Ending up in the hospital after experiencing chronic pain caused Lee Smart to rethink what was important in his life. Jenn talks with Lee about how meeting his wife Tonya and walking away from a lucrative business and from a focus on achievement to focusing on helping himself and others heal put him on a path from surviving to thriving.
Guest Bio: Read more about Lee here
Guest Location: Louisiana, US
Resources from Lee's Journey:
Ending up in the hospital after experiencing chronic pain caused Lee Smart to rethink what was important in his life. Jenn talks with Lee about how meeting his wife Tonya and walking away from a lucrative business and from a focus on achievement to focusing on helping himself and others heal put him on a path from surviving to thriving.
Guest Bio: Read more about Lee here
Guest Location: Louisiana, US
Resources from Lee's Journey:
Hi, welcome to this episode of the High Note Healing Inspirations from Life. I'm your host, jen Nguyen, and today we talk to Lee Smart about healing childhood trauma and the journey from surviving to thriving. You can read Lee's full bio in the show notes, but I'll say this Lee is an amazing storyteller who has a playful energy and is someone who thinks differently from those around him. I met Lee at a virtual conference for leadership coaches a few years ago and I thought I need to know more about his story and all that he's learned from it. So Lee and I talk about how he journeyed from surviving to thriving in his life, from dealing with domestic violence and addiction in his childhood home to finding the love of his life and his wife, tanya, to healing his body from chronic pain, even when few professionals could explain what was happening to him. I learned a lot from Lee in this conversation, so stick around afterwards for my love and learning.
Speaker 1:Outro, which is a short reflection from me about my key takeaways from this conversation. Let's get started. Hi, I'm very excited for today's guest. I'll let you introduce yourself.
Speaker 2:Well, hi, my name is Lee Aaron Smart and I am a coach. Do quite a few things in my work, but number one is trying to help build people.
Speaker 1:Awesome. I want to hear as a child or a teenager, when you were a kid, what was something you could do for hours on end and never get tired.
Speaker 2:One of the first things that comes to mind for me was the first time I ever started riding a bicycle. I had been trying for months to try and figure out how to ride this bicycle and it just wouldn't click. And then all of a sudden one day I picked up and started riding, and it was early in the morning and I did not stop until the sun went down. My mom told me you got to come in. And I remember when I got up the next day I had been riding so much that I couldn't walk the next day. I had so much soreness in between my legs from that seat that walking around.
Speaker 2:Funny, and part of the joy of that you look back on those types of moments is that joy of conquering, of really struggling to accomplish something, and you fight, and you fight and you fight and it just gets to where it's frustrating and then all of a sudden something will click, bam. And that's where the real joy lies, is not these simple pleasures. It's where you really find something that you're working for and then striving for, and then you just struggle through it and you get frustrated and you want to throw things around and finally, whenever it clicks and you get good at it. It's just so much amazing, just energy there, and it allows somebody to go out and ride a bicycle for all day long, even though never did it before.
Speaker 1:I love that. I'm imagining you feeling like Superman, Like wow, and you're, how old were you that time?
Speaker 2:Probably six, seven, somewhere around there. You say Superman. I used to have a Superman outfit that the first time I put it on I jumped off the porch and I couldn't fly and I got angry. So probably three at about that point.
Speaker 1:Oh man, I could see you with the cape being like why am I not soaring? That's awesome, lee. I also hear, in addition to the joy of the journey and the beauty of the effort, I also hear a physicality like the physical work to figure out the bike and then conquer the bike. It felt good to you.
Speaker 2:Oh, certainly there is joy in being physical. There's joy in running around and chasing kids around, and so I'll tell you about an exercise that I did. My mentor had me do an exercise where I had to figure out an identity that I embodied for my overall energy throughout the day, and his was he wanted to be a world-class athlete. He wanted to have enough energy and go about his day where he was a world-class athlete. That just never clicked with me and I stood on it for probably two months trying to figure out what it was.
Speaker 2:And I was in the kitchen and I was making food one day and my youngest daughter jumped up off the floor and started running around the couch in circles for no reason whatsoever. And whenever that started happening, I was like that is it, that is what I want right there. I want that childlike energy to just get up and start running around for no freaking reason. And it was just so amazing whenever that clicked for me because now every day, whenever I do that journal entry, I write down as my identity for energy. It's childlike, because I really love bringing that kind of energy into the world. It's a real challenge for me because as adults we just have so much to do and in our culture it's just this go, go, go, more and more and more, push, push, push all the time, and it can be heavy. It can be so heavy and we forget how awesome it is to play. So you have to bring that to the front of our mind day in and day out if we want to live our day intentionally with that kind of energy.
