Embrace growth, overcome challenges, and unleash your potential

We all have a thing. I remember when I first realized this, I was probably in early college. I would say the most unhealthy version of myself. Spends a lot of time in comparison, spends a lot of time looking at other people, and just believing they have it perfect and I do not.

And looking across, the classroom when I was a student, looking across the auditorium, looking across the sidewalk and seeing people that just look like they have a perfect, and I see myself more with a critical eye, unhealthy version of Tiffany shows up in the world like that. And I remember as like my world started to get a little bit bigger and I got to know people in a little different way.

I remember realizing that if you get to know people, you start to realize like literally everybody has a thing. Everybody has a thing that is standing in their way, keeping them from. Becoming the thing, deciding the thing, going for the thing, having the confidence to do the thing. Everybody has something and the package can look perfect, but if you get to know a person deep enough, everybody has a thing.

So right now we're in the middle of Kyler going through his takeover of Scare, confident, and he's talking about his thing. His thing is anxiety. It's his thing. I talked at the very beginning of the feed, if you've been with us since the beginning, my thing was fear and what it said to my head and the way that it tried to keep me from all the stuff I really wanted to do and become, and it was making decisions for me, not my dreams.

And so if you today are in this place where there's like maybe a couple ways this could be playing out. One is you're looking at the world, you're looking at the people around you. You're looking at others strangers oftentimes and saying, oh, if only I could, I wish you wanna trade your thing in for their life because it looks perfect.

I'm telling you, I promise you they have a thing.

And I'm also telling you that you've got a choice to make. Some of us are like walking around our thing. We're like trying to ignore it. We're not dealing with it. We're trying to bury it. We're trying to just push through, which is what I was doing with my fear. Instead of saying, you know what? I'm sick of this.

I'm tired of it. I wanna free myself from this. I wanna get out from under it. I picture this tunnel and there's like all this clutter in it and my job is to go through it as fast as possible instead of just being able to put on my tennis shoes and some starting blocks and like running through it.

I'm like bobbing and weaving and having to move stuff and climb over stuff and moving it's dirty and it's unorganized and it's messy and I have to go slow because for me that's what fear was doing to the like pipe of life for me. I had all this clutter in it that was so distracting and taking so much energy.

So what is your thing? What is it? Can you name it? Take hold of it. I'm encouraging you. Take ownership we're hearing in Kyla's journey. Please listen along. If you're not him deciding to say like, you know what? I'm gonna take ownership of this anxiety thing. I'm no longer gonna pretend like it doesn't exist.

It does. And I'm gonna say it. And that was a very liberating thing for me in my journey with fear, is be like, you know what? I'm first just gonna admit it. So do that first. Take ownership of it. Say it, say it to somebody that you know is gonna care about you as a person. And say it to them, I'm struggling with this.

I don't want to be, I don't wanna be alone in this. I don't want it to have control over me. I don't want it to decide for me. I don't want it to be the filter in which I view the world, my relationships, my opportunities. I don't want this to be a thing in my life. And Can you speak away all of it? No, but for me, that was the first step.

I am not a therapist. I am not those things, but the first thing is to acknowledge it, to name it, and then begin looking for resources and support in people who can come into that space with you and keep you accountable to the journey. I think that's what this podcast did for me when I realized like, I gotta go on this journey.

I've got to stick my head in the lion's mouth of this fear thing and figure out is it gonna chop my head off or am I gonna survive? and microphone created a ton of accountability for me to keep pushing through that journey. Because I knew I had to drop something every single week. I gotta keep going.

I've gotta have a new insight. I gotta keep on this journey. I've got to keep moving. And I think for Kyler, this opportunity of leading an organization of wanting to do his very, very best for this organization and for the people here, and people he loves and cares about and wants excellence for in their life.

that has been a level of accountability for him to deal with this, to say, I'm gonna name it. I'm gonna embrace this. I'm gonna accept and understand that this is part of me and part of my life and part of my journey that has kept him accountable to that commitment to himself in a way that I think nothing else would have.

It's like, for some reason it's hard to be excellent just for yourself I don't know. For me it's like, it's not reason enough. I don't know why that's really stupid, but when you know that where you are is keeping other people from being able to get to where they want to go For me, and I see this in Kyla too, like that is Catalyst to be like, well, I guess I'll go do the hard thing because I'm not gonna settle for these people.

Like they deserve my best. They deserve the best. So name it. Get away that you're accountable to the journey. like when my husband and I were wanting accountability on the journey of putting our marriage back together, that was, that was marriage counseling. that created accountability for the process of, okay, we, we named it, this is not Okay.

we had accountability cuz we both knew about it and we talked to our parents. and we had a process. We had a, a way in which we were gonna stay committed. To the thing we'd said that we were gonna do by showing up for counseling and engaging therapy and, participating in that. So find a person and find a process.

And, and the other thing I'll say is when you decide to fix your thing and I say fix it like it's a switch, that's a gross. Oversimplification. I know that, it's not fixing it, but what I mean is having a toolbox to be able to deal with your thing and to know, here's the way it's gonna show up in my body, and this is the things that I do, and this is how I take my power back as a person and don't allow it.

To have so much control. There's people in our organization that their thing is depression. there's trauma and loss, there's perfectionism. Everybody has a thing that doesn't make us broken, that makes us human.

And I think it is this incredible special. Thing that we have as human beings and the gift that we have is to be able to name the thing, to share our thing and to support each other in becoming the best version of who we are in the context of our thing, like the thing we have to deal with.

Let's not be ashamed of it. Let's not try to hide it. Let's not let. It has so much power that it takes over the outcomes in our lives. I tell you, I have seen some of the most beautiful journeys of people that I love when they say, you know what? I'm not gonna let this own me. And the first solve is not always the perfect solve.

The second solve is not always the perfect solve. You pick up pieces of a toolbox that you. Gather that you put together that is unique for what it is that you need and that's how you grow through it. That's how you move through it. So I'm so proud of Kyler for stepping into this message of talking about anxiety, but don't listen to what he's saying only as it relates to anxiety.

Yes, that's his story. That's his thing. Minus fear. What is yours? What is the thing that desperately wants to take control of your life? Control of your dreams, to be the governor for what it is that you accomplish in life? Don't let it, don't let it.

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