📍 How are you doing Shafer?

 

Great. Thank you so much for having me.

 

The pleasure. You are a mom, a physician, a neurologist, a life coach, a writer.

 

What's next?

 

Oh, wow. What's next? Writing is really big for me right now. I have two books. I'll be coming out one later this year and another in the spring and creating an online community. We don't tell our stories. That's related to my second book. We don't tell our stories and in support of people who are victims of intimate partner abuse and violence.

 

Wow. So you are formally trained as a doctor. How did you become a writer and why did you pick this specific topic?

 

Yeah. I have actually been a writer lifelong. I was a musician starting from the age of 14 professionally. And so I wrote music as well as I wrote for local paper and a magazine in Indianapolis, Indiana, where I grew up.

 

So I've been writing for a really long time. And this is just a coming back to myself and coming back to that part of me. I had really let go of a lot of the things that fed my soul during my life, in part because that's normal when you're in medical training. It's pretty much all encompassing, right?

 

It's difficult to spend as much time on those things that really nourish you outside of the wonderful gifts of becoming a physician. But also, I was in a relationship where I didn't really feel that over time I had the autonomy to do the things that I really wanted to do. And so I had to make some really difficult choices to take that back and the process that I went through of reclaiming my story and working towards my future, because.

 

I really understood that if I can't grow here, I need to go and grow and I need to really take ownership of my life and my story, not only for myself, but also for my family, for my children. That process was so transformative for me that it naturally evolved into me learning more about being a life coach.

 

And then. Writing more, creating music more, creating my podcast, just really leaning into reconnecting with people and trying to share the story of claiming your story and building the future that really aligns with who you want to be.

 

Reclaiming your story. That sounds wonderful. What was your story before point?

 

Seems like there was a clear point after which you decided to Yeah.

 

I was a very independent young person, as a teenager, as I said, I was working in the music industry as a very young person. I was the only kid in the room most of the time when I was writing and recording and producing.

 

And then I was married very young. And I worked very hard to get into medical school and then go through that process. And I was really so focused on training that I didn't even have time to worry about things like home dynamics. I wasn't really even home. And that really allowed things to go on, I think, for longer than if I had been.

 

Spent more time at home. But as all things change over time, after I was out of residency, after I was in the home more and really starting to come into my own, right? When you become an attending physician and you're responsible for your patients, you're responsible for your clinic, you're responsible for the hospital, for taking on the call and everything.

 

You really do. Even if you're a person who has unfortunately, been disempowered in life, you do start to feel that you do have some strength there. And what I experienced was there was this dissonance between what I was learning and growing into professionally. And the person that I was expected to be at home and the more dissonance occurred, the less acceptable it was for me to fill that role outside of the home.

 

And that just eroded slowly over time until I was really only in the home and only working outside of my clinical profession. And it really took me just really Just disintegrating really the person that I had been before until I was just a tiny little speck of who I had been as a person.

 

I really didn't feel control over my personhood and it took my best friend shaking my soul and asking me, do you know that you matter? And I had really lost myself to the point that I didn't. And that question shocked me to my core and I really took it in. And I realized I do matter. I want to matter.

 

But if I believe that, I need to behave differently so that it can become true. And I had to do a lot of difficult work on my mindset and make difficult decisions for my environment so that it could be true and that I could grow into being that person. And that journey for me was so important and so transformative.

 

That for me, my mission became trying to help others also reclaim their story and simply trust themselves and live the life that they really want to live and not allow anyone to force them or push them into a box they don't fit in to seek belonging to themselves and then bring that energy to the world.

 

Wow. When I think about you, as you talk about your journey, you are young, you are into music, you are doing amazing things, you are smart, you go to get into medical school, you're a physician, you're a neurologist, at this point in life, in your story, you have accomplished things that most people desire to accomplish, dream to accomplish.

 

Some people might be looking at you in the past, just having heard about you thinking, I want to be like her. She's strong and powerful and smart and she's so accomplished in her field. How did that person become so little that she forgot that she mattered? What happened?

 

Yeah. It's a great question and I think, there's a gift that you can give yourself of.

 

Self awareness and self regulation that I think, I don't know if it's cultural or if it's a family system issue, but many of us grow up from a very young age and we take it into early adulthood. This fixation on regulating the world around us or the people around us seeking validation, seeking approval through becoming a doctor or Going into the profession our parents want us to perhaps, or going into the profession that makes a lot of money because then maybe we'll find a partner that will respect us because we have that power, right?

