that process, you gain power over them." "Our neurology has an inherent negativity bias. Once you understand it, you can work with it and manage it, but if you don't, you're fighting a battle with your neurology." "Start with the frame if you want to improve and increase focus. Remember a time in your life when you had a lot of focus? Reach out, touch it, make the frame bigger, and wrap it around you. "If you resolve these things properly, the things outside of you will no longer trigger you the same way they can because you're not allergic to it anymore." Key Takeaways: Start with small, achievable goals and build up success over time to feel more confident tackling larger challenges. Externalize problems through techniques like bucket listing to gain power and disidentify from issues that limit you. Test different personal transformation techniques to see what works best for you based on your experiences. Understand how your neurology and decision-making processes work to manage biases better and achieve desired outcomes. Experiment with NLP techniques like magic framing using all your senses rather than strictly on visualization. Episode Timeline: [00:25] How can small, achievable goals build confidence and help progress toward larger, more challenging problems? [4:36] How does disidentifying from problems through externalization and analysis free up power? [9:26 ] Courses and bonuses on personal transformation, mind control, and NLP [14:05] What are some tips for managing approach anxiety during infield training, including controlling posture and breathing? [16:39] What techniques are effective for personal growth and happiness? [21:02] How can understanding neurology help in decision-making and behavior, particularly focusing on the role of kinesthetic and somatic processes? [25:39] Why are personal belief and experimentation important in David Snyder's teachings? [27:51] What technique can separate the happiest parts of one's life using vibrational constructs? To learn more about Dr. David Snyder and everything about NLP, visit: Website: https://www.nlppower.com/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@DavidSnyderNLP Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/davidsnydernlp

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 2149: In "Helping Your Child with Anxiety," Dr. Laura Markham offers compassionate and practical strategies for parents to support their anxious children. Markham emphasizes the importance of understanding, empathy, and gentle guidance in teaching children to manage their fears and anxieties, empowering them to face challenges with confidence and resilience. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://www.peacefulparenthappykids.com/read/helping-your-child-with-anxiety Quotes to ponder: "Anxiety is a signal, not a sentence. It's your body's way of telling you that something needs to be noticed and perhaps changed." "Worry exaggerates and threatens with worst-case scenarios that are unlikely to happen. Teach your child to stand up to worries by using the NED approach: Notice, Externalize, and Dispute the worry." "Empathy creates the safety that is essential for emotional expression. Laughter changes the body chemistry to decrease stress hormones that contribute to anxiety." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In episode #124 chat with William Wadsworth, a memory and productivity psychologist, author, and host of the Exam Study Expert podcast.Highlights: 1.     If you feel overwhelmed, confused, or frustrated – you are likely simply cognitively overloaded. 2.     When you understand Cognitive Load Theory you can combat procrastination and be a more effective learner.3.     Optimize intrinsic load by breaking tasks into manageable components and applying full cognitive power to each step.4.     Identify and address external distractions like technology and environmental factors (use headphones as a signal for focused work and create a tangents list for future exploration)5.     Externalize “to-do” lists to minimize mental clutter and stay focused on the task at hand.6.     Recognize the role of germane load in fostering creativity and insights and embrace spaces for idea generation, such as walks or shower time.Connect with William YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@examstudyexpertTwitter: https://twitter.com/examstudyexpertFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/examstudyexpertInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/examstudyexpertExam Study Expert podcast via https://examstudyexpert.com/podcastThe Scholars Way (30 day mindset / productivity program for scholars): https://william-s-school-4d20.thinkific.com/courses/the-scholars-way?ref=8cdb35Sounds of the Bodlein: https://www.ox.ac.uk/soundsofthebodleian/Six Pillars of Study Success (free download): https://examstudyexpert.com/PillarsProductivity Episodes#81 Productivity Hacks with Scott Miller; https://www.buzzsprout.com/1547113/episodes/11089338#87 Increase Your Productivity and Decrease Stress with Dr. Frank Buck: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1547113/episodes/11526361#89 Technology Addiction vs. Technology Mindfulness: How to Put Humans First with Rob Krecek: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1547113/episodes/11545822#92 How to Make SPACE for Things that Matter with Daniel Sih: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1547113/11832398Support the showSupport this free content: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1547113/supporters/new Get The Happy Doc Student Handbook: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0578333732Other resources at: http://Expandyourhappy.com Treat me to a green tea: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/expandyourhappyWant to make my day? Rate, review, subscribe & share with someone you love.

We're sitting down with Public Speaker, Author, and Psychotherapist Bronwyn Schweigerdt. Bronwyn's expertise lies in helping her clients externalize feelings they're ashamed to exhibit. Over the years, she has successfully helped people break free of depression, anxiety, bipolar, and more. Tune in, as Bronwyn shares how we can stop passing the generational cycle of guilt and shame to our children. She also explains how we can have a healthy perspective and response to anger, and the impact good mental health can have on our nutrition. To follow Bronwyn, and learn more about her great work, subscribe to her podcast, “Angry at the Right Things” https://www.podbean.com/pu/pbblog-egkd4-f39c32You can also subscribe to her YouTube Channel, https://youtu.be/PZp6PiqcXqw?si=rtQCQw7rr7R0mixWFurthermore, to subscribe to our sister podcast, Talking In 3s, Click here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/talkingin3ss-podcast/id1555383581To join our Talking In 3s Facebook group, click here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/928287941885320/

I have yet to know a human who has not made concessions in at least one of their relationships – between the gaslighting that we experience in our families, religious establishments, society, friendships, and intimate partners, it's near impossible to not internalize things that cause us to doubt the validity of our desires and needs, and when that has happened, what is and is not okay in a relationship becomes blurry… so we settle… and so, so many of us end up lowering our bar in our relationships. In fact, I've had many clients sadly say their bar ended up on the ground. Today, my guest and I are going to share stories and insights from our own lives, and in doing so, hope to inspire you to Raise your bar sis! In case you missed it last week, I have got a REALLY exciting offering for you today! I am about to partner with WORTH to do a special adaptation of my empowerment program. In this class, you get LIVE teaching & LIVE Q and A time with me, and you get to do this with other women whose questions and insights will add to your own journey. Can't make the live class? You can watch the recordings, submit your questions via an online document, and I'll answer your question in the next class! All this for about 1/3 the cost of what it would be to do a group cohort with me. If you're interested, please go here. Class begins March 6th. Story Time: Sarah and Annie talk about times that they made concessions and settled for less than you wanted and/or needed, and ended up lowering their bar. From exes, to new people they were dating, to friendships and jobs - what happened, WHY it happened, and how they learned how to stop self-abandoning and making concessions!Top Take-Aways: If self-love feels too big, start with self-acceptance; and if self-acceptance feels too big, start with self-awareness. Externalize your relationship with yourself, and then view that relationship like you do the people you love - are you loving yourself well - FIRST?Set mutuality/reciprocity as the place you set your bar - don't settle for less than you give. If you want to understand more about the ways gaslighting has shown up in your life and robbed you of being able to be free to be you (and make those concessions), check out my website. I have a number of offerings that will help you break the hold gaslighting has had over you and help you step into that Radical self-love.Also, please follow me on your preferred social media platform, and connect with me there! I'd love to hear your thoughts, questions, and feedback, and that is where we can do that! I'm on Facebook, Instagram, and Tiktok. And remember – you may have crashed and burned; been broke and hurt, but damn it, you're a phoenix and you're rising again. I think it's time we fly.

ADHD makes it harder to convert intentions into actions. Ari Tuckman, Psy.D., MBA, outlines a more useful way of thinking about executive functions that involves tweaking your environment, choosing the right tools, and other ways to externalize EFs. Free Resources on Executive Functions and ADHD: Download: Is It Executive Function Disorder? Read: 7 Deficits Tied to ADHD Read: ADHD Minds Are Trapped in Now (& Other Time Management Truths) Access the video and slides for this episode here: https://www.additudemag.com/webinar/executive-function-strategies-time-memory-adhd/ Thank you for listening to ADDitude's ADHD Experts podcast. Please consider subscribing to the magazine (additu.de/subscribe) to support our mission of providing ADHD education and support.

This movie is all about the inner turmoil of Louis Wain. You may not recognize his name, but you'll recognize his art (it's worth Googling). If you have a pet cat, it's because of Louis Wain. Communicating a character's inner thoughts or mental state is a tricky thing for film to do. It can be tricky for novelists too because it often leads to long passages of exposition. But externalizing the internal can (and must) be done. Do you know how? If not, this episode will show you how.For access to writing templates and worksheets, and more than 70 hours of training (all for free), subscribe to Valerie's Inner Circle: www.valeriefrancis.ca/innercircleFor information about Valerie's upcoming webinars, visit: www.valeriefrancis.ca/webinarsTo learn to read like a writer, visit Melanie's website: www.melaniehill.com.auFollow Valerie on Instagram, Threads and X (Twitter) @valerie_francisFollow Melanie on Instagram, X (Twitter) and Facebook @MelanieHillAuthor

In today's episode, Gina shares a practice of using a metaphor to better understand and explain our struggles with anxiety. A specific metaphor of a mountain is provided within the episode. Listeners are encouraged do develop their own metaphors based on their own personal experiences with anxiety. Listen in and gain greater understanding of your anxiety today! Please visit our Sponsor Page to find all the links and codes for our awesome sponsors! https://www.theanxietycoachespodcast.com/sponsors/ Thank you for supporting The Anxiety Coaches Podcast. Find even more peace and calm with our Supercast premium access membership! https://anxietycoaches.supercast.com/ Here's what's included for $5/month: ❤ New Ad-Free episodes every Sunday and Wednesday ❤ Access to the entire Ad-free back-catalog with over 600 episodes ❤ Premium meditations recorded with you in mind ❤ And more fun surprises along the way! All this in your favorite podcast app! To learn more go to: https://www.theanxietycoachespodcast.com Join our Group Coaching Full or Mini Membership Program  Learn more about our One-on-One Coaching What is anxiety? Quote: Every mountaintop is within reach if you just keep climbing. -Mountaineer Barry Finlay Chapters 0:00:24 Introduction and Overview 0:01:32 The Benefits of Metaphors for Anxiety 0:07:16 Using the Metaphor of Climbing a Mountain to Overcome Anxiety 0:16:13 Using Metaphors to Cope with Anxiety 0:17:19 Sharing Your Metaphor and Helping Others Summary The Anxiety Coaches Podcast delves into the idea of transforming fear and anxiety into strength with the use of metaphors. In this episode, the host Gina Ryan speaks in-depth about the power of metaphors when managing anxiety. She outlines how these metaphors allow us to externalize anxiety from our sense of self, which allows us to view our anxiety from a different, more constructive perspective. Ryan also explains how using metaphors can simplify anxiety, create a connection with personal experiences, facilitate communication and expression, and stimulate creative problem-solving. To drive her point home, the speaker offers her own metaphor of anxiety as a mountain. She describes how the jagged peaks of the mountain represent worries, doubts, and fears that can be almost insurmountable. As individuals climb higher and overcome obstacles, they gain a new perspective and emerge stronger on the other side. By visualizing anxiety as a mountain to conquer, the speaker urges her listeners to see anxiety as a challenge to be faced and embraced, rather than something to be fought and avoided. Furthermore, the metaphorical mountain can become a catalyst for growth and self-discovery, transforming anxiety into an opportunity for personal development. In the podcast, Ryan encourages her listeners to create their own metaphors for anxiety and to share them with others. She hopes that her words will provide guidance and comfort to those struggling with anxiety and enable them to view their anxiety from a new perspective. Overall, this podcast offers an insightful and empowering approach to managing anxiety through the use of metaphors. Anxiety, Metaphors, Externalize, Perspective, Simplify, Creativity, Communication, Personal Growth, Self-Discovery, Empowering Approach Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode of The Marketer's Journey, I interview Joe Sawyer, CMO at Mirakl. Joe began his career as one of the first e-commerce analysts and witnessed the dot-com boom, then became a CMO of an e-commerce company, bringing his journey full circle. I was eager to hear how his experience as an analyst has informed his current approach, and what he thinks most CMOs misunderstand about the role of analysts. We discuss when to use an analyst and when to use your company's own internal knowledge, and the importance of focus for a robust marketing strategy. Check out this and other episodes of The Marketer's Journey on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts!Key takeaways from this episode:Don't see your relationship with analysts as transactional. Joe believes that CMOs and MarTech executives fundamentally misunderstand the role of analysts. Analysts like to engage and ask big questions about the ‘whys' of your company, and you need to prove to them that your company or tech is the next big disruptor in the market. If you understand they are your partners, they can help you shape your organization's story. Externalize the internal. Joe believes vendors need to remember that they have a lot of value internally, which they can ultimately transform into external assets. Creating assets that are independently valuable is a key lead-generating tool, and empowering internal thought leaders with the tools they need to create these assets is something that Joe believes is often overlooked. Sometimes you don't need an analyst paper—you have all the tools you need already. Don't create a category, redefine one. Joe believes that instead of creating a new category, organizations need to redefine a static, existing one. The way forward for many vendors is to disrupt how a category is perceived, while redefining the needs and expectations of the space. Learn more about Mirakl here: https://www.mirakl.comLearn more about Joe here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-sawyer-a4255