Speaker 1:Yes to the spontaneous, fun, freedom of childlike play and childlike energy. That's awesome, okay, I also like, though, how real you're being about how hard it is to tap into that when we are busy adulting and taking care of our kids and going to work and taking care of the house or the apartment and paying the bills and all the things right. So I'm going to ask you about the effort and the attention and the journey that got you to the point where you could write in your gratitude journal about play. So take me back. What's the moment you started your healing journey, lee, and what were you healing from?
Speaker 2:So how do you feel about me just starting from the beginning and working to this point? Is that okay with you? Yes, lots of commission on thattoo so— Started off, when I was born, my mom and dad had already split. They were married and split. She was unfaithful, she had a lot of issues and her pain ended up spreading a lot of pain to everybody that she touched, because she was just one of those souls that was absolutely amazing.
Speaker 2:Whenever she was sober, so smart, so gifted, but hurt, she was hurt and that hurt was definitely passed down from her father, which was passed down from his father as many of the things that we see from the older generation on how to raise children come to find out. It's just wrong. We're going to beat you into place. We're going to force you to do what I think is necessary. You're not allowed to be you. You're not allowed to live by your own freedoms. It was just a nasty place to grow up from. So my grandfather highly abusive man. He made my backside black and blue, from the backs of my knees to the tops of my shoulders a couple of times, and I watched him grab my mom by the neck and throw her up against the wall one time because she allowed me to pierce my ear. And that's it. I pierced my ear, I was in middle school and he grabbed a hold over and threw her against the wall.
Speaker 2:She stayed drunk for a long time. When she was sober she was phenomenal. She died in her early 50s and that caused a lot of pain because as a child, we take on that it's all our fault. As a child, we think that we're responsible for everything in our life as a child. So what's wrong with me that she would do that to herself? She says she loves me but yet she won't quit drinking. And then I've got people telling me how great of a person my grandfather is, highly verbally abusive.
Speaker 2:Growing up there was just what the hell's wrong with me. You know why do I have to go through this? And I hate to be dramatic about it? Because there's a lot of people who have some really bad things that happen to them. But at the same time, trauma is not what happened to you. Trauma is how your body responds to it and some people have one event that was a 10 off the charts, off the scales, a 10 trauma boom right there. But that's still the same thing as plus one plus one plus one, day in and day out, plus one plus one. You know it all adds up and your body hang on to it.
Speaker 2:Mine did, and so I ended up with an inflammatory disorder. Gut pain, back pain started to present whenever I was about 10. My uncle was physical therapist. I remember going to him about that age and there was just no fix for it. It wasn't physical, but nobody knew that. He later on died in a boating accident and that was the end of that family. It took about seven more years after that, but whenever he died that family just went crazy. There was so much pain, so much depression. It was just nasty right. It tore everybody apart so it ended up getting bad.
Speaker 1:I'm sorry for that devastating loss.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we lost my uncle. We lost both my grandparents. We lost my mom all within a 12 year period and it was just the decline for my grandparents. The decline from a mom was slow and achingly slow. So I spent the first half of my life sex, drugs and rock and roll, was it? I did a lot to numb myself. I started smoking weed whenever I was 12. I started drinking regularly whenever I was 15. I started smoking weed with my mom whenever I was 15.
Speaker 2:It was all about numbing and forgetting and dissociation. You start talking about fight or flight. There's also the freeze response. There's this thing that happens where your brain will shut off and you just don't remember details of things because your brain says I've had enough. And now that I look back, now that I know what I know, now I see that I have a buddy that can remember just about everything we did and I can't remember any of it. It's amazing. So that's how I lived. The first part it was all about sex, drugs and rock and roll. Got into weightlifting just because I wanted the body, so I can attract women, because I'm going to get somebody to love me, right, alcohol all the time. But then that lifestyle ends up, managed to get a woman pregnant. That same year that I got her pregnant, both my grandparents died and a hurricane wiped out my hometown, 2005. So all that happened in one year Wiped out my hometown. My hometown was shut down from October all the way until May, barely functioning.