 

There are all sorts of ways that we seek external approval and we go along paths that aren't necessarily in alignment with who we are because we are, from the very beginning, trying to regulate our environment. And I think something natural happens. And we used to call it a midlife crisis, but I think it's just a natural Awakening of the self.

 

You've gone through so much. You've learned so much. You realize how much time you've wasted on trying to fix everything around you. And now that you realize that time is gone. This time I have left is precious. How am I going to spend it? And it starts with figuring out how to regulate yourself so that you're not always Expending all of this energy on your environment because it's such a waste of energy.

 

If you could just say, what do I want? What am I going to do today to move me towards that goal? How will I hold myself accountable? When do I expect a result by? Okay. So if you would do that for yourself and put that much energy into yourself every day, just a fraction of all the energy you've been really expending, trying to control your environment in a year.

 

I promise you're going to look back and think, Oh my, my goodness, I had no idea I had so much control over my destiny, over my personhood. And I am so much closer to the person I want to be. And I have shown myself that I will make it there eventually to the person I dream of, because I have shown myself through actionable steps that I can do this.

 

And I couldn't fix everything around me that was a losing game, but this is a winning game and I'm here to play and I'm not going to give up.

 

That's a wonderful attitude and a way to think about things. So someone is listening to this podcast. We don't know what state of life they're in, They're unhappy. Maybe they're seeming not fulfilled. Whether it be by their career choices, whether it be by their relationship choices, what is the first thing you would tell them? To do if they're in a situation, they want to get out of it.

 

What's the very first step?

 

Listen to yourself, , ask yourself, what do I want to do? And unfortunately, if you're that far away from yourself, right? If you have really gone on that path so far away from yourself and you're feeling lost, the first answer to that question may not be an honest one. And that's okay. I want you to challenge yourself then.

 

Okay. No, but what, Do you want to do, and then there might be an excuse. I want to do this, but, and this is something I call with my coaching, the but wheel. So we can go, but, so I want to change my career. I've never done anything else. And I'm too old to retrain. So this is what it is.

 

Or we could say, I want to change my career. And I'm 47, right? But I've pivoted before I've changed courses before. I know I can do this. I know I want to, so I'm going to do it. So we can change the momentum, because if we have a but, if we're falling back into the past, if we're believing our limiting beliefs, that leads us back on this hamster wheel of life, right?

 

It just keep going and going in this negative trajectory living in the past, not breaking free of our limiting beliefs. But if we shift the trajectory. The momentum and we move forward and we lean into what we're afraid of. We lean into the possibilities, even if we're scared. Or maybe even especially if we're scared, that's when the magic happens.

 

And once you start rolling and you just go step by step, the momentum can just be awe inspiring. And I can say that I'm certainly evidence of that myself. A few years ago, if I could just like tap on her shoulder and say when she was feeling like, gosh, I don't know if I can do this another. Your day.

 

This is so hard. If I could just whisper to her keep going. I'm proud of you. I'm proud of you for making these choices every day to show up for future you. I wish I could do that for her, but I'm just so glad that I don't have to. And that I kept doing it. And I hope that hearing not only my story, but the stories of the incredible people that come on the podcast will help give people that strength to see themselves a bit in these stories, to see.

 

Perseverance to see resilience and to know that they can take those steps for themselves too.

 

Wonderful. Sometimes in my experience, when I'm working with people, friends, family, clients, we know logically, intellectually, what we need to do, but somehow we're not able to come to terms with it emotionally.

 

That could be due to fear. That could be due to certain norms that we just have to fit in like a pretzel, right? How do you reconcile that?

 

Because some of these emotions, especially fears, they might be ingrained in us for years and years, for decades. How do you start on doing that?

 

Yeah, there's that old phrase, and it might be maybe a bit politically incorrect, if you're hysterical, it's historical, right? If something is really triggering for you, It's historical, it's not factual, right?

 

And so when you are a very logical person and you feel that, you're feeling the history, you're feeling the pain, you're feeling the emotion, and it's easy to want to run. But I think just like everything else that I've been discussing about, when you. Are becoming self aware and you're committing to growing.

