October 15, 2018
Richard Trevino II is a consultant, a speaker, and a writer with expertise in the area of productivity and leadership. His leadership mastery covers the topics of company culture, conflict resolution and communication, all important aspects of leadership. Richard started the company, Elevation Consulting Firm to help companies grow their people and increase their bottom line. His writings have appeared in Entrepreneur, Addicted 2 Success, AskMen and Thrive Global.
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Most Influential Person
Effect on Emotions
- I think it's everything, because when you're conscious, where you're at, you're mindful of what's going on. You understand? Like I said a while ago, you understand that everything can be gone tomorrow. Your life can be gone. Life is very fragile. My wife almost died almost five years ago. We lost our baby. She was pregnant four months. We lived in the hospital for three months. It was touch and go. We almost lost her. She had massive blood transfusions.
- Life is very fragile. So for me, I think being mindful of where you are and understanding that life is a gift and it's here one moment and it's gone the next. I think that's everything.
- For me it's freedom because it allows me this opportunity to say I'm going to be me, I'm gonna feel free to express myself and show you who I am and where I'm at right now because I may not ever get another opportunity.
Thoughts on Breathing
- Well, that's funny because I have a new APP on my phone. I have an apple watch and my wife got this for me for father's Day. And so there's actually an app on there that literally twice a day stops me and it's a, it's a breathing exercise. I thought it was silly at first. Like I'm not even joking. I thought it was silly at first, but as I've done it, Bruce, I'm telling you right now, man, there's something to that. It literally forces you to stop and go through the breathing activity and when you do that, I'm like, Oh my God, I'm so much more calm.
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Bullying Story
- Towards the latter part of my career at this one company, and I won't mention the name right because it's just not my style. But I was literally doing the best I had ever done.
- My team was actually the number one team in our district and one of the best teams in the region. We were doing amazing work. I was one of the highest paid employees. I was making more money than my manager was. I was one of the highest paid employees. My staff was some of the highest paid agents in the region. we were doing phenomenal.
- Around us, in our district the teams were falling apart. It was just utter chaos. And I would try to bring people in like some of the agents that needed help and try to put them under our team's wings and help them to make sure that we gave them a fighting chance.
- However, there was an upper manager, a regional vice president that just had just the ugliest heart and just wanted to just make mean changes and try to, you know, flex her muscle on people and you know, I just stuck to myself and I literally put our team in the corner and I faced everybody to me and I was in the corner and I said, you keep your eyes this way. We focus here. Keep your eyes on me. Do not put your eyes on any of the negativity. Just look here, I'm going to help you. We're going to make it through this and we're going to flourish in the middle of it all.
- Well, during that time that regional vice president began to bully. That's what really, what was going on. Some people think, oh, that's a management style.
- That's not a management style, that's bullying people. Harassing people is really what it came down to. She was bullying; flexing her authority on people and didn't need to do that. And then, especially people that were actually mild mannered people, pretty reserved people that would go with the flow with anythingthing.
- She made it a point to just flex her muscle and to make an example out of them to everybody else. And there was never a need to do that. In the end, I ended up leaving the company.
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October 11, 2018
SustainableThree founder Liz Rutledge is deeply passionate about the environment. Liz has been practicing mindfulness in one form or another since she was ten years old and now teaches mindfulness at Denver area schools. She’s also in the process of earning her Mindful School certification. Liz also teaches how to compost, garden, recycle and participate in other sustainability activities. She is a blogger and has written the blog on sustainablethree.com since 2014. In addition, Liz is a freelance writer and dabbles in novels, editorials, and other blogs. She loves to garden and travel as well as being a wife and mother to three children. She is passionate about focusing on the three areas; your self, your community and your planet.
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Most Influential Person
- My Yoga teacher, Tina Porter
Effect on Emotions
- I am maybe able to be aware in a moment of how I'm feeling and course correct if needed.
Thoughts on Breathing
- Breathing is critical to my mindfulness practice. I literally have a sticker on the back of my car that says breathe, because I think that is literally where it all is, is in the breath.