If you struggle with a nasty inner critic, you're going to love & honestly need today's episode. When I was at EmpowerHER Live, one of my friends led me through an INCREDIBLE  externalizing the problem exercise that's helped me to separate myself from my inner critic and to be bale to manage it more. This has been LIFE-CHANGING! As ambitious women, we all have that voice in our heads that's trying to stop us and keep us small, and this is the exercise that can help us to tactically manage it! After you listen, tag me on Instagram-- @dr.meggymarie-- and let me know what you think! ***Christine's episode 

What's next for research at Organize 365®? Now that I've learned that I have ADHD, I'm ready to dive deeper into this topic of executive function and organization with formal research. Lots of times ADHD can be diagnosed when the person's executive functions are analyzed.  In this episode, I shared three examples of me relying on my working memory.  I analyze if my working memory helped or hindered the situation and explore explanations as to why I responded, the way I did, in each situation.   The executive function of working memory holds information in your head for a short amount of time so you can manipulate that information and do something.  Example: A math problem.  You take in the information of the numbers and functions that are being requested. When you do the problem in your head you are using your working memory to solve the problem. All hope is not lost - yes we can improve our executive functions according to Psychology today.  They suggest to identify which executive function you want to improve and then pick a strategy to help you improve. Strategies to improve your executive functions include: Chunk things into smaller tasks Externalize information using notepads, to do lists, or reminders  (had you completed the math problem, mentioned earlier, on paper, you would be helping your working memory by reducing demand upon your working memory so it is available for other items you need to remember) Buddy up with a peer to foster accountability Blocking access to distractions such as your phone in a drawer while focusing on a task Use rewards to motivate periods of consistent effort EPISODE RESOURCES: Psychology Today Strategies for improving executive function The Sunday Basket® The Friday Workbox® The Holiday Blitz Planning Day for Home Planning Day for Work Notepads and Notecards Find me on Instagram @Organize365 Did you enjoy this episode? Please leave a rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Share this episode with a friend and be sure to tag Organize 365® when you share on social media!

What's next for research at Organize 365®? Now that I've learned that I have ADHD, I'm ready to dive deeper into this topic of executive function and organization with formal research. Lots of times ADHD can be diagnosed when the person's executive functions are analyzed.  In this episode, I shared three examples of me relying on my working memory.  I analyze if my working memory helped or hindered the situation and explore explanations as to why I responded, the way I did, in each situation.   The executive function of working memory holds information in your head for a short amount of time so you can manipulate that information and do something.  Example: A math problem.  You take in the information of the numbers and functions that are being requested. When you do the problem in your head you are using your working memory to solve the problem. All hope is not lost - yes we can improve our executive functions according to Psychology today.  They suggest to identify which executive function you want to improve and then pick a strategy to help you improve. Strategies to improve your executive functions include: Chunk things into smaller tasks Externalize information using notepads, to do lists, or reminders  (had you completed the math problem, mentioned earlier, on paper, you would be helping your working memory by reducing demand upon your working memory so it is available for other items you need to remember) Buddy up with a peer to foster accountability Blocking access to distractions such as your phone in a drawer while focusing on a task Use rewards to motivate periods of consistent effort EPISODE RESOURCES: Psychology Today Strategies for improving executive function The Sunday Basket® The Friday Workbox® The Holiday Blitz Planning Day for Home Planning Day for Work Notepads and Notecards Find me on Instagram @Organize365 Did you enjoy this episode? Please leave a rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Share this episode with a friend and be sure to tag Organize 365® when you share on social media.

"The main ingredient of success isn't positive thinking it's non-negative thinking," says Kevin following up on last week's show on Learned Helplessness.  Do you have a sense of your explanatory style? Do difficult things ALWAYS happen to you? It turns out that shifting a helpless explanatory style to an optimistic or deserving explanatory style is not as hard as it seems.When something difficult happens, take the time to notice how you are thinking about it. Are there resources available to you that you can reach out to for help? What do you have control over? De-personalize the event by not generalizing against yourself. You may not resolve the situation today but there is always another chance, another way, another outlook that supports an optimistic, realistic mindset and an experience of success.Kevin and Niseema talk about the three ways to shift from a helpless explanatory style to optimistic thinking:View the situation as temporary rather than permanent.Don't personalize. Externalize by seeing what the outside factors are that you had no control over.Notice when you say "always" and "never" and get specific about this one time.--------------------------For more information or support contact Kevin or Niseema at info@thepositivemindcenter.com, or call 212-757-4488. These are challenging times and we hope this episode served to validate and ease your anxiety about what you may be experiencing. Please feel free to also suggest show ideas to the above email. Thank you for listening,Kevin and Niseemawww.tffpp.orghttps://www.kevinlmhc.comwww.niseema.comwww.thepositivemindcenter.comPRODUCTION CREDITSOpening Music : Another Country, Pure Shadowfax, ShadowfaxMid Break Music: Original Composition by Geoff BradyEnd Music : TFFPP Theme - Giullian Goiello for The Foundation for Positive PsychologyThe Positive Mind is produced with the help of:Producer/ Research: Connie Shannon Engineering: Geoff BradyWebsite Design and End Music: Giullian GioelloMarketing and PR: Jen Maguire, Maguire PR, jen@maguirepr.com

This week, we have the full panel of the ADHD reWired Podcast Family joining in for this month's Q&A Session, recorded on July 13th 2021. Find all the good stuff below!   [00:03:56] Maria, a mom and former teacher, asks about subtypes of ADHD. She also asks about structure and looks for tools to strategize while jump-starting a teaching career online and plan better.  Eric explains how ADHD “subtypes” shifted to “presentations” because over time, the presentation of ADHD can change. He also goes in depth about the diagnostic criteria, and the differences between children and adults. Most adults are the “combined” type of ADHD, along with Eric himself. When looking for strategies, he goes on to explain how it's important to look at the functional impairments. Any kind of diagnosis is a starting point, but isn't prescriptive. Moira explains how as people age, the more we internalize symptoms, so the hyperactivity may be more in thought rather than physically hyperactive. Women are also more likely to be inattentive, in the inattentive type. As Maria put it: “Meta inattentiveness!”   [00:09:24] Malika asks about menopause and how she's observed that her symptoms have become much worse since it came on full time.  Moira talks about estrogen, and once someone goes through menopause, the body doesn't make any more. Estrogen reduces ADHD symptoms, which is why when women are pregnant, they present with fewer ADHD symptoms. And, while women are in perimenopause, the estrogen levels are more erratic than in puberty. She talks about how hormone replacement therapy can be used to replace estrogen, and it also depends on someone's own health profile and family history,  and hormone replacement therapy may not be for everyone. Another suggestion was increasing medication during that time, and a lot of things around lifestyle become important. Resource mentioned here:    [0:14:31] Sandra asks, “How can I help my 14-year-old son become more organized for high school, and writing notes for his classes to study from for tests?” Brendan asks parents of ADHD kids: What's going on with the IEP and the 504? What are the supports happening at school to help him get to where he needs to be? Brendan says the best option is to have someone take notes or provide them for him so that he has good notes to study from, whether it's a teacher or a peer, so he can study notes that are useful. He explains that someone giving a model can help Sandra's son understand how he should be taking notes so he can do a better job with moving forward. Brendan also explains to be patient as he practices his new [note-taking] skill, and to leverage IEPs, 504s, and talking to teachers, guidance counsellors, special education teachers, etc.  Roxie talks about how she's had to work really hard to take better notes and that models are helpful. She acknowledges that it's about incremental changes, because the template or the model doesn't automatically mean we become amazing at it right away.  Resource mentioned here: Eric mentions a course on how to draw your notes. He also explains that sometimes we don't know what's important, so we might take notes on everything, then we try to distill what's important and what's not.  Brendan also suggests taking notes in two different colors, and to switch colors when a concept changes.  Will reiterates the sketchnote idea and is great to help create that organization. Will also mentions the Cornell-style of taking notes, then Brendan goes in depth with how they work and how he makes that style work for him. It can be good for [taking notes during] business meetings, too! Moira found how-to books, and suggests that note taking is a life-long skill. As a teacher, she actively tried to teach these tips to her students, not realizing it was because of her own struggle with it. She also recommends having conversations with educators who are going to be more helpful with things like this, so that it can be looked at as building a lifelong skill. It's also okay for students to rely on their peer groups for good notes, share each other's strengths, and can make studying easier, too.  MJ looks at note-taking from the student-perspective and how she would have liked to have been a part of the conversation to explain what works [for her], what doesn't, and why. She explains that allowing kids to have the voice to explain what does work versus being told how it's “supposed” to be done could be really helpful.  Roxie brings up how it can be difficult to prioritize what's important. She finds it helpful if she is really specific and succinct about what is going into the note-taking experience and writes a little road map. Eric emphasizes that, with all things ADHD, they require experimentation until we find out what works.   [00:30:30] Ryan, who is in her mid-20's, talks about struggling in the workplace with event planning and asks about a good system and starting place for planning, looking for tools on one hand and methods on the other. Eric says she gets to try a bunch of different tools to find the ones that work. Then, once they “stop working”, it's likely because it got boring to use. He explains that there isn't one “right” way to manage “all the things.” One rule, Eric explains, is to, “Get things out of your head. Don't keep things in your head ever, it's one of the most reliable places where things get lost.” In other words: Externalize as much information as possible using things like a calendar or a to-do list. He goes on to say that the issue may not be the tool, but how often we are interacting with the tools we have. Eric then explains how to “cue” ourselves when things are coming up, and to write in more information we need on our to-do lists and in our calendars than we think we need. Brendan shares the way he used to consistently screw up his own calendar, and shares what he does now so that others don't make the same mistakes. He emphasizes writing down a “point-person” when a task or calendar event involves reaching out to someone. Brendan also talks about segmenting the to-do list in “today”, “this week”, and “this month/later”, depending on the individual's ability to hold information and organize, how breaking it down could reduce overwhelm, and to write specific dates so we know when things are coming up and when they are due.  Eric gets really specific: “What you're doing NOW, what you're doing NEXT. Everything else is just noise.”  Will says the biggest part about using planners is consistency in getting used to that system and how there's no perfect planner. Using one that's “good enough” often really helps, and that it's “okay it's not perfect.”  Roxie finds that when she's having a hard time getting things done on her to-do list, it's a good idea for her to check her boundaries if she is saying yes to too many things. Eric-ism: “Just because it got put on your to do list doesn't mean it has squatter rights to stay there.”    [00:39:43] Kim asks about food and diet, and how they went on a whole-food plant-based vegan diet. They've found it has helped with their energy and ADHD symptoms, and wonders if that is the experience of others who have gone on a whole-food plan-based vegan diet.   MJ talks about how she experimented with pescatarian, vegan, then raw vegan diets in the past. For her, it depended on her activity levels and continues practicing with what her body feels like when she eats certain foods because it's not always the same. She goes on to explain how it [a diet] depends on a person's tolerances, allergies, and that it can take some experimentation, and learning and observing what feels good when we eat certain foods. Will says when we switch to diets like that, we tend to “up” the quality of foods we're eating vs. eating foods detrimental to our ADHD. He also explains that there aren't any specific studies [with data to back up] on diets that are good for ADHD. Roxie talks about inflammation, and how certain foods can cause inflammation, which causes brain-fog. For her, highly refined foods cause her to feel foggy.  Eric talks about how corn is in a ton of things, and when there's inflammation, it causes brain-fog, which affects quality of life. On an individual basis, he also encourages paying attention to the foods that do make us feel good, and the ones that don't make us feel good. Experiment, and drink lots of water! Brendan circles back to what Will spoke to - we feel good when we replace “the crap” with broccoli and lettuce and apples and stuff. It's important to recognize what makes us feel better because extreme diets are hard to maintain, and instead look at the fine-tuning.  Moira works with a dietician who gave her an analogy: “When we have a sore throat, we're not going to eat scratchy foods because it's going to irritate our throats…. So if we're eating smooth, cold things, it's going to feel better. But it doesn't necessarily mean that we should [always] eat that way.” And if we take something out of our diet like a whole food group but aren't replacing it with something, we may become nutritionally deficient.    [00:48:34] Gina is in the middle of getting assessed for ADHD and wonders about medication to bridge the gap between her strategies and her brain. She asks what it felt like if any of the panelists began taking ADHD medication as an adult. She wonders if medication may have a placebo effect or if it's actually working. Eric talks about a WOW-effect when taking ADHD meds/stimulant medication. He vividly remembers taking his ADHD medication and, for the first time, he got through a chapter and actually remembered what he just read. For Eric, when the meds are working, it's a profoundly noticeable difference and shifts him out of neutral.  For Brendan, taking ADHD medication was subtle - more of a “heh!” than a “wow”. He noticed he would pick things up and put them away instead of just walking by them, thinking “Oh this must be what neurotypical people do.” Then, Eric and Brendan emphasize that their ADHD medication helps them do the things that normal people make look easy.  Moira found that, as she was driving, she wasn't strategizing while driving. ADHD medication also gave her more peace because she didn't have as many thoughts. She explains that folks who have ovaries and a cycle, hormones will impact how medication works throughout the cycle. Moira and Eric also explain that a general rule is to increase medication dosage until the side-effects outweigh the benefits.  Will is similar to Brendan with how the medication works for him, and finds it really noticeable when he's not on medication. He notices it takes a long time to form thoughts, has long pauses, and answers things slowly. For Will, medication makes him feel “back to normal”.  MJ is also in the “heh” camp like Will and Brendan. The “wow” came later when she noticed that she was able to catch up on two weeks of paperwork when she started medication. Her house got really clean, too. Roxie, while talking with her accountability team, explained how she's had a hard time activating on some things, and lost sight of the medication piece when it came to activation. She wanted to err on the side of caution and spoke with her doctor about her dosage. She was happy to discover she has options.  Eric explains how ADHD medication is a very efficacious medication, which does sometimes require trial and error.    Jaclyn asks for advice or resources for ADHD parents of ADHD toddlers, especially regarding discipline.  Brendan reframes “discipline”, which feels like having to let the kid “know” they're in trouble. He likes to think more about boundaries, especially with toddlers. If they cross the boundary, they can be redirected and reign them in, instead of yelling at them. Gentle boundaries > Yelling. Brendan explains having a relationship with and being on the same team as our kids to reduce conflict, even in their teenage years. Moira explains how her and a friend wish, for their past selves, that there was more education about ADHD, being able to talk about people who had been there before as parents with ADHD and toddlers with ADHD. Moira also emphasizes taking care of ourselves, supporting ourselves, finding community, and doing everything we can to be a good parent.  Will has a 6-year-old who is diagnosed. As a parent, it calms him down to assume that they are trying their best and don't know any better.  Eric quotes an adage: “[Your kid is] ...not giving you a hard time, they're having a hard time.” Eric explains how ADHD is a developmental delay, and encourages taking the oxygen mask as much as we need to, especially if - as a parent - we also have ADHD. It's okay for the adult in the family to take a time-out, too. Brendan and Roxie wrap up the final thoughts about parenting with ADHD.   [01:06:08] Will closes the show with a groan-worthy dad-joke.  Check out the Other Podcasts on the ADHD reWired Podcast Network: with Brendan Mehan with Will Curb with MJ Siemens with Moira Maybin coming soon - Wait, What Was the Question? with Will Curb and Coach Roxie Martin. Reach out to Will and Roxie at   Don't Forget These, Too! — Get your name on the waitlist to join the fall season of ADHD reWired's Coaching and Accountability Groups — Join your ADHD-friendly co-working space! — Support the show by becoming a Patron! — Join Eric, Brendan, Will, MJ, Moira, Roxie, and Barb for an hour of Live Q&A on Zoom, every 2nd Tuesday of the month at 12:30pm Central (10:30am Pacific / 1:30pm Eastern) Other Noteworthy Mentions on the Show:  