 

You have to decide when I feel that I'm going to investigate it. I'm not going to get furious. I'm going to get curious about it. And what I call it is my trigger detector, like a metal detector. When you're on the beach and you're going and it's ding ding, ding, do you drop the metal detector and run away?

 

No, you dig in the sand because you're onto something and your emotions are the same. When you feel triggered, when you feel those emotions boil up, you can either run away, which won't get you to the heart of the matter, or you can dig and you can explore and get curious and lean into it. And then when you survive that, you have a data point that says, yeah, I was scared and I did it anyways, and now I can do the next thing anyways, and I can tackle bigger and bigger fears and I can learn to sit with and study my emotions and do something with them. Like they're your trigger detector, right? You are on this adventure with your emotions. They are your nervous system telling you something really important.

 

Important about you and your environment. So it helps you to not be afraid of them, but to basically be in partnership with them and stay curious.

 

So we talked about the but wheel. That's a tangible tool that you offer. You talked about the trigger detector. I love the analogy of freaking on the beach and, it starts beeping, what do you do with it?

 

What's the next tool?

 

That's beautiful.

 

So it's an excellent question. And that's why I start the process with saying you need to reclaim your story. So that doesn't mean that you need to carry your story around like a backpack anymore, which is what you've been doing, right? It's been this heavy thing that you're lugging around and you've got all these explanations.

 

And if someone asks you a question why did you do that? You might try to defend your decisions. And it's just this really arduous. Process of any time you go to face your fears, right? But instead of doing that, you're going to reclaim your fear. You're not gonna defend yourself. You're not going to explain yourself.

 

Trigger detector goes off. I'm afraid of that. And like you said, okay, I've already done some work. I understand that. It goes back to some inner child work I need to do, right? It goes back to my family system. It goes back to these beliefs I developed based on who I felt I needed to be as a child to survive.

 

in my family dynamic at that time. And I've been carrying around those ways of interpersonally connecting with people my whole life. Maybe it worked at home. Maybe it didn't because remember we formed these habits when we didn't have the. frontal lobes that we have now, they weren't fully developed. So we're still using these old habits of trying to relate to people, but we're not connecting.

 

We're disconnecting not only from the people around us, but from ourselves. And that process is a really individualized one on one process, right? And it requires just really curious questions. One after one, paring it down, getting really direct. Really simple and getting out of that habit of over explaining even to yourself or justifying your feelings and just getting down to the heart of the matter and deciding how you want to move forward and deciding, one forgiving yourself.

 

If you do have some habits that aren't serving you and you have been using them, accepting that this is why I got here. I'm claiming this. This is why I behave this way. But now I can reframe it because now I've learned other things. I'm older. I'm wiser. I have this gift of regulation of my nervous system and I can choose differently.

 

I'm allowed to edit my story. My story wasn't written when I was seven.

 

I love that analogy you're using of carrying around that backpack. It's so visual. It reminds me of a conversation I had with somebody on a similar topic and she referred to it as a trauma wallet. It is a wallet that we are carrying with all these credit cards, there are all these traumas that are inserted in it.

 

And sometimes when you're faced with a difficult situation, we just flip open the wallet. And whether it be for others or whether it be for us. And it's so hard to imagine what it is like to be in that person's shoes because sometimes they are not consciously doing it. They have been doing it for such a long time.

 

It's becoming. Unconscious behavior.  My next question,  as you're saying it continue to say it as reclaim your story. Not rewrite your story. Is that purposeful?

 

It is because you can't really rewrite what's happened to you. You can claim it. You can claim every challenge. And this is actually something I made a funny reel about this week because We had something funny happen to us as a family this week. Our car was hit by our sweet city trolley, probably the first time.

 

And we weren't in the car. Fortunately, it wasn't a big deal. We were in another. Business and we ran out and the kids saw the trolley. They've never ridden it before. They were so excited. They run up on the trolley, right? And it takes an hour to ride this trolley. And so I say the driver, do you mind if I go grab their water bottles, they're just in our car. And he says Oh, is that your car? Oh, we've been looking for you. I'm so sorry. I need to talk to you. And so he goes outside with me and my white car is now also red and green because he, just, he was trying to actually avoid an illegally parked car and he hit my car trying to wiggle around them.

 

And then what happened was I've promised my kids a ride on this trolley, right? We're riding the trolley. . Everyone's having a jolly good time.  And it's all, lovely. And only towards the end of this ride, do the kids realize Oh, he. He hit our car.