Suggested Resources
- Book: Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation In Everyday Life by Jon Kabat-Zinn
- App: Headspace / Insight Timer
Bullying Story
- I have had moments of being bullied when I was a teen. I had horrible acne and was called pizza face and that was not fun. But I actually have a very recent example that might be relevant to your listeners.
- I recently made a post on social media thinking that I was being helpful and I was actually bullied quite badly in the comments section after making what I thought was a very positive comment and I just sort of sat with it all day and, and instead of just reacting to the negative reactions that I received from my post or deleting my original comment, I just let it be and I kinda thought through it and I talked to some friends and in the end one of the people that was in that communication thread asked me privately, this is on facebook. if we could talk.
- And I told her, you know, I'm happy to speak on the phone, but this texting back and forth thing is really not the way I'm feeling heard. I feel like I was completely misunderstood and she said I totally get it. So we had a phone conversation last night actually, and it was not easy to have the conversation because she had to tell me some things that were hard to hear, but I was so glad I did because it opened up a dialogue where maybe if I had just deleted my comments and said, oh my gosh, these people are so hateful, I'm out, that never would have happened.
- So there's a space that's been created for healing and she's friended me on facebook and she's actually going to send me a book to help me kind of understand. It was about race; a very, very misunderstood topic, I think. And she coached me on how to kind of post a mindfully thought response and I posted it and then went to bed.
- But it's incredible to me that even as a 47 year old woman, I'm having to deal with bullying even with all the work I do to try to be a good influence in the world and try to be a positive influence in the world.
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October 8, 2018
Dr. John Hagelin is a Harvard-trained quantum physicist, life-long educator and inventor and leading researcher on higher states of consciousness. He is the recipient of the prestigious Kilby award in physics, and is renowned for developing a highly successful grand unified field theory based on the Superstring. He is currently President, Maharishi University of Management and the Director of Maharishi University of Management’s Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy. A physicist by training, Hagelin was a researcher at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in the early 1980s. Hagelin stood as a candidate for President of the United States for the Natural Law Party. H Dr. Hagelin has been published extensively in the area of supersymmetric unified quantum field. He has appeared many times on news shows such as ABC’s Nightline, NBC’s Meet the Press and in major metropolitan newspapers including the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. He is International Director of the Global Union of Scientists for Peace.
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Most Influential Person
Effect on Emotions
- Emotions are generally more joyful. A lot of the negative emotions of anxiety and depression are stress driven, so if you have a powerful stress buster, and meditation generally is meant to be a stressful.
- Remember, mindfulness based stress reduction is meant to be a stress buster. The very, very deep rest that comes with tm is an even more powerful stress buster. That completely changes the complexion of one's emotions.
- So also because meditation takes your awareness deep to very fine, fine levels of feeling one's emotions, tend to get more deeply appreciated. They become richer. You start to feel more like a fine artist who has a very deep kind of feeling for things.
- I didn't have that kind of refinement growing up. So that's a nice side effect of meditation.
Thoughts on Breathing
- That's very interesting. In the TM technique, you don't really worry about your breath. You just follow the mind as it flows into this state of deep silence and inner unboundedness and your breath goes with it in the sense that as the mind gets deeply rested and settled, the breath gets deeply rested and settled.
- In the meditative state, the deepest points of meditation, I'd swear I wasn't breathing. Now, if you really pay attention to it, you'll notice that there is a puff of breath coming up the nose and a just a puff of breath coming out, but it doesn't even really get past your head and you're living on that. The requirement for oxygen goes way down.
- When the body is deeply rested and the cells inside the body aren't burning as much oxygen, aren't burning as much fuel. So a very deep state of rest will soften the breath and my breath is soft even an activity as a consequence of that regular practice.
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Bullying Story
- I don't think I've been myself participating in bullying activity. I tend to always stand up for the underdog, whoever might be getting bullied to within the limits of my own strength and of course as a younger person, I was as vulnerable as anybody and I didn't have as much strength as I would've wanted to stand up more forcefully for people who were being misused.