Good morning and welcome to your fortieth meditation. How do you deal with the feeling of overwhelm? With the feeling that there are just too many things to do and not enough time to do them? Do you just jump right in and start doing what needs to get done? Or do you do anything but those things in a semi-conscious effort to avoid having to do them?

My mind has been out of whack lately. So I just decided to write everything going on in my head down. It really helped. Give it a shot!

Defining and standardizing microservice architectureMicroservices break down application development into independent functional components. One of our guests, Emily Jiang of IBM, defines a microservice as “a piece of software that can do one thing and do one thing very well.” For building good microservice architecture, she recommends following the 12 Factor App methodology. The 12 principles in this methodology were created in an effort to guide development and help standardize Java microservices. Emily identifies some of them, such as:Externalize your configurationResilient and faster start upFaster shutdownAnother guest, Roberto Cortez of Red Hat, agrees with her definition, and also adds, “I believe that every team or company has their own definition of microservices. So when people sometimes say, ‘Whoa, how big should a microservice be? Should it be 10k bytes or this many lines of code?’ It doesn't really matter, right? What actually matters is what you do with it in your own organization.”The monolith to microservices “lift and shift” can be trickyRoberto makes it clear that moving from a monolithic architecture to microservices is more than just a technical change for organizations. “If you require microservices, it’s not only about the architectural design patterns that you have to implement, or all the technical aspects of microservices, it’s also a cultural change.” Instead of everyone working together on one thing, you’ll have teams working on separate pieces. They’ll need to communicate differently. “It's going to be a huge cultural impact for the company if your team is not used to working in that direction. And I've seen multiple companies fail, not because the technical aspect was not there, but because the company didn't have the culture to adopt that kind of methodology.”Moving into MicroProfileEclipse MicroProfile is a collaboration of several open source projects, like Red Hat, which aims for more effective delivery of microservices to enterprise Java applications. Emily Jiang defines MicroProfile as the established programming model for microservices and cloud native applications, which includes APIs to achieve quality services for your application. She adds, “That's why MicroProfile is a great framework for doing microservices, because they can manage the quality services for you.”Learn best practices and get started with Eclipse MicroProfile on Platform.sh Platform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack

This is one part in a series of episodes on "The Untethered Soul". Part 2 -- Free Yourself from the Voice Inside (& Reach Pure Awareness) Your consciousness != the voice inside - Voice inside constantly talks/ never shuts up - Just sit still & listen: you’ll hear it very quickly - Listen when you shower or any free time - Think of it as your inner roommate - Start by watching as if someone was in there with you - Externalize that voice as another person - view it objectively w/o letting emotions interfere - It’s not you talking (b/c you’re the one listening) - Thus, you can’t silence thoughts you don’t like - Make them your best friend instead - If they’re a real person, wouldn’t they be so annoying? - Notice how often they’re wrong yet has so much control over your life - You often have to convince it & listen to it or else you'll have on edge, doubtful, & anxious - Why do you let them control your life? Why do you care so much about what they say? - The voice inside your head is like backseat driving - Gives a sense of control & security over the external world that’s out of your control - Tries to protect you from the unknown - When that inner voice stops talking, you can take in details (& sensations) of everything all at once w/a single glance - vs looking while the voice in your head pointing things out - When you feel that all the time, you'll be truly independent from the inner roommate - Reclaim your life to live it how you want it, not driven by this voice - By no longer identifying with this voice -- recognize that’s it’s not you - You != thoughts, only aware; You != emotions, only feel; You !=your body, only experience through it --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

An installment of the Oxford Series on the Choralosophy Podcast In choral music, in a different way than in other types of music making, WE ARE the instrument. This creates a unique vulnerability within choral music. If my saxophone is flat, I can fix the ligature, and EXTERNALIZE the problem. With singers, we must still … Continue reading "Episode 63: “We Face People.” The Courage of the Choir with Bob Chilcott"

An installment of the Oxford Series on the Choralosophy Podcast In choral music, in a different way than in other types of music making, WE ARE the instrument. This creates a unique vulnerability within choral music. If my saxophone is flat, I can fix the ligature, and EXTERNALIZE the problem. With singers, we must still … Continue reading "Episode 63: “We Face People.” The Courage of the Choir with Bob Chilcott"

An installment of the Oxford Series on the Choralosophy Podcast In choral music, in a different way than in other types of music making, WE ARE the instrument. This creates a unique vulnerability within choral music. If my saxophone is flat, I can fix the ligature, and EXTERNALIZE the problem. With singers, we must still … Continue reading "Episode 63: “We Face People.” The Courage of the Choir with Bob Chilcott"

In this episode Shunda Jenkins talks how externalize and observe our emotions. She shares a meditative technique that you can use to help you manage your emotions. Having emotions is part of life but they were never design to become a part of our identity. To learn how to manage your emotions, tune in to today's episode. Shunda Jenkins is a certified Personal Trainer, Nutrition Coach, and Mindset Practitioner and Life Coach. She has a background in health coaching, quality, and teaching. She is passionate about helping her clients uncover what is keeping them from living a balanced life. Focused on 4 key areas for healing, physical, spiritual, emotional, and mental well being. If you are interested in learning more about how her services can help you develop a plan to achieve your goals, book a free session today. Booking Link: https://www.facebook.com/shundamindsetlifecoach If you are enjoying this Podcast and want to support my movement in changing lives, check out my t-shirt collection recent design, “Free Your Mind.” I created this design because I am passionate about, taking care of the whole body not just the Physical, also the Mental. Check out my shop AIW by Shunda Jenkins https://teespring.com/stores/aiw-by-shunda-jenkins Thanks for watching and supporting, stay tuned to the next episode. Website: www.shundajenkins.com Instagram: Shunda Jenkins Facebook: Shunda Jenkins Instagram: Shunda Jenkins Facebook: Shunda Jenkins Sponsorships: on for this episode --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/shunda-jenkins/support

You're listening to this podcast, so you want to explore more possibilities in this time of abundance. How can you store all the tasks, notes, and appointments you make in your limited brain? Like a car externalizes transportation and your cell phone extends the reach of your voice, a to-do list, a calendar, and a list of goals externalize your mind and allow you to remember more. Even better: When you put your todo list and calendar in a trusted place, you can focus on this moment now with all your attention. Your pets, children, friends, and loved ones will enjoy your complete attention.

In this episode, Charlie discusses the importance of treasuring our thoughts. By guarding our minds against external circumstances, we protect ourselves from others' negativity. For more content from Charlie, and/or to order Charlie's book Unlocking Greatness, please visit http://www.charlieharary.com

If we keep our negative experiences in us it becomes toxic. One way of healing is by getting it out in the open in safe places and spaces so we can heal effectively. Listen in for some tips from the book "Healing the shame that binds you" by John bradshaw --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/diamond-chronicles/support