 

Oh my gosh.

 

And, but it goes back to, could I have been mad about it? I guess I could have, was I avoiding my emotions about it?

 

No, at the end of the day, it's a thing. No one was hurt. Thank goodness. And it's a pretty darn funny story.  And that's a really silly little challenge.

 

Yeah. It's going to be a little bit of a pain, but it's not a big deal. Anything that happens to us, when I am a guest on podcasts and I'm talking about some really challenging things that have happened to me in my life the thing is the natural response for me because of where I've come in my healing on that but wheel is forward momentum.

 

So it's yeah, this thing happened to be, but you know what? If that didn't happen, this other thing wouldn't have happened. I wouldn't have grown in this way. I wouldn't have ended up where I am now. Was it painful? Yes. But we have to go through pain to grow. They're literally called growing pains for a reason and I don't want to stop growing.

 

So I'm going to have to keep going through things.

 

Yeah. Yeah. So I'm still trying to visualize what the rewriting and the reclaiming difference is. I was on this path and this traumatic event happened and my life took this turn. One would say rewriting would be, I want to come back to where that divergence happened and I want to rewrite it.

 

I want to continue. What would reclaiming look like?

 

I think I'm trying to find a better way to state it. So when something really bad happens to you even something as traumatic as an assault happens to you, what often happens is we take on color and burden and narratives that aren't ours to take on.

 

The story becomes, I shouldn't have been walking there at night. I shouldn't have worn that. If only maybe I had been more assertive. Maybe if I hadn't had a drink, right? These are all conversations women have in our heads when something really traumatic happens to us. But reclaiming that story is this happened to me.

 

It was not my fault. I'm going to move forward, protect myself, and I am going to allow myself to experience these emotions. Excuse me, to experience these emotions, but I'm not going to let it. Become my story that I did something wrong. Become my story that my life, that my value is different than I thought it was before this happened to me.

 

Because that is an external force on my life. It's not me.

 

Edit your life. Could you be again, carrying on that narrative of you were assaulted, right? Let's say as a young teenager and you've been carrying around this weight of a low sense of self worth and that I deserve bad things because this bad thing happened to me and I must have deserved that.

 

Again, that's. . That's not your story. Your story is that something bad happened to you and now you're going to reclaim your life because you're not going to let this person take it from you, right? And you get to edit as you move forward. You get to say, you know what? I carried that shame. It wasn't mine to carry.

 

Even if I carried it for 20 years, I now understand it wasn't mine to carry. And I'm going to, again, take it out of that backpack. I'm going to take the lessons with me, but I can leave the pain here. I don't need it anymore. It's not serving me. I don't have to carry it around.

 

That's wonderful. We do a lot of inner work. We try to reclaim our story, put down the guilt that we have been carrying telling that we've been telling ourselves for years and years, this was my fault somehow. And coming to acceptance, like you said,  this happened to me. I didn't choose to be in this situation, but now that it has happened, I have to find a way that I can be who I want to be without carrying that heaviness of the backpack.

 

But you see somebody, you hear some conversation, you watch a scene in a movie that you went to with your kids, and it triggers. How do we control ourselves in that moment? Because at that point, it's not conscious, subconscious behavior. What are some tools that you can share with the audience who might have experienced that?

 

It's your nervous system. And one thing, it's a message, right? And you could even see it as a gift to tell you, sometimes those triggers happen in a little way. And if we choose to ignore them, we're ignoring the gift of the moment, which is saying, hey, We need to work on this and let's work on it when it's a mole hill because the mountain is coming, right?

 

The mountains coming. So this is just a little reminder from the universe that we have some work to do on our regulation and I think a really good place to start one asking really curious questions, not running away from the emotions, but asking yourself honest questions and sticking with it and leaning into it.

 

Another thing you can do that's really helpful if you're just trying to avoid getting into that fight or flight reaction in that moment that's going to leave you feeling dysregulated for 20, 30, 40 minutes is to just come back into your body. And this is something, people who have CPTSD and they have nightmares and they wake up, they can do things like just, okay, I'm breathing.

 

I'm in my bed. My bed is safe. There's no one here. Maybe they had a dream. Someone was standing over them, right? There's no one here. My door is locked. My alarm is on. My house is safe. My neighborhood is safe. My city is safe. And this is zoom out and zoom back in that you can do so you can start in your body, zoom out and then come back.