Speaker 1:Was this Hurricane Katrina?
Speaker 2:No, that was Hurricane Rita. We don't get the press coverage that New Orleans gets because we're on the opposite side of Louisiana, we don't have nearly the population. So Katrina came in, wiped out New Orleans, all the media, everything was in New Orleans. Hurricane Rita came in a month later and absolutely devastated my hometown, so much so that I had to move. I moved 16 times in 2005.
Speaker 2:Here comes turn number one. We were in that hospital and my daughter was being born. My dad came up to me. Now here's the bright side of my life. Right, he's my dad, not a very emotionally regulated man, but a very solid, very disciplined man. He showed us his love just because he supported us. He didn't know how to show it otherwise. I see that now we're in the hospital and he turns around and tells me boy, you better make yourself into something she could be proud of. Yes, sir, you got it. So what I saw at that point was people that you can be proud of worked.
Speaker 2:So I started working and I worked my ass off and I ended up falling into a trade, falling into the mechanic industry, and I just had a natural knack for it. So I did that for years and I worked and I worked, and I worked and ended up starting my own business, and that business became highly successful. I was making about $40,000 a week, but all this time I had this inflammatory disorder. Ankylosing spinalitis is what I was diagnosed with twice.
Speaker 2:I still don't 100% believe that and I'll get to that here in a second, but my body started to give out on me the stress of running that job, running that work and the fact that I was still numbing myself. I would stress myself to the max and I would numb myself in the evening with beer, so that's what it took for me to go to sleep. I had to drink four or five beers every day. So fast forward a few years and I almost died on top of the mountain and I ended up in the hospital room. In the meantime, I had left the woman I was with and I ended up finding my wife and along this journey she and I became very, very close, truly wonderful woman, and we had three more children. By the time I started having this health crisis, we had four children.
Speaker 1:Wonderful. What's your wife's name?
Speaker 2:Tanya.
Speaker 1:Tanya what a blessing.
Speaker 2:I will most certainly talk a little bit more about that blessing here in just a second, because there really truly has not been a better blessing in my life than that woman. I'm getting two sponges even thinking about where I am now and where I would have been if it wasn't for her. We had our four children and my wife and I was in the hospital bed and I remember my son walking up to me in that hospital bed and immediately he just started crying. I think he was seven, six or seven about that time and just seeing me strapped to all the machines and monitors and everything, it just was like a just seeing his face.
Speaker 2:You know you make it to the top of the first mountain sometimes and it's hollow. You know our society holds so much stock and work and push and more and money and things and it doesn't. I can't imagine anybody sitting on their death bed going Dan, I wish I'd worked another day. What do people say? Whenever I was there, I wanted more time with those people. I wanted more time with my wife and my three daughters and my son and my dad and my brothers and my sister and I didn't want to work anymore.
Speaker 1:Relationships are the greatest well.
Speaker 2:I realized at that point that my work in the world was to spread that message that, yes, work is important, surviving is important and having enough money to survive, but we don't have to have all the stuff and the things and the house and the picket fence and the car and the two dogs and the two and a half children. And that's not where joy and happiness comes from. It comes from having amazing experiences with amazing people. There's really not much else out there that is really truly important. Yes, you have to work enough to survive. Yes, you have to be secure enough to allow your body to go. Okay, I'm set, I've got enough, I'm not going to be in danger. Tomorrow we start and talk about Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Right, there's so much more, so much more than working and money.
Speaker 2:So all along this time I've been a self-improvement junkie. That's been a huge thing for me to constantly improve myself through books, and so much so that it became information as entertainment. So I would spend my time. You know most people watch Netflix. I would read self-improvement books. You know people are amazed. They had some friends come over and their kids walked in the house and they said there's no TV in here. What is going on.
Speaker 2:That's about the point I realized that I needed to turn my focus from business and money and achievement and acquiring to other things. And even now, with all the work that I've done, I realized that the work is never done. There's always going to be a next step, another wound, another, something that'll happen. So you end up working on one thing and you put everything else on maintenance and you just continue moving forward throughout all of it. The work is never done.