In this episode of The Podlets Podcast, we are diving into contracts and some of the building blocks of the Cloud-Native application. The focus is on the importance of contracts and how API's help us and fit into the cloud native space. We start off by considering the role of the API at the center of a project and some definitions of what we consider to be an API in this sense. This question of API-first development sheds some light onto Kubernetes and what necessitated its birth. We also get into picking appropriate architecture according to the work at hand, Kubernetes' declarative nature and how micro-services aid the problems often experienced in more monolithic work. The conversation also covers some of these particular issues, while considering possible benefits of the monolith development structure. We talk about company structures, Conway's Law and best practices for avoiding the pitfalls of these, so for all this and a whole lot more on the subject of API's and contracts, listen in with us, today! Note: our show changed name to The Podlets. Follow us: https://twitter.com/thepodlets Website: https://thepodlets.io Feeback and episode suggestions: info@thepodlets.io https://github.com/vmware-tanzu/thepodlets/issues Hosts: Carlisia Campos Josh Rosso Duffie Cooley Patrick Barker Key Points From This Episode: • Reasons that it is critical to start with APIs at the center. • Building out the user interface and how the steps in the process fit together. • Picking the way to approach your design based on the specifics of that job. • A discussion of what we consider to qualify as an API in the cloud-native space. • The benefit of public APIs and more transparent understanding. • Comparing the declarative nature of Kubernetes with more imperative models. • Creating and accepting pods, querying APIs and the cycle of Kubernetes. • The huge impact of the declarative model and correlation to other steps forward. • The power of the list and watch pattern in Kubernetes. • Discipline and making sure things are not misplaced with monoliths.• How micro-services goes a long way to eradicate some of the confusion that arises in monoliths. • Counteracting issues that arise out of a company's own architecture. • The care that is needed as soon as there is any networking between services. • Considering the handling of an API's lifecycle through its changes. • Independently deploying outside of the monolith model and the dangers to a system.• Making a service a consumer of a centralized API and flipping the model. Quotes: “Whether that contract is represented by an API or whether that contract is represented by a data model, it’s critical that you have some way of actually defining exactly what that is.” — @mauilion [0:05:27] “When you just look at the data model and the concepts, you focus on those first, you have a tendency to decompose the problem.” — @pbarkerco [0:05:48] “It takes a lot of discipline to really build an API first and to focus on those pieces first. It’s so tempting to go right to the UI. Because you get these immediate results.” — @pbarkerco [0:06:57] “What I’m saying is, you shouldn’t do one just because you don’t know how to do the others, you should really look into what will serve you better.” — @carlisia [0:07:19] Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode: The Podlets on Twitter — https://twitter.com/thepodlets Nicera — https://www.nicera.co.jp/ Swagger — https://swagger.io/tools/swagger-ui/ Jeff Bezos — https://www.forbes.com/profile/jeff-bezos/ AWS — https://aws.amazon.com/ Kubernetes — https://kubernetes.io/ Go Language — https://golang.org/ Hacker Noon — https://hackernoon.com/ Kafka — https://kafka.apache.org/ etcd — https://etcd.io/ Conway’s Law — https://medium.com/better-practices/how-to-dissolve-communication-barriers-in-your-api-development-organization-3347179b4ecc Java — https://www.java.com/ Transcript: EPISODE 03 [INTRODUCTION] [0:00:08.7] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Podlets Podcast, a weekly show that explores Cloud Native one buzzword at a time. Each week, experts in the field will discuss and contrast distributed systems concepts, practices, tradeoffs and lessons learned to help you on your cloud native journey. This space moves fast and we shouldn’t reinvent the wheel. If you’re an engineer, operator or technically minded decision maker, this podcast is for you. [EPISODE] [0:00:41.2] D: Good afternoon everybody, my name is Duffy and I’m back with you this week. We also have Josh and Carlisia and a new member of our cast, Patrick Barker. [0:00:49.4] PB: Hey, I’m Patrick, I’m an upstream contributor to Kubernetes. I do a lot of stuff around auditing. [0:00:54.7] CC: Glad to be here. What are we going to talk about today? [0:00:57.5] D: This week, we’re going to talk about some of the building blocks of a cloud native application. This week we’re going to kind of focus on contracts and how API’s kind of help us and why they’re important to cloud native ecosystem. Usually, with these episodes, we start talking about the problem first and then we kind of dig into why this particular solution, something like a contract or an API is important. And so, to kind of kick that of, let’s talk about maybe this idea of API-first development and why that’s important. I know that Josh and Patrick both and Carlisia have all done some very interesting work in this space as far as developing your applications with that kind of a model in mind. Let’s open the floor. [0:01:34.1] PB: It’s critical to build API-centric. When you don’t build API-centric, most commonly, you’ll see a cross ecosystem building UI centric, it’s very tempting to do this sort of thing because UI’s are visually enticing and they’re kind of eye candy. But when you don’t go to API-centric and you go that direction, you kind of miss the majority of use cases down the line which are often around an SCK, just ended up being more often than not the flows that are the most useful to people but they’re kind of hard to see it to be getting. I think going and saying we’re building a product API-first is really saying, we understand that this is going to happen in the future and we’re making this a principle early, we’re going to enforce these patterns early, so that we develop a complete product that could be used in many fashions. [0:02:19.6] J: I’ve seen some of that in the past as well working for a company called Nicera, which is a network virtualization company. We really focused on providing an API that would be between you and your network infrastructure and I remember that being really critical that we define effectively what would be the entire public API for that product out in front and then later on, we figured out what obviously to learn this semantics of that sort, to be able to build a mental model around what that API might be, that’s where the UI piece comes in. That was an interesting experiment and like, we ended up actually kind of creating what was the kind of creating what was kind of the – an early version of the Swagger UI in which you basically had a UI that would allow you to explore and introspect and play with, all of those different API objects but it wasn’t a UI in the sense that you know, it had like a constrained user story that was trying to be defined, that was my first experience where I was working with a product that had an API-first model. [0:03:17.0] CC: I had to warm up my brain, I think about why do we build API’s to begin with before I could think why API-first is of a benefit and where the benefits are. And I actually looked up something today and it’s this Jeff Bezos mandate, I had seen this before, right? I mean, why do we view the API’s? API what you’re talking about is data transfer, right? Taking data from over here and sending it over there or you’re making that available so somebody can fetch it. It’s communication. Why do we build API? To make it easier to do that so you can automate, you can expose it, you can gate it with some security, right? Authentication, all of those things and with every increasing amount of data, this becomes more and more relevant and I think when Patrick was saying, when you do it API first, you’re absolutely focusing on making it all of those characteristics a priority, making that work well. If you want to make it pretty, okay, you can take that data in. Transforming some other way to make your presentation pretty, to display on the mobile device or whatever. [0:04:26.4] PB: Yeah, I think another thing with inserting the API design upfront in the software development lifecycle, at least in my experience has been – it allows you to sort of gather feedback from who your consumers will be early on before you worry about the intricacies of all the implementation details, right? I guess with Nicera’s instant stuff, I wonder when you all made that contract, were you pushing out a Swagger UI or just general API documentation before you had actually implemented the underlying pieces or did that all happen together? [0:04:58.1] D: With an API-first, we didn’t build out the UI until after the fact so even to the point where we would define a new object in that API, like a distributed logical router for example. We would actually define that API first and we would have test plants for it and all of that stuff and t hen we would surface it in the UI part of it and that’s a great point. I will say that it is probably to your benefit in the long run to define what all of the things that you’re going to be concerned with are out front. And if you can do that tin a contractual basis, whether that contract is represented by an API or whether that contract is represented by a data model, it’s critical that you have some way of actually defining exactly what that is so that you can also support things like versioning and being able to actually modify that contract as you move forward. [0:05:45.0] PB: I think another important piece here, too, is when you just look at the data model and the concepts, you focus on those first, you have a tendency to more decompose the problem, right? You start to look at things and you break it down better into individual pieces that combine better and you end up with more use cases and you end up with a more useable API. [0:06:03.2] D: That’s a good point. Yeah, I think one of the key parts of this contract is kind of like what you’re trying to solve and it’s always important, you know? I think that, when I talk about API-first development, it is totally kind of in line with that, you have to kind of think about what all the use cases are and if you’re trying to develop a contract that might satisfy multiple use cases, then you get this great benefit of thinking of it as you can kind of collapse a lot of the functionality down into a more composable API, rather than having to solve each individual use cases and kind of a myopic way. [0:06:34.5] CC: Yeah, it’s the concept of reusability, having the ability of making things composable, reusable. [0:06:40.7] D: I think we probably all seen UI’s that gets stuck in exactly that pattern, to Patrick’s point. They try to solve the user story for the UI and then on the backend, you’re like, why do we have two different data models for the same object, it doesn’t make sense. We have definitely seen that before. [0:06:57.2] PB: Yeah, I’ve seen that more times than not, it takes a lot of discipline to really build a UI or an API, you know, first to focus on those pieces first – it’s so tempting to go right to the UI because you get these immediate results and everyone’s like – you really need to bring that back, it takes discipline to focus on the concepts first but it’s just so important to do. [0:07:19.5] CC: I guess it really depends on what you are doing too. I can see all kinds of benefits for any kind of approach. But I guess, one thing to highlight is that different ways of doing it, you can do a UI-first, presentation first, you can do an API-first and you can do a model-first so those are three different ways to approach the design and then you have to think well, what I’m saying is, you shouldn’t do one just because you don’t know how to do the others, you should really look into what will serve you better. [0:07:49.4] J: Yeah, with a lot of this talk about API’s and contracts, obviously in software, there’s many levels of contracts we potentially work on, right? There’s the higher level, potential UI stuff and sometimes there’s a lower level pieces with code. Perhaps if you all think it’s a good idea, we could start with talking about what we consider to be an API in the cloud native space and what we’re referring to. A lot of the API’s we’ve described so far, if I heard everyone correctly, they sounded like they were more so API, as describing perhaps a web service of sorts, is that fair? [0:08:18.8] PB: That’s an interesting point to bring up. I’m definitely describing the consumption model of a particular service. I’m referring to that contract as an infrastructure guy, I want to be able to consume an API that will allow me to model or create infrastructure. I’m thinking of it from that perspective. If AWS didn’t have an API, I probably wouldn’t have adopted it, like the UI is not enough to do this job, either, like I need something that I could tie to better abstractions, things like terraform and stuff like that. I’m definitely kind of picturing it from that perspective. But I will add one other interesting point to this which is that in some cases, to Josh’s point, these things are broken up into public and private API’s, that might be kind of interesting to dig into. Why you would model it that way. There are certainly different interactions between composed services that you’re going to have to solve for. It’s an interesting point. [0:09:10.9] CC: Let’s hold that thought for a second. We are acknowledging that there are public and private API’s and we could talk about why their services work there. Other flavors of API’s also, you can have for example, a web service type of API and you can have a command line API, right? You can see a line on top of a web service API which is the crazy like, come to mind, Kubernetes but they have different shapes and different flavors even though they are accessing pretty much the same functionality. You know, of course, they have different purposes and you have to see a light and another one, yet, is the library so in this case, you see the calls to library which calls the web service API but like Duffy is saying, it’s critical sometimes to be able to have this different entry points because each one has its different advantages like a lot of times, it’s way faster to do things on the command line than it is to be a UI interface on the web that would access that web API which basically, you do want to have. Either your Y interface or CLA interface for that. [0:10:21.5] PB: What’s interesting about Kubernetes too and what I think they kind of introduced and someone could correct me if I’m wrong but is this kid of concept of a core generative type and in Kubernetes, it ends up being this [inaudible]. From the [inaudible], you’re generating out the web API and the CLI and the SCK and they all just come from this one place, it’s all code gen out of that. Kubernetes is really the first place I’ve seen do that but it’s really impressive model because you end up with this nice congruence across all your interfaces. It just makes the product really rockable, you can understand the concepts better because everywhere you go, you end up with the same things and you’re interacting with them in the same way. [0:11:00.3] D: Which is kind of the defining of type interface that Kubernetes relates to, right? [0:11:04.6] PB: Obviously, Kubernetes is incredibly declarative and we could talk a bit about declarative versus imperative, almost entirely declarative. You end up with kind of a nice, neat clear model which goes out to YAML and you end up a pretty clean interface. [0:11:19.7] D: If we’re going to talk about just the API as it could be consumed by other things. I think we’re kind of talking a little bit about the forward facing API, this is one of those things that I think Kubernetes does differently than pretty much any other model that I’ve seen. In Kubernetes, there are no hidden API’s, there’s not private API. Everything is exposed all the time which is fascinating. Because it means that the contract has to be solid for every consumer, not just the ones that are public but also anything that’s built on the back end of Kubernetes, the Kublet, controller manager, all of these pieces are going to be accessing the very same API that the user does. I’ve never seen another application built this way. In most applications, what I see is actually that they might define an API between particular services that you might have a contract between those particular services. Because this is literally — to Carlisia’s point, in most of the models that I’ve seen API’s are contract written, this is about how do I get data or consume data or interact with data, between two services and so there might be a contract between that service and all of its consumers, rather than between the course or within all of the consumers. [0:12:21.7] D: Like you said, Kubernetes is the first thing I’ve seen that does that. I’m pulling an API right now, there’s a strong push of internal API’s for it. But we’re building on top a Kubernetes product and it’s so interesting how they’ve been able to do that, where literally every API is public and it works well, there really aren't issues with it and I think it actually creates a better understanding of the underlying system and more people can probably contribute because of that. [0:12:45.8] J: On that front, I hope this is a good segue but I think it would be really interesting to talk about that point you made Patrick, around declarative versus imperative and how the API we’re discussing right now with Kubernetes in particular, it’s almost entirely declarative. Could you maybe expand on that a bit and compare the two? [0:13:00.8] PB: It’s interesting thing that Kubernetes has really brought to the forefront – I don’t know if there’d be another notable declarative API be terraform. This notion of you just declare state within a file and in some capacity, you just apply that up to a server and then that state is acted on by a controller and it brings us straight to fruition. I mean, that’s almost indicative of Kubernetes at this point I think. It’s so ingrained into the product and it’s one of the first things to kind of do that and that it’s almost what you think of when you think of Kubernetes. And with the advent of CRD’s and what not, that’s now, they want to be extended out to really in the use case you would have, that would fit this declarative pattern of just declaring to say which it turns out there’s a ton of use cases and that’s incredibly useful. Now, they’re kind of looking at, in core Kubernetes, could we add imperative functionality on top of the declarative resources, which is interesting too. They’re looking at that for V2 now because there are limitations, there are some things that just do fit in to declarative pattern perfectly that would fit just the standard rest. You end up some weird edges there. As they’re going towards V2, they’re starting to look at could we mix imperative and declarative, which is and even maybe more interesting idea if you could do that right. [0:14:09.3] CC: In the Kubernetes world, what would that look like? [0:14:11.3] PB: Say you have an object that just represents something like on FOO, you have a YAML file and you're declaring FOO to be some sort of thing, you could apply that file and then now that state exist within the system and things noticed that that state of change that they’re acting on that state, there are times when you might want that FOO to have another action. Besides just applying states, you may want it to have some sort of capability on top of the point, let’s say, they’re quite a few use cases that come in where that turns into a thing. It’s something to explore, it’s a bit of a Pandora’s box if you will because where does that end. Kubernetes is kind of nice that it does enforce constraints at this core level and it produces these really kind of deep patterns within the system that people will find kind of easy to understand at least at a high level. Granted, you go deep into it, it gets highly complex but enforcing like name spaces as this concept of just a flat name space with declarative resources within it and then declarative resources themselves just being confined to the standard rest verbs, is a model that people I think understand well. I think this is part of the success for Kubernetes is just that people could get their hands around that model. It’s also just incredibly useful. [0:15:23.7] D: Another way to think about this is like, you probably seen articles out there that kind of describe the RESTful model and talking about whether REST can be transactional. Let’s talk a little bit about what that means. I know the implementation of an API pattern or an interface pattern might be. That the client sends information to the server and that the server locks that client connection until it’s able to return the result, whatever that result is. Think of this, in some ways, this is very much like a database, right? As a client of a database, I want to insert a row into a database, the database will lock that row, it will lock my connection, it will insert that row and it will return success and in this way, it’s synchronous, right? It’s not trying to just accept the change, it just wants to make sure that it returns to a persisted that change to the database before, letting go of the connection. This pattern is probably one of the most common patterns in interfaces in the world like it is way super common. But it’s very different than the restful pattern or some of the implementations of a restful pattern. In which what we say, especially in this declarative model, right? In a declarative model, the contract is basically, I’m going to describe a thing and you're going to tell me when you understand the thing I want to describe. It’s asynchronous. For example, if I were interacting with Kubernetes and I said, cube kettle create pod, I would provide the information necessary to define that pod declaratively and I would get back from the API server 200 okay, pod has been accepted. It doesn’t mean to it's been created. It means it’s been accepted as an object and persisted to disk. Now, to understand from a declarative perspective, where I am in the life cycle of managing that pod object, I have to query that API again. Hey, this pod that I ask you to make, are you done making it and how does this work and where are you in that cycle of creating that thing? This is where I like within Kubernetes, we have the idea of a speck which defines all of the bits that are declaratively described and we have the idea of a status which describes what we’ve been up to around that declarative object and whether we’ve actually successfully created it or not. I would argue that from a cloud native perspective that declarative model is critical to our success. Because it allows us to scale and it allows us to provide an asynchronous API around those objects that we’re trying to interact with and it really changes the game as far as like, how we go about implementing those inputs. [0:17:47.2] CC: This is so interesting, it was definitely a mind bender for me when I started developing against Kubernetes. Because what do you mean you’ve returned the 200 okay, and the thing is not created yet. When does it get created? It’s not hard to understand but I was so not used to that model. I think it gives us a lot of control. So it is very interesting that way and I think you might be right, Duffy, that it might be critical to the success of native apps because it is always like the way I am thinking about it right now just having heard you is almost like with all the models, let’s say you are working with a database in that transactional system. The data has be inserted and that system decides to retry or not once the transaction is complete as we get a result back. With a Kubernetes model or cloud native model, I don’t know what, which is both a proper things to say, the control is with us. We send the request, Kubernetes is going to do its thing, which allows us to move on too, which is great, right? Then I can check for the result, when I want to check and then I can decide what to do with the results when I want to do anything with it if it all, I think it gives us a lot more control as developers. [0:19:04.2] D: Agreed. And I think another thing that has stuck in my head around this model whether it would be declared over imperative is that I think that Go Lang itself has actually really enabled us to adopt that asynchronous model around things that threads are first class, right? You can build a channel to handle each individual request, that you are not in this world where all transactions have to stop until this one is complete and then we’ll take the next one out of queue and do that one. We're no longer in that kind of a queue model, we can actually handle these things in parallel quite a bit more. It makes you think differently when you are developing software. [0:19:35.9] J: It’s scary too that you can check this stuff into a repo. The advent of Git Ops is almost parallel to the advent of Kubernetes and Terra Form and that you can now have this state that is source controlled and then you just apply it to the system and it understands what to do with it and how to put all of the pieces together that you gave it, which is a super powerful model. [0:19:54.7] D: There is a point to that whole asynchronous model. It is like the idea of the API that has a declarative or an imperative model and this is an idea and distributed system that is [inaudible]. It is like edge triggering or level triggering but definitely recommend looking up this idea. There is a great article on it on Hack Noon and what they highlight is that the pure abstract perspective there is probably no difference between edge and level triggering. But when you get down to the details especially with distributed systems or cloud native architectures, you have to take into account the fact that there is a whole bunch of disruption between your services pretty much all the time and this is the challenge of distributed systems in general, when you are defining a bunch of unique individual systems that need to interact and they are going to rely on an unreliable network and they are going to rely on unreliable DNS. And they’re going to rely on all kinds of things that are going to jump in the way of between these communication models. And the question becomes how do you build a system that can be resilient to those interruptions. The asynchronous model absolutely puts you in that place, where if you are in that situation wherein you say, “Create me a pod.” And that pod object is persisted and now you can have something else to do the work that will reconcile that declared state with the actual state until it works. It will just keep trying and trying and trying until it works. In other models, you basically say, “Okay, well what work do I have to do right now and I have to focus on doing this work until it stops.” What happens if the process itself dies? What happens if any of the interruptions that we talk about happen? Another good example of this is the Kafka model versus something like a watch on etcd, right? In Kafka, you have these events that you are watching for. And if you weren’t paying attention when that event went by, you didn’t get that event. It is not still there. It is gone now whereas like with etcd and models like that, what you are saying is I need to reconcile my expectancy of the world with what the desired thing is. And so I am no longer looking for events. I am looking for a list of work that I have to reconcile to, which is a very different model for these sorts of things. [0:21:47.9] J: In Kubernetes, it becomes the informer pattern. If you all don’t know, which is basically at the core of the informer is just this concepts of list and watch where you are just watching for changes but every so often you list as well in case you missed something. I would argue that that pattern is so much more powerful than the Kafka model you’re just going to skin as well because like you mentioned, if you missed an event in Kafka somehow, someway is very difficult to reconcile that state. Like you mentioned, your entire system can go down in a level set system. You bring it back up and because it is level set, everything just figures itself out, which is a lot nicer than your entire system going down in an edge-based system and trying to figure out how to put everything back together yourself, which is not a fun time, if you have ever done it. [0:22:33.2] D: These are some patterns in the contracts that we see in the cloud native ecosystem and so it is really interesting to talk about them. Did you have another point Josh around API’s and stuff? [0:22:40.8] J: No, not in particular. [0:22:42.2] D: So I guess we give into like what some of the forms of these API’s to talk about. We could talk about RESTful API’s versus to TIPC-based API’s or maybe even just interfaces back and forth between modular code and how that helped you architect things. One of the things I’ve had conversations with people around is we spend a lot of our time conditioning our audience when in cloud native architecture to the idea that monliths are bad, bad, bad and they should never do them. And that is not necessarily true, right? And I think it is definitely worth talking through like why we have these different opinions and what they mean. When I have that conversation with customers, frequently a monolith makes sense because as long as you’re able to build modularity into it and you are being really clear about the interfaces back and forth between those functions with the idea that if you have to actually scale traffic to or from this monolith. If the function that you are writing needs to be effectively externalized in such a way that can handle an amount of work that will surpass what the entire monolith can handle. As long as you are really clear about the contract that you are defining between those functions then later on, when it comes to a time to externalize those functions and embrace kind of a more microservices based model mainly due to traffic reload or any of the other concerns that kind of drive you toward a cloud native architecture, I think you are in a better spot and this is definitely one of the points of the contract piece that I wanted to raise up. [0:24:05.0] CC: I wonder though how hard it is for people to keep that in mind and follow that intention. If you have to break things into micro services because you have bottlenecks in your monolith and maybe have to redo the whole thing, once you have the micro services, you have gone through the exercise of deciding, you know this goes here, these goes there and once you have the separate modules it is clear where they should go. But when you have a monolith it is so easy to put things in a place where they shouldn’t be. It takes so much discipline and if you are working on a team that is greater than two, I don’t know. [0:24:44.3] PB: There are certain languages that lend themselves to these things like when you are writing Java services or there are things where it is easy to — when writing even quickly, rapidly prototyping an application that has multiple functions to be careful about those interfaces that you are writing, like Go because it is a strongly type language kind of forces you into this, right? There are some other languages that are out that make it difficult to be sloppy about those interfaces. And I think that is inherently a good thing. But to your point like you are looking at some of the larger monoliths that are out there. It is very easy to fall into these patterns where instead of an asynchronous API or an asynchronous interface, you have just a native interface and you are a asynchronous interface in which you expect that I would be able to call this functional and put something in there. I will get the result back and that is a pattern for monoliths. Like that is how we do it in monoliths. [0:25:31.8] CC: Because you say in there also made me think of the Conway’s Law because when we separate these into micro services and I am not saying micro services is right for everything for every team and every company. But I am just saying if you are going through that exercise of separating things because you have bottlenecks then maybe in the future you have to put them elsewhere. Externalize them like you said. If you think if the Conway’s Law if you have a big team, everybody working on that same monolith that is when things are in depth in the place that they shouldn’t be. The point of micro services is not just to technically separate things but to allow people to work separately and that inter-team communication is going to be reflected in the software that they are creating but because they are forced to communicate and hopefully they do it well that those micro services should be well-designed but if you have a monolith and everyone working on the same project, it gets more confusing. [0:26:31.4] D: Conway’s Law as an overview is basically that an organization will build software and laid out similar to the way the thought musician itself is architected. So if everybody in the entire company is working on one thing and they are really focused on doing that one thing, you’d better build a monolith. If you have these groups that are disparate and are really focused on some subset of work and need to communicate with each other to do that thing then you are going to build something more similar or maybe more capable as a micro service. That is a great point. So actually one of the things about [inaudible] that I found so fascinating with it, it would be a 100 people and we were everywhere. So communication became a problem that absolutely had to be solved or we wouldn’t be able to move forward as a team. [0:27:09.5] J: An observation that I had in my past life helping folks, breaking apart Java monoliths like you said Duffy, assume they had really good interfaces and contracts right? And that made it a lot easier to find the breaking points for their API’s to pull those API’s out into a different type of API. They went from this programmatic API, that was in the JBM where things were just intercommunicating to an API that was based on a web service. And an interesting observation I oftentimes found was that people didn’t realize that in removing complexity from within the app to the network space that oftentimes caused a lot of issues and I am not trying to down API’s because obviously we are trying to talk about the benefits of them but it is an interesting balancing act. Oftentimes when you are working with how to decouple a monolith, I feel like you actually can go too far with it. It can cause some serious issues. [0:27:57.4] D: I completely agree with that. That is where I wanted to go with the idea of why we say that building a monolith is bad and like with the challenges of breaking those monoliths apart later. But you are absolutely right. When you are going to introduce the wild chaos that is a network between your services, are you going to externalize functions and which means that you have to care a lot more about where you store a state because that state is no longer shared across all of the things. It means that you have to be really super careful about how you are modeling that. If you get to the point where this software that you built that is a monolith that is wildly successful and all of its consumers are networked based, you are going to have to come around on that point of contracts. Another thing that we haven’t really talked on so much is like we all agree that maybe like an API for say the consumer model is important. We have talked a little bit about whether private API’s or public API’s make sense. We described one of the whacky things that Kubernetes does, which is that there are no private API’s. It is all totally exposed all the time. I am sure that all of us have seen way more examples of things that do have a private API mainly because perhaps the services are trained. Service A always fact to service B. Service B has an API that it may be a private API. You are never going to expose to your external customers only to service A or to consumers of that internal API. One of the other things that we should talk about is when you are starting to think about these contracts. One of the biggest and most important bits is how you handle the lifecycle of those API’s, as they change right? Like I say add new features or functionality or as I deprecate old features and functionality, what are my concerns as it relates to this contract. [0:29:33.5] CC: Tell me and take my money. [0:29:37.6] D: I wish there was like a perfect answer. But I am pretty convinced that there are no perfect answers. [0:29:42.0] J: I spent a lot of time in the space recently and I have researched it for like a month or so and honestly, there are no perfect answers to try to version an API. Every single on of them has horrible potential consequences to it. The approach Kubernetes took is API evolution, where basically all versions of the API have to be backwards compatible and they basically all translate to what is an internal type in Kubernetes and everything has to be translatable back to that. This is nice for reasons. It is also very difficult to deal with at times because if you add things to an API, you can’t really every remove them without a massive amount of deprecation effort basically moderating the usage of that API specifically and then somehow deprecating it. It is incredibly challenging. [0:30:31.4] PB: I think it is 1-16 in which they finally turn off a lot of the deprecated API’s that Kubernetes had. So a lot of this stuff that has been moved for some number of versions off to different spaces for example deployments used to be extensions and now they are in apps. They have a lot of these things. Some of the older API’s are going to be turned off by default in 1-16 and I am really interested to see how this plays out you know from kind of a chaos level perspective. But yeah you’re right, it is tough. Having that backwards compatibility definitely means that the contract is still viable for your customers regardless of how old their client side looks like but this is kind of a fingernail problem, right? You are going to be in a situation where you are going to be holding those translations to that stored object for how many generations before you are able to finally get rid of some of those old API’s that you’ve have obviously moved on from. [0:31:19.6] CC: Deprecating an end point is not reviewed at all and ideally like better with, you would be able to monitor the usage of the end point and see as you intend deprecating is the usage is going lower and if there is anything you can do to accelerate that, which actually made me think of a question I have for you guys because I don’t know the answer to this. Do we have access to the end points usage, the consumption rate of Kubernetes end points by any of the cloud service providers? It would be nice if we did. [0:31:54.9] D: Yeah, there would be no way for us to get that information right? The thing about Kubernetes is something that you are going to run on your own infrastructure and there is no phone home thing like that. [0:32:03.9] CC: Yeah but the cost providers could do that and provide us a nice service to the community. [0:32:09.5] D: They could that is a very good point. [0:32:11.3] PB: [inaudible] JKE, it could expose some of the statistics around those API end points. [0:32:16.2] J: I think the model right now is they just ping the community and say they are deprecating it and if a bunch of people scream, they don’t. I mean that is the only way to really know right now. [0:32:27.7] CC: The squeaky wheels get the grease kind of thing. [0:32:29.4] J: Yeah. [0:32:30.0] D: I mean that is how it turns out. [0:32:31.4] J: In regarding versioning, taking out of Kubernetes for a second, I also think this is one of the challenges with micro service architectures, right? Because now you have the ability to independently deploy a service outside of the whole monolith and if you happen to break something that cracks contractually you said you would and people just didn’t pay attention or you accidentally broke it not knowing, it can cause a lot of rift in a system. So versioning becomes a new concern because you are no longer deploying a massive system. You are deploying bits of it and perhaps versioning them and releasing them at different times. So again, it is that added complexity. [0:33:03.1] CC: And then you have this set of versions talk to this set of versions. Now you have a matrix and it is very complicated. [0:33:08.7] PB: Yeah and you do somewhat have a choice. You can’t have each service independently versioned or you could go with global versioning, where everything within V1 could talk to everything else than V1. But it's an interesting point around breakage because tools like GRPC kind of enforce you to where you cannot break the API, through just how the framework itself is built and that’s why you see GRPC in a lot of places where you see micro services just because it helps get the system stable. [0:33:33.1] D: Yeah and I will call back to that one point again, which I think is actually one of Josh’s points. If you are going to build multiple services and you are building an API between them then that means the communication path might be service A to service B and service B to service A. You are going to build this crazy mesh in which you have to define an API in each of these points to allow for that consumption or that interaction data. And one of the big takeaways for me in studying the cloud native ecosystem is that if you could define that API and that declarative state as a central model to all of your services then you can flip this model on its head instead of actually trying to define an API between in front of a service. You can make that service a consumer of a centralized API and now you have one contract to right and one contract to standby and all of those things that are going to do work are going to pull down from that central API. And do the work and put back into that central API the results, meaning that you are flipping this model on its head. You are no longer locking until service B can return the result to you. You are saying, “Service B here is a declarative state that I want you to accomplish and when you are done accomplishing it, let me know and I will come back for the results,” right? And you could let me know in an event stream. You can let me know by updating a status object that I am monitoring. There’s lots of different ways for you to let me know that service B is done doing the work but it really makes you think about the architecture of these distributed systems. It is really one of the big highlights for me personally when I look at the way that Kubernetes was architected. Because there are no private API’s. Everything talks to the API server. Everything that is doing work regardless of what data it’s manipulating but it is changing or modifying. It has to adhere to that central contract. [0:35:18.5] J: And that is an interesting point you brought up is that Kubernetes in a way is almost a monolith, in that everything passes through the API server, all the data leaves in this central place but you still have those distributed nature too, with the controllers. It is almost a mix of the patterns in some ways. [0:35:35.8] D: Yeah, I mean thanks for the discussion everybody that was a tremendous talk on contracts and API’s. I hope everybody got some real value out of it. And this is Duffy signing off. I will see you next week. [0:35:44.8] CC: This is great, thank you. [0:35:46.5] J: Cheers, thanks. [0:35:47.8] CC: Bye. [END OF INTERVIEW] [0:35:49.2] ANNOUNCER: Thank you for listening to The Podlets Cloud Native Podcast. Find us on Twitter https://twitter.com/ThePodlets and on the https://thepodlets.io website where you will find transcripts and show notes. We’ll be back next week. Stay tuned by subscribing. [END]See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Eric's guest on this episode of ADHD reWired is Elaine Birchall. Elaine is a social worker and a hoarding behavior and intervention specialist. She is the director of Birchall Consulting and is dedicated to helping those with hoarding behaviors to learn to manage their possessions and vulnerabilities. She founded the Canadian National Hoarding Coalition and hosted the weekly Voice America radio show Take Back Your Life When Things are Taking Over and many other things. Elaine describes hoarding as a disorder that leads to excessive accumulations of stuff, some or all of your living spaces are not useable because of things and stress or impairment of functioning because there are piles of stuff. You might say to people I am a bit of a hoarder, but unless the symptoms repeatedly occur, consistently and extend over some time, it's probably not hoarding. The younger a person is when diagnosed with the disorder, the better the chance of recovery is. For some people decluttering a room is very difficult. Elaine gives us tips and tricks to keep it from taking so long. The key to a list is keeping it close by, you don't want to look for it, or you might get sidetracked, and the whole hampster on a wheel things starts over. Elaine tells us to set three goals every day to get your decluttering done and still have time to do what you want. She talks about her scaling system so you can decide how to categorize the items you need to get rid of. Can you rip your house apart and get it all done in one day? Elaine says to find out how much energy you have and do a task that matches it. Don't have the power to do a 15 min job, but try to handle an hour's situation. It won't work.  Listen to this fantastic conversation, and if any of this sounds like you or someone you know. You never know when you may have an ah-ha moment. Take notes, phone a friend, or just sit back and plugin but you won't want to miss this episode. You'll Learn: [03:04] Elaine, welcome to the show! [03:47] They chat about hoarding confoundedness and vulnerabilities. [04:21] Elaine, how did you get into specializing in hoarding? [07:52] There are three criteria of hoarding. Elaine defines and explains them. [12:21] Hoarding and ADHD can have very similar rules. [14:35] It needs to be repeated, consistent, and extend over some time before you can call it hoarding. [15:53] When diagnosed early, it is easier to recover than if you wait, and the groove gets more profound, then you can only manage it. [22:32] What triggers the hoarding disorder? What is the Path? [27:33] Being in control of a part of your life gives you peace like a clean. [29:51] Don't put it down, put it away! [30:19] Catch yourself when you say I'll pick it up later. Tell yourself, do it now. [31:58] The trick is to take a second, hold the thing in your hand, and ask yourself if I was looking for you where you would be? [32:44] Two ways to remediate the clutter is the swiss cheese method or pick a spot and start in a corner and work your way around. [35:27] Externalize the message so that it occupies time and space. A chalkboard list or a list on your phone. [38:01] Set three goals every day (1) Have joy, fun, and play (2) remind yourself that you are a developing human being (3) Legitimate work. [41:48] Elaine explains her rule of three. [42:27] Elaine talks about her scaling system around clutter. [44:02] Can you rip your house apart and do the whole thing in one day? [44:48] Gage how much fuel you have and find a job that matches that. [49:24] Elaine runs two support groups for hoarding, but she is preparing to do an online group also. [51:32] Elaine gives us some tools to use on how to approach someone with this disorder. [52:06] Get Elaine’s book, it is designed to fill the gap if you aren’t getting help. [54:31] If you're a regular listener, consider becoming a patron and on our Patreon at Links and Resources Elaine on | | |