- But as a physicist who is willing to talk about consciousness and is dedicated to researching consciousness, that makes me a little bit of an outlier in the physics community because physical scientists don't talk about consciousness.
- It's like, real men don't do ballet because for a physicist, we study the physical world, we're meat and potatoes people. If we can see it, we can touch it, we can taste it, it's real. This consciousness stuff, what is that, the tooth fairy, Santa Claus?
- It's a crazy point of view because physicists have consciousness. They should recognize that they are conscious and since consciousness doesn't exist within their physical equations, they tend to dismiss it as something that's not real.
- Actually, if they take their study of physics more deeply, they will discover that consciousness does fit into their physical equations.
- That is the very source of physics and every discipline for that matter, but be that as it may, having been a bit of an outlier, willing to talk about conscience, that there are plenty of physicists who have dismissed me.
- In fact, when I went from Stanford University Faculty to Maharishi University Faculty in 1983, people wrote me off. They thought that was kind of obviously going to be the end of me. It wasn't. I mean that was really the start of my fruitful research in physics and I had developed a doctoral program and got a national science foundation grant to do research in unified field theory.
- So my physics was fine, but even then, even though my physics was demonstrably better than it had been. I still, I think I probably was considered to be odd because I was into consciousness, into meditation and so forth.
- So definitely you can tell when you're at a social event or conference involving other physicists, you know, physicists can take an attitude towards you and they certainly did to me. I certainly felt that at times patronizing and so forth.
- So if you took that stuff seriously and it was certainly tempting for me at times, you know, to react to it, you know, to, to push back in a way that might not be productive, you know, get into an argument or toss an insult back to the other person.
- But, by about that time in my life, you know, I had been meditating for quite some years and I didn't find myself overthrown by it. I found the whole thing actually a little humorous. I was able to just smile quietly as all this was going on because it was going on. I know it was going on.
- I wasn't always invited to give the keynote speeches at conferences. Even if I did the keynote research behind it, you know, just a little bit of a second class treatment. It was as though I were an African American in the deep South 40 years ago. You just don't get the same treatment.
- I mean, you know, it just wasn't the nature of the culture at the time. And I felt a little bit like that. Anyway, yes, being grounded in yourself is really so key.
- It's really important to be in the driver's seat in the sense that you're not reactive because if you're reactive, if you're defensive, it's hard to know what you're going to say, but it's probably not going to serve you. Right? So being grounded in yourself, your big self, your inner silence, unshakably so.
- And that's something that's developed over years and years. That's a great antidote to overreacting and from ever getting thrown off of your feet.
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October 4, 2018
Dr. Rubye Bray is president of Wu Li Turtle, and WuLiTurtle.com is where she is a certified executive coach, Georgetown trained, and is an expert in the topic of leadership and organizational performance. She created the business breakthrough program where she works with high level professionals from around the world to boost their leadership skills and business performance. Dr Bray was a university doctoral professor for 16 years. She recently retired as a lieutenant colonel with more than 21 years of service and a vice president for a technology firm. She's chaired more than 80 dissertations and in so doing, she has supported leaders in many institutional types, finance, government education, entertainment, health, labor, law, manufacturing, and defense, in locations around the world.
Contact Info
- Phone: 703_864_3769
- Email: rbraye@wuliturtle.com
Most Influential Person
Effect on Emotions
- Mindfulness has made it possible for me to respond instead of react.
- Instead of carrying anger all the time so that when something is said that's harmful and hurtful, I am ready to retaliate with the same type of expression, I now realize that love is the answer.
- So for everything that happens, it's like, go inside and find what would love do.
- What would love say? What would love think? How would love behave? That's how mindfulness and slowing down is really blessed and helped me.
Thoughts on Breathing
- Breathing, for me, represents the source of life.
- When breath ends, we've transitioned to a new place, and so I treasure breath like I treasure love. There is such gratitude and acceptance and, I can't say enough, for the breath.
- With each breath, I am given an opportunity, a possibility to be my best self, to think my best thoughts, to say the best words. That's the importance of breathing for me.