Speaker 2:Whenever I made it to the top of that mountain and then I ended up in that hospital bed and all I can think about was I don't want to keep silent about this, I want to bring as many people along with me as I can. So what I did next was start to heal my body, and I did that. So I used to listen to or used to I still listen to a podcast called the New man podcast. The host is Triplenir and he had a guest on. His name was John Mitchell. His name is John Mitchell, functional medicine doctor Got with John and John Mitchell he had the hardest time with me because I'm obstinate, as can be sometimes. We ended up fixing me and I ended up better off than I've ever been in my life.
Speaker 1:Wow, by doing what?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a whole can of worms there. What do I do in what? The short and skinny of it Deep is the foundation that all the pillars of health rest on. And then the pillars of health are food and movement and gratitude and celebration, breathing and I could probably throw a couple of other ones in there, but that really is truly the foundation that you want to rest your entire well-being on. It's just food and movement and breathing, and you cannot be healthy without good sleep.
Speaker 1:All of that sounds like the house of longevity.
Speaker 2:A little bit. Yeah, it's more than longevity, though. It's current well-being.
Speaker 1:Yes, being fully alive in the moment to enjoy life now. Yes, okay, so you've got the podcast. You've got Dr John Mitchell helping you lay the foundation of rest, put in the pillars for well-being. Now what becomes possible?
Speaker 2:Oh. So I tell you, the next turn was whenever a hurricane came through and wiped out that business that was making me all that money. So here we go again, right In Laura, almost the category five, one mile per hour short, completely devastated us even worse than Rita did in 2005. Wow, it took my building and picked it up and put it in the neighbor's parking lot. Unbelievable and this was in the middle of me doing this whole healing process I was healing from all the other stuff when this happened. So, yeah, absolutely devastating at that point.
Speaker 2:So I ended up taking a little bit of a backwards slide, but I had been studying to be a coach at that point. It gave me the opportunity, after we cleaned up from the storm. I took that opportunity to shut that business down, because I'll tell you the truth that there was a major disconnect. I felt like I was doing nothing but polishing turds all day and it sucked the life out of me. It wasn't about the money anymore, it was about what kind of service can I bring into this world? So I decided to shut it down, which was an agonizing decision, because here it is, I've got this cash cow that I'm sitting on and I'm just going to give it up. That's backwards, isn't it? But it's not about the cash, it's about the work I want to do.
Speaker 1:What I'm hearing is you made a choice to put down the survival mountaintop, go through the valley of letting go of the business and choosing to climb up the thriving mountain by starting coaching.
Speaker 2:I would also label that thriving mountain as a service mountain, because at my heart it's always it's been about service every step of the way.
Speaker 1:What does service mean to you?
Speaker 2:Service depends on the person that I'm with. There's so many programs out there that I have the method. Use my process and we'll get you where you need to go. It's these cookie cutter methods that don't exactly fit everybody. Service depends 100% on the person that I'm trying to serve. We learn this together in Coactive Coaching.
Speaker 2:The more I treat people like they are naturally creative or sourceful in whole, then we empower them to take control of their own life. That is true power. Rather than giving somebody a fish, you guide them to the riverbank and you show them how to tie their hook. You show them how to bait that hook and you allow them to cast that line into the water. You allow them to catch that fish, that service because you've taught them how to take care of anything.
Speaker 2:Because if you look at what happens to people throughout the journey of their life and you start off as a baby and wham, wham, wham, and somebody comes in, oh, something's wrong, and they figure it out for you because you can't talk. Is it food? Wham, wham, nope. Is it diaper? Oh, yep, that's it Right. And so somebody comes in and figures it out for you and many people still go through their lives like that Wham wham and they expect somebody else to come in and take care of them, and that's not how you operate as an adult. You have to take care of you, because the only person really and truly that you can count on is yourself. Yes, you have to have a support network. Yes, you have to have people that you can count on to walk with you, but they're not going to carry you. You got to walk on your own two feet.
Speaker 1:I love how, the moment you shifted to thriving, it became not just about you thriving, but everyone around you thriving as well. That thriving was an act of service and an act of empowerment for your community, for the loved ones and the people around you. So it makes me curious what has healing made possible for you, lee, and for the people around you?