David Allen is the international bestselling author of, "Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity." Forbes called him one of the Top 5 executive coaches in the United States. Fast Company said David Allen is "one of the world's most influential thinkers." Today, David discusses his background and how Getting Things Done got started.Who is David Allen?David Allen is an author, consultant, executive coach, and international lecturer. He is widely recognized as the world's leading authority on personal and organizational productivity. He is founder of the David Allen Company, which provides services designed to increase performance, capacity and aligned execution through its global partners. Clients include some of the world’s most prestigious corporations, including over 40% of the Fortune 100.His thirty-five years of pioneering research, coaching and education of some of the world's highest-performing professionals has earned him Forbes' recognition as one of the “Top five executive coaches” in the United States, and as one of the "Top 100 thought leaders" by Leadership Magazine. Fast Company hailed David Allen "One of the world's most influential thinkers" in the arena of personal productivity, for his outstanding programs and writing on time and stress management, the power of aligned focus and vision, and his ground-breaking methodologies in management and executivepeak performance.David is the author of three books; the international bestseller, Getting Things Done: the Art of Stress-Free Productivity (popularly known by the brand shorthand of GTD®), Ready for Anything, and Making It All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and Business of Life. Getting Things Done has been a perennial business bestseller since it's publication in 2001, and the 2015 revised edition is now published in 30 languages. TIME magazine heralded Getting Things Done as "The defining self-help business book of its time."GTD has an international following of adopters in corporate enterprises, institutions and entrepreneurs. It has given rise to a thriving GTD industry of websites, blogs and software applications. Internet searches bring up tens of millions of references. David Allen is a rarity in the Twitter world, as one of the few non-celebrities with over a million followers hanging on his informative wit and inspiration. PC Magazine noted him as one of the “Top One Hundred to Follow” on Twitter.Highlights[3:22] Why David and his wife moved to Amsterdam[7:22] Studying abroad in Switzerland[14:33] 35 jobs before 35 [21:19] The orgins ofr the Next Actions List[25:01] An introduction to agreements[35:07] Capture and your next actions[38:51] If you keep a calendar, you can do this[40:48] Externalize your brain[44:01] Creating good next actionsResourcesThe Decline of the West by Helmut Werner, Oswald SpenglerLifespringGetting Things Done by David Allen The Getting Things Done Workbook by David AllenGetting Things Done Guru David Allen and His Cult of HyperefficiencyJohn-RogerRussel Bishop Continue Your High-Performance Journey with David AllenTwitterWebsiteDisclaimerThis information is being provided to you for educational and informational purposes only. This is being provided as a self-help tool to help you understand your genetics, biodata and other information to enhance your performance. It is not medical or psychological advice. Virtuosity LLC, or Decoding Superhuman, is not a doctor. Virtuosity LLC is not treating, preventing, healing, or diagnosing disease. This information is to be used at your own risk based on your own judgment. For the full Disclaimer, please go to (Decodingsuperhuman.com/disclaimer). See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Introduction:             Optimal Concept of the Week: Imposter Syndrome Introduced in 1978 as Imposter phenomenon by Dr. Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes mostly describing  it in high achieving women. Dr. Valerie Young is a current expert on the subject developed competence types.             Perfectionist - Everything must be perfect             Natural Genius – Need to pick up on things right away             Soloist – Don’t want or need anyone’s help             Expert – Want to feel that they know everything about a subject             Superman/woman – Judges self based on how many things at once Social media increasing the phenomenon Stop comparisons Look at accomplishments Realize you aren’t alone Externalize the voices in your head. Imagine being said about a friend or visualize a workout coach screaming at you telling you aren’t good enough. You’d fire that coach!   Ask the Doc:  “Should I be stretching or warming up before my workout?”  Basics - Stretch between sets and after workout. Do a warm-up before.   Final Thots: Calf Raises 2 second stretch at bottom, 1 second raise, 2 second hold at top, 2 second negative  Why seated vs Standing Concentric vs. Eccentric Type 1 vs. Type 2 muscle fibers