- Without breath, I am not. With breath, I am.
Suggested Resources
Bullying Story
- When I integrated Cloverdale, [a middle school in Montgomery, Alabama] I was bullied in ways that were just horrific.
- It is not enough to be told. I won't use the terms and the phrases. I don't want to put them in the universe again.
- Things that were believed about black people, things the children and their parents said to black people and things that were done to black people.
- My mother, embracing nonviolence, simply said, "If you get in a fight and come home and I am made aware, you will have another fight with me." She was so committed to nonviolence, but that didn't mean that I had to be passive, that I couldn't stand up and confront evil, but that I was not to retaliate with violence.
- And so I found myself whispering prayers, both for me and those that I interacted with, the other children and their parents, the teachers at the school, and the administrators at the school, "Help us all. Help us all."
- I can remember sitting in church listening to Dr King addressing the importance of nonviolence and not retaliating with violence. That would be like putting gasoline on a fire. You don't fight fire with fire.
- And it was just a gift. And even now as an adult, there are times when I just project love and light out into the universe, knowing that, like the symbol for the ying and the yang, there will always be light, there will always be darkness. The brightest light helps to balance the darkest darkness.
- It's like, let me carry this bright light. And in so doing, I don't do it just for me, but to help model the way for others.
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October 1, 2018
Deepak Shukla is a marathon runner, Muay Thai fighter, SEO agency owner and nominee for Young Entrepreneur of the year. He has run in over 25 marathons and was also a 3X Ironman. When he's not working, you'll find Deepak getting tattoos, hanging out with his cat Jenny or eating Calzone!
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Most Influential Person
Effect on Emotions
- I'm more aware of them [my emotions], almost like I can see them before they're coming or I can sense the triggers and become mindful of what's happening and what my trigger points are. This has allowed me to manage my negative emotions and process them a lot more effectively than I used to. It's been absolutely huge for me.
Thoughts on Breathing
- Breathing helps calm me. It really helps calm me. It's that resetting and emotional trigger. I got a lot of practice doing [this breathing with] some of these ultras [I've done].
- You really have to reset your breathing when you look down and you see you've got a really technical route to run and it's 1:00 AM in the morning, the wind's blowing and you're scared as well.
- Not only are you breathing hard because you're tired because you're 14 hours into a run. You're also scared because it just looks really dangerous and there's that trigger that is activated through [breathing].
- Not only does it allow me to regulate my body functions, if you will, my cardiovascular system. It also allows me to center myself and to regain my composure.
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Bullying Story
- I was bullied. I was 11 years old. In the UK education system, you go into secondary school at age 11. So at that time, it's kind of a whole new playground. The area in which we grew up is a place called is a place called West Drayton, which is a suburb in west of London. It's a white working class community and I was one of very few British Indian kids that were in that school.
- This school had a registration system had to be overhauled because the amount of bullying that existed. With any kind of registration you would typically be put with people in your same class or at your same level. For example, you wouldn't put a commanding officer and a new recruit in the same class. My school was different in that they'd put the 11 year olds with the 16 year olds all the way through the registration.
- And in that registration, there were four brothers, ages 11, 12, 14 and 16. And really it just happened that, they took a liking to me. But, you know, it just evolved into really horrible kind of tense registration experiences because I was an easy target. I was there kind of by myself. They would do the play fighting, but really actually they punched you quite hard and then if you try and fight back a little bit, then one of the other brothers would kind of push you.
- I eventually moved school. I moved off after two and a half years. So by the time I was 13 and a half or 14, I think I always recall that as I just told you, I would once or twice try to kind of fight back if you will. And I did again when I was about 13 and a half and one of the brothers kind of just struck me in the face. I remember falling over. It was at lunchtime and I was walking away and trying to just do my best to hold back from, from crying.
- I also bullied as well in parallel. It was weird. I saw other people, when I look back on it in hindsight.
- It's difficult for me to talk about because I'm kind of ashamed of it, but I mean it's the reality of what happened.