Speaker 2:The stronger I am, the better able I am to lift others, and I encourage that so much so in the people that I work with, because a lot of the people I work with have given themselves over to their career, they've given themselves over to their children and they give and they give and they give and they don't take care of themselves and it absolutely wears them out. And whenever we start to work together many people have this I'm being selfish. If I take care of myself, I can't do that. I've got too many people relying on me, I've got too many responsibilities. If I take care of myself, then everything's going to fall apart. And whenever we really take a look at it, if we are stronger, if we take care of ourselves, if we heal ourselves, if we do the mental fitness, if we do the physical fitness, we become greater. And the greater we become, the better able we are to bring others with us. I think about one of my favorite things you cannot feel somebody else's vessel if yours is empty.
Speaker 1:I can't pour from an empty cup, so it sounds to me like there have been a few key people who have poured into you when you've felt you're emptious. So can you tell me about your wife, tanya? What role has Tanya played in your healing journey and your life?
Speaker 2:Thank you for bringing that back up. I hate to leave loose ends. Wonderful thing about our relationship is never, ever, ever, never, ever along the way, did she ever make me feel less than without a doubt. Every step of the way, she just loved and gave love, and gave love no matter what I was going through, no matter how nasty I became, she just loved. And anytime I was going through something, and she I just want you to be happy. I cannot tell you how many times she told me I want you to be happy, I just want you to be happy.
Speaker 2:And through that just unconditional love, I wanted to be a better person because I wanted to be worthy of it, which that's a different thing there. Right, you have to just accept that you are worthy of it. You don't have to earn it. Why have you finally accept that you can be worthy of such love? Then whole new doors open up and just taking that love, and it just really made me a better person all around Because she accepted me for me, even as flawed as I was. Through all of it, she accepted me for me. What a wonderful, wonderful place to be. I wish everybody on this planet could experience something like that Wow. And I guarantee you, if you could be that person, if you could be the person that loves unconditionally, you will receive it back. Same thing with money, same thing with being a friend, same thing with anything that you want. If you give it, it can't help but come back to you. And it's not going to come back to you the way that you expected either. It'll just come back to you in just the most unexpected ways. You give love, you give money money in the fact that you're not afraid to give it to people that need it and do well and run their craft well.
Speaker 2:As a business owner, I've thought that I had to do it all. So I'd scarcity mindset. I've got to do it all. I'm not giving anybody any money and just me, me, me, me. Whenever I finally let that go and started letting people take care of what they're good at and I did what I was good at I started making a whole lot more money. Friendship's the same thing. The more you can be a friend and go out there and just serve somebody. I've got a buddy right now that his truck went down. The first thing I did was go pick him up, brought him to the house, put him in my truck and said here you go. As soon as your truck is done, I'll take it back. Don't you dare rush, that's an abundance mindset.
Speaker 2:That's it abundance. A lot of people think if I give you a slice of my pie, I've got less pie. And that's not the way the world works. If I give you a slice of my pie, my pie gets bigger.
Speaker 1:Given that she has given you life and made so much possible for you and I get to experience this awesome version of you. Lee, I'm curious where do you see your journey, your healing journey, leading you next?
Speaker 2:Currently I'm working on an addiction issue. I thought whenever I kicked the beer that I kicked the addiction issue, and that's not true. I found myself addicted to exercise, which I bet you didn't know that could happen. There's a thing called overtraining and you can go so far that you start to experience the same nervous system issues as if you were traumatized in some way, shape or form. Your nervous system gets so far stuck on the sympathetic side that you stay in fight or flight pretty much the whole time. You can always tell whenever you get too far, because everybody has their own symptoms and just signs that you know that you're off track. Mine are lack of playfulness is one of them.
Speaker 2:Irritability, sensitivity to noise I haven't developed tinnitus in my ear that the more on point I am, the less it presents, the more stressed I am and the more off kilter I am, the louder the ringing in my ears and the more I can't understand what people are saying. My hearing actually goes whenever I know I'm off. I find that I I isolate socially. I isolate because there's this I've got to get stuff done. Things become more important than relationships at that point. The to-do list becomes more important than relationships and that's from being stuck in that go, go, go, go mindset. So, and there's a few other key indicators for me, but everybody has their own and some of them we share as people, but without a doubt, you can start to notice them if you really pay attention.