 

And it's almost like you took this journey to your surroundings and then back to yourself  and you were safe. And so it just brings you back to your body and that amount of time and focus on your body, focus on the fact that you're safe can be enough to bring you back into a regulated state.

 

So that's something certainly people can try when they feel those triggers starting.

 

That's incredible because I know I've talked to a lot of people who experienced that they have had some traumatic event. But in the past and the dreams, although are completely unrelated they are a version of I'm under threat.

 

I am in danger. Something has happened to me. I have to protect myself. I have to protect the people around me is the common theme. So you're saying in situations like that, the best thing to do is just get yourself out of the body. Like you said as far as you can. Watch the safety of the environment you're in, realize that none of those things are true, and then try to come back into the body.

 

Exactly. Come back. And then once you're back in your body, because your body might not feel like a safe place to be in immediately. So focus on the truth of the moment, which is that you are safe. And I think it's really important to understand that when you are someone who has been in unsafe situations, as many of us have.

 

I've been, there is a process when you're healing of trying to weed out the difference between things that trigger you that are truly unsafe, things that you really need to respond to and things that are triggering you that are not unsafe. And when you can work on that and focus on that and really be honest with yourself about, okay.

 

If a car's coming at me, I understand that my heart's going to race and I'm going to run out of the way. All my attention will be on that. My blood flow will go to my brain away from my gut. This is my body's response to get me moving. That's appropriate. If my best friend that broke my heart texts me, I don't have to go into fight or flight.

 

I'm allowed to have emotions about it, but I'm also allowed to accept those emotions and cope with them in a way that lets me stay present in my body in this moment and move forward and not get stuck in. In the history, because again, that's the beauty of self awareness and really coping with and sitting with your emotions is that just because you don't cope with them, they're still in the backpack, right?

 

They're still going to keep waking you up at night with bad dreams. They're going to keep getting triggered. They're not resolved until you truly do that work. So doing this hard work. It's really important to understand this isn't something that you do and then you feel, as you were saying earlier, you think you've done the work and something sneaks up on you and then you feel like you failed.

 

One thing, if you're not failing, you're not trying. So we should all be failing at something every day. And some, small or large magnitude, otherwise we're not growing. It's okay for this to take a long time because that means you're really doing something. worthwhile. So don't be disheartened by failures and setbacks.

 

They're just lessons and you can learn from them. So just keep going and keep pushing yourself.

 

Let's come at this from a different angle. We talked about a traumatic event has happened. Maybe multiple things have happened. It had shaped you to be a different type of person than you truly intended to be years ago when, before that event. And now the processes and the tools and the techniques you're discussing is allowing one, empowering one to be able to reclaim their story.

 

Are these also applicable? How are they different? How are they the same for someone who is young? Maybe a mother or a father listening to this who has a teenager. And they don't want some of them to have to go through a traumatic experience to come to the realization in life that I need to reclaim my story.

 

What was the moving forward process looks like without having to undo the trauma or without having to get to a point where it's so bad that it's that challenging?

 

What do we have control over, right? Ourselves. That's all. And that's something that, clients who have teenagers again, often when they're not to the point of healing yet, they are trying to save their kids.

 

They are trying to fix their children's lives, to help them avoid pain. And those are all so honorable and so wonderful for our kids. That's not within their control. The thing that's within their control is them leading their life in such a way that they are modeling. Self regulation for their children that they are modeling self respect and self awareness.

 

If you are in an abusive marriage and your children are seeing that, and you want them to marry a really wonderful, caring, loving person. Are you setting them up on that path, or are you showing them something different and expecting them to somehow develop a skill that they haven't learned?

 

Do what I say, not as I do. They do what we do. So I think when you are trying to benefit your children, your wisdom, It's just in how you show up every single day and I can tell you, I see that in my children. My oldest daughter is an author and she's a podcaster and she's a philanthropist. She's doing so many incredible things and in part it's because she sees me doing it and she says, Oh, that's interesting.