- There was another guy, a kid, a Hungarian migrant, I think. Solveeka was his first name, I think. And, you know, he was from a migrant family just as I was, but he was the first generation migrant. I was in second generation, of course I'm born and raised here in London.
- I just always remember that kind of a taunting him and making references to silly comments about, you know, the kid's mom and people would laugh and that would make me feel better. And then I just remember being pulled out of class once and being told that, Solveeka came to us crying.
- That was a huge learning experience for me for all of that to be happening at the same time. It was really quite odd. So, emotionally, things were very messy at that time.
September 27, 2018
Eva Vennari is founder of The Elevate institute and she's on a mission to dismantle the status quo of the sickness industry. Eva spent most of her adult life suffering from all kinds of conditions and fighting for her sanity. She decided to take matters into our own hands. That's when everything shifted and her body went from being the enemy to being her best and most devoted ally and partner. Eva now teaches worldwide how sensitive people can take charge of their wellbeing and thrive in their lives.
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Most Influential Person
Effect on Emotions
- I'm more in touch with them [my emotions], and less afraid of them and I love that our emotions are governed by our thoughts and I can back out of anything and not be fearful of my own emotions.
Thoughts on Breathing
- Breathing is a big one because if I'm not conscious of my breathing and I notice they're shallow breath's going on, that automatically triggers that sympathetic dominance and I think my body goes into this panic mode so I can remember to breathe.
Suggested Resources
- Book: Secrets of the Lost Mode of Prayer: The Hidden Power of Beauty, Blessing, Wisdom, and Hurt by Gregg Braden
- App: Water Your Body (This App will remind you to drink water)
Bullying Story
- I was married for four years. It's been a long time, but I married somebody who would be considered a bully. It wasn't physical, it was that emotional and mental abuse that I simply didn't have the tools in my mindfulness box to understand how to deal with.
- I just figured I'm a nice person and everybody should be nice to me. And this person, you know, he decided he was going to take advantage and I wished that I had been more present of mind to that lack of coherence between the brain and the heart because I knew walking down the aisle that I probably shouldn't be doing this.
- And I did it anyways because the invitations were out. People were sitting there and I was like, oh my God, how embarrassing is this going to be? I was 20. I was young. I didn't have the experience that I do now.
- I would not put up with things that I put up with in order to go through with that.
- So in hindsight, you know, if we don't learn from our mistakes, I don't know what good they are. So make them young, I guess.
- That would've been great to be able to manage that situation better, to be more mindful.
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September 24, 2018
Steve Sims is the man that makes things happen and I mean just about anything you can imagine, like appearing on stage with your favorite rock band, getting married at the Vatican, or having lunch with Richard Branson. Steve works with celebrities, professional athletes, and other dreamers who want to live life to the fullest and make the unimaginable real. Steve does all this, but at the same time is grounded. He believes in meditation and uses his own style of meditation to get it done. Steve is the author of the best selling book, Bluefishing: The Art of Making Things Happen.
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Most Influential Person
- Walt Disney and Dr. Suess. Also Jayson Gaignard, Joe Polish, Jay Abraham, Dean Jackson. There are so many.
Effect on Emotions
- Breathing and mindfulness are one and the same. How I think of things tells me how I feel about them.
Thoughts on Breathing
- People don't realize the importance of breath.
- You know, you'll go to a car and you'll stand there and try and work out what's the best gas to put in the machine, but you won't pay attention to you recharging and paying attention to your breath.
- Take the time to breathe.
Suggested Resources
- Book: Bluefishing: The Art of Making Things Happen by Steve Sims
- App: It shuts your phone off. I don't know the name of it, it allows you to surf the Internet but the phone will only connect to the internet for like a three hour period and you get yourself into a habit of that. You start focusing on making the most value out of your time, so it's one that shuts your phone off. Tim Ferriss told me about it.
Bullying Story
- I would openly say I wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed is a young lad. I noticed very, very early on that fear was the issue. If we don't have fear of something then we achieve way, way more. But we're held back by how much we actually fear.