Speaker 2:Another thing that's been absolutely phenomenal that goes from the athletic world to overall healing is tracking HRV. So HRV is heart rate variability and you can tell, based on the space between your heartbeats and how variable they are, whether or not you're in a rest and digest and cognitive performing state of mind versus being amped up and excited and talk about fight or flight. And one of the things that drives me nuts is oh, we don't have to worry about tigers anymore because they're not jumping out of the bushes like they were. Well, those people that say that you don't enter fight or flight because we don't have it anymore haven't driven through downtown Houston, traffic and rush hour. You wanna talk about fight for your life? Good Lord, that's a surefire way to make sure that your HRV tanks. But anyway, the higher your HRV, the it's kind of a scientific way to measure the meditative state, for lack of a better way to describe it.
Speaker 2:So the calm, another way to describe it. If you're really, really low in HRV, it's kind of like you study for a test. You know you got all the information in your brain and you sit down to take that test and it won't come out because you're panicking. And when you panic it shuts off the prefrontal cortex and whenever you start to lose that, all of a sudden you can't think straight and the information just won't come out. Versus high HRV, that's a very calm state. That is where your higher level thinking lies.
Speaker 2:I'm finding all this out through athletics and so I've experimented with CrossFit for the last year and I'm noticing that I have less and less cognitive performance as I do it, because I'm addicted to it and I'm reliant on it to get me to that state, that higher state of endorphin rush. And you know it's some of the same things that happen whenever you ingest chemicals. You know your body just produces them naturally and we've figured out a way to stoke those chemicals. And you go in there and you exercise really hard and your body goes whoop. We're surviving. Let's kick up the endorphins.
Speaker 1:I appreciate your immense self-awareness to say you know what I know. Society tells me exercise is good, but at the end of the day, I have physical cues you know the ringing in the ears, the things you described. I have emotional cues, irritability, I don't wanna be around others, et cetera. I have indicators and cues that are telling me I am not the most regulated, centered, grounded version of myself and therefore this isn't the way to go. And it doesn't mean throw the baby out with the bathwater, right like. There's a version, I'm sure, of exercise that is very healthy in your life. But I so admire your self-awareness to say this version, ain't it?
Speaker 2:Yes, like that you said self. I think of that big S self like the higher self, the best version of you, and it lives in you. Allowing that version to run the show, rather than the little monkey brain that can run the show sometimes, you'll end up in a far better spot without fail.
Speaker 1:I'm so, so happy we're doing this. Lee, okay, I would love to hear what do you wish for others when it comes to healing?
Speaker 2:The first thing that comes to my mind what I wish for others when it comes to healing is being okay with slowing down. Everything in our life is pushing us and pushing us and we think we have to do all the things. And whenever I finally get through that to-do list, I'm finally gonna be set free. And every time we lock off the head of one of these tasks, two more grow back in its place, just like the Hydra from Greek mythology. Every time you get something done, two more always grow back, if not three. And it just grows and it grows and it never stops. And whenever we actually take the time to slow down, everything gets better. And they have a saying. In the military, I wanna say the Navy SEALs came up with it first. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.
Speaker 1:I love that quote. What does it mean to you?
Speaker 2:It means I need to spend some more time sitting on my porch. Is what it means?
Speaker 1:Yes, is sitting on your porch an opportunity for play? Is it an opportunity for rest? Is it an opportunity for gratitude? All what does slowing down in your porch make possible for you?
Speaker 2:There's a little bit of everything out there for me sometimes. One is I get the opportunity to go watch my kids play in the yard. Many times I do that with my wife, so there's just gratitude for that and there's love with her and there's appreciation of the beauty that surrounds me. So I live on a piece of property that's 10 acres that is completely surrounded by woods. Yesterday my wife and I were taking a walk through the woods and we came very close to a pack of coyotes that were howling and screaming, and we've seen snakes and bunnies and deer and alligators. So there's appreciation of beauty, appreciation of nature, and then there's the rest. But I do some of my best journaling sitting out there in the sun, because we, as humans, it's necessary for us to get sunshine on our skin and in our eyes.
Speaker 1:Vitamin D.
Speaker 2:We're not meant to be inside, we're meant to be outside for sure. So there's so many things, so many things out there. And then I've spent a lot of time on that porch, after a hard day's work in the yard on the weekend, building this piece of property and building that porch and building my kid's tree house, building the shop. And sit on that porch and after a good hard day's work and just take in the joy of being able to do those things and just sitting back and admiring what I've been able to build and admiring that I get the opportunity to build. Creation is such an important part of my life.