As men, we are conditioned to push down our emotions. For a sensitive kid like Henry Johnstone, the pain and anger of denying his feelings led to substance abuse and self-harm. So, how do we learn to overcome this cultural conditioning and find the courage to express our emotions? Henry is the founder of Henry Johnstone Coaching and the host of The Inner Warrior podcast. As a coach, mentor and speaker, Henry is committed to helping men communicate with themselves and in their relationships. He believes that men can discover their vulnerability and overcome the destructive, outdated roles dictated by masculinity, redefining themselves as who they want to be. Today, Henry joins Emerald to describe how pushing down his feelings caused catastrophic damage to his heart and share the struggle with addiction and self-harm that followed. He explains how he eventually overcame his fear of abandonment, discussing his simple practice for generating the courage to express his emotions. Henry also offers insight on the creative power that came from learning to convey his feelings and how he coaches couples to communicate more effectively. Listen in to understand how Henry navigates imposter syndrome and self-doubt, reframing the uncertainty as an opportunity for self-reflection. **Emerald’s team is aware of the loss of sound quality on this episode, and we are working on a solution to bring our sound quality back up to the standard you have come to expect as listeners. What You Will Learn How pushing down his feelings damaged Henry’s heart Henry’s resulting struggle with addiction and self-harm How Henry overcame the fear of abandonment Henry’s simple practice for generating courage Question worst-case scenario Seek out safe space (friend, therapist) Externalize through dialogue How expressing his emotions ignited Henry’s creativity How Henry coaches men and couples to communicate How Henry navigates his ongoing battle with self-doubt How to reframe depression as something that serves you Connect with Henry Johnstone Henry’s Website The Inner Warrior Podcast Resources Brian Cardoza Jim Carrey on ‘Deep Rest’ Connect with Emerald GreenForest Creative Age Consulting Group Emerald’s Website Emerald on LinkedIn Emerald on Twitter Email: listeners@menonpurposepodcast.com This episode is sponsored by the Creative Age Consulting Group. Men - Is it time NOW for you to make your mark? Visit timetomakeyourmark.com to apply for an invitation-only consultation.