 

Can I do that too? And we say, sure. Yeah. Yeah. We can do that. How does that look to you? How would you like to accomplish that? What are our goals? And I use those as opportunity for her to see the power of her choices, the power of her voice. And the intriguing thing for me is when she goes and does her interviews on podcasts and on, television to promote her work, that is what she always returns to when she's asked about why she does what she does, it's because she wants to encourage other young people to understand how powerful they are and how strong their voices are and that they can choose how they want to show up in the world and how writing her books and doing her philanthropic work has been revolutionary for her for just coming of age and recognizing her agency and her power and hearing her have those conversations with adults.

 

And these interviews that are, they're not expecting that answer. It just, it makes me so proud and was, is really affirming for me that the choices I made to choose taking back my autonomy and to choose making my own path and staying true to myself was the right decision, not only for me, but for my family.

 

Yeah. And that's the wonderful thing. Yeah. And exactly. It's by reclaiming your story helped your family incredibly. And perhaps they wouldn't be this version of themselves if you hadn't. And there's so many parents out there. So many of us who look at our lives, obviously we think the worst of ourselves and we want our children to be the best version of us.

 

We do not have the anxiety or the stress or, all these mistakes that we have made or all the ugly bits that we think exists within us. And we're trying to protect them. We're trying to guide them. But like you said, children look at us, learn from us the way we are instead of just hearing the words.

 

Yeah. Because it's modeling. I love it.

 

Yeah. And they need to see us mess up and they need to see us say, wow, I was really frustrated. I acted out of my alignment with my values, right? I acted in a way that I'm not proud of. Can I try that again? Because then they understand they're allowed to make mistakes because when you don't feel like you're allowed to make mistakes.

 

Then comes in shame, then comes in a life of, again, focusing on approval externally instead of focusing on staying true to yourself. So I think, again, that's how we help try to skip some of the really big issues when we empower young people to understand their agency and to understand that it is truly their life.

 

And they have to choose how to live it. And I think that they will, because they respect themselves and their time and this one life they have, they will make better choices because they're not trying to impress anyone else but themselves. They want to make sure that at the end of their life, the end of this year, at the end of the day that they can go to sleep and know I showed up for myself today because they've learned that their job isn't to impress anybody else.

 

You said you have the first book published and now you're working on the second book. Let's talk about your books. What was the area of focus on the first one and what's different in the second one?

 

Yeah. So my first book is actually a children's book and I'm waiting actually on the illustrations to be completed.

 

And that's the boy and his brightly colored blocks. And that's a story about a little boy who's neurodivergent and he's going about his day and he is experiencing all of the really big frustrations that a little, three, four year old boy will experience when he, has to eat food he doesn't like or maybe mom didn't take the crust off or she put it in the wrong location or it's in the wrong cup.

 

Or I got dirty now I have to take a shower. I don't like showers. I don't like being wet, that sort of thing. And he's having all of these dysregulated moments throughout the day. And the mom is showing up in a very calm, peaceful way, trying to lend her state rather than joining him in chaos.

 

She is just, Giving him the space to one, be himself. He's not being scolded for being upset, but he also has a different tone that he can choose to lean in into if he so chooses. And what happens towards the end of the day is the worst thing possible happens. And that's his brightly colored blocks topple over, which is about, the worst thing in his little world.

 

But because all day long he's seen over and over that when something bad happens, he can focus on just fixing it and moving forward. That's what he chooses to do in that moment. And not only is the mom just so excited that he looks at her and says, it's okay, mom. I can just do it better next time.

 

Not only is he gifted that regulation, but the mom knows, okay, not to listen to all those external voices telling her, Oh, you need to discipline them differently. You need to send them to their room, even though they're not in a neurodevelopmental way for that to be appropriate, right?

 

They're not old enough. They don't understand. So she learns also, okay, I'm on the right path. I'll keep going and I'll keep. providing this safe, loving space for my child.

 

What's the inspiration behind the story?

 

I have a son who is very reactive to things that he doesn't expect or he doesn't like.

 

And certainly I had to do a lot of inner child parenting and a lot of listening to my own triggers to learn how to cope with his really big responses to things. And I was really inspired by seeing his development through providing that to him to write this book, because we often don't have anyone in our world that's saying, Keep going, that's not offering unsolicited advice about a situation.

 

They don't really understand because they don't understand your child like you do. And I think it's just important to say, okay, mom, best you're doing your best. Keep going. And that was really my goal with the book.

 

What's the next book about?

 

So the next book is going to be a totally different story.