Speaker 1:And it's us that are highest selves when we're creating the world we wanna live in.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, very much so.
Speaker 1:For those who are on their healing journeys. They may be at the beginning, they may be in another valley or up on another mountaintop. What resources do you recommend for healing?
Speaker 2:Currently I am reading a book called how to Do the Work, Dr Nicole LaPera. I'm not sure if I pronounced that right, but that one's been pretty phenomenal. How to Win Friends and Influence People is a fantastic book. There's so many of them.
Speaker 1:These are a great start.
Speaker 2:It's going to vary so much based on who needs what. So I think if I were to think about a specific subject, a specific topic, I could come up with something off the top of my head. Being general like that, I can't think of a whole lot right off.
Speaker 1:I agree with you, Leigh Each of us is going to have to discover where we are in our journey and what speaks to us for that point in time, that moment on our path.
Speaker 2:Two more books real fast. The Body Keeps the Score. Wonderful book when it comes to healing from trauma, when the body says no, it's another really, really good one. But, like I said, it just depends on where you are in your journey, what kind of resources that you need, and you'll find that, if you start to look, you'll find what you need.
Speaker 1:I love that. What a perfect note to end on. I love this conversation.
Speaker 2:I love your energy and you do a phenomenal job of pulling things out that are key moments and key pieces. Absolutely so much appreciation for this opportunity and being a part of my journey and sharing this little piece with me.
Speaker 1:What a conversation. Thank you for sticking around for my love and learning reflection. Here's what I'm loving and learning from my conversation with Leigh the value of both sameness and difference across people, the importance of slowing down and a house of well-being. So I'll say a bit about each, on the value of both sameness and difference across people. I'll say a little bit more about me and Leigh. So on the outside, looking in, leigh and I are really different. Leigh is a man, I'm a woman. Leigh is from the South, I'm from the North. Leigh is white, I'm black and Latina. And yet we have a lot of sameness around what we think is important in life, like service, relationships and love. And what we have in common is so much more present than our differences when we're talking. And I don't mean to suggest at all that sameness is better than difference. Instead, what I'm saying is that both are valuable, the sameness and the difference.
Speaker 1:Some of us have probably heard the quote. It's often attributed to JFK, president Kennedy, what unites us is greater than what divides us, and I think I'm adding that it's both the sameness and the difference that make us humans so powerful when we come together and can make our lives richer, more full the importance of slowing down. Leigh shared a quote from the Navy and I've heard it quoted from sailors in the maritime world more broadly slow is smooth and smooth is fast. What stands out to me is the importance of slowing down sometimes to get to where I'm headed in life, even when I feel the pressure to speed it up. And that's really hard for me to do. To slow down, I'm just being real, but I'm guessing the point isn't to always go slow. It's to choose with intentionality and presence when to go fast and when it serves me best to go slow. Because I hear the power of slowing down for many reasons One, so that we don't burn ourselves out. Two, so that we can notice the cues in our lives when something isn't working for us Physical cues, emotional cues, cognitive cues, etc. And three, so that we can focus on what matters most, namely human connection and healthy relationships. And it's reminding me of an awesome line from the rapper Toby and Weigwe from Houston, who has such awesome music. Toby says relationships are the greatest.
Speaker 1:Well, another essential source of richness in my life is health, which connects to Leigh's house of well-being. So Leigh is actively building well-being into his life. He said his foundation for current well-being is sleep, and the pillars of that well-being home, so to speak are food, movement, gratitude and celebration and breath, and I like how simple and clear each of those pillars in that foundation are. Even more so, though, I like the reminder that to help myself and others best, I have to start from a place of wellness across multiple arenas physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. And when I do take care of myself in those ways, it doesn't just serve me. The stronger and healthier I am, the more I can uplift others. So for me, it was an important reminder that my thriving enables me to more effectively contribute to others thriving.
Speaker 1:So my question for you is what are you loving and what are you learning from this conversation? I hope you were inspired by at least one thing for your own healing journey, and if you were inspired, please share this episode with someone you love or someone you think who might appreciate it. It would mean so much to me. And not everything will be for everyone, and that's A-OK. Take what you need, leave what you don't, and, based on what you're loving and learning from this conversation, what's one thing you commit to doing next for your healing? Thank you so much for listening. Much love everyone.