Acceptance vs. Resignation: How Grandparents Raising Grandchildren Can Thrive

The importance of acceptance

SPEAKER_00 0:00

What if the exhaustion you feel isn't from the work you're doing, but from the reality you're resisting? Today we're joined by world-renowned leadership expert and psychologist Dr. Anthony Sillard to discuss the one tool every invisible CEO needs to survive acceptance. We're pulling back the curtain on why we fight against the lives we didn't choose and how surrendering to what is actually gives us the power to change what will be. Welcome to Grandparents Raising Grandchildren, Nurturing Through Adversity. In this podcast, we will delve deep into the challenges and triumphs of grandparents raising grandchildren. As we navigate the complexities of legal, financial, and emotional support, I invite you to join us on a journey of exploring thoughts, feelings, and beliefs surrounding this growing segment of our society. Drawing from real stories and expert advice, we will explore the nuances of child rearing for children who have experienced trauma and offer valuable resources to guide you through the intricate journey of kinship care. We'll discuss how we can change the course of history by rewriting our grandchildren's future all within a supportive community that understands the unique joys and struggles. This podcast was made especially for you. Welcome to a community where your voice is heard, your experiences are valued, and your journey is honored. Before I started raising these grandchildren, I had this picture of who I was as a grandmother. And in my head, somehow, I was always in a clean apron, my hair was perfect, smiling as I pulled home-cooked meals from the oven. I was the woman my grandchildren adored, the one who never lost her patience and spent every evening reading stories and singing them to sleep. But then one day I realized with these grandchildren, I'm not that woman. And after everything I've survived, overcoming serious illness, the tragic loss of my own child, a divorce, I felt like I deserved a retirement. I found myself wishing I could sleep in on a Tuesday or paralyzed by fear of what would happen to these children if something happened to me. For the first two years, I was doing this because it was the right thing to do. I was a CEO running on duty, not desire. But somehow a shift has happened. I've let go of every tool in my toolbox that I didn't actually need. I stopped trying to be the apron grandmother and started being the anchor grandmother, not just for them, but for myself. I realized there's nothing I'd rather be doing. Now my CEO strategy is simple. I take the best care of myself that I can and I let these kids know that I love them and that I'm doing my best. That shift from fighting the life I have to accepting the mission I'm on is exactly what Dr. Anthony Silard and I are diving into today. We're talking about the ideal versus the real and how to find peace when they don't match. Welcome back, Dr. Silard. It's so nice to have you on the show.

SPEAKER_01 4:10

Laura, I love what you're doing, and I love I love grandparents raising grandchildren. So I'm very happy to be back here with you.

Exploring love and suffering connection

SPEAKER_00 4:16

I love connecting with you because we both have a passion about helping people feel positive about what they're doing in their life. In your book, Love and Suffering, you share the story of Bill. He's a Navy pilot captured during the Vietnam War, and he spends years in this windowless, rat-infested cell fighting his reality until a voice told him, This is your life, Bill. So for the grandmother who went to bed a retiree and woke up a mother to a traumatized toddler again, the current reality often feels like something of a prison. We're talking today about acceptance and resignation. How do we say, This is my life without feeling like we've given up on a life that we wanted?