- And I remember as a kid being a very big lad. I don't know if it was the Irish genes or whatever, but I've always been a big, big boy. Um, and I remember at school, all the young lads wanting to earn their stripes, would pick on the big lad. You know, I got picked on a lot, so I got picked on way more than the smaller kids.
- So if you want to know about bullying, I, I believe for a long period I was the one getting bullied. I remember this lad coming up to me, that was a bit bigger, not as big as me, but still big enough to cause me to be a bit concerned.
- And he came up to me in the school class, and he was trying to earn his stripes around his mates so we have two or three of his mates around him and I remember this vividly, walks up to me in a class and he's like, me and you, school end. I'm going to have you, you know, and it was a typical kind of like, you know, 13 year old hard talk that sounds pathetic now.
- And in a split second, all I could think about was, oh my God, after school, I'm going to get beaten up. And then I thought, I don't want to spend the whole afternoon worried about getting beaten up. So I stood up and punched him in the head and I got suspended. But I wasn't fighting.
- And then I came back to school and it was funny. I came back to school and he didn't pick on me, but other people still did. I remember this feeling of being bullied and then I never used to respond.
- People used to push me around and I didn't want to fight.
- And then I remember seeing some other people being bullied and I remember stepping in. And the only fights I ever got in was when I saw other people being bullied, I hate people being bullied. I hate people being intimidated and the trouble is nowadays and I don't want to get psychological, but we bully and intimidate ourselves.
- We already have talked about how we dilute our own dreams. That's a bully on your shoulder. Get rid of that bastard. He's not worth being there.
- But it was funny because when when was on the train, and it was funny you brought this question up by the way. No one's ever asked me that. So. Well done.
- When I was on a train, going to a building site, this boy started talking to me. We were both young lads. I had no idea who he was. I'm dressed up to go on a building site with my tools and my bag lunch. Okay.
- He's got a sharp suit on and a newspaper. He looked like one of the guys out on Wall Street.
- And I was so envious that he was going to be in an office, dry, and with girls, and all this kind of stuff and I'm going to be on a building site with a bunch of old patty's.
- He started talking to me as though he knew me. And I'm like, hello. You know? Yeah, you okay? He was a kid that I protected from getting beaten up at school and he recognized me on the train and he was the one that told me about the job that I went and applied for that got me to Hong Kong and that started this whole journey.
- I often wondered, if I had looked away from that kid getting pushed around, where would I be now? it put me where I am today.
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September 20, 2018
Akshay Nanavati is an entrepreneur, a high performance athlete, and a global thought leader. He overcame drug addiction, alcoholism and a bout of depression so intense that it sent him to the brink of suicide. In a fleeting moment, Akshay made a life changing decision to flip his life upside down. He has since built a global business, run ultramarathons, climbed mountains in the Himalayas, skied 350 miles across the world’s second largest icecap and fought as a U.S. marine in Iraq. He also wrote the book on FEAR - a book he entitled Fearvana which was so inspiring that the Dalai Lama himself, wrote the introduction. Akshay is now on a mission to run across every country in the world to raise awareness of his concept of Fearvana. He is scheduled to run an 11 day marathon across Liberia this October.
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Most Influential Person
Effect on Emotions
- Oh, mindfulness has been a game changer. It's allowed me to be with my emotions and transcend them.
- One quick story is in relationship to survivor's guilt. I struggled with survivor's guilt when I came back from the war. I lost a friend. I let that guilt consume me in many dark ways through alcohol and all these kinds of things that drove me to some dark places.
- I felt I didn't deserve to be here; I didn't deserve to be alive. But now my guilt is an ally. I still feel it. I have a picture of my friend that says on the wall and it says, this should have been you. You earned this life.
- So mindfulness has allowed me to be with that guilt and be okay with it and channel it to something useful.
Thoughts on Breathing
- I'm starting to get much more proactive, you know, through yoga and through my running because I'm really working on it a lot more.
- I also recently learned from my friend about the Wim Hof breathing method, Wim Hof, The Iceman. So it's starting to get much more proactive.