 

Tracked. So this is, we don't tell our stories and it is related to my online community. My website, www dot, we don't tell our stories and my Facebook group and tick talk to that nature. And it's about just sharing those stories that have been hidden in darkness, bringing them into the light and trying to encourage victims of Enter, excuse me, victims of domestic abuse and violence, that there is no safety in silence, that we have to use our voices.

 

We have to do it safely, but we have to use our voices.

 

Yes, we will absolutely put all of these links in the bio so anybody can join your Facebook group and follow you on TikTok and go to your website and perhaps talk to you if you offer those options. I know there's people who are looking for this type of help.

 

Many of us suffer in silence. It's a live a life of quite desperation. Where we don't really know what to say or what to do. And sometimes keeping your lips tightly bit is the only thing we can do. So I think you're doing a wonderful thing with sharing these resources, because those who are listening to it can definitely avail of them.

 

You're a mom, you're an author. You are changing lives actively of women around the world who are suffering some heavy stuff, how do you maintain that level of performance every single day?

 

Yeah. It's leaning into your purpose for me it's not really, it doesn't feel that way.

 

Yeah. Yeah. And when I think about things, because my husband and I will talk about this, what would we want to do if we had some time off, which we were always working when we're together, we have a publishing house together. So we're always doing some endeavor. I don't want to take a day off.

 

I love what I'm doing. It just doesn't appeal to me. I want to take time with my children and we do that when we're together. We are fully together and fully present and we really lean into the things they want to do. And I think the fact that I can do that with my children is probably also why I'm so energized to do the work I do because I take such.

 

incredible energy from being fully present with them when we are together, when we have those moments. And then I'm showing up full in my power and in my purpose during the time that I choose to work. And it just inspires me and keeps me going.

 

Love it. In today's world, when there are a lot of entrepreneurs, there are a lot of people even with jobs working from home, finding that time to be able to really focus on your purpose, to be able to do the work can be hard.

 

When there are kids around, we need you. So how do you tactically go about that? I love the idea of. Having that focused time with them where you are really present with them. Sometimes kids don't understand that, you're working and they're knocking on the door or, they want a hug, and all the needs and wants.

 

Exactly. How do you balance that? How do you keep it in a way so that you can be with them, but also maintain the balance of following your purpose? Yes.

 

Yeah. They do a really good job of understanding when I'm working and, when my partner and I'm my partner, we call it a transcontinental life.

 

We actually live on different continents and so we travel a lot to be together. So when we are together he is super helpful with the kids. We do so many things together as a family, which is just, it's just, It's naturally developed over time and when I think about what do we want to do in our free time, right?

 

We want to play outside we want to go to the library and then my daughter's an author so while we're at the library we're visiting her books and we're talking about getting the next one in there and it's just, I think she and I are quite similar in that way. She's just always wanting to do the next thing.

 

She's wanting to write the next book right now. She's working with the humane society, writing her fourth book and creating a fundraiser for them and creating a fundraiser to create a wildlife preserve. So we just take all the things that we love and we make them into family projects. So even if we're working it's more fun.

 

So we do that. And the thing that my son who's younger, he just loves being. Along for the ride. He loves being there. If she's in a play, he loves being there. If mommy's working on a podcast, he wants to, learn the theme song to it. So we just make everything a bit of a family endeavor and we really enjoy that.

 

Wonderful. Anything else you would like to add?

 

No I so much for the opportunity to speak with you today and thank you for letting me talk about my kids too and about my daughter's efforts because, I think as parents often we want to plug them and talk about them way more than we want to talk about ourselves.

 

Yeah. And, this is real life, a lot of us are out there, when I was young or I know I have clients or I speak to a lot of people and you think, I could have been something, but now I'm a dad, I'm a mom and I'm a parent and entrepreneurship or believing in a cause and doing a cause are for the youngins with no kids and no responsibilities.

 

But by talking about our children on a platform like this, we empower them in a different way. This is real life. Real life is following your purpose, but maintain the balance with your family. It's about being drowning into work and really being passionate about it, but then not forgetting that your children exist.

 

It's about having the good times, the fun times, but also the serious times. Anytime I have an opportunity to talk to somebody about the balance, I think I take it because it is, there's a lot of power in it and it empowers people and it gives them hope and makes them realize that. It doesn't matter how old we are, there is a way to do the things that we have always wanted to do.