SPEAKER_01 5:01

Yeah, I think I think it's it's it's not easy because whether it's a grandmother who has gone from retiree to like mother mothering 2.0 after not feeling appreciated for mothering 1.0 for decades. And then now she feels that responsibility again with another human being, right? With a grandchild. Or whether it's someone who you know who feels like, hey, I don't like what's going on politically, uh, I don't feel like people like me are being seen, or whether it's someone who feels like, hey, in my own family, I don't feel understood, acknowledged, detected by my own father. I think so many people are suffering. The reason I wrote love and suffering was to try to look at this connection between love and suffering, which the more I dove into it, so as I so as a as a research professor in organizational psychology, I get really intrigued with a certain theme, a topic, and I want to understand it better. And so I realized that there's no way to understand love without also understanding suffering. And and that actually in our lives, the the ideal that we want is always above the real. And that distance between the real and the ideal, that is the suffering, right? That that like that grandmother who wakes up and finds herself in being a mother once again, that reality is is that real is different than the ideal she had for her retirement. And and how do we manage that? And I think the story of Bill, as you're saying, I mean, it's really telling because Bill, Bill, imagine, you know, this guy is living in the Midwest, the US, he's you know, in his comfortable suburban home, he's watching TV with his with his wife of about four years, and they've got two young children. And he he he goes off to uh to to to the Vietnam War, as it's called in the U or as it was called in the US, or the American War, as it was and is still called in Vietnam. And and he's a within a month and a half, he's he's his pilot, you know, so he's a pilot and his plane goes down and he's captured. And really, I mean, he just can't process it. It's like it's like, how could this have happened to me, this kind of fall from grace?

Finding purpose in adversity

SPEAKER_00 7:11

And and really he's feels like a punishment sometimes, right? What have I done to deserve this?

SPEAKER_01 7:17

He feels like, you know, I mean he's really about to die. He's lost like 30 pounds. And you know, I go back to uh Viktor Frankel's book, Man's Search for Meaning, where Frankel was an Austrian psychologist and and he went to Auschwitz and Poland and was you know captured by the Nazis. He he was there and he thought, okay, well, here I am in this horrible place. I'm going to study the prisoners because that that kept him going. That was his that was aligned with his passion, with his purpose. And and he noticed that the prisoners, uh, the prisoners who were able to survive were more that were more likely to do so because there was something they were put on this earth to do that they had not yet completed. So maybe it was to complete a series of scientific experiments they had started before the war. Maybe it was to take care of a child that they had to they had to survive. There was something they needed to survive for. The prisoners who were less likely to survive survive, he says that there wasn't really anything to survive this these horrible circumstances for. And he said they would get this look in their eye. It was kind of like that that like deer caught in the headlights, the way like the way like a baby can look at you but not be looking at you.

SPEAKER_00 8:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:32

And they just once they got that look, within two days, they were they were prostrate on the ground and their own urine and feces have passed away. 48 hours. Right. So in so here's the thing. One of the quotes I have in Love and Suffering, one of one of one of my own quotes, is don't let someone else's suffering spoil your own. You see, we grow up in America in the West with this idea that like that, you know, I mean, they the US Constitution, right? The pursuit of happiness. And that happiness is the is kind of the holy grail and suffering is is what's to be avoided at all cost. You know, the problem with buying that narrative is that that's what leads to addiction.

SPEAKER_00 9:15

Right. You know, you're I think there's a kind of resilience. When we when we serve unconditionally, we might be suffering, but really, if the objective is to have all these things that we can't have, then that's more like passive resistance. Do you know what I'm trying to say?

SPEAKER_01 9:33

Everyone gets it all mixed up because they think that acceptance is the passivity. Yeah. What people don't realize, and this is as I was researching love and suffering, this is what I discovered, is that acceptance is one of the most like understudied and underestimated sources of our strength. And that's why in in love and suffering, there's these the four plateaus: acceptance, forgiveness, gratitude, love. It begins with acceptance because we really don't have the tools to change anything until we accept what that anything is. Laura, if you want to move, let's say you've got a chair and you want to move it from your living room to the dining room, like you can't just go, okay, I'm just gonna focus on the dining room. You have to first accept where the chair is in the living room. Right. Like that's where it is, that's where you have to go and find it. And then, okay, now that I've I've embraced that this is where the chair is, I can pick it up and I can move it to the other room. So it's the same with our lives. We can't change anything in our lives before first accepting where we currently are. And and that includes everything about where we are that we that we don't like, that we wish were different, that we feel that makes us feel betrayed, rejected, unhearted.

SPEAKER_00 10:45

Angry.

SPEAKER_01 10:46

Angry.