Molly and Sara discuss go in-depth on how to surrender to a higher power and how to let go of what no longer serves us or holds us back in order to move forward. If we let go of a situation, we can learn from it and grow. However, if we can get raveled up […] The post BK26: I Surrender appeared first on Soul Searching Zone- Intuitive Life Caoch- Kelly T. Smith.

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.” In this episode of Made You Think, Neil and Nat discuss The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus. In this book we learn about the Legend of Sisyphus and his never-ending toil. How to find meaning in the struggle and hope for the future. “The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks and this fate is no less absurd but it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious.” We cover a wide range of topics, including: Meaning of life, Suicide, Law & Death Evolution, the Brain as an Illusion & the Decline of Religion Tangents on Tesla, Twilight Zone & Twitter The Absurd Man, Consciousness and Japanese Duels And much more. Please enjoy, and be sure to grab a copy of The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus You can also listen on Google Play Music, SoundCloud, YouTube, or in any other podcasting app by searching “Made You Think.” If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to check out our episode on The Elephant in the Brain for more on taboo subjects of the mind or our episode on The Book of Five Rings for ideas on philosophy and a retrospective look over life. Be sure to join our mailing list to find out about what books are coming up, giveaways we're running, special events, and more. Links from the Episode Mentioned in the show Syphilis  [02:10] Antibiotics [02:21] Suicides [03:06] Meaning of life [03:35] Ethics [03:56] Metaphysics [03:57] Antinatalism [04:27] Evolution [05:48] Humanity [05:54] Post Modernists [07:05] Last Will and Testament [07:32] Absurd Man [08:50] Freakonomics Podcast – The Suicide Paradox [11:34] Euthanasia [12:30] Libertarianism [13:15] Stroke [13:24] Prohibition [13:48] Morphine [14:02] Life Insurance [14:16] Hospice Care [14:27] Painkiller Medication [16:57] Facilitated Suicide [17:11] Malpractice [17:24] Hospital [17:53] Liability [18:05] DNR [18:53] Washington [19:24] Legality of Cannabis[19:30] Alcohol Laws [19:44] California [19:50] Colorado [19:51] Byzantine [19:57] Mississippi [20:13] Texas [20:14] Pennsylvania [20:14] Nebraska [20:15] Lawsuit [20:44] Small Breweries [20:51] Lobbying [20:53] Alabama [20:58] Government [21:22] Nanny state [21:47] Austin [22:12] Dallas [22:19] Houston [22:20] Pickup Trucks [22:40] Red Pill [23:20] Atheist [23:50] God [23:53] Consciousness [24:36] Solipsism [27:58] World Simulation [28:15] Automaton [28:38] The Matrix [28:44] Costa Rica [34:19] Dog Refuge in Costa Rica [34:24]   Japanese Duels [36:59] Akane no Mai – Westworld episode on Musashi [37:10] Character Map [38:14] Kindle X-Ray [38:57] Game of Thrones [39:35] Emergency Awesome - YouTube [39:51] Click (film) [42:31] Post Religious [46:12] Secular [46:19] Genetics [47:32] Nihilism [47:45] Nationalism [48:01] Dichotomy [49:22] Hedonism [53:24] Ivory Tower [56:07] Intellectual Yet Idiot [56:09] Frugality [57:44] Stoicism [57:45] Minimalism [58:25] Confirmation Bias [59:10] Rome [59:54] Amazon [01:00:10] Amazon Valuation [01:00:23] Microsoft [01:01:13] Netflix [01:01:18] Apple [01:01:25] Nokia [01:01:43] Twitter [01:01:47] iPhone [01:01:49] Google [01:02:08] IMDb [01:02:32] Alexa [01:02:46] Twitch [01:02:59] Zappos [01:03:00] Pillpack [01:03:03] Audible [01:03:05] Kiva Systems [01:03:06] Goodreads [01:03:08] Stack Overflow [01:03:15] Basecamp [01:03:17] Domo [01:03:17] Business Insider [01:03:18] Washington Post [01:03:21] LivingSocial [01:03:27] AmazonBasics [01:03:40] Tesla [01:03:57] Hyperloop Transportation System [01:04:28] Legend of Sisyphus – Wikipedia [01:07:52] Nomad lifestyle [01:22:37] A Nice Place to Visit - Twilight Zone episode [01:23:02] Uncomfortable Reading – Neil Soni [1:24:14] Crony Belief [01:26:06] Lindy Rule [01:26:24] Gestalt [01:26:49] Guardians of the Galaxy [01:26:59] Disney [01:27:08] New York Times [01:27:43] Wall Street Journal [01:27:44] Harvard discrimination [01:31:01] Books mentioned The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus Skin in the Game by Nassim Taleb [05:01] (Nat’s notes) (book episode) Sapiens by Yuval Harari [05:27] (Nat’s notes) (part I, part II) Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch [05:29] (book episode) Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett [05:32] (Nat’s notes) (book episode) The Stranger by Albert Camus [08:22] Mastery by Robert Greene [09:55] (Nat’s notes) (book episode) Cowboy Conservatism by Sean Cunningham [21:14] Homo Deus by Yuval Harari [24:23] (Nat’s notes) (book episode) Elephant in the Brain by Kevin Simler [25:07] (Nat’s notes) (Neil's notes) (book episode) I am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter [26:41] Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter [26:47] (Nat’s notes) (book episode) The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi [37:13] (Nat’s notes) (book episode) War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy [38:06] The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey [44:58] (Nat’s notes) (book episode) Letters from a Stoic by Seneca [58:36] (Nat’s notes) (book episode) Happy Accidents by Morton A. Meyers [01:17:39] (book episode) Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse [01:17:56] (book episode) The War on Normal People by Andrew Yang [01:41:56] (book episode) The Jungle by Upton Sinclair [01:25:40] (Nat’s notes) (book episode) People mentioned Albert Camus Anthony Bourdain [03:01] Young Jamie [06:44] Joe Rogan [06:44] Kafka [07:28] Jordan Peterson [23:57] (12 Rules For Life episode) Musashi [37:02] (The Book of Five Rings episode) Adam Sandler [42:22] Yuval Harari [46:58] (Homo Deus episode, Sapiens episodes Part I, Part II) Seneca [57:56] (Letters from a Stoic episode) Tim Ferriss [58:30] Epictetus [59:27] Jeff Bezos [59:53] Elon Musk [01:05:00] Nietzsche [01:06:37] Dostoevsky [01:12:05] Mark Manson [01:21:57] Nassim Taleb [01:25:39] (Antifragile episode, Skin in the Game episode) James Gunn [01:26:47] Sarah Jeong [01:27:57] Andrew Yang [01:41:46] (War on Normal People episode, Q&A episode) Show Topics 01:28 – This week’s episode is Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus. It is a philosophical book exploring the meaning of life, questioning if suicide is ever the rational choice. Themes include, humans questioning their cosmic significance and when life is a struggle, is it still worth living? 06:19 – The book is an essay in 4 sections, Absurd Reasoning, Absurd Man, Absurd Creation & Myth of Sisyphus. Camus was insecure about his work, similarly to Kafka who didn’t wish for his uncompleted works to be published after his death. Camus’ other work, The Stranger, was good, entertaining but it’s easy to hate the main character. Having read more by Camus it’s easier to understand his other works better. 10:03 – Taboo topic of suicide, often discussed as a wholly bad thing and something we should prevent at all costs. This book is a personal exploration of whether or not it makes sense. There are plenty of statistics to suggest that talking about suicide and reporting on suicides causes an increase. We have a natural aversion to talking about it. This essay is an argument against it as none of the reasons presented for it are considered convincing. 12:40 – For those in unbearable pain, what is the compassionate thing to do? This directly competes with the human with the human instinct for not ending a life. If someone is in pain, should it be illegal to let them go? Is it cruel and selfish to extend someone’s life artificially? The practice of assisted suicide still exists even though illegal but just via more illicit means. 14:38 – Insurance has no incentive to keep people alive as they stop paying out for care but hospitals stop getting paid when people die. Waiting for people to pass naturally is often a long drawn out process. Hospitals have to be vigilant in these situations before death to avoid malpractice lawsuits. Their desire is to minimize liability when someone does die. It is often a morally difficult decision for families. Legality of negative actions (not giving an intervention) vs positive action (assisting or speeding up the process of dying). 19:31 – Laws around alcohol and cannabis. Texas is very polarized compared to other states like Pennsylvania. 22:37 – “Living naturally is never easy, you continue making the gestures commanded by existence for many reasons. the first of which is habit. Dying voluntarily implies that you've recognized even instinctively the ridiculous character of that habit. The absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation and the uselessness of suffering” 24:00 – The brain as an illusion. Consciousness doesn’t have much control, just along for the ride. Can often result in a feeling of chaos or overwhelm. Hard to explain this concept to others not familiar with these subjects. Internal vs external experience of “I”, sub personalities and the internal chatter of the mind. It’s hard to consider that everyone experiences that about themselves. Considering everyone has their own unique experiences, it’s easier to think that it’s just me and the world and you’re all part of the simulation. Perhaps everyone else's consciousness is a figment of our imagination. 29:16 – Determinism vs Free Will & Evolution vs God. You can also think there is third option between non free-will and non determinism, where your brain is still deciding things, there is free will but it’s not yours. Very philosophical episode so far, contemplating the randomness in the universe. 32:07 – Man’s attachment to life. We get into the habit of living (surviving) before we acquire the habit of thinking. Animalian Drive, social bonds and the coexistence behaviors of other animals like chimps & dogs. Human’s drive to co-operate overrides our other urges. However scarcity causes confrontation. 35:52 – Violent crime can be thought of as failure of the cognitive mind. Crime levels show that we co-exist together relatively peacefully. Especially considering density of population, e.g on the island of Manhattan, most of which haven’t killed someone while living there. Getting through lengthy books, taking notes and needing character maps to follow plot. 40:27 – “Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep. And Monday Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm. This path is easily followed most of the time but one day the ‘why’ arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement begins. This is important weariness comes at the end of the acts of a mechanical life, but at the same time it inaugurates the impulse of consciousness.” Meaningless of the routine. Moment of clarity after extended periods of working hard. The movie Click and fast forwarding through the autonomous parts of life. How often are you in the driver's seat? How often is life on autopilot? Autopilot can used as a function to get out of your own way. You couldn’t function if you were aware of the absurdity of life for your whole day at your factory job. That would cause more suffering. You have to be satisfied with your life so that when the consciousness comes in you don’t feel weary of how absurd it is. 45:38 – “He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world” Changing notions of religion, no longer an unhesitant belief - without religion people are now ‘woke’. Science answers the how and what but doesn’t answer the why. Science and religion should be separate. If religion and nationalism are fading away, what are we a part of then? Jordan Peterson is an example of figureheads that people are looking up to in place of religion. Externalize the meaning of our lives onto these people - like an over obsessive mother who won’t let their child grow up, or obsession in romantic relationships. 49:13 – There is no objective meaning of life however we have an innate longing and desire for meaning - how do you reconcile those two things? “The mind's first step is to distinguish what is true from what is false. However, as soon as the thought reflects on itself what it first discovers is a contradiction. Of whom and what indeed can I say I know that? This heart within me I can feel and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge and the rest is construction for if I tried to seize this self of which I feel sure. If I try to define a to summarize it it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers.” 50:06 – What does the mind do that the brain doesn’t do? We are always stuck within that contradiction. Lots of overlapping themes with GEB episode. “If through science I can seize phenomena and enumerate them I cannot for all that apprehend the world. Were I to trace its entire relief with my finger I should not know anymore” Simply having the data from science isn’t the same as understanding and knowing. The mind is like water dripping through fingers, we can’t hold on to the concept. “What is absurd is the confrontation of the irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart. The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. At this point of his effort, man stands face to face the irrational, he feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.” We want to be happy and we want reasons for existing but the world has nothing to offer us we can never find an external explanation for being and so we either have to create one ourselves or just accept that we will never have one. It’s a hard concept to be comfortable with. 52:51 – Chapter 2. Examples of the absurd life. Revolt, Freedom, Passion. It's the actor who recognizes that everything is ephemeral. Life ends at the end of the role. Mini universes are created within plays. The actor - in those 3 hours he travels the whole course of the dead-end path that the men in the audience take a lifetime to cover. You can sit and observe an actor but you can never do that with your own life. 54:40 – The Conqueror. Fighting and taking action, demands respect. Not sitting thinking. But they are not contemplating their life. Comparison of the conqueror to business. Choosing action over contemplation. 56:47 – Who is the "I". Discussing this topic makes you very self aware. These observations are not reasons not to pursue things in life. Stoicism and Minimalism are great philosophies for people who don’t want to feel bad about giving up on their goals. However some people interpret Stoicism as saying to go for your goals. There is fun in accomplishment. Your mindset is often reflected in what you’re reading. Our differing mindset applies different meanings to the same books. Our minds don’t hold on to thoughts we disagree with. We extract what is valuable. Our struggles and wealth can play a part on our viewpoint. Epictetus in poverty vs Seneca with wealth. 01:00:00 – Tangent. Modern wealth, Jeff Bezos and the escalating new heights of wealth. Which tech companies would you be least surprised to not exist in 10 years? Amazon, IPO’s, Tesla and stock prices. 01:06:05 – Humans long for happiness and reason but absurdity is born from our need and the silence of the world. It’s a philosophical contradiction. Nietzsche said we had killed God in becoming God ourselves. That we are taking power and trying to be the arbiters of our faith. We decide what is meaningful. The goal is to not wait for heaven in the afterlife but to create that eternal meaningful life here. 01:07:42 – The Myth of Sisyphus. He defied the Gods and put Death in chains so that no human needed to die. When Death was liberated and it became time for Sisyphus to die, he tried to escape. The Gods decided to punish him for all of eternity. He would push a rock up a mountain and upon reaching the top, the rock would roll down again leaving Sisyphus to start over. Is Camus saying that we are all Sisyphus now? Trying to defy death? Stuck in the absurd meaningless tasks of life. Despite being the Absurd Man, Sisyphus has accepted his fate and continues doing it. “He is as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the Gods, his hatred of death and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this Earth.” Trying to live eternal life here on Earth means we have condemned ourselves to the meaningless repetition. We are doing this senseless toil and we are occasionally conscious of it and trying to find meaning. To live a meaningful life you stay in the routine and stay “unwoke”. Once you’re conscious of the absurdity of life and try to do something about it you are trying to become like God. 01:11:59 – However there is meaning in the task itself, there’s a happy ending to this story. Camus was saying there’s not a God but there doesn’t have to be for your life to have meaning. There is hope in the returning steps of Sisyphus. “A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself. I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step, toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour, like a breathing space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the layers of the Gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.” In those moments, walking back down after the rock, he still has some control and he is conscious of it. 01:14:24 – “I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain, one always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks, he too concludes that all is well. The universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futiile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” 01:15:03 – “All of Sisyphus' silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing.” A struggle can make your life meaningful. Tackling a goal can be uplifting. Finite and infinite games and horizon thinking idea. Goals as directional, metrics to shoot for. Being obsessed with a goal you ignore other opportunities and miss out on serendipitous discoveries. Tangent on goal setting, and adapting and changing the goal as you progress. Reaching the goal is not what makes you happy. You have to enjoy the struggle. 01:22:29 – The appeal of a nomadic life. However living the easy, happy life isn’t possible all of the time. Only by losing, does winning mean anything. Sisyphus can choose how he feels about the struggle. 01:23:22 – It’s very easy to keep reading books you already agree with, to avoid struggling with difficult feelings. When you read things that challenge your belief, feeling and challenging that discomfort is something necessary to do. Discriminating some races feels wrong while others not. 01:32:30 – “For the rest of men he knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life. Sisyphus returning toward his rock in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions, which become his fate, created by him combined under his memories eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus convinced of the holy human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see, who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go, the rock is still rolling.” The book ends on a hopeful note, answers the question of suicide. Even though life may seem absurd, you can find meaning in the absurdity and the struggle. You can find your rock. 01:34:36 – Thank you to everyone supporting us on Patreon. We have some lovely bonus material to go with this episode. The first tier is $5, if you think we’re worth more than a fancy coffee we would love it if you supported the show. At that level you get the bonus material, notes for each episode, community area to talk about the show, Q&A. At the $10 tier you get to join at monthly one-hour hangout for a casual chat. We feel Patreon is a better model for the future than advertising. Check us out there or you can go to MadeYouThinkPodcast.com/Support - we’ve got our sponsors there. We’ve got a link through to Amazon you can bookmark, you can go to Kettle & Fire for their delicious Bone Broth - use code THINK for a discount at checkout. Go to Perfect Keto for their healthy supplements. Four Sigmatic for the great mushroom coffee and Cup and Leaf . You’ll get 20% off with code THINK. Also check out our Made You Think Tea Bundle. 01:41:46 – Keep telling people about the show. If you haven’t listened to the episode with Andrew Yang we’d love to hear what you think about the format. We also love getting book recommendations, let us know on Twitter. I’m @TheRealNeilS and I am @NatEliason Until next time, have a good one everyone. If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe at https://madeyouthinkpodcast.com.