- Before that it was just really through deep breath and meditation, but it's definitely something I'm working on now. Enhancing to take my running and my life to the next level.
- My nutritionist friend Anthony, he had studied with Wim Hof, so he taught me a little bit about the Wim Hof breathing method and I mean on my second try, I held my breath for I think two to two and a half minutes. I'm not somebody who could do that. Like for some people it might be nothing, but for me I was never able to do that. Like that was not good at that.
- But just through this technique, I was blown away by how long I was able to hold my breath on my second try of doing it.
Suggested Resources
Bullying Story
- This story is kind of awful. I'm not proud of it. But there was this one kid in Singapore, he was this little Indian kid and I used to kind of tease him a lot on the playing field. It was nothing serious, you know.
- But one day it got pretty serious. We were in the class and I essentially was the leader of this outfit where I got every kid in class; boys and girls, even the girls to get up and essentially punch this kid.
- The poor kid was obviously helpless, I mean, this is the entire class. He left the class crying. I still pretty vividly remember it.
- The whole class got in trouble, but they knew that I was the leader of this little band of bullies. I was suspended from school for a few days.
- Needless to say, my mom wasn't too proud of me. I wasn't too proud of it as well, but that was the one that stands out because that one was pretty awful to subject a kid to.
- So I actually apologized to this guy years later on facebook. I remember him saying something along the lines of, I've learned to let that go and I'm in a good place, but you should let that go as well.
- So it was very sweet of him to say that. It didn't leave long lasting scars, thankfully. And he said you should let go as well. So I was like, thanks for saying that man. I'm glad you're well.
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September 17, 2018
Katie Krimitsos is a mom, wife, adventurer, podcaster, business strategist, seeker and change maker. She's committed to brightening the light of women around the world - through her Biz Women Rock community, which supports Women Entrepreneurs - and now through her new podcast,Meditation for Women, guided meditations that are specifically created with the special journey of women in mind.
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Effect on Emotions
- Mindfulness has clarified my emotions and slowed them down. It has detached the emotions from who I am and what my actions are going to be and it's really slowed down that process. My actions and who I show up to be is a lot more intentional.
Thoughts on Breathing
- Oh breathing is huge. I think it's probably the core of my mindfulness practice. It's the core of everything for me. So there are times where the very first thing that I'll do is just stop, close my eyes, take three deep breaths. And even just that allows me to find that pause and get centered. It's huge.
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Bullying Story
- Actually have a reverse kind of a story which I think is really interesting. I am the mom to a two and a half year old, very strong willed, very opinionated, very chock full of personality, little girl.
- So [she's] two and a half and she goes to school a couple days a week and there have been a couple instances where she's hitting and she's like, you know, kind of like somebody takes her toy and she hits or you know, she didn't want somebody to touch her so she hits, right.
- And I have found that this is a very uncomfortable but necessary for my husband and I. We have already had this conversation of like, dude, she's one of those kids who's going to go after what she wants.
- She's the one who walks in the room with a class full of kids who are like a year older than her and she will take over the room, which is a great skill. But we both realize we really have to make sure that we're watching this so it doesn't turn into bullying. We [believe we] can really massage it into all the great skills that are a [strong leader].
- So that was the most recent experience that I've had with really recognizing it and needing to teach her those lessons of when it's okay to be physical with somebody. I mean, I don't want my kid to get beaten up either.
- I don't want people to just take from her and that can be okay. So I want her to learn how to stand for herself and when it is not okay. So that's the most in my face bullying thing that I'm super aware of right now as a mother, oh my goodness. And it's, it's scary because I'm in charge of that.
- And so for mindfulness, obviously mindfulness for me and Chris as parents and being aware of that and needing to deal with that in the moment and actively trying to teach her what to do when you get angry and how can you breathe? And we do that.
- [We tell her] hey, when you're mad, you know, stomp your feet and take a deep breath. And sometimes if she's really mad she'll be like, no, I don't want to. But you know she's learning that.
- So she's learning to take a deep breath, do the pause, so that you can see what's going on versus what the emotions are driving you to.
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