Parental responsibilities in social development

SPEAKER_00 10:46

You know, and I think that's something that many people are missing in teaching children. It's easier to put a tablet in front of them and and ignore them than teach them that this isn't a healthy thing for you to do, and we're gonna put up with your resistance against that temporarily to help you to understand that sometimes you've got to do things you don't want to do.

SPEAKER_01 11:11

Well, that's that's absolutely right. Most of us, speaking of acceptance, we do not want to accept that our number one responsibility as parents and grandparents is to help our children and grandchildren to navigate social relationships, is to help our children and grandchildren assimilate into social groups. You know, there's there's there's what's what's called in developmental psychology the fourth trimester. The idea behind the fourth trimester is that is that if you look at the development of the human brain, especially the prefrontal cortex, which is where we make all of our social decisions, well, most of that development occurs outside the womb in the fourth trimester. The fourth trimester is from the day of birth until really into our 30s. Jenny Redeski, who I interviewed for my previous book, Screened In, The Art of Living Free in the Digital Age, she wrote the screen use guidelines for the American Academy of Pediatrics. And she has this concept, which I just love, called the conversational duet. And it's essentially this back and forth call and response between parent or grandparent and their child. And that's how we help them navigate social relationships. Let me put this into plain English, okay? So our kids are 12 and 9 years old. So our daughter, Chloe, she she went to a birthday party uh about two weeks ago uh of her best friend, and her best friend got a bigger key piece of cake than she did. So she's throwing a tantrum because it wasn't fair to her. This is how she felt. So I pull her aside and I have to say to her, hey, Chloe, you know what? And so this is where we we start with empathy, because to help someone get to acceptance, we have to begin with empathy. And so I'll say, Chloe, I hate it when someone else gets a bigger piece of cake. In fact, I hate it when anyone gets more than I do, it just feels so unfair, right? And especially cake. Cake is so delicious. How could they do that? And then I'll say, but the other part of this though, Chloe, is that sometimes we're the ones who get the bigger piece of cake. And that's the thing, it's almost impossible to cut cake exactly down the, you know, to make the sizes 100% identical. And sometimes one person gets a bigger piece, sometimes the other person gets a bigger piece. But the more important thing here, Chloe, is that your, you know, is is that Julia, your close friend, if she sees you getting so angry because she got a bigger piece of cake, what what's she gonna think? How what would you think if you were Julia? And she'd be like, um, that I don't like her. You go, well, she might. She might think that like your interest in your own, in what you get is more important to you than what she gets. And it's important in friendship that we really want the other person to have have wonderful things. And we don't want to get we don't want to get in the way with that. We want to help that. So that's the thing. In so many ways, that's what parents and grandparents do with their children.

SPEAKER_00 13:59

Yeah.

unknown 13:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:00

We're not doing a service, we're doing a disservice to them.

SPEAKER_01 14:03

Yeah, and it begins with accepting that if you want to outsource emotion, the, you know, I call it the emotion elevator, okay, because we're all in the in sort of the the emotional ground floor where with our base emotions are, you know, as Chloe was in that moment, and we're angry and we're just going to express those base emotions. So what we do as caretakers is we we encourage our children and grandchildren to come into the elevator with us and let's go up to the higher level of emotion regulation. And how do you regulate those emotions so you can assimilate into social groups, so you can have you can develop close and meaningful friendships. And that's the thing, a lot of parents don't want to accept that. And so they outsource it to the electronic babysitter. And then we have, Laura, for the first time in US history, whereas it's always been that for a college student to see a mental health counselor is like the rare exception. Well, now it's 61%. So it's the norm now for four-year university students at some point to have some kind of mental health breakdown where they need to see a counselor.

SPEAKER_00 15:49

And you know, so many people are on anxiety medication because they don't want to feel, right? They don't want to have to make these decisions.