Performance anxiety is just the tip of the iceberg. Lynn Lyons breaks down the process of dealing with anxiety, and explains the difference between regular worry and something more disruptive. Her tips can easily be adapted to help the students in your class approach events like performances, solos, or auditions with more courage and confidence.   [Subscribe on iTunes] [Subscribe on Android]   Highlight to Tweet: “When you are comparing yourself to someone else, you are comparing your inside to their outside.” -Lynn Lyons   “Anxiety is a quest for certainty, and there is no way to appease it.” - Lynn Lyons   “It’s a very courageous thing, to be a performer.” -Lynn Lyons Show Notes: What's going on with anxiety? Is it as bad as it seems? Worry and anxiety are both normal parts of our lives. When worry takes over, and starts to cause us to avoid certain things, it becomes a problem. Anxiety says, “No thanks, I’m out.” It leads to avoiding normal daily activities. Anxiety and worry are particular problems for creative people. Imagination can amplify worry’s effect. What happens when we try to eliminate worry and anxiety? (Hint: it gets worse!) The more you try to eliminate worry, the stronger it gets. Externalize the worry. When it shows up (because of course it will), recognize it, acknowledge it, and allow it to be there. Then pivot and do whatever you came to do. What's the connection between anxiety and depression? Untreated anxiety is the “speed lane” into depression. Anxiety is one of the top predictors of depression in adolescents. We need to normalize anxiety. Anxiety’s agenda is comfort and certainty. We must learn to tolerate uncertainty. Live performance is a great arena for learning the skills to cope with uncertainty (anxiety). What should everyone know about anxiety, but most people don't? Breathing alone won’t control your anxiety. It’s a great first step, but there needs to be a follow up. Worry convinces you that “you can’t handle it.” Everyone hears that voice. But we can change our relationship to that voice. The “what” isn’t as important as “how” you deal with it. Bio: Lynn Lyons, LICSW is an internationally recognized psychotherapist, author, and speaker with a special interest in interrupting the generational patterns of anxiety in families. Her skill-based approach to anxiety focuses on the need to teach families about HOW anxiety works and what families can do to pull members out of the powerful “anxiety cult” that demands obedience to its need for certainty and comfort. Lynn’s approach uses humor, playful connection, and a constant focus on DOING, an umbrella strategy she has taught to thousands of professionals and families.Lynn is the author of several books, including Anxious Kids, Anxious Parents with Reid Wilson.She maintains a private practice in Concord, New Hampshire where she sees families whenever she’s not on the road teaching. Resources/links Mentioned: Lynnlyonsnh.com Are Smartphones Harming Kids? Choir Nation group on Facebook Email Patreon - Support the podcast! Sponsored by: Sight Reading Factory (Use promo code “NINJA” at checkout for 10 free student accounts!)     My Music Folders (Use promo code “NINJA” at checkout for “last column” or best pricing - usually reserved for bulk purchases only!)    

(Breather) Have you ever wondered just how much physical stress and emotions affect your body? Referencing back to a previous show with Dr. Ron Sinha, who has worked largely in the affluent Silicon Valley area, I talk about how psychological conditions can have a serious impact on your health, regardless of how “big” or “small” whatever problems you’re dealing with might seem. The point is: stress is stress, regardless of the source of that stress - the impact on your health is the same. Which brings me to the related concept of the *hedonic treadmill.* The hedonic treadmill ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill ) (or hamster wheel) is a preset thermostat for your own intrinsic level of happiness.  So let’s say someone was wired to be generally unhappy from childhood. If that person wins the lottery and becomes instantly rich, there would be a momentary rush of happiness or a thrill, which over time would return back to your preset thermostat level of happiness.  Studies of lottery winners show that they don’t respond to ordinary situations or everyday events with an inflated level of bliss. The treadmill refers to how individuals are constantly spinning on a wheel where they seek outside pleasures, hoping that will somehow reset their thermostat to a higher level of happiness. “Maybe if I leave this job and join a start-up, run my own business, make more money, get a nicer car, or push my kids harder so I can live through their success, then I’ll be happier…” Angry, dissatisfied, unhappy, selfish people don’t all of a sudden become peaceful, happy, selfless individuals as a result of positive changes in their financial or personal situation. The converse is also true: If you are wired to be happy and more resilient, then sudden adverse changes in your health or your finances may temporarily move your happiness levels lower, but then you snap back closer to your pre-programmed levels. Again, in my neck of the woods, there is a tremendous focus on constantly driving towards external goals to hopefully reset the thermostat.  This rarely ever works. As a matter of fact, it just creates sequentially greater and greater expectations that result in temporary highs, but then you’re back to your preset level of dissatisfaction. “All these years of hard work and sacrifice, yet I still feel like this. ” Sound familiar? I’m by no means encouraging you to demotivate yourself or your kids, but for every moment you set a high goal, take time to appreciate all the surrounding moments, achievements, and gifts you take for granted. If you are pushing yourself or your loved ones towards external goals and setting higher and higher expectations while consistently sacrificing nutrition, exercise, sleep, social connection, nature connection, and mindfulness, then you are chaining yourself to the hedonic treadmill and not making progress towards a more fulfilling life. I deliberately have learned to set really low expectations for most events and personal interactions in my life, and it really has made a huge difference for me.  If expectations are not met, no worries, and if they’re met or exceeded, then I feel joy and gratitude. Here are some tips that are seriously helpful when you find yourself faced with this issue: *1) Identify*. Label rumination when it happens… “There I go ruminating again.” *2) Categorize*. Be familiar with the common rumination movie themes you replay in your head like if-then, great expectations, and social comparisons. *3) Externalize*. Grab some popcorn (a handful of nuts would be healthier!) and watch ruminating thoughts like a movie. *4) Detach and Distract.* Rumination is sticky and it will pin you to your office chair, your couch or your bed, so you feel helpless and paralyzed.  You literally become a victim or prisoner of your own thoughts. Immediately detach yourself from your rumination environment and then positively distract yourself with exercise, reach out to a friend, read a book you enjoy, do something creative, get out into nature, etc.  Mondays are days I’m most susceptible to rumination and the simple act of working in a public place like a coffee house rather than in my solitary office makes a huge difference. *5) Be Present.* Remember I said that ruminating about the past is linked to depression, while ruminations about the future are tied to anxiety.  The space in between is the present and mindfulness practices like meditation help bring you back to your center. *6) Pause and Reflect.* Become the wise elder every now and then.  Ask yourself if you’re constantly running on the hedonic treadmill and forcing your family down a similar path.  Prioritize your mind and body and encourage those you love to do the same. Remember, you cannot reset your thermostat through incessant material pursuits and external goal achievements. *7) Get Help.* For many, the rumination movies continue to dominate their lives despite using some of the above techniques.  There are past experiences and traumas that have become strongly embedded into our psyche and need to be addressed by a mental health professional.  Unfortunately, seeking help is often considered taboo to the very individuals and cultures that need it the most. However, it’s a necessary step if you want to be able to break free from the things that no longer serve you, and the truth is, we ourselves are often to blame for the cages we find ourselves locked in. Usually, we are the ones who got ourselves there - so, therefore, we are also fully capable of getting ourselves out of whatever restraints and constraints that we’re currently facing. *TIMESTAMPS:* FOMO is fear of keeping up, fear of missing out. These conditions impact our health. [02:53] Biochemical effects of the brain’s functioning show that all the cells of your body are affected by your thoughts.  [04:38] Studies of lottery winners show that they don’t respond to ordinary situations with an inflated level of bliss. [05:32] Individuals are constantly spinning on a wheel. [07:40] People are striving to reset their happiness thermostat. [11:39] Brad’s tips on overcoming the dangerous adverse consequences of FOMO are listed.  (1) is Identify. (2) categorize; (3) externalize; (4) detach and distract; (5) be present; (6) pause and reflect; [14:22] Set an example for your kids with a healthy mindset. [17:58] Social behaviors are contagious. [18:48] Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-get-over-yourself-podcast/donations Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands