0:00:09 – Speaker 2
Hey, it’s me, Erin. Thanks for joining us on the More Love podcast. Do not tell Rebecca, but this podcast is about empathy. She likes people to think she’s dead inside, but the truth is she’s a big time feeler who has truly helped me uncover that empathy is my superpower. Here she comes.
0:00:28 – Speaker 3
Hey, Bestie, Hi love.
0:00:30 – Speaker 2
What are you doing? Oh, just getting ready to host a podcast. A podcast About what Life? Our life as best friends who are more like sisters. Yay, I love us and I can’t wait to share our stories with the world, Especially the ones that involve us pushing each other right To be our most authentic selves.
0:00:50 – Speaker 3
Oh man Okay.
0:00:56 – Speaker 2
Welcome back to our seven remaining listeners after last week’s podcast where Rebecca went off on ASMR and pissed some people off.
0:01:07 – Speaker 3
Well, I’m so sorry to you.
0:01:10 – Speaker 2
ASMR lovers. I actually don’t know if that’s true, but I just watched back that episode in preparation for it going posted and I’m like, wow, you had a lot of feelings about that. You had a lot of feelings.
0:01:24 – Speaker 3
Well, you didn’t warn me.
0:01:26 – Speaker 2
What? That we were going to talk about that? Yeah, you said we’re going to watch these videos. Yeah, and then I’m like, how did you feel about?
0:01:32 – Speaker 3
that you knew I was going to have a reaction. I know.
0:01:35 – Speaker 2
Well, I thought you’re just going to have a lot of questions. I didn’t think you were going to throw fire.
0:01:38 – Speaker 1
Oh well, you threw some fire, don’t you know me? You threw some fire.
0:01:42 – Speaker 2
So yes, welcome back. We did have 1,008 listeners and now we’re down to six, so it’s fine. Do you see my hat today? I do. Are you a little bit jealous or a lot of bit jealous?
0:01:55 – Speaker 3
I said to you if you, I’m actually curled my hair today and if you bust out something I’m going to have to wear, oh, you mean like a hat oh wow, you know what’s funny it was happening at school today. Oh, yeah, it was pink.
0:02:11 – Speaker 2
It was a pink one. Here’s your pink hat.
0:02:15 – Speaker 1
Listen I saw you did this at the fair.
0:02:18 – Speaker 2
You did.
0:02:19 – Speaker 3
I saw you post a picture. You’re like something about bring back white trash.
0:02:23 – Speaker 2
I don’t understand why this isn’t a thing I used to be. What do you mean?
0:02:27 – Speaker 3
When, when we were in college. Oh, college Like the Van. Dutch years. What’s that? Van doi, van Dutch, you know. See, like Colton knows what I’m talking about.
0:02:36 – Speaker 2
Don’t ask Scott, we’re not talking to Scott today we can’t talk to Scott Actually, we could talk all about Scott, because he can’t respond.
0:02:42 – Speaker 3
I need to. I need to bring it back to the Van Dutch.
0:02:45 – Speaker 2
Is that how you say it?
0:02:46 – Speaker 3
Van Dutch. There is an entire docu series on Netflix, hulu one of them, because it involves murder, scam, the whole thing. What is Van Dutch? It’s a, it’s a clothing brand. Oh, that, like Paris Hilton, made famous when she was on that simple life Like did she have one of these hats.
0:03:07 – Speaker 2
Yes, she did Everybody?
0:03:09 – Speaker 3
did you act like? I thought this was?
0:03:12 – Speaker 2
something I just. Every time I go past these hats at the fair, I’m like these are trash. I love these. And when I was talking to the woman, she’s like well, what do you want on it? And I’m like I want hearts. I need the background to be teal, blue with black. You even got to pick the. The trashier the better. The whole thing. I love these. I really do not understand why these are not a thing. They are now. They sure are. I wish I had one for you, col.
0:03:44 – Speaker 1
I wish I I’ll send one to you, I would rock it yeah.
0:03:48 – Speaker 2
I think I feel like he would have a green one. Oh, is it because he is?
0:03:52 – Speaker 3
green behind his head right now.
0:03:53 – Speaker 2
I don’t know. It just strikes me that he’s he’d be green. I disagree. I say navy blue, and navy blue is fine too. Oh, okay, yep, that’s fine too. Okay, say Colt on it.
0:04:02 – Speaker 3
Speaking of hearts and absolutely. Oh, he’s one of us. Okay, he doesn’t get his own brand.
0:04:08 – Speaker 1
Oh welcome to the.
0:04:08 – Speaker 2
Moorlof podcast. This is how we do it over here. We got introduced Colt before we introduced Colt. Why don’t we do hippie voodoo shop? Oh wait, we can’t today. Why not, Rebecca? Because I was so hyper focused.
0:04:24 – Speaker 3
I was hyper focused on being on time because we have a guest and always I’m late, always and I was just focusing on the fact that we had a guest and so I forgot my bag of Chutch geese. Yes, and I am naked. This feels very weird, and then you wouldn’t even share any of your Chutch geese with me.
0:04:39 – Speaker 2
Nope, nope, I’m going to take a picture. She has literally one little mini jug of water in front of her and she has her little like set for her earphones. What’s in front of me, rebecca? All the, all the good things, oh, can I at least have the absolutely not? Absolutely not, I have. How does this feel? By the way, it feels terrible. How does it feel? I’d like to remind you of a time we were on a plane and you would not allow me to use your neck pillow because I had forgotten mine at home, and every two seconds you said what? Oh, you like my neck pillow? Do you want to see it? This is so comfortable. This is the best neck pillow I’ve ever had. Right, because?
0:05:14 – Speaker 1
I would you like to see my rocks over here.
0:05:16 – Speaker 2
You can’t touch them. I’m going to rub them all right now, touching them all, every single one of them. Oh, I have a candle over here that you wanted on yours, and when I did, I said can I at least have the candle?
0:05:26 – Speaker 3
You said absolutely not, Nope.
0:05:28 – Speaker 2
Nope, I have two jugs of water. I have the thing over here to be able to push if I want to turn it off, do you?
0:05:34 – Speaker 3
want to pay back, so yeah, whatever, I’m so good.
0:05:38 – Speaker 2
And you know where the empathy is right now Dumpster, dumpster, fire Gone. So I would love to set an affirmation for today, I’ll take care of it myself.
0:05:48 – Speaker 3
I’m sure it says release all the things, I’ll take care of it myself. It says be yourself.
0:05:53 – Speaker 2
Whoever? You want to be. So, colts, we are going to shuffle.
0:05:59 – Speaker 1
I’m observing the most empathetic communication. It’s really going places, it’s needs-based.
0:06:06 – Speaker 2
It’s needs-based.
0:06:07 – Speaker 3
There’s some user frustration in my place.
0:06:10 – Speaker 2
There’s some user frustration, so I’m going to shuffle these cards and if you could hang on, that was a bad shuffle. If you could let me know when to stop Colt, that would be great.
0:06:21 – Speaker 1
Can we just take the fourth card from the top right now?
0:06:23 – Speaker 3
Wow, wow. That is very specific.
0:06:26 – Speaker 2
We sure can, we sure can your two energies are right on my tail. We sure can. Here we go. Here we go. Can’t wait to see what it has to say. Okay, ready, colt. This is our affirmation for today that we’re going to set. I know that each step I take toward one dream creates momentum for the next. I am moving forward. That’s a good one. I’m talking to Colt.
0:06:53 – Speaker 3
It’s a very good one. This is very, very good. Wow, there’s rules. Did I get the?
0:06:58 – Speaker 1
rulebook Did you guys have like a yellow card?
0:07:02 – Speaker 3
and a whistle that was about to get busted out of the stand. We’re going to have a refereed that’s usually Scott. It’s going to be Scott, yeah.
0:07:08 – Speaker 2
Usually Scott in his little bubble tells us. I know that each step I take toward one dream creates momentum for the next. I am moving forward. What you’re lucky that you don’t have to experience today, colt, is you do not need to put any oil on your inner armpits, you do not need to rub any of these rocks and you do not need to have Rebecca try and read tiny little print on a card to tell you what your intention is for the day, but she can’t and always comes up with an excuse. Oh, it’s blue on black. Oh, this text is so small.
0:07:45 – Speaker 3
Oh, I left my things at home. No because you don’t let me. It’s too small. Fine, next week we’re switching. How does it feel?
0:07:52 – Speaker 2
Terrible. It doesn’t feel good, does it? No? So would you like one of these rocks? Yeah, okay.
0:08:00 – Speaker 1
How does that feel when I pass these to you? Does that feel better? Yeah?
0:08:04 – Speaker 2
Okay, maybe don’t be so dead inside. Maybe try to be nicer to people. I want the big one, oh cool.
0:08:13 – Speaker 1
We have a lot to work on here.
0:08:15 – Speaker 2
We do Cool, we do, and we’re so happy that you’re with us to work on it. I am really excited to introduce you to Colt Now. First, I need to say this Colt, we have an interesting history with guests, okay. So I need you to be as prepared as you possibly can be here.
0:08:33 – Speaker 1
We’ve only ever had. Am I about to get on like a watch list?
0:08:35 – Speaker 2
Yeah, we’ve only ever had one guest and then after we had the one guest. People were like he was really nice, he was great. We didn’t get to hear enough Aaron and Rebecca, so how about no more guests? Okay, yeah sure.
Right, so no pressure, but you are guest number two. Guest number two coming on the heels of lots of energy being thrown into the More Love podcast. Yeah, I can dig it. Do I? Do? You think you can hang with that? I sure do. I do too. Sure, do so. Let’s introduce Colt so that he at least has a proper introduction. Mm-hmm, it’s before people start throwing shade.
0:09:22 – Speaker 1
Yeah, it’s either Colt or Strike Two.
0:09:27 – Speaker 2
How many guests will they go to before they stop bringing on guests? No, that’s totally not Colt. So, gosh, colt got introduced to me. Has it been a year? A year now.
0:09:38 – Speaker 1
At least yep, At least a year, yeah so Through Concern Center.
0:09:42 – Speaker 2
And when I say that Colt is a marketing genius, he will blush and hope you like, stop it. Stop it. I’m not, but I really mean that. I mean that with my entire soul. I have never met someone who thinks about things as creatively and as out of the box as Colt does. And the name of his company is Scrappy AF. Yes, you know what the AF stands for. And he is absolutely scrappy because he will do whatever he needs to do to figure out how to get you to the top. And is that why we’re working with him for Concern Center? It sure is. Well, it’s also our motto. What be scrappy? Yeah, absolutely. Do all that, yes, everything you need to do, yes, we very much relate Absolutely.
But I’m telling you, colt, there is something about your soul that speaks to mine. There is something about the way that you process things, think about things. We have been connected in some other life, as Rebecca would like to say. I don’t know if you feel that way, but I do. I do and I just genuinely feel like what you bring to the Concern Center relationship, to our partnership, all of this is something that is so next level. You can’t even. It’s not even tangible. We can’t put it in a box, it is just amazing.
And I know that when we level up for Concern Center and we’ve been leveling up for the last couple of years when we level up to this next level that we’re going to with you, we will be absolutely unstoppable.
0:11:19 – Speaker 1
I love to hear it. I’m very excited about it. Of course, I’ve been tracking the story for a long time. Big believer, I like the energy that’s behind it as well.
0:11:28 – Speaker 2
Awesome. We love it. So tell us, start by telling us just a little bit about maybe your story and how it did Scrappy get started and how did you become such a marketing genius?
0:11:40 – Speaker 1
Well, right on, I’ve been in marketing communications for 23 years. I had started scrappy about three years ago, following my last role as chief marketing officer for a company based out of Cincinnati, and really just kind of observed, because most of the companies that I’ve supported been in the B2B space and they’re really doing a bad job. Yeah.
0:12:02 – Speaker 2
In the B2B sectors to connect with humans.
0:12:05 – Speaker 1
We’ve seen so much great intelligence in the B2C sector like consumer, consumer, packaged goods, household stuff but we do great. I mean consumer brands do a great job of connecting to people emotionally. They understand needs, they understand feelings and they communicate in those spaces. Many go to the B2B sectors and it’s like we forgot that these are still humans, like, yes, it’s business to business, but businesses are people. They’re still people, they’re totally still people and we’ve just absolutely missed the boat on that. And you know, if you bring some of that intelligence from the B2C sectors the business to consumer sectors, into the B2B areas, where no one’s told a fricking joke in 10 years, has no personality, it’s like you can easily help brands absolutely dominate in their sectors and I basically I don’t think I’m a rockstar marketer, but I’m playing in a field where, if you leverage those strategies, you’ll go far fast.
0:13:04 – Speaker 2
Yeah.
But you know what those strategies tap into, cole, is this incredible sense of being able to understand human beings, what their experience is, what they like, what they don’t like, what they think is funny, what takes it a little bit too far.
And in my experience, there’s a great sense of self-awareness and empathy involved in that. I’ve always said I’m not a great marketer right, I am not someone who has any degree of marketing experience whatsoever. But I’m incredibly clear on what moves me, what I like, what I don’t like, what I don’t like, how I feel when I’m watching something, when I see something and I’m like, ooh, that really spoke to me. That is why, every time I see some piece of art or some piece of like marketing design that really speaks to me, I pick that up and I have to have it, because there is something in a human quality associated with that that just touches me in some way. If it doesn’t move me, I’m not interested. So there’s a massive human component to what you’re talking about and I can relate with that and love that, love that, yeah.
0:14:10 – Speaker 1
Yeah, and your authenticity about it is one thing that you say. You’re not a great marketer, but great marketing is authentic and you are a very authentic person. You don’t try to get a person excited. You are excited and that’s what makes them excited. Right? You’re starting in the right place, yeah.
0:14:27 – Speaker 2
Yeah.
0:14:28 – Speaker 1
Like you can see this as like kind of a cycle. If you start from your own excitement, then people get excited. If you start from I want to make this person excited, it doesn’t work the same way, yeah.
0:14:37 – Speaker 2
That’s a really good point.
Such a good point, interesting, right, and what you and I both share, rebecca, is we can’t fake it. Oh, so we couldn’t be out there being. Like you know what I love to do Brush off cars at a car dealership in the middle of winter, get excited about it, right? Because that ain’t it. We do not like that stuff at all, right? And so we can’t fake it. Thank God you love Concern Center, or at least you love me. I don’t know One of the two, but you can at least hang with it in that sense, all right.
So one of the things that we were hoping to talk with you about today I gave you a very long list of this is empathy, and what are these things associated with? Empathy Do you really like and those types of things? And two things popped up for you. One was you don’t have to be vulnerable to be empathic, but you have to be empathic to be vulnerable, something that, ironically, we talked about with our first guest. And then the second one is talking about empathy and needs based communication. Can you say a little bit more in your mind about what needs based communication is and how empathy plays a role in that?
0:15:55 – Speaker 1
I absolutely can. Thank you. Thank you Appreciate that question. I would love to couch my response to that in a little bit of a story.
0:16:06 – Speaker 3
Love it, love stories, love it, we love stories.
0:16:09 – Speaker 1
Like a real story, but you know we can say that it’s based on relevance. So let’s have this fictitious couple, husband and wife in the house together, and I choose the husband or the wife differently each time. This time We’ll have it be. The wife is very distraught. She’s she’s going all through the house trying to find something. She’s trying to find her pink pencils. And she’s gone through all the cabinet. She’s gone through every drawer, flipped up the couch, like she’s in a frantic search for her pink pencils. Husband not engaged, no idea, like she’s she’s heard her say several times can’t find that pink. Not really engaged, not understanding why that’s important, why that’s valuable.
The reason this is instructive for us in the conversation of needs based communication is because this is a very common type of disconnect that occurs between people. There are needs at play here, but they’re not actually being communicated. So she’s trying to find pink pencils and there’s two points of disconnect. There’s the disconnect point of preference and the disconnect point of method. Now I’ll tell you what that means. She uses pink pencils as her preference for when she is journaling, which is her method for meeting her personal need of self expression. So while she’s tearing around the house trying to find pink pencils.
What’s actually a motion for her in this moment is the need for self expression, and it’s a very important need for people. Many people have self expression as a daily need, some people less often, but we all have it as a core common human need, but as a core common human need. And unless the husband comes to understand that the search that she’s on is a search to meet the need her own personal need of self expression, he just hears pink pencils and thinks she’s out of her mind. What we have to do as people is we need to get better at communicating our core needs, rather than communicating in the language of methods, which sometimes people can understand, or the language of preferences, which even less often people understand, and then blaming other people for not understanding our needs. So this is kind of the the table setting for the discussion that I want to have with y’all.
0:18:29 – Speaker 3
First of all, I’m pretty sure that story happened last night in my home. No, but it’s definitely good.
0:18:38 – Speaker 2
But I mean OK, we’re going in here, we’re going in. This is why we don’t have guests. Why can’t we just go back to fart jokes and ASMR and that kind of stuff? Oh my God yeah.
0:18:54 – Speaker 1
Yeah, this is where our language gets sideways, and it happens in the corporate space too, but we’ll start at the personal space. I first got introduced to these concepts when I encountered a communication philosophy of communication methodology called nonviolent communication. This is the work of Marshall Rosenberg and the the phrasing nonviolent communication Anytime I mentioned to people brings up this idea. Oh, maybe Colt was a bit of a communicator.
0:19:25 – Speaker 2
The communicator.
0:19:27 – Speaker 1
I’m yeah, you know I’ve been studying nonviolent communication. They sort of reflect on some imagined version of my past, but I’ll give you the top of the book here. It says if violent means acting in ways that result in hurt or harm, then much of how we communicate could indeed be called violent communication. And that is sort of the the foundational understanding of nonviolent communication. Because we don’t communicate with empathy, we don’t communicate in a collaborative format, rarely communicate with authenticity, and this is where I first encountered this stuff. Oh boy.
0:20:07 – Speaker 2
I need a pen, I got to write down some things. I have a lot of thoughts right now. Let’s just do a gut check right now, rebecca, at a scale of one to ten, how nervous are you to have this conversation?
0:20:20 – Speaker 3
Oh, you know what I’m not. I actually very much enjoy this because it’s not about dissecting things. I say it’s about, it’s about. I very much resonate with this Very, very much, so I need you to say more about that.
0:20:33 – Speaker 2
I am a 10 out of 10. Because you want to puke scale?
0:20:37 – Speaker 3
Because you always, but this is where you’re again. You’re super power, You’re always like. They may be saying that, but that’s not what they mean. Yes, that’s what he’s saying.
0:20:48 – Speaker 2
So we I’m aware it just never happens for me. I’m real clear. I’m so uncomfortable right now because I’m constantly the one who’s like. I didn’t hear you say pink pencils. I heard you say self-expression in your journal and I know where you keep your journal and I know what page you’re on in your journal and I know what you’ve written in your other pages of your journal because you told me about those things. And not only that, but I bought you these pink pencils and I have a spare for you because I want to make sure that you’re completely covered at all times and not uncomfortable.
0:21:17 – Speaker 3
That’s what happened with the pink pencils, I know.
0:21:21 – Speaker 2
Anyone know who gets me pink pencils? No one. Well, you do, sometimes I do, you do. You get me pink pencils? I do have friends that get me pink pencils, but if we’re talking about relationships, I struggle with the pink pencils.
0:21:33 – Speaker 1
Yeah, so I mean like, where is? This is very common, but can you identify in your own experience, where is the disconnect? Because you have a extreme capacity to identify the needs behind the preferences, behind the methods that people communicating At least two, if not 10, points of disconnect. You know you have a fantastic intuition for that, but where is the disconnect? Why is it that people around you aren’t understanding your needs?
0:21:58 – Speaker 2
That’s a great question. My superficial answer, my go-to answer which may or may not be true I think if I looked a little deeper into it there’d probably be more to it is that people just don’t take the time to get to know who I am as a person.
0:22:18 – Speaker 1
Okay.
0:22:19 – Speaker 2
Yep, you both hated that answer. No, I didn’t. You both hated it. Colt looked at me like I had 16 hands. I did it. You know what Colt said Colt, you know what Colt’s eyes said to me. Yeah, that’s a good answer. What is it about you, though? What about you? You not other people? What about you? And then you looked at me just with this like no, here’s the look on your face. You’re gonna go there. You’re gonna go there on the podcast.
0:22:42 – Speaker 3
That’s what happened, it’s true. It’s true because my answer is you don’t actually show people who you really are.
0:22:49 – Speaker 1
You’re so busy being neat, I’m gonna step out for a second, let’s do that podcast.
0:22:55 – Speaker 3
Yeah, you’re so busy making sure you’re there for everybody else and doing all the things that either you don’t have an opportunity or you don’t feel safe enough to do that, because it’s been. You know, your past experiences is that people don’t see, you don’t hear, you don’t any of that, so you actually don’t, I don’t even bother.
0:23:17 – Speaker 2
No, no, and I just do a masterful job of saying just enough that people are like I’m so close to her, I totally understand her, I totally get her, but don’t allow myself to go to that vulnerable place with people, because my past experience has been I test and I test and I test and I throw a little bit out there and I’m constantly disappointed.
0:23:43 – Speaker 1
That’s it right there. You have that fear that if somebody actually knew your needs and they demonstrated to you that they weren’t important enough to meet, then you would be reflecting on yourself internally. Yeah.
0:23:57 – Speaker 3
Are we all done? Thank you for coming. Thank you for coming. What the hell is this?
0:24:03 – Speaker 2
Is this what it feels like to be on the other side of a conversation with me? Yep, I’m sorry, that’s a lot. Say that again. That was absolutely beautiful and like my hands got sweaty when you said that you want to rub me a rock.
0:24:19 – Speaker 1
So you said, yeah, I need some rocks.
0:24:22 – Speaker 2
You’re in some water and let’s go back to the hippie voodoo shit. Okay, get her some cards. I’m just picking these all up right now because this is all sorts of uncomfortable.
0:24:32 – Speaker 1
I brought my own cards. No, you didn’t.
0:24:35 – Speaker 2
Are you serious? What is?
0:24:38 – Speaker 1
it.
0:24:38 – Speaker 2
What kind of cards they’re hippie voodoo cards.
0:24:41 – Speaker 1
This is called. This is called GROC I cannot GROC your world.
0:24:46 – Speaker 3
What is?
0:24:46 – Speaker 1
GROC your world, groc your world. So GROC was actually created from NVC. This is a group that creates tools for people to put this communication methodology into practice in their personal lives. Groc card set is two decks of cards One on the right one on the right Fire and Heart.
0:25:07 – Speaker 3
What are those symbols, heart and what was the other?
0:25:09 – Speaker 1
one Kind of a sun. A sun, okay. All right, I’m grabbing more rocks. I love when she becomes uncomfortable.
0:25:17 – Speaker 2
This is great. This is great. Bring it on, Kyle. I got them all Bring it on Geez.
0:25:24 – Speaker 1
The deck with the hearts in the back is probably 50 or so, I think. Cards On each card, a single word, and each single word is a feeling.
0:25:34 – Speaker 3
You can throw those in the garbage. That’s what you got, right.
0:25:39 – Speaker 1
This is.
We are so poorly educated in how to even understand our own feelings, how to express them, how to communicate from that authentic place about what your needs are, what your feelings are.
That something as kindergarten, rudimentary, as a deck of cards with a single word on each, that is a word of a feeling, the name of a feeling. It’s just like it’s been a groundbreaking experience for me in my 40s to have access to a tool that allows me to communicate. What is the experience happening, unfolding inside me when I’m in an emotional space. And the ability to go through this deck of cards and find the words that name the feelings that I am experiencing and lay them out in front of me, take that internal maelstrom and then put it in front of my mind, in front of my eyes, and see what it is that’s inside of me, has been absolutely a transformation experience. Transformative experience for me in my life, Not only in reflecting on my own experience, but in communicating to my partner, julia, what it is that I’m experiencing, or in other conversations, like when my son, adrian is in heavy spaces and he’s having difficulty communicating and public education did not remotely give him the tools to do so.
0:26:51 – Speaker 3
Oh, we’re very aware.
0:26:52 – Speaker 1
This is a tool that we found, and, man, what a difference.
0:26:55 – Speaker 3
Game changer Okay.
0:26:56 – Speaker 1
Game changer.
0:26:57 – Speaker 3
You already ordered them on the Amazon, yeah.
0:27:00 – Speaker 1
Right.
0:27:00 – Speaker 2
That we’re turning those.
0:27:02 – Speaker 1
And then the second deck. Each card in the second deck. These are the needs. So you have needs like accountability and competence and respect and understanding and dependability. These are our core common human needs. Like a 99% hit rate, people read through these cards. They go yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. I have all these needs Right. And they’ve done a good job of on the need. On the feelings, they’ve done a good job of eliminating judgment based words like I feel abandoned. That’s not a feeling, that’s a evaluative. Let’s unpack that to the real feelings that you’re experiencing. And on the need side, I think they’ve done a really good job of just honing it down to the core common human needs. And when I lay out the cards that express the feelings and then I then I grab the needs deck and I go through the needs deck ask myself what common human needs are at play for me that are creating these feelings. And of course, you can do it with positive feelings, but usually when you have positive feelings, you just want to enjoy them.
0:28:03 – Speaker 3
So you don’t get the best yeah.
0:28:08 – Speaker 1
So you could sort of do a shorthand version in your head. I’m feeling great and it’s probably because these four needs are being met and are really good way for me right now.
0:28:16 – Speaker 2
The reframe on that I think is interesting is that it’s about these needs being met, as opposed to I’m having a great day because the sun is shining right, instead of I’m having a great day because my need to feel connected to something bigger than myself is being you know met.
0:28:34 – Speaker 3
That’s a really good point.
0:28:37 – Speaker 2
We often find these external things that we can connect with or say that we feel good about, as opposed to the needs that we have. I think that’s really interesting yeah.
0:28:52 – Speaker 1
It’s been a Bible eye-opener for me. I have come to believe and I don’t know that everybody shares this thinking that every feeling that I will experience, positive or negative, is a function of needs either being that or not being that. It’s just the one-to-one relationship. That’s how it works.
0:29:09 – Speaker 3
I mean when you what’s?
0:29:13 – Speaker 2
the word Break it down Right when you get down to its core, raw sense are my needs being met?
0:29:24 – Speaker 3
Because somebody could say something or do something or be something today, when your quote-unquote needs are being met, and you’ll have one response, and tomorrow the exact same scenario. But your need is off, something’s off. It will affect you differently.
0:29:41 – Speaker 2
And the compilation of people that are in your life impact that. So if I need my partner to fill a certain amount of needs, but of those 10 needs, 8 of them are being fulfilled by my closest girlfriends, then I only need him to fulfill 2. But if my closest girlfriends are only fulfilling 4, then I’m going to be putting more on him.
0:30:03 – Speaker 1
Right.
0:30:03 – Speaker 2
To fulfill 6.
0:30:05 – Speaker 1
Right. Well, that one should be like repeated, because that is a very important sort of recognition of how the needs play out between partners and community.
0:30:16 – Speaker 2
That’s really strong Because of what we put on our partner.
0:30:21 – Speaker 1
Yeah. Yeah, our expectations there seems to be like this increasing dynamic in our Western culture that your partner needs to be your meter of all needs and it’s like, please don’t do that, that is so dangerous.
0:30:36 – Speaker 3
We talk about that all the time.
0:30:41 – Speaker 2
Yeah, you think that’s a Western experience that we have created, that we expect our partners to be the ones who fulfill that for us.
0:30:57 – Speaker 1
I think more and more that’s the case because we have elevated this idea of self-reliance, that you stand up your family as a singular unit. You have your own white picket fence, you’ve got your own household. You are separated by tens or hundreds of miles from the ancestral line of your family, the parents, the grandparents, their cities away, states away, and we exalt this. We mark it as a sign of strength and success. In other cultures it’s not the case. It takes a village is a real thing. They’re very much connected with community. They’re very much connected in their ancestral lines. They have parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles. That whole reality is very much alive. And it’s not a mark of you can’t do it on your own. It’s a sign of strength to have a family in that way. I think that there’s a real difference in terms of how we view things in the Western culture. That has cost us in many important ways.
0:32:00 – Speaker 2
You’re describing my family cult without even knowing it. So we built a house two years ago and my parents lived in Syracuse, new York. My brother lives about 10 minutes up the road from me and we had a lot of conversations about what does the future look like in terms of their aging, in terms of where they’re going to be, where my brother and I are going to be, what does our family circumstance look like, and we went through a million different options them building a house, us building a house, them moving into an apartment, us staying where we are all of these different things and ultimately we decided that we were going to create a shared home environment where my parents have an in-law house attached to my house and in between our two houses is essentially this completely separate area where we have a laundry room and a pantry and a coat closet Right. So we each have separate living quarters. They have their own entrances from the garage. We are the only ones who have an entrance down to our basement, so if they want to go into the basement, they can, but they have to come over on our side and part of my thinking associated with that was one it’s so important for my son to have that really close connection and relationship with his grandparents, because I had a very close relationship with my grandparents and that was really big as a part of my upbringing.
Two I have always had a good relationship with my parents. My parents are very helpful, supportive, just like emotionally connecting with me, type of people that I enjoy being around. And there are another set of hands. We now have four adults in my house for one child, which is incredible. So something as small, as you know Carter, getting up in the morning, having breakfast ready, being taken to school, going to Taekwondo. You know, participating in all of these things is now a shared responsibility across our family and I never once had a thought in my mind oh well, I have to do this because Mark and I just can’t manage this on our own. We were fine. We lived for seven years completely on our own with Carter. Right, we maybe was a little more messy, but we definitely made it work, right, there was no concern about that, but it was much more about the sense of I want to be close to my family and I want to grow with my family and they’re meaningful and important to me and I want us all to work together in this communal living environment.
0:34:37 – Speaker 1
Yeah, and when you tell people about that, are you getting like girl, you’re out of your damn mind, Like what kind of reactions are you getting?
0:34:47 – Speaker 2
I get mixed bag One. A majority of the reactions are there is not a chance in hell I would live with my parents living next door, yeah Right. And then the other reactions I get is oh my God, I’m so jealous because it would be so much easier if I had a healthier relationship with my parents and they lived next door.
0:35:05 – Speaker 1
Sure.
0:35:05 – Speaker 2
Now, don’t, don’t get me wrong. There there’s some stuff right, as with as with every family right. I like to joke that my mom is just exacerbated all the time. She’s like just nervous constantly about everything, right, and I’m like my gosh, we don’t need to like holy cow and she jokes with me that I’m just on my tranks and I don’t care about anything, right. So we definitely have different ways, but we had to communicate through a lot of that stuff. We’ve had to figure out what are their needs, what are our needs? Like even something as small as how do they expect my son to be taken care of? Is that their responsibility or my responsibility, mine and Mark’s responsibility?
0:35:46 – Speaker 1
That’s a lot easier to kind of quantify and articulate that piece about the individual day-to-day aspects of care. But what you said a moment ago is a lot harder to sort of wrap your head around and quantify this idea that, well, what does it look like to be in the energy of a person who is constantly exasperated, and then how does another person respond and help to address that energy in a positive and productive way? Never going to get that education outside of having the consistent experience of you and your mom interacting in that relationship and how valuable for that to be present in his life.
0:36:25 – Speaker 2
Yes, and how we bring humor into that, right? Because my mom will have this exacerbated response to the fact that a jelly bean fell on the floor and I’ll be like, mom, are we serious right now? The level of like, oh my goodness, that just happened, like it really just doesn’t, it doesn’t matter, right. And then she’ll be like, well, maybe it matters to me and I’ll be like, maybe it does, but maybe keep that shit to yourself, because you had me running from downstairs thinking someone’s arm flew off right. And then we’ll start to laugh, right, and we’ll both communicate Like I have a need that you’re not exasperating, like huh, in the event that something really tragic didn’t happen, and she has a need to express the fact that when she’s in a moment, she needs to be present in that moment, regardless of who’s around right, and when we’re both in the same house, we need to figure out how we’re going to manage that while my kid stares at both of us like, well, you guys are nuts, you guys are absolutely nuts.
0:37:26 – Speaker 1
Yeah, so I would, if I may suggest, when communicating about what you experience, when you observe that energy is to speak about it. Like when I observe this heightened energy of bordering on panic. With this energy, what happens for me is that my need for a calm and peaceful experience, that’s a need that everyone’s going to hear she’ll understand that need herself gets impacted and from that I feel these ways. This is what comes up when my need and those things are sort of being compromised. I feel this. So here’s my request.
That’s the general format that you get into from nonviolent communication. It starts with that observation like here’s the example they have I hear you say you won’t have the report complete until next week, that it goes to the feeling, and I’m feeling some frustration and concern. Then you talk about the needs. It’s important to me that our team is timely on reports so our production team can be efficient. Then to the request Would you tell me what is preventing you from completing the report and what our team might do to get it finished by 4pm tomorrow? So that’s the cycle, right. It’s observations, feelings, needs and requests.
0:38:43 – Speaker 2
Observations, feelings, needs and requests. Do you want to know what would make all? Of that a whole lot easier Colt.
0:38:48 – Speaker 1
Hey, what’s that?
0:38:50 – Speaker 2
If I felt that when I put an observation, a need and a request into the universe, someone actually gave a shit. Okay, so right back.
0:39:01 – Speaker 1
Here’s what I want to encourage is that we want to make sure that we’re communicating with your actual feelings and relative to needs that that other person knows well.
0:39:16 – Speaker 2
What if you’re not clear that they know those feelings well Right.
0:39:23 – Speaker 1
So as a highly sensitive person.
0:39:25 – Speaker 2
I can tell you from a needs-based experience whatever Rebecca brings to me, I’m there for it, right, because I’m highly empathic. I’m in her experience. Even if I’ve never experienced it myself, I’m right there with her. I might as well have been experiencing it, right? But when you are an introverted, highly sensitive person, you’re not going to be a highly sensitive, highly empathic person, the trifecta of all feelings, right?
And you are someone that often does not feel that people feel things at the level that you do, understands needs at the level that you do, right, that you are, for all intents and purposes, on this island. And that’s to circle back around to what we talked about before. There’s a constant feeling of disappointment that, yes, people will get to a seven out of 10 with me, but very rarely will people get to a 10 out of 10, where it hits me to a point where I’m like, wow, that gave back to me at a level that I felt very seen, I felt a little uncomfortable, I felt vulnerable, right, I mean that happened during the conversation today, cole, when I said oh, wow, is this what it feels like to have a conversation with me, right To the point where maybe I need to dial that down a little bit because wow, that’s a lot, that’s good stuff, right, but I think that all of that plays into at least my own.
I’d love for you to speak about this, because I know you feel things also deeply, but in a little bit of a different way, that I think I have a hard time not expressing my needs and expressing myself and expressing my opinions. I feel like I do that often for people. It’s what happens with that. That usually makes me want to crawl into a hole and be like well, that’s great. I literally just was super vulnerable about what my needs and feelings were and it got trampled or it was dismissed Right, right, yeah, yeah, in some way shape or form, Did you?
0:41:21 – Speaker 1
when you expressed that, I really appreciate you sharing all this. This is exactly. I’ll first say that I don’t consider myself a person who experiences at the same amplitude, right Like the magnitude of the experience of feelings. As I observe, I’m not in the high amplitude feelings feeler. I know that that’s true about myself. As you talk about this sense of you’ve communicated to another person what your needs are, have you also made specific and discrete requests? Yes, Okay.
Right out to I’ll write them all down and tell you exactly what to do step by step is still don’t happen.
0:42:02 – Speaker 3
Okay, there you go. So here’s where the fear happens, because this is what you’re afraid of is that you’ve shared it and you’ve been explicit about that.
0:42:12 – Speaker 1
This need not being met creates these feelings for me and I have the request from you that looks like this About those needs getting that Yup, it is possible that in these communications you learn about another person that they are not interested in meeting the requests for your needs.
0:42:29 – Speaker 2
Is it that they’re not interested or not capable? And is there a difference? There is a difference, there’s certainly a difference.
0:42:36 – Speaker 1
You know, like that, if you’re getting the sense that they have, they’re aware that they lack the capacity or understanding of how or whatever, and they’re communicating to you in that regard. I’m unclear on how to do that. I don’t have the instincts to make that happen. I want to. I want to learn how. I’m interested in becoming a person who can consistently meet your needs in this way. That’s one thing. If it’s like you make the request and you’ve made the request however many times over however many months or years, and you can see it ain’t happening, you gotta make a choice.
0:43:16 – Speaker 2
Thanks for coming today, folks, I know I can’t, can’t do it. Thanks for coming. And that right there is the valley in which I struggle constantly. Constantly because I have a very hard time discerning the difference between people who are incapable and people who are choosing not to, and my go-to is constantly incapable, which makes sense because I’m a mental health provider and my job has always been to sit with people and to help them be capable. So it’s very hard for me to sit with people who I feel are incapable of being able to do these things and see it as a desire not to, especially when I see these moments of growth and connection and ability to meet those needs, and then I get my hopes up that I’m like see, it is capable, it is possible we can do these things, only to then be disappointed, to then be in a situation where I’m like God again, are we just at a new level of not being able? Did we master that one level? And then now we’re at this new level, right, and very recently I’ve gotten to a point where I just said this to you the other day Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe it doesn’t matter if you’re incapable or if you’re just not doing it. Maybe the beginning, middle and end of the story is I’m not getting my needs met.
And then to your point, cole, then you have to make a decision right and that point right. There is the point that feels to me like a get to the cliff. And then I got to back up and I get to the cliff. And I got to back up because I have this incredibly difficult empathic connection to not giving up on people. I will do it to spite myself 100% of the time. I will do it to the anger of friends and family and my partner, who will look around and be like, oh my gosh, why are people reacting in this way? You deserve better than that, right. I will hear all of those things and still not do it because of this. I don’t know. I don’t know what it is, but it’s this real difficulty.
0:45:39 – Speaker 1
It’s a need. It’s a need. Okay, get the card out. You got to name that need. You got to name the need. What is it?
0:45:44 – Speaker 2
Put the card out, Cole. What are the fricking cards? What’s the unmet need?
0:45:50 – Speaker 1
Look if you want to like, if you want the shorthand, go look for the NVC needs list. You’ll have it. All the cards come from the NVC needs list. If you want to know what needs are at play. There is a need for you that’s happening there. I’m holding right now nurturance, but nurturance is from you to sorry, is from another to you. There’s something in this deck, something in the needs that is happening for you.
You have a need to be in support of those people to see people succeed, but those aren’t going to be on the list. You need to uncover and uncover and peel back until you get to the need that you’re meeting with that action and then decide which one. If you got this one need being met with this action versus these 10 needs that aren’t being met, then you have to say, like you know what this one need isn’t actually worth all these needs.
0:46:40 – Speaker 3
I think I know what it is.
0:46:41 – Speaker 2
I can’t wait. This is me being real vulnerable here you guys.
Let me tell you what my need is to share this with you and not have you move on to talk about something else immediately, because this is going to be. This is interesting. I was talking. We have a wine club with girls up the street once a month. In the wine club we were talking about a bunch of different hilarious things, but one of the things that came up was my pattern of being a savior.
When you really start to look underneath this pattern of being a savior and you look at my past relationships and you look at my past friendships and you look at my inability to go deeply with people because I just have to keep it surface level, I was reminded in this conversation by, again, my therapist that I had a long time ago struck in like 10 to 12 years ago, that I absolutely loved he.
Whenever a theme would come up in our conversations, he would write it down, an index card and he would give me the index card. I still have one of the index cards because it resonated so deeply with me personally. I’m not going to get it right because I don’t remember exactly what it said, but it was something along the lines of I have a need to be a savior, because if I’m not a savior, I have no worth, I have no meaning and I have no desire for people to connect with me. The need there is my own sense of worthiness, my own sense of being important enough for people, my own sense of needing to bring value, because in some way, if I’m not bringing you value, you have no need for me.
0:48:27 – Speaker 1
Stop.
0:48:31 – Speaker 3
Don’t look at me, look at me.
0:48:34 – Speaker 2
I know, I know.
0:48:38 – Speaker 1
That’s a big on-tack right there. I appreciate you sharing that Rebecca’s going to throw up.
0:48:44 – Speaker 2
I know it is just so perfect with our trash hats on, I know.
0:48:50 – Speaker 3
I know. I don’t know how you’re not crying right now. Are you holding it back? It’s my Prozac.
0:48:56 – Speaker 2
I love that shit. It’s really good for me.
0:49:00 – Speaker 1
Great Cole, you’re invited back in 10 years.
0:49:03 – Speaker 2
Yeah, guess what? No more guests.
0:49:04 – Speaker 3
I’m going to make that one. But see, this is where my protection of you comes out so fucking fierce, because I see the people who are an energy suck and take for granted an advantage of that about you. The fact that they don’t even see that blows my mind.
0:49:25 – Speaker 2
Don’t see that. That’s where it’s coming from for me, yes.
0:49:29 – Speaker 3
They don’t know you well enough to know that you will not sleep all night for their dumb ass, stupid problem that’s been on repeat for fucking three years. Yep See, now I’m getting angry. I got to get out of that, I know.
0:49:44 – Speaker 2
No, it’s perfect. People relate with you and I think that people, when they genuine. This is how you show your love, this is always how you show your love. Right Is in protection and in turn it off and in you know. You care about me so deeply that one you want to make sure that no one is taking advantage of that, but also you’re someone who sees me to the depths of my being and cannot possibly understand how there would be any level of association with worthiness associated with being a savior.
0:50:23 – Speaker 3
I mean I can, based on you dissecting it. However, what I cannot understand is why other people don’t see it, why other people cannot see it. It is so clear to me I don’t even know what happens.
0:50:39 – Speaker 1
If a person sees that Don’t, they have to accept that they are a person being saved.
0:50:44 – Speaker 3
Jesus, why’d you win? I don’t know, I don’t know.
0:50:50 – Speaker 2
Oh, my God, good Lord, thank God Scott can’t talk today. He’s in the back bubble. Oh my God, oh great. Thank you for the clapping, thank you. Tonight on a special episode. We have to see themselves as being saved.
0:51:09 – Speaker 3
Maybe that’s because I’m so clear I need to be saved on the way. Yeah, you just accepted it from the very beginning.
0:51:14 – Speaker 1
You’re like save me, Lord Save me.
0:51:16 – Speaker 3
Oh Lord, I mean, I think it ties in I’m just like angel Jesus. Aaron, save me.
0:51:21 – Speaker 1
I think it ties in with this idea of we were talking about the sort of the Western culture has exalted this. You know this independent perfection being Like if you need help from somebody, if you need community, if you need a confidant, if you need anybody to elevate you well, you blew it.
0:51:39 – Speaker 2
Get over your shit.
0:51:41 – Speaker 1
Get it together and carry on soldier Like we’re just. We have just valued so many tragic things honestly In other cultures. This idea that I do need. I recognize that my needs get met by these eight people Right, and that doesn’t mean that I needed saving. It means that I am a person who’s benefiting from an amazing community people.
0:52:03 – Speaker 3
Yep, but I think that comes back to what he just made me think of when you asked me the question about how did I know my quote unquote role or my place in the world and how am I so comfortable there? Not that I don’t want to grow, be pushed or anything like that, but I’m very clear that I want to remain here because that allows me to do X, y and Z. I don’t have the need to compete with anyone ever. Like you do you man? I’m going to do me and maybe we can do something together. Maybe we can. You know all the things, but I don’t ever feel the need to do something that makes me look better than someone else or be more successful or be have a better title or more money or better things.
0:52:52 – Speaker 2
What’s the need in that Cole? The need to fit in.
0:52:56 – Speaker 1
She said there is no need. I mean, that’s, that’s, that’s really. I don’t have a need. I’m very, very need for the need. Yeah.
0:53:01 – Speaker 3
But that’s what I’m saying. Like it doesn’t, my needs are met. In that way, I feel very confident and very comfortable where other people who are constantly striving or changing jobs are this because they have this need to be an authority or a expert.
0:53:18 – Speaker 1
Or a self-made man or woman.
0:53:20 – Speaker 2
Yes, yes, and you’ve always been you always have Always. Just people have fun like hey. Would you like to take over this executive director role and you’re like I would rather not?
0:53:32 – Speaker 3
You can double my salary, and I was still saying no.
0:53:34 – Speaker 2
Yeah.
0:53:35 – Speaker 3
And that’s always, always surprised me.
0:53:38 – Speaker 2
But it’s so natural. You just stay in your lane. You know your lane really well, but I’m not.
0:53:45 – Speaker 3
But please don’t hear me say I’m never trying to grow, get better, expand, nothing like that. I believe everybody should do that.
0:53:51 – Speaker 2
But yeah, yeah. Well, that’s the whole Gail and Oprah thing, right?
0:53:57 – Speaker 1
You don’t desire to be.
0:53:58 – Speaker 2
Oprah no Right.
0:53:59 – Speaker 1
No, yeah, I think that accepting help from others threatens people’s sense of their own. Solo I got this capacity, which I don’t believe in.
0:54:12 – Speaker 3
Yeah, I don’t think that that’s the way we need to be, but it is.
0:54:16 – Speaker 1
I agree with you. It is a value that we’ve elevated, and it’s problematic.
0:54:20 – Speaker 2
Hmm, it is problematic because, well, for many reasons, but I think you want to talk about self-worth. When people are constantly feeling like they can’t show that true, authentic version of themselves for fear that if they put that out there, that it’s not accepted, it’s not valued, it’s not okay, then that’s what continues to perpetuate the cycle of hurt associated with people like me.
0:54:47 – Speaker 1
Hmm.
0:54:48 – Speaker 2
So if, out of 10 people that I’m looking to save, if 10 out of 10 of those people were like you, oh, I need to be saved in these particular ways, right? Hmm, I don’t need to be saved in these other ways, but I do need help in these ways. And this is how our relationship works really, really well, because I don’t let you over save and you don’t let me do this other thing, right, hmm, then wouldn’t we be able to balance each other out so much more? Hmm, if I’m constantly trying to save and someone is trying to convince everyone around them that they don’t need to be saved, including me, then we’re constantly going to do that dance back and forth that continues to perpetuate.
0:55:33 – Speaker 3
I don’t like how I feel right now. That continues there is.
0:55:37 – Speaker 1
So the first thing I want to ask you, erin, is you made a specific request that, as you’re going to share, as vulnerable as you did, that you wanted. You were just asking us to take the time to unpack it with you. I want to ask you if you feel like that need has been met.
0:55:50 – Speaker 2
I do and I appreciate you asking that.
0:55:55 – Speaker 1
Right on, I want. I want to make a suggestion about us using this language, the word specifically of saved, supported. I love it more. Saved is harder for people to accept that they need and it’s also more burdensome for the person doing the saving. Yeah, somewhere between saving others and this idea that I got from a great friend of mine, sarah Armstrong, of having a personal board of directors which is super lightweight and exalting everybody who’s there, like, oh, you’d want to board of directors, oh, everybody you’d select would have to be gifted in some way. It’s like well, that’s a lot easier to feel like you’re on somebody’s personal board of directors than you’re on their last leg of life savior team. So but even though that’s what you know, I get it, I know why the language is being used and I know how dire the circumstances can feel that that saving can feel like a very appropriate word. But I want to just make a suggestion to offload some of the energy in that language. Yeah, because I think we’ll find it easier.
0:56:52 – Speaker 2
Yeah, it’s a really good point. I want to Right Now that I’m able to, since last Saturday when it first came out and I was reminded that index card right, I’m like the word savior is not a word that is that I associate with myself.
0:57:08 – Speaker 1
Right.
0:57:08 – Speaker 2
Because that does put people in a one down position. It says that you need to be saved, Right. So that isn’t. I do want to use different wording and at the same time, I’m very clear that if you were to ask me what I feel like my role is associated with myself worth, it would still be the word savior. So it’s not the word I would want to use and it feels so deep rooted to me that that’s what needs to be unpacked. That’s what needs to be.
0:57:36 – Speaker 3
You know it’s interesting because when you use the word supporter, when you first said let’s change the word save to supporter or savior to supporter, I immediately went absolutely not because the word supporter allows you to keep hanging. Really it allows you to keep hanging with them and allows you to keep perpetuating this need to be met and it will still never be met.
0:57:56 – Speaker 2
Wow, and you know what I thought when he said supporter that’s not deep enough, isn’t that fascinating. When he said supporter, I thought whoa, that’s like hey, buddy, let me just. That’s what I mean.
0:58:10 – Speaker 3
I guess that’s what I’m saying, but I’m saying that that’s not enough.
0:58:15 – Speaker 2
I mean just hit you on the arm and be like, hey, good luck, pal Right, that doesn’t feel deep enough for me, for you. You keep saying no, she still now has an opportunity to have to keep hanging with these people and I would rather you just be like. This ain’t working for me. Good luck to you. Gone, I know.
0:58:36 – Speaker 1
So in the word supporter you’re feeling like an energy of an enabler.
0:58:39 – Speaker 2
Yeah, Me or her?
0:58:43 – Speaker 1
Rebecca.
0:58:45 – Speaker 3
Not enabler, because I don’t think you’re an enabler. And an enabler to me is the one who’s listening or giving in or constantly quote unquote, supporting. When I hear supporter in her context, it’s she will hang with you, she will talk through all the things, she will give you her absolute advice or opinion, even if you don’t want to hear it. But she’s still hanging with you. Where I’m saying cut that shit, loose you. It’s too much of a burden, it’s too much of an energy suck where. So enabler is not it? Because I don’t view you as an enabler at all.
Does that make sense? Am I explaining that?
0:59:25 – Speaker 2
Supporter is still. You think that’s still too much for me. You don’t even want me to be in the supporter category. What?
0:59:32 – Speaker 3
word would you use? No, I do want you to be in a supporter category, but what I’m saying is, if he eliminated the savior word and moved it to supporter, you will always Remain in a place where your need is not met.
0:59:46 – Speaker 1
Wow, that’s a really good insight.
0:59:48 – Speaker 3
Always because for you, what do I need to move to Savior? You don’t want to be a savior. You don’t want to make people feel like they need to be saved, so that’s going to make you feel uncomfortable. Does that make sense? I?
1:00:00 – Speaker 1
need help, I need help, I can, so let me try it yeah, please. Here’s what I’m hearing is that is, that if we, if we downgrade the language around what you’re doing From savior to supporter the weight of what it’s costing, you kind of comes off, even though you’re playing the exact same damn role.
1:00:23 – Speaker 3
Do you want to be?
1:00:24 – Speaker 1
the savior of eight different people, wow. Ask yourself that question with the magnitude of that word, and then decide that’s what I want to be, rather than allow you to sneak through the under the bar with the word supporter.
1:00:38 – Speaker 3
Wow. Well, you can decide to be a supporter. How come, when other people say the same same things, I say you get it immediately. I can’t.
1:00:48 – Speaker 2
I thought you were saying don’t even go to supporter, go to, I hate everyone and we’re not talking about any what it got you. You’re saying don’t let this bedge off the hook. You call her a savior. You let her know what she is. She needs to feel every moment of that savior, because you know I don’t like that. I know, I don’t want to have to be a savior.
1:01:08 – Speaker 3
I know. That’s why, if you went to supporter, it’s like, oh, that feels good, and like I feel like this is my lane, you do not let her off the hook.
1:01:14 – Speaker 2
She is not a supporter, she’s a savior. In fact, I’m calling her that every single day, so she has to see it right in her face and be like oh, I don’t, I don’t want that attached to me Well good, Change it. Yeah, that’s nuts. Holy therapy hour here, folks. A few things are clear to me.
1:01:35 – Speaker 1
One this trashy hat is still as awesome as it was in the beginning of this conversation.
1:01:40 – Speaker 2
Okay, it’s even better when you’re talking about important things. Number two Colt is as amazing as I said he was in the beginning. I know Number three there are no more guests.
1:01:50 – Speaker 1
We’re all done. That’s what it’s too much.
1:01:53 – Speaker 3
We are all done.
1:01:54 – Speaker 2
Thank you for being the alpha and the omega of the guests here, Colt all done.
1:01:59 – Speaker 3
It’s because she doesn’t like being on my side of the situation. Nope.
1:02:02 – Speaker 2
Number three. I know or no four. I think we’re on four. I am now the one who’s dead inside, so congratulations. The new podcast is about Rebecca taking you all on her hippie dude Jerry, when she remembers her cards. We’re going to drink our Dunkin Donuts, we’re going to rub some rocks and that’s what you’re going to get from us from now on, from now on, so welcome.
Congratulations in all seriousness, even though that was all 100% serious, 100% serious. Colt, you’re welcome back on the show when Rebecca is the only one here Anytime. I’m really happy that Scott could not chime in. I can’t even imagine Scott Scott’s. I can’t even imagine what he would say during this conversation.
1:02:53 – Speaker 3
I’m visualizing and I’m preparing myself for the ride home.
1:02:56 – Speaker 2
Oh, ride home. I hope you are, I know, I hope you are I hope your afternoon’s clear.
1:03:01 – Speaker 3
I probably the evening too. Yeah, you’re not kidding.
1:03:04 – Speaker 2
Holy cow. But in all reality, if anyone after this is like you know what? I need more Colt in my life.
1:03:12 – Speaker 1
Right, how do they get?
1:03:14 – Speaker 2
in touch with you. Colt for all of your services.
1:03:17 – Speaker 1
Yeah, well, great, thank you for asking that. I mean I invite the email, right? I mean, what do you say? You have you? Well, when it was a thousand people, I was intimidated, but since you cut it back to six, that’s right yeah. I invite outreach to Colt Bryner at Gmail, bri NER, and would be delighted to hear anybody who’s got stories about their own pink pencils, how they’ve experienced that in their personal life, in their work life. This is part of my own purpose and mission and I love having conversations about this stuff.
1:03:48 – Speaker 2
Do you still have your podcast, colt?
1:03:51 – Speaker 1
I don’t have that podcast for at least the time being. Sarah was offered a really great role with a company that she just needed to give her full focus to.
1:04:01 – Speaker 2
Oh, awesome for her.
1:04:04 – Speaker 1
All blessings for her to be in that role. I think it’s fantastic and I actually think that that company is going to have a real impact on American healthcare, so I’m all about it.
1:04:12 – Speaker 2
That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Well, you’re just backburnered for right now, but you can always come on the More Love podcast whenever you need your fix. That’s right, yeah.
1:04:21 – Speaker 1
We’ll see the feedback you get and then you let me know.
1:04:23 – Speaker 2
Oh yeah, I’m not reading the comments this time. How about that? How about that? Were we supposed to end with an empathy problem? We sure were. Is that happening today? Hell, no, we are all done. We are all done for today, folks. Imagine if I actually did bring my oils. Yeah Right, I need yeah to bathe in it. I’m not sure which one, but whatever. So this is from one trashy hat signing off to another saying thanks for joining us on the More Love podcast. I loved that Me too. Isn’t empathy amazing?
1:04:56 – Speaker 3
Well, we’re amazing. I don’t know about all this empathy stuff.
1:05:00 – Speaker 2
That’s fine. I accept you wherever you are. Oh God, I love you. I love you too, and if you love us, please like and subscribe to More Love the power of empathy podcast, wherever you get your podcasts. See you next time.
Hey, it’s me, Erin. Thanks for joining us on the More Love podcast. Do not tell Rebecca, but this podcast is about empathy. She likes people to think she’s dead inside, but the truth is she’s a big time feeler who has truly helped me uncover that empathy is my superpower. Here she comes.
0:00:28 – Speaker 3
Hey, Bestie, Hi love.
0:00:30 – Speaker 2
What are you doing? Oh, just getting ready to host a podcast. A podcast About what Life? Our life as best friends who are more like sisters. Yay, I love us and I can’t wait to share our stories with the world, Especially the ones that involve us pushing each other right To be our most authentic selves.
0:00:50 – Speaker 3
Oh man Okay.
0:00:56 – Speaker 2
Welcome back to our seven remaining listeners after last week’s podcast where Rebecca went off on ASMR and pissed some people off.
0:01:07 – Speaker 3
Well, I’m so sorry to you.
0:01:10 – Speaker 2
ASMR lovers. I actually don’t know if that’s true, but I just watched back that episode in preparation for it going posted and I’m like, wow, you had a lot of feelings about that. You had a lot of feelings.
0:01:24 – Speaker 3
Well, you didn’t warn me.
0:01:26 – Speaker 2
What? That we were going to talk about that? Yeah, you said we’re going to watch these videos. Yeah, and then I’m like, how did you feel about?
0:01:32 – Speaker 3
that you knew I was going to have a reaction. I know.
0:01:35 – Speaker 2
Well, I thought you’re just going to have a lot of questions. I didn’t think you were going to throw fire.
0:01:38 – Speaker 1
Oh well, you threw some fire, don’t you know me? You threw some fire.
0:01:42 – Speaker 2
So yes, welcome back. We did have 1,008 listeners and now we’re down to six, so it’s fine. Do you see my hat today? I do. Are you a little bit jealous or a lot of bit jealous?
0:01:55 – Speaker 3
I said to you if you, I’m actually curled my hair today and if you bust out something I’m going to have to wear, oh, you mean like a hat oh wow, you know what’s funny it was happening at school today. Oh, yeah, it was pink.
0:02:11 – Speaker 2
It was a pink one. Here’s your pink hat.
0:02:15 – Speaker 1
Listen I saw you did this at the fair.
0:02:18 – Speaker 2
You did.
0:02:19 – Speaker 3
I saw you post a picture. You’re like something about bring back white trash.
0:02:23 – Speaker 2
I don’t understand why this isn’t a thing I used to be. What do you mean?
0:02:27 – Speaker 3
When, when we were in college. Oh, college Like the Van. Dutch years. What’s that? Van doi, van Dutch, you know. See, like Colton knows what I’m talking about.
0:02:36 – Speaker 2
Don’t ask Scott, we’re not talking to Scott today we can’t talk to Scott Actually, we could talk all about Scott, because he can’t respond.
0:02:42 – Speaker 3
I need to. I need to bring it back to the Van Dutch.
0:02:45 – Speaker 2
Is that how you say it?
0:02:46 – Speaker 3
Van Dutch. There is an entire docu series on Netflix, hulu one of them, because it involves murder, scam, the whole thing. What is Van Dutch? It’s a, it’s a clothing brand. Oh, that, like Paris Hilton, made famous when she was on that simple life Like did she have one of these hats.
0:03:07 – Speaker 2
Yes, she did Everybody?
0:03:09 – Speaker 3
did you act like? I thought this was?
0:03:12 – Speaker 2
something I just. Every time I go past these hats at the fair, I’m like these are trash. I love these. And when I was talking to the woman, she’s like well, what do you want on it? And I’m like I want hearts. I need the background to be teal, blue with black. You even got to pick the. The trashier the better. The whole thing. I love these. I really do not understand why these are not a thing. They are now. They sure are. I wish I had one for you, col.
0:03:44 – Speaker 1
I wish I I’ll send one to you, I would rock it yeah.
0:03:48 – Speaker 2
I think I feel like he would have a green one. Oh, is it because he is?
0:03:52 – Speaker 3
green behind his head right now.
0:03:53 – Speaker 2
I don’t know. It just strikes me that he’s he’d be green. I disagree. I say navy blue, and navy blue is fine too. Oh, okay, yep, that’s fine too. Okay, say Colt on it.
0:04:02 – Speaker 3
Speaking of hearts and absolutely. Oh, he’s one of us. Okay, he doesn’t get his own brand.
0:04:08 – Speaker 1
Oh welcome to the.
0:04:08 – Speaker 2
Moorlof podcast. This is how we do it over here. We got introduced Colt before we introduced Colt. Why don’t we do hippie voodoo shop? Oh wait, we can’t today. Why not, Rebecca? Because I was so hyper focused.
0:04:24 – Speaker 3
I was hyper focused on being on time because we have a guest and always I’m late, always and I was just focusing on the fact that we had a guest and so I forgot my bag of Chutch geese. Yes, and I am naked. This feels very weird, and then you wouldn’t even share any of your Chutch geese with me.
0:04:39 – Speaker 2
Nope, nope, I’m going to take a picture. She has literally one little mini jug of water in front of her and she has her little like set for her earphones. What’s in front of me, rebecca? All the, all the good things, oh, can I at least have the absolutely not? Absolutely not, I have. How does this feel? By the way, it feels terrible. How does it feel? I’d like to remind you of a time we were on a plane and you would not allow me to use your neck pillow because I had forgotten mine at home, and every two seconds you said what? Oh, you like my neck pillow? Do you want to see it? This is so comfortable. This is the best neck pillow I’ve ever had. Right, because?
0:05:14 – Speaker 1
I would you like to see my rocks over here.
0:05:16 – Speaker 2
You can’t touch them. I’m going to rub them all right now, touching them all, every single one of them. Oh, I have a candle over here that you wanted on yours, and when I did, I said can I at least have the candle?
0:05:26 – Speaker 3
You said absolutely not, Nope.
0:05:28 – Speaker 2
Nope, I have two jugs of water. I have the thing over here to be able to push if I want to turn it off, do you?
0:05:34 – Speaker 3
want to pay back, so yeah, whatever, I’m so good.
0:05:38 – Speaker 2
And you know where the empathy is right now Dumpster, dumpster, fire Gone. So I would love to set an affirmation for today, I’ll take care of it myself.
0:05:48 – Speaker 3
I’m sure it says release all the things, I’ll take care of it myself. It says be yourself.
0:05:53 – Speaker 2
Whoever? You want to be. So, colts, we are going to shuffle.
0:05:59 – Speaker 1
I’m observing the most empathetic communication. It’s really going places, it’s needs-based.
0:06:06 – Speaker 2
It’s needs-based.
0:06:07 – Speaker 3
There’s some user frustration in my place.
0:06:10 – Speaker 2
There’s some user frustration, so I’m going to shuffle these cards and if you could hang on, that was a bad shuffle. If you could let me know when to stop Colt, that would be great.
0:06:21 – Speaker 1
Can we just take the fourth card from the top right now?
0:06:23 – Speaker 3
Wow, wow. That is very specific.
0:06:26 – Speaker 2
We sure can, we sure can your two energies are right on my tail. We sure can. Here we go. Here we go. Can’t wait to see what it has to say. Okay, ready, colt. This is our affirmation for today that we’re going to set. I know that each step I take toward one dream creates momentum for the next. I am moving forward. That’s a good one. I’m talking to Colt.
0:06:53 – Speaker 3
It’s a very good one. This is very, very good. Wow, there’s rules. Did I get the?
0:06:58 – Speaker 1
rulebook Did you guys have like a yellow card?
0:07:02 – Speaker 3
and a whistle that was about to get busted out of the stand. We’re going to have a refereed that’s usually Scott. It’s going to be Scott, yeah.
0:07:08 – Speaker 2
Usually Scott in his little bubble tells us. I know that each step I take toward one dream creates momentum for the next. I am moving forward. What you’re lucky that you don’t have to experience today, colt, is you do not need to put any oil on your inner armpits, you do not need to rub any of these rocks and you do not need to have Rebecca try and read tiny little print on a card to tell you what your intention is for the day, but she can’t and always comes up with an excuse. Oh, it’s blue on black. Oh, this text is so small.
0:07:45 – Speaker 3
Oh, I left my things at home. No because you don’t let me. It’s too small. Fine, next week we’re switching. How does it feel?
0:07:52 – Speaker 2
Terrible. It doesn’t feel good, does it? No? So would you like one of these rocks? Yeah, okay.
0:08:00 – Speaker 1
How does that feel when I pass these to you? Does that feel better? Yeah?
0:08:04 – Speaker 2
Okay, maybe don’t be so dead inside. Maybe try to be nicer to people. I want the big one, oh cool.
0:08:13 – Speaker 1
We have a lot to work on here.
0:08:15 – Speaker 2
We do Cool, we do, and we’re so happy that you’re with us to work on it. I am really excited to introduce you to Colt Now. First, I need to say this Colt, we have an interesting history with guests, okay. So I need you to be as prepared as you possibly can be here.
0:08:33 – Speaker 1
We’ve only ever had. Am I about to get on like a watch list?
0:08:35 – Speaker 2
Yeah, we’ve only ever had one guest and then after we had the one guest. People were like he was really nice, he was great. We didn’t get to hear enough Aaron and Rebecca, so how about no more guests? Okay, yeah sure.
Right, so no pressure, but you are guest number two. Guest number two coming on the heels of lots of energy being thrown into the More Love podcast. Yeah, I can dig it. Do I? Do? You think you can hang with that? I sure do. I do too. Sure, do so. Let’s introduce Colt so that he at least has a proper introduction. Mm-hmm, it’s before people start throwing shade.
0:09:22 – Speaker 1
Yeah, it’s either Colt or Strike Two.
0:09:27 – Speaker 2
How many guests will they go to before they stop bringing on guests? No, that’s totally not Colt. So, gosh, colt got introduced to me. Has it been a year? A year now.
0:09:38 – Speaker 1
At least yep, At least a year, yeah so Through Concern Center.
0:09:42 – Speaker 2
And when I say that Colt is a marketing genius, he will blush and hope you like, stop it. Stop it. I’m not, but I really mean that. I mean that with my entire soul. I have never met someone who thinks about things as creatively and as out of the box as Colt does. And the name of his company is Scrappy AF. Yes, you know what the AF stands for. And he is absolutely scrappy because he will do whatever he needs to do to figure out how to get you to the top. And is that why we’re working with him for Concern Center? It sure is. Well, it’s also our motto. What be scrappy? Yeah, absolutely. Do all that, yes, everything you need to do, yes, we very much relate Absolutely.
But I’m telling you, colt, there is something about your soul that speaks to mine. There is something about the way that you process things, think about things. We have been connected in some other life, as Rebecca would like to say. I don’t know if you feel that way, but I do. I do and I just genuinely feel like what you bring to the Concern Center relationship, to our partnership, all of this is something that is so next level. You can’t even. It’s not even tangible. We can’t put it in a box, it is just amazing.
And I know that when we level up for Concern Center and we’ve been leveling up for the last couple of years when we level up to this next level that we’re going to with you, we will be absolutely unstoppable.
0:11:19 – Speaker 1
I love to hear it. I’m very excited about it. Of course, I’ve been tracking the story for a long time. Big believer, I like the energy that’s behind it as well.
0:11:28 – Speaker 2
Awesome. We love it. So tell us, start by telling us just a little bit about maybe your story and how it did Scrappy get started and how did you become such a marketing genius?
0:11:40 – Speaker 1
Well, right on, I’ve been in marketing communications for 23 years. I had started scrappy about three years ago, following my last role as chief marketing officer for a company based out of Cincinnati, and really just kind of observed, because most of the companies that I’ve supported been in the B2B space and they’re really doing a bad job. Yeah.
0:12:02 – Speaker 2
In the B2B sectors to connect with humans.
0:12:05 – Speaker 1
We’ve seen so much great intelligence in the B2C sector like consumer, consumer, packaged goods, household stuff but we do great. I mean consumer brands do a great job of connecting to people emotionally. They understand needs, they understand feelings and they communicate in those spaces. Many go to the B2B sectors and it’s like we forgot that these are still humans, like, yes, it’s business to business, but businesses are people. They’re still people, they’re totally still people and we’ve just absolutely missed the boat on that. And you know, if you bring some of that intelligence from the B2C sectors the business to consumer sectors, into the B2B areas, where no one’s told a fricking joke in 10 years, has no personality, it’s like you can easily help brands absolutely dominate in their sectors and I basically I don’t think I’m a rockstar marketer, but I’m playing in a field where, if you leverage those strategies, you’ll go far fast.
0:13:04 – Speaker 2
Yeah.
But you know what those strategies tap into, cole, is this incredible sense of being able to understand human beings, what their experience is, what they like, what they don’t like, what they think is funny, what takes it a little bit too far.
And in my experience, there’s a great sense of self-awareness and empathy involved in that. I’ve always said I’m not a great marketer right, I am not someone who has any degree of marketing experience whatsoever. But I’m incredibly clear on what moves me, what I like, what I don’t like, what I don’t like, how I feel when I’m watching something, when I see something and I’m like, ooh, that really spoke to me. That is why, every time I see some piece of art or some piece of like marketing design that really speaks to me, I pick that up and I have to have it, because there is something in a human quality associated with that that just touches me in some way. If it doesn’t move me, I’m not interested. So there’s a massive human component to what you’re talking about and I can relate with that and love that, love that, yeah.
0:14:10 – Speaker 1
Yeah, and your authenticity about it is one thing that you say. You’re not a great marketer, but great marketing is authentic and you are a very authentic person. You don’t try to get a person excited. You are excited and that’s what makes them excited. Right? You’re starting in the right place, yeah.
0:14:27 – Speaker 2
Yeah.
0:14:28 – Speaker 1
Like you can see this as like kind of a cycle. If you start from your own excitement, then people get excited. If you start from I want to make this person excited, it doesn’t work the same way, yeah.
0:14:37 – Speaker 2
That’s a really good point.
Such a good point, interesting, right, and what you and I both share, rebecca, is we can’t fake it. Oh, so we couldn’t be out there being. Like you know what I love to do Brush off cars at a car dealership in the middle of winter, get excited about it, right? Because that ain’t it. We do not like that stuff at all, right? And so we can’t fake it. Thank God you love Concern Center, or at least you love me. I don’t know One of the two, but you can at least hang with it in that sense, all right.
So one of the things that we were hoping to talk with you about today I gave you a very long list of this is empathy, and what are these things associated with? Empathy Do you really like and those types of things? And two things popped up for you. One was you don’t have to be vulnerable to be empathic, but you have to be empathic to be vulnerable, something that, ironically, we talked about with our first guest. And then the second one is talking about empathy and needs based communication. Can you say a little bit more in your mind about what needs based communication is and how empathy plays a role in that?
0:15:55 – Speaker 1
I absolutely can. Thank you. Thank you Appreciate that question. I would love to couch my response to that in a little bit of a story.
0:16:06 – Speaker 3
Love it, love stories, love it, we love stories.
0:16:09 – Speaker 1
Like a real story, but you know we can say that it’s based on relevance. So let’s have this fictitious couple, husband and wife in the house together, and I choose the husband or the wife differently each time. This time We’ll have it be. The wife is very distraught. She’s she’s going all through the house trying to find something. She’s trying to find her pink pencils. And she’s gone through all the cabinet. She’s gone through every drawer, flipped up the couch, like she’s in a frantic search for her pink pencils. Husband not engaged, no idea, like she’s she’s heard her say several times can’t find that pink. Not really engaged, not understanding why that’s important, why that’s valuable.
The reason this is instructive for us in the conversation of needs based communication is because this is a very common type of disconnect that occurs between people. There are needs at play here, but they’re not actually being communicated. So she’s trying to find pink pencils and there’s two points of disconnect. There’s the disconnect point of preference and the disconnect point of method. Now I’ll tell you what that means. She uses pink pencils as her preference for when she is journaling, which is her method for meeting her personal need of self expression. So while she’s tearing around the house trying to find pink pencils.
What’s actually a motion for her in this moment is the need for self expression, and it’s a very important need for people. Many people have self expression as a daily need, some people less often, but we all have it as a core common human need, but as a core common human need. And unless the husband comes to understand that the search that she’s on is a search to meet the need her own personal need of self expression, he just hears pink pencils and thinks she’s out of her mind. What we have to do as people is we need to get better at communicating our core needs, rather than communicating in the language of methods, which sometimes people can understand, or the language of preferences, which even less often people understand, and then blaming other people for not understanding our needs. So this is kind of the the table setting for the discussion that I want to have with y’all.
0:18:29 – Speaker 3
First of all, I’m pretty sure that story happened last night in my home. No, but it’s definitely good.
0:18:38 – Speaker 2
But I mean OK, we’re going in here, we’re going in. This is why we don’t have guests. Why can’t we just go back to fart jokes and ASMR and that kind of stuff? Oh my God yeah.
0:18:54 – Speaker 1
Yeah, this is where our language gets sideways, and it happens in the corporate space too, but we’ll start at the personal space. I first got introduced to these concepts when I encountered a communication philosophy of communication methodology called nonviolent communication. This is the work of Marshall Rosenberg and the the phrasing nonviolent communication Anytime I mentioned to people brings up this idea. Oh, maybe Colt was a bit of a communicator.
0:19:25 – Speaker 2
The communicator.
0:19:27 – Speaker 1
I’m yeah, you know I’ve been studying nonviolent communication. They sort of reflect on some imagined version of my past, but I’ll give you the top of the book here. It says if violent means acting in ways that result in hurt or harm, then much of how we communicate could indeed be called violent communication. And that is sort of the the foundational understanding of nonviolent communication. Because we don’t communicate with empathy, we don’t communicate in a collaborative format, rarely communicate with authenticity, and this is where I first encountered this stuff. Oh boy.
0:20:07 – Speaker 2
I need a pen, I got to write down some things. I have a lot of thoughts right now. Let’s just do a gut check right now, rebecca, at a scale of one to ten, how nervous are you to have this conversation?
0:20:20 – Speaker 3
Oh, you know what I’m not. I actually very much enjoy this because it’s not about dissecting things. I say it’s about, it’s about. I very much resonate with this Very, very much, so I need you to say more about that.
0:20:33 – Speaker 2
I am a 10 out of 10. Because you want to puke scale?
0:20:37 – Speaker 3
Because you always, but this is where you’re again. You’re super power, You’re always like. They may be saying that, but that’s not what they mean. Yes, that’s what he’s saying.
0:20:48 – Speaker 2
So we I’m aware it just never happens for me. I’m real clear. I’m so uncomfortable right now because I’m constantly the one who’s like. I didn’t hear you say pink pencils. I heard you say self-expression in your journal and I know where you keep your journal and I know what page you’re on in your journal and I know what you’ve written in your other pages of your journal because you told me about those things. And not only that, but I bought you these pink pencils and I have a spare for you because I want to make sure that you’re completely covered at all times and not uncomfortable.
0:21:17 – Speaker 3
That’s what happened with the pink pencils, I know.
0:21:21 – Speaker 2
Anyone know who gets me pink pencils? No one. Well, you do, sometimes I do, you do. You get me pink pencils? I do have friends that get me pink pencils, but if we’re talking about relationships, I struggle with the pink pencils.
0:21:33 – Speaker 1
Yeah, so I mean like, where is? This is very common, but can you identify in your own experience, where is the disconnect? Because you have a extreme capacity to identify the needs behind the preferences, behind the methods that people communicating At least two, if not 10, points of disconnect. You know you have a fantastic intuition for that, but where is the disconnect? Why is it that people around you aren’t understanding your needs?
0:21:58 – Speaker 2
That’s a great question. My superficial answer, my go-to answer which may or may not be true I think if I looked a little deeper into it there’d probably be more to it is that people just don’t take the time to get to know who I am as a person.
0:22:18 – Speaker 1
Okay.
0:22:19 – Speaker 2
Yep, you both hated that answer. No, I didn’t. You both hated it. Colt looked at me like I had 16 hands. I did it. You know what Colt said Colt, you know what Colt’s eyes said to me. Yeah, that’s a good answer. What is it about you, though? What about you? You not other people? What about you? And then you looked at me just with this like no, here’s the look on your face. You’re gonna go there. You’re gonna go there on the podcast.
0:22:42 – Speaker 3
That’s what happened, it’s true. It’s true because my answer is you don’t actually show people who you really are.
0:22:49 – Speaker 1
You’re so busy being neat, I’m gonna step out for a second, let’s do that podcast.
0:22:55 – Speaker 3
Yeah, you’re so busy making sure you’re there for everybody else and doing all the things that either you don’t have an opportunity or you don’t feel safe enough to do that, because it’s been. You know, your past experiences is that people don’t see, you don’t hear, you don’t any of that, so you actually don’t, I don’t even bother.
0:23:17 – Speaker 2
No, no, and I just do a masterful job of saying just enough that people are like I’m so close to her, I totally understand her, I totally get her, but don’t allow myself to go to that vulnerable place with people, because my past experience has been I test and I test and I test and I throw a little bit out there and I’m constantly disappointed.
0:23:43 – Speaker 1
That’s it right there. You have that fear that if somebody actually knew your needs and they demonstrated to you that they weren’t important enough to meet, then you would be reflecting on yourself internally. Yeah.
0:23:57 – Speaker 3
Are we all done? Thank you for coming. Thank you for coming. What the hell is this?
0:24:03 – Speaker 2
Is this what it feels like to be on the other side of a conversation with me? Yep, I’m sorry, that’s a lot. Say that again. That was absolutely beautiful and like my hands got sweaty when you said that you want to rub me a rock.
0:24:19 – Speaker 1
So you said, yeah, I need some rocks.
0:24:22 – Speaker 2
You’re in some water and let’s go back to the hippie voodoo shit. Okay, get her some cards. I’m just picking these all up right now because this is all sorts of uncomfortable.
0:24:32 – Speaker 1
I brought my own cards. No, you didn’t.
0:24:35 – Speaker 2
Are you serious? What is?
0:24:38 – Speaker 1
it.
0:24:38 – Speaker 2
What kind of cards they’re hippie voodoo cards.
0:24:41 – Speaker 1
This is called. This is called GROC I cannot GROC your world.
0:24:46 – Speaker 3
What is?
0:24:46 – Speaker 1
GROC your world, groc your world. So GROC was actually created from NVC. This is a group that creates tools for people to put this communication methodology into practice in their personal lives. Groc card set is two decks of cards One on the right one on the right Fire and Heart.
0:25:07 – Speaker 3
What are those symbols, heart and what was the other?
0:25:09 – Speaker 1
one Kind of a sun. A sun, okay. All right, I’m grabbing more rocks. I love when she becomes uncomfortable.
0:25:17 – Speaker 2
This is great. This is great. Bring it on, Kyle. I got them all Bring it on Geez.
0:25:24 – Speaker 1
The deck with the hearts in the back is probably 50 or so, I think. Cards On each card, a single word, and each single word is a feeling.
0:25:34 – Speaker 3
You can throw those in the garbage. That’s what you got, right.
0:25:39 – Speaker 1
This is.
We are so poorly educated in how to even understand our own feelings, how to express them, how to communicate from that authentic place about what your needs are, what your feelings are.
That something as kindergarten, rudimentary, as a deck of cards with a single word on each, that is a word of a feeling, the name of a feeling. It’s just like it’s been a groundbreaking experience for me in my 40s to have access to a tool that allows me to communicate. What is the experience happening, unfolding inside me when I’m in an emotional space. And the ability to go through this deck of cards and find the words that name the feelings that I am experiencing and lay them out in front of me, take that internal maelstrom and then put it in front of my mind, in front of my eyes, and see what it is that’s inside of me, has been absolutely a transformation experience. Transformative experience for me in my life, Not only in reflecting on my own experience, but in communicating to my partner, julia, what it is that I’m experiencing, or in other conversations, like when my son, adrian is in heavy spaces and he’s having difficulty communicating and public education did not remotely give him the tools to do so.
0:26:51 – Speaker 3
Oh, we’re very aware.
0:26:52 – Speaker 1
This is a tool that we found, and, man, what a difference.
0:26:55 – Speaker 3
Game changer Okay.
0:26:56 – Speaker 1
Game changer.
0:26:57 – Speaker 3
You already ordered them on the Amazon, yeah.
0:27:00 – Speaker 1
Right.
0:27:00 – Speaker 2
That we’re turning those.
0:27:02 – Speaker 1
And then the second deck. Each card in the second deck. These are the needs. So you have needs like accountability and competence and respect and understanding and dependability. These are our core common human needs. Like a 99% hit rate, people read through these cards. They go yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. I have all these needs Right. And they’ve done a good job of on the need. On the feelings, they’ve done a good job of eliminating judgment based words like I feel abandoned. That’s not a feeling, that’s a evaluative. Let’s unpack that to the real feelings that you’re experiencing. And on the need side, I think they’ve done a really good job of just honing it down to the core common human needs. And when I lay out the cards that express the feelings and then I then I grab the needs deck and I go through the needs deck ask myself what common human needs are at play for me that are creating these feelings. And of course, you can do it with positive feelings, but usually when you have positive feelings, you just want to enjoy them.
0:28:03 – Speaker 3
So you don’t get the best yeah.
0:28:08 – Speaker 1
So you could sort of do a shorthand version in your head. I’m feeling great and it’s probably because these four needs are being met and are really good way for me right now.
0:28:16 – Speaker 2
The reframe on that I think is interesting is that it’s about these needs being met, as opposed to I’m having a great day because the sun is shining right, instead of I’m having a great day because my need to feel connected to something bigger than myself is being you know met.
0:28:34 – Speaker 3
That’s a really good point.
0:28:37 – Speaker 2
We often find these external things that we can connect with or say that we feel good about, as opposed to the needs that we have. I think that’s really interesting yeah.
0:28:52 – Speaker 1
It’s been a Bible eye-opener for me. I have come to believe and I don’t know that everybody shares this thinking that every feeling that I will experience, positive or negative, is a function of needs either being that or not being that. It’s just the one-to-one relationship. That’s how it works.
0:29:09 – Speaker 3
I mean when you what’s?
0:29:13 – Speaker 2
the word Break it down Right when you get down to its core, raw sense are my needs being met?
0:29:24 – Speaker 3
Because somebody could say something or do something or be something today, when your quote-unquote needs are being met, and you’ll have one response, and tomorrow the exact same scenario. But your need is off, something’s off. It will affect you differently.
0:29:41 – Speaker 2
And the compilation of people that are in your life impact that. So if I need my partner to fill a certain amount of needs, but of those 10 needs, 8 of them are being fulfilled by my closest girlfriends, then I only need him to fulfill 2. But if my closest girlfriends are only fulfilling 4, then I’m going to be putting more on him.
0:30:03 – Speaker 1
Right.
0:30:03 – Speaker 2
To fulfill 6.
0:30:05 – Speaker 1
Right. Well, that one should be like repeated, because that is a very important sort of recognition of how the needs play out between partners and community.
0:30:16 – Speaker 2
That’s really strong Because of what we put on our partner.
0:30:21 – Speaker 1
Yeah. Yeah, our expectations there seems to be like this increasing dynamic in our Western culture that your partner needs to be your meter of all needs and it’s like, please don’t do that, that is so dangerous.
0:30:36 – Speaker 3
We talk about that all the time.
0:30:41 – Speaker 2
Yeah, you think that’s a Western experience that we have created, that we expect our partners to be the ones who fulfill that for us.
0:30:57 – Speaker 1
I think more and more that’s the case because we have elevated this idea of self-reliance, that you stand up your family as a singular unit. You have your own white picket fence, you’ve got your own household. You are separated by tens or hundreds of miles from the ancestral line of your family, the parents, the grandparents, their cities away, states away, and we exalt this. We mark it as a sign of strength and success. In other cultures it’s not the case. It takes a village is a real thing. They’re very much connected with community. They’re very much connected in their ancestral lines. They have parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles. That whole reality is very much alive. And it’s not a mark of you can’t do it on your own. It’s a sign of strength to have a family in that way. I think that there’s a real difference in terms of how we view things in the Western culture. That has cost us in many important ways.
0:32:00 – Speaker 2
You’re describing my family cult without even knowing it. So we built a house two years ago and my parents lived in Syracuse, new York. My brother lives about 10 minutes up the road from me and we had a lot of conversations about what does the future look like in terms of their aging, in terms of where they’re going to be, where my brother and I are going to be, what does our family circumstance look like, and we went through a million different options them building a house, us building a house, them moving into an apartment, us staying where we are all of these different things and ultimately we decided that we were going to create a shared home environment where my parents have an in-law house attached to my house and in between our two houses is essentially this completely separate area where we have a laundry room and a pantry and a coat closet Right. So we each have separate living quarters. They have their own entrances from the garage. We are the only ones who have an entrance down to our basement, so if they want to go into the basement, they can, but they have to come over on our side and part of my thinking associated with that was one it’s so important for my son to have that really close connection and relationship with his grandparents, because I had a very close relationship with my grandparents and that was really big as a part of my upbringing.
Two I have always had a good relationship with my parents. My parents are very helpful, supportive, just like emotionally connecting with me, type of people that I enjoy being around. And there are another set of hands. We now have four adults in my house for one child, which is incredible. So something as small, as you know Carter, getting up in the morning, having breakfast ready, being taken to school, going to Taekwondo. You know, participating in all of these things is now a shared responsibility across our family and I never once had a thought in my mind oh well, I have to do this because Mark and I just can’t manage this on our own. We were fine. We lived for seven years completely on our own with Carter. Right, we maybe was a little more messy, but we definitely made it work, right, there was no concern about that, but it was much more about the sense of I want to be close to my family and I want to grow with my family and they’re meaningful and important to me and I want us all to work together in this communal living environment.
0:34:37 – Speaker 1
Yeah, and when you tell people about that, are you getting like girl, you’re out of your damn mind, Like what kind of reactions are you getting?
0:34:47 – Speaker 2
I get mixed bag One. A majority of the reactions are there is not a chance in hell I would live with my parents living next door, yeah Right. And then the other reactions I get is oh my God, I’m so jealous because it would be so much easier if I had a healthier relationship with my parents and they lived next door.
0:35:05 – Speaker 1
Sure.
0:35:05 – Speaker 2
Now, don’t, don’t get me wrong. There there’s some stuff right, as with as with every family right. I like to joke that my mom is just exacerbated all the time. She’s like just nervous constantly about everything, right, and I’m like my gosh, we don’t need to like holy cow and she jokes with me that I’m just on my tranks and I don’t care about anything, right. So we definitely have different ways, but we had to communicate through a lot of that stuff. We’ve had to figure out what are their needs, what are our needs? Like even something as small as how do they expect my son to be taken care of? Is that their responsibility or my responsibility, mine and Mark’s responsibility?
0:35:46 – Speaker 1
That’s a lot easier to kind of quantify and articulate that piece about the individual day-to-day aspects of care. But what you said a moment ago is a lot harder to sort of wrap your head around and quantify this idea that, well, what does it look like to be in the energy of a person who is constantly exasperated, and then how does another person respond and help to address that energy in a positive and productive way? Never going to get that education outside of having the consistent experience of you and your mom interacting in that relationship and how valuable for that to be present in his life.
0:36:25 – Speaker 2
Yes, and how we bring humor into that, right? Because my mom will have this exacerbated response to the fact that a jelly bean fell on the floor and I’ll be like, mom, are we serious right now? The level of like, oh my goodness, that just happened, like it really just doesn’t, it doesn’t matter, right. And then she’ll be like, well, maybe it matters to me and I’ll be like, maybe it does, but maybe keep that shit to yourself, because you had me running from downstairs thinking someone’s arm flew off right. And then we’ll start to laugh, right, and we’ll both communicate Like I have a need that you’re not exasperating, like huh, in the event that something really tragic didn’t happen, and she has a need to express the fact that when she’s in a moment, she needs to be present in that moment, regardless of who’s around right, and when we’re both in the same house, we need to figure out how we’re going to manage that while my kid stares at both of us like, well, you guys are nuts, you guys are absolutely nuts.
0:37:26 – Speaker 1
Yeah, so I would, if I may suggest, when communicating about what you experience, when you observe that energy is to speak about it. Like when I observe this heightened energy of bordering on panic. With this energy, what happens for me is that my need for a calm and peaceful experience, that’s a need that everyone’s going to hear she’ll understand that need herself gets impacted and from that I feel these ways. This is what comes up when my need and those things are sort of being compromised. I feel this. So here’s my request.
That’s the general format that you get into from nonviolent communication. It starts with that observation like here’s the example they have I hear you say you won’t have the report complete until next week, that it goes to the feeling, and I’m feeling some frustration and concern. Then you talk about the needs. It’s important to me that our team is timely on reports so our production team can be efficient. Then to the request Would you tell me what is preventing you from completing the report and what our team might do to get it finished by 4pm tomorrow? So that’s the cycle, right. It’s observations, feelings, needs and requests.
0:38:43 – Speaker 2
Observations, feelings, needs and requests. Do you want to know what would make all? Of that a whole lot easier Colt.
0:38:48 – Speaker 1
Hey, what’s that?
0:38:50 – Speaker 2
If I felt that when I put an observation, a need and a request into the universe, someone actually gave a shit. Okay, so right back.
0:39:01 – Speaker 1
Here’s what I want to encourage is that we want to make sure that we’re communicating with your actual feelings and relative to needs that that other person knows well.
0:39:16 – Speaker 2
What if you’re not clear that they know those feelings well Right.
0:39:23 – Speaker 1
So as a highly sensitive person.
0:39:25 – Speaker 2
I can tell you from a needs-based experience whatever Rebecca brings to me, I’m there for it, right, because I’m highly empathic. I’m in her experience. Even if I’ve never experienced it myself, I’m right there with her. I might as well have been experiencing it, right? But when you are an introverted, highly sensitive person, you’re not going to be a highly sensitive, highly empathic person, the trifecta of all feelings, right?
And you are someone that often does not feel that people feel things at the level that you do, understands needs at the level that you do, right, that you are, for all intents and purposes, on this island. And that’s to circle back around to what we talked about before. There’s a constant feeling of disappointment that, yes, people will get to a seven out of 10 with me, but very rarely will people get to a 10 out of 10, where it hits me to a point where I’m like, wow, that gave back to me at a level that I felt very seen, I felt a little uncomfortable, I felt vulnerable, right, I mean that happened during the conversation today, cole, when I said oh, wow, is this what it feels like to have a conversation with me, right To the point where maybe I need to dial that down a little bit because wow, that’s a lot, that’s good stuff, right, but I think that all of that plays into at least my own.
I’d love for you to speak about this, because I know you feel things also deeply, but in a little bit of a different way, that I think I have a hard time not expressing my needs and expressing myself and expressing my opinions. I feel like I do that often for people. It’s what happens with that. That usually makes me want to crawl into a hole and be like well, that’s great. I literally just was super vulnerable about what my needs and feelings were and it got trampled or it was dismissed Right, right, yeah, yeah, in some way shape or form, Did you?
0:41:21 – Speaker 1
when you expressed that, I really appreciate you sharing all this. This is exactly. I’ll first say that I don’t consider myself a person who experiences at the same amplitude, right Like the magnitude of the experience of feelings. As I observe, I’m not in the high amplitude feelings feeler. I know that that’s true about myself. As you talk about this sense of you’ve communicated to another person what your needs are, have you also made specific and discrete requests? Yes, Okay.
Right out to I’ll write them all down and tell you exactly what to do step by step is still don’t happen.
0:42:02 – Speaker 3
Okay, there you go. So here’s where the fear happens, because this is what you’re afraid of is that you’ve shared it and you’ve been explicit about that.
0:42:12 – Speaker 1
This need not being met creates these feelings for me and I have the request from you that looks like this About those needs getting that Yup, it is possible that in these communications you learn about another person that they are not interested in meeting the requests for your needs.
0:42:29 – Speaker 2
Is it that they’re not interested or not capable? And is there a difference? There is a difference, there’s certainly a difference.
0:42:36 – Speaker 1
You know, like that, if you’re getting the sense that they have, they’re aware that they lack the capacity or understanding of how or whatever, and they’re communicating to you in that regard. I’m unclear on how to do that. I don’t have the instincts to make that happen. I want to. I want to learn how. I’m interested in becoming a person who can consistently meet your needs in this way. That’s one thing. If it’s like you make the request and you’ve made the request however many times over however many months or years, and you can see it ain’t happening, you gotta make a choice.
0:43:16 – Speaker 2
Thanks for coming today, folks, I know I can’t, can’t do it. Thanks for coming. And that right there is the valley in which I struggle constantly. Constantly because I have a very hard time discerning the difference between people who are incapable and people who are choosing not to, and my go-to is constantly incapable, which makes sense because I’m a mental health provider and my job has always been to sit with people and to help them be capable. So it’s very hard for me to sit with people who I feel are incapable of being able to do these things and see it as a desire not to, especially when I see these moments of growth and connection and ability to meet those needs, and then I get my hopes up that I’m like see, it is capable, it is possible we can do these things, only to then be disappointed, to then be in a situation where I’m like God again, are we just at a new level of not being able? Did we master that one level? And then now we’re at this new level, right, and very recently I’ve gotten to a point where I just said this to you the other day Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe it doesn’t matter if you’re incapable or if you’re just not doing it. Maybe the beginning, middle and end of the story is I’m not getting my needs met.
And then to your point, cole, then you have to make a decision right and that point right. There is the point that feels to me like a get to the cliff. And then I got to back up and I get to the cliff. And I got to back up because I have this incredibly difficult empathic connection to not giving up on people. I will do it to spite myself 100% of the time. I will do it to the anger of friends and family and my partner, who will look around and be like, oh my gosh, why are people reacting in this way? You deserve better than that, right. I will hear all of those things and still not do it because of this. I don’t know. I don’t know what it is, but it’s this real difficulty.
0:45:39 – Speaker 1
It’s a need. It’s a need. Okay, get the card out. You got to name that need. You got to name the need. What is it?
0:45:44 – Speaker 2
Put the card out, Cole. What are the fricking cards? What’s the unmet need?
0:45:50 – Speaker 1
Look if you want to like, if you want the shorthand, go look for the NVC needs list. You’ll have it. All the cards come from the NVC needs list. If you want to know what needs are at play. There is a need for you that’s happening there. I’m holding right now nurturance, but nurturance is from you to sorry, is from another to you. There’s something in this deck, something in the needs that is happening for you.
You have a need to be in support of those people to see people succeed, but those aren’t going to be on the list. You need to uncover and uncover and peel back until you get to the need that you’re meeting with that action and then decide which one. If you got this one need being met with this action versus these 10 needs that aren’t being met, then you have to say, like you know what this one need isn’t actually worth all these needs.
0:46:40 – Speaker 3
I think I know what it is.
0:46:41 – Speaker 2
I can’t wait. This is me being real vulnerable here you guys.
Let me tell you what my need is to share this with you and not have you move on to talk about something else immediately, because this is going to be. This is interesting. I was talking. We have a wine club with girls up the street once a month. In the wine club we were talking about a bunch of different hilarious things, but one of the things that came up was my pattern of being a savior.
When you really start to look underneath this pattern of being a savior and you look at my past relationships and you look at my past friendships and you look at my inability to go deeply with people because I just have to keep it surface level, I was reminded in this conversation by, again, my therapist that I had a long time ago struck in like 10 to 12 years ago, that I absolutely loved he.
Whenever a theme would come up in our conversations, he would write it down, an index card and he would give me the index card. I still have one of the index cards because it resonated so deeply with me personally. I’m not going to get it right because I don’t remember exactly what it said, but it was something along the lines of I have a need to be a savior, because if I’m not a savior, I have no worth, I have no meaning and I have no desire for people to connect with me. The need there is my own sense of worthiness, my own sense of being important enough for people, my own sense of needing to bring value, because in some way, if I’m not bringing you value, you have no need for me.
0:48:27 – Speaker 1
Stop.
0:48:31 – Speaker 3
Don’t look at me, look at me.
0:48:34 – Speaker 2
I know, I know.
0:48:38 – Speaker 1
That’s a big on-tack right there. I appreciate you sharing that Rebecca’s going to throw up.
0:48:44 – Speaker 2
I know it is just so perfect with our trash hats on, I know.
0:48:50 – Speaker 3
I know. I don’t know how you’re not crying right now. Are you holding it back? It’s my Prozac.
0:48:56 – Speaker 2
I love that shit. It’s really good for me.
0:49:00 – Speaker 1
Great Cole, you’re invited back in 10 years.
0:49:03 – Speaker 2
Yeah, guess what? No more guests.
0:49:04 – Speaker 3
I’m going to make that one. But see, this is where my protection of you comes out so fucking fierce, because I see the people who are an energy suck and take for granted an advantage of that about you. The fact that they don’t even see that blows my mind.
0:49:25 – Speaker 2
Don’t see that. That’s where it’s coming from for me, yes.
0:49:29 – Speaker 3
They don’t know you well enough to know that you will not sleep all night for their dumb ass, stupid problem that’s been on repeat for fucking three years. Yep See, now I’m getting angry. I got to get out of that, I know.
0:49:44 – Speaker 2
No, it’s perfect. People relate with you and I think that people, when they genuine. This is how you show your love, this is always how you show your love. Right Is in protection and in turn it off and in you know. You care about me so deeply that one you want to make sure that no one is taking advantage of that, but also you’re someone who sees me to the depths of my being and cannot possibly understand how there would be any level of association with worthiness associated with being a savior.
0:50:23 – Speaker 3
I mean I can, based on you dissecting it. However, what I cannot understand is why other people don’t see it, why other people cannot see it. It is so clear to me I don’t even know what happens.
0:50:39 – Speaker 1
If a person sees that Don’t, they have to accept that they are a person being saved.
0:50:44 – Speaker 3
Jesus, why’d you win? I don’t know, I don’t know.
0:50:50 – Speaker 2
Oh, my God, good Lord, thank God Scott can’t talk today. He’s in the back bubble. Oh my God, oh great. Thank you for the clapping, thank you. Tonight on a special episode. We have to see themselves as being saved.
0:51:09 – Speaker 3
Maybe that’s because I’m so clear I need to be saved on the way. Yeah, you just accepted it from the very beginning.
0:51:14 – Speaker 1
You’re like save me, Lord Save me.
0:51:16 – Speaker 3
Oh Lord, I mean, I think it ties in I’m just like angel Jesus. Aaron, save me.
0:51:21 – Speaker 1
I think it ties in with this idea of we were talking about the sort of the Western culture has exalted this. You know this independent perfection being Like if you need help from somebody, if you need community, if you need a confidant, if you need anybody to elevate you well, you blew it.
0:51:39 – Speaker 2
Get over your shit.
0:51:41 – Speaker 1
Get it together and carry on soldier Like we’re just. We have just valued so many tragic things honestly In other cultures. This idea that I do need. I recognize that my needs get met by these eight people Right, and that doesn’t mean that I needed saving. It means that I am a person who’s benefiting from an amazing community people.
0:52:03 – Speaker 3
Yep, but I think that comes back to what he just made me think of when you asked me the question about how did I know my quote unquote role or my place in the world and how am I so comfortable there? Not that I don’t want to grow, be pushed or anything like that, but I’m very clear that I want to remain here because that allows me to do X, y and Z. I don’t have the need to compete with anyone ever. Like you do you man? I’m going to do me and maybe we can do something together. Maybe we can. You know all the things, but I don’t ever feel the need to do something that makes me look better than someone else or be more successful or be have a better title or more money or better things.
0:52:52 – Speaker 2
What’s the need in that Cole? The need to fit in.
0:52:56 – Speaker 1
She said there is no need. I mean, that’s, that’s, that’s really. I don’t have a need. I’m very, very need for the need. Yeah.
0:53:01 – Speaker 3
But that’s what I’m saying. Like it doesn’t, my needs are met. In that way, I feel very confident and very comfortable where other people who are constantly striving or changing jobs are this because they have this need to be an authority or a expert.
0:53:18 – Speaker 1
Or a self-made man or woman.
0:53:20 – Speaker 2
Yes, yes, and you’ve always been you always have Always. Just people have fun like hey. Would you like to take over this executive director role and you’re like I would rather not?
0:53:32 – Speaker 3
You can double my salary, and I was still saying no.
0:53:34 – Speaker 2
Yeah.
0:53:35 – Speaker 3
And that’s always, always surprised me.
0:53:38 – Speaker 2
But it’s so natural. You just stay in your lane. You know your lane really well, but I’m not.
0:53:45 – Speaker 3
But please don’t hear me say I’m never trying to grow, get better, expand, nothing like that. I believe everybody should do that.
0:53:51 – Speaker 2
But yeah, yeah. Well, that’s the whole Gail and Oprah thing, right?
0:53:57 – Speaker 1
You don’t desire to be.
0:53:58 – Speaker 2
Oprah no Right.
0:53:59 – Speaker 1
No, yeah, I think that accepting help from others threatens people’s sense of their own. Solo I got this capacity, which I don’t believe in.
0:54:12 – Speaker 3
Yeah, I don’t think that that’s the way we need to be, but it is.
0:54:16 – Speaker 1
I agree with you. It is a value that we’ve elevated, and it’s problematic.
0:54:20 – Speaker 2
Hmm, it is problematic because, well, for many reasons, but I think you want to talk about self-worth. When people are constantly feeling like they can’t show that true, authentic version of themselves for fear that if they put that out there, that it’s not accepted, it’s not valued, it’s not okay, then that’s what continues to perpetuate the cycle of hurt associated with people like me.
0:54:47 – Speaker 1
Hmm.
0:54:48 – Speaker 2
So if, out of 10 people that I’m looking to save, if 10 out of 10 of those people were like you, oh, I need to be saved in these particular ways, right? Hmm, I don’t need to be saved in these other ways, but I do need help in these ways. And this is how our relationship works really, really well, because I don’t let you over save and you don’t let me do this other thing, right, hmm, then wouldn’t we be able to balance each other out so much more? Hmm, if I’m constantly trying to save and someone is trying to convince everyone around them that they don’t need to be saved, including me, then we’re constantly going to do that dance back and forth that continues to perpetuate.
0:55:33 – Speaker 3
I don’t like how I feel right now. That continues there is.
0:55:37 – Speaker 1
So the first thing I want to ask you, erin, is you made a specific request that, as you’re going to share, as vulnerable as you did, that you wanted. You were just asking us to take the time to unpack it with you. I want to ask you if you feel like that need has been met.
0:55:50 – Speaker 2
I do and I appreciate you asking that.
0:55:55 – Speaker 1
Right on, I want. I want to make a suggestion about us using this language, the word specifically of saved, supported. I love it more. Saved is harder for people to accept that they need and it’s also more burdensome for the person doing the saving. Yeah, somewhere between saving others and this idea that I got from a great friend of mine, sarah Armstrong, of having a personal board of directors which is super lightweight and exalting everybody who’s there, like, oh, you’d want to board of directors, oh, everybody you’d select would have to be gifted in some way. It’s like well, that’s a lot easier to feel like you’re on somebody’s personal board of directors than you’re on their last leg of life savior team. So but even though that’s what you know, I get it, I know why the language is being used and I know how dire the circumstances can feel that that saving can feel like a very appropriate word. But I want to just make a suggestion to offload some of the energy in that language. Yeah, because I think we’ll find it easier.
0:56:52 – Speaker 2
Yeah, it’s a really good point. I want to Right Now that I’m able to, since last Saturday when it first came out and I was reminded that index card right, I’m like the word savior is not a word that is that I associate with myself.
0:57:08 – Speaker 1
Right.
0:57:08 – Speaker 2
Because that does put people in a one down position. It says that you need to be saved, Right. So that isn’t. I do want to use different wording and at the same time, I’m very clear that if you were to ask me what I feel like my role is associated with myself worth, it would still be the word savior. So it’s not the word I would want to use and it feels so deep rooted to me that that’s what needs to be unpacked. That’s what needs to be.
0:57:36 – Speaker 3
You know it’s interesting because when you use the word supporter, when you first said let’s change the word save to supporter or savior to supporter, I immediately went absolutely not because the word supporter allows you to keep hanging. Really it allows you to keep hanging with them and allows you to keep perpetuating this need to be met and it will still never be met.
0:57:56 – Speaker 2
Wow, and you know what I thought when he said supporter that’s not deep enough, isn’t that fascinating. When he said supporter, I thought whoa, that’s like hey, buddy, let me just. That’s what I mean.
0:58:10 – Speaker 3
I guess that’s what I’m saying, but I’m saying that that’s not enough.
0:58:15 – Speaker 2
I mean just hit you on the arm and be like, hey, good luck, pal Right, that doesn’t feel deep enough for me, for you. You keep saying no, she still now has an opportunity to have to keep hanging with these people and I would rather you just be like. This ain’t working for me. Good luck to you. Gone, I know.
0:58:36 – Speaker 1
So in the word supporter you’re feeling like an energy of an enabler.
0:58:39 – Speaker 2
Yeah, Me or her?
0:58:43 – Speaker 1
Rebecca.
0:58:45 – Speaker 3
Not enabler, because I don’t think you’re an enabler. And an enabler to me is the one who’s listening or giving in or constantly quote unquote, supporting. When I hear supporter in her context, it’s she will hang with you, she will talk through all the things, she will give you her absolute advice or opinion, even if you don’t want to hear it. But she’s still hanging with you. Where I’m saying cut that shit, loose you. It’s too much of a burden, it’s too much of an energy suck where. So enabler is not it? Because I don’t view you as an enabler at all.
Does that make sense? Am I explaining that?
0:59:25 – Speaker 2
Supporter is still. You think that’s still too much for me. You don’t even want me to be in the supporter category. What?
0:59:32 – Speaker 3
word would you use? No, I do want you to be in a supporter category, but what I’m saying is, if he eliminated the savior word and moved it to supporter, you will always Remain in a place where your need is not met.
0:59:46 – Speaker 1
Wow, that’s a really good insight.
0:59:48 – Speaker 3
Always because for you, what do I need to move to Savior? You don’t want to be a savior. You don’t want to make people feel like they need to be saved, so that’s going to make you feel uncomfortable. Does that make sense? I?
1:00:00 – Speaker 1
need help, I need help, I can, so let me try it yeah, please. Here’s what I’m hearing is that is, that if we, if we downgrade the language around what you’re doing From savior to supporter the weight of what it’s costing, you kind of comes off, even though you’re playing the exact same damn role.
1:00:23 – Speaker 3
Do you want to be?
1:00:24 – Speaker 1
the savior of eight different people, wow. Ask yourself that question with the magnitude of that word, and then decide that’s what I want to be, rather than allow you to sneak through the under the bar with the word supporter.
1:00:38 – Speaker 3
Wow. Well, you can decide to be a supporter. How come, when other people say the same same things, I say you get it immediately. I can’t.
1:00:48 – Speaker 2
I thought you were saying don’t even go to supporter, go to, I hate everyone and we’re not talking about any what it got you. You’re saying don’t let this bedge off the hook. You call her a savior. You let her know what she is. She needs to feel every moment of that savior, because you know I don’t like that. I know, I don’t want to have to be a savior.
1:01:08 – Speaker 3
I know. That’s why, if you went to supporter, it’s like, oh, that feels good, and like I feel like this is my lane, you do not let her off the hook.
1:01:14 – Speaker 2
She is not a supporter, she’s a savior. In fact, I’m calling her that every single day, so she has to see it right in her face and be like oh, I don’t, I don’t want that attached to me Well good, Change it. Yeah, that’s nuts. Holy therapy hour here, folks. A few things are clear to me.
1:01:35 – Speaker 1
One this trashy hat is still as awesome as it was in the beginning of this conversation.
1:01:40 – Speaker 2
Okay, it’s even better when you’re talking about important things. Number two Colt is as amazing as I said he was in the beginning. I know Number three there are no more guests.
1:01:50 – Speaker 1
We’re all done. That’s what it’s too much.
1:01:53 – Speaker 3
We are all done.
1:01:54 – Speaker 2
Thank you for being the alpha and the omega of the guests here, Colt all done.
1:01:59 – Speaker 3
It’s because she doesn’t like being on my side of the situation. Nope.
1:02:02 – Speaker 2
Number three. I know or no four. I think we’re on four. I am now the one who’s dead inside, so congratulations. The new podcast is about Rebecca taking you all on her hippie dude Jerry, when she remembers her cards. We’re going to drink our Dunkin Donuts, we’re going to rub some rocks and that’s what you’re going to get from us from now on, from now on, so welcome.
Congratulations in all seriousness, even though that was all 100% serious, 100% serious. Colt, you’re welcome back on the show when Rebecca is the only one here Anytime. I’m really happy that Scott could not chime in. I can’t even imagine Scott Scott’s. I can’t even imagine what he would say during this conversation.
1:02:53 – Speaker 3
I’m visualizing and I’m preparing myself for the ride home.
1:02:56 – Speaker 2
Oh, ride home. I hope you are, I know, I hope you are I hope your afternoon’s clear.
1:03:01 – Speaker 3
I probably the evening too. Yeah, you’re not kidding.
1:03:04 – Speaker 2
Holy cow. But in all reality, if anyone after this is like you know what? I need more Colt in my life.
1:03:12 – Speaker 1
Right, how do they get?
1:03:14 – Speaker 2
in touch with you. Colt for all of your services.
1:03:17 – Speaker 1
Yeah, well, great, thank you for asking that. I mean I invite the email, right? I mean, what do you say? You have you? Well, when it was a thousand people, I was intimidated, but since you cut it back to six, that’s right yeah. I invite outreach to Colt Bryner at Gmail, bri NER, and would be delighted to hear anybody who’s got stories about their own pink pencils, how they’ve experienced that in their personal life, in their work life. This is part of my own purpose and mission and I love having conversations about this stuff.
1:03:48 – Speaker 2
Do you still have your podcast, colt?
1:03:51 – Speaker 1
I don’t have that podcast for at least the time being. Sarah was offered a really great role with a company that she just needed to give her full focus to.
1:04:01 – Speaker 2
Oh, awesome for her.
1:04:04 – Speaker 1
All blessings for her to be in that role. I think it’s fantastic and I actually think that that company is going to have a real impact on American healthcare, so I’m all about it.
1:04:12 – Speaker 2
That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Well, you’re just backburnered for right now, but you can always come on the More Love podcast whenever you need your fix. That’s right, yeah.
1:04:21 – Speaker 1
We’ll see the feedback you get and then you let me know.
1:04:23 – Speaker 2
Oh yeah, I’m not reading the comments this time. How about that? How about that? Were we supposed to end with an empathy problem? We sure were. Is that happening today? Hell, no, we are all done. We are all done for today, folks. Imagine if I actually did bring my oils. Yeah Right, I need yeah to bathe in it. I’m not sure which one, but whatever. So this is from one trashy hat signing off to another saying thanks for joining us on the More Love podcast. I loved that Me too. Isn’t empathy amazing?
1:04:56 – Speaker 3
Well, we’re amazing. I don’t know about all this empathy stuff.
1:05:00 – Speaker 2
That’s fine. I accept you wherever you are. Oh God, I love you. I love you too, and if you love us, please like and subscribe to More Love the power of empathy podcast, wherever you get your podcasts. See you next time.