SPEAKER_01 15:56

That's that's exactly right. And why don't they want to feel? It comes back to acceptance, and that's where addiction, that's the birthplace of addiction, is not wanting to feel, not wanting to accept the emotions within us and the state of our lives as it is. And so instead of confronting those feelings, you know, we we we're kind of like we as human beings are kind of like a prism. Like if you put a prism next to a rose, it takes the color of the rose. If you put a prism next to some some cow dung, it takes the color of the dung. But we're not the rose or the dung. We're just the prism.

Discussing gender roles in grandparenting

SPEAKER_00 16:27

Right. I want to talk about acceptance also in terms of what it's like for us as grandparents to accept these children as they are and their parents as they are, because I've found that accepting not just the situation, but the people that we're involved in now with our life is difficult. We, and it's taken me a long time to understand that although we can be the authors of our story, we cannot change the other characters in the book. Well, hypothetically. I can't I have to deal with the fact that I have a child whose mother did methane utero, so she has a cognitive brain disorder. I have to live with a very difficult human being who is not always readable. And I get frustrated and think, well, she shouldn't be that way. But that's not the reality of the child that I'm raising. So speak to that a bit.

SPEAKER_01 17:20

Would you well, Laura, I think we we have to say that again, acceptance is not passivity. Acceptance is acknowledgement. It's embracing the emotions, the feelings, the the thoughts that come up within you. And knowing though, that they're they're not true. What we feel in any moment is not true. It may some of the times it's true, sometimes it's not, but we feel we have we have a lot of different emotions we feel. But I think once we get to the what we have to say, like once we come to that space, that place of acceptance, now we really have the tools we need for self-growth. And that's where I think let's also call this what it is. You and I spoke about this in a previous episode. Acceptance is different for grandmothers than for grandfathers, right? And so, so it's not fair, it's not equitable that all of this responsibility falls in the lap of grandmothers. And that's what we're seeing in our society. You know, we all we all talk about you know, gender enlightenment, gender fluidity, and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But at the end of the day, the gender relationships are are almost exactly the same as they used to be. It's the bulk, vast bulk of housework, childcare falls in the to the to the in in in falls into the laps of women and and men stay away from it. And it's like you, it's like you once said, women are the feelers, men are the fixers, right? So I think also a lot of grant grandfathers out there, of you guys that are listening and and you grandmothers out there, I'd recommend you play this to your to your husbands. For you grandfathers out there, it's not enough that you fix the lawnmower or mow the lawn to have like a more harmonious marriage and also the relationships you grandfathers need with your grandkids to really feel satisfied as you're aging, to feel like you really are building these social relationships which form like a protective buffer against loneliness and disconnection for you. You know, you really gotta dive in there more and get in and get involved with washing the dishes, get involved with cooking, get involved with not just once a week, you're gonna take the kids to the ballgame, but you know, but and there's all this research that shows that that's what men, not just grandfathers, but that's what men tend to do. It's these kind of one-offs, right?

SPEAKER_00 19:27

Especially if we have young boys, these are the role models that we're giving them.

SPEAKER_01 19:31

And and and the research shows that for young boys and girls, they're what they get from fathers and grandfathers, they cannot get from mothers and grandmothers. If you look, even young boys, especially young boys, but also young girls, where the grandfather is very involved, you just see this tremendous difference. Like they sleep with less people, there's less drug use, they do better in stuff.

SPEAKER_00 19:56

Thank you for bringing that up.

Embracing masculinity and femininity

SPEAKER_01 19:58

Yeah, there is the differences are huge. And and so this is the thing, too, is that now what what what are we looking at? What's happening with older men? We see the largest, most significant cause of death in the UK for men 45 and older is suicide. We're seeing deaths of despair in the US. Men tend to focus almost exclusively on what I call the five PRs. Okay, I used to call it the four, I got a fifth one now. The five PRs to procreate, produce, provide, protect, and prove themselves. And that's what they do. And what do they miss? The C's, compassion, community, collaboration, connection, commiseration. And without those C's, that's the thing, is that is that for men, it's a lot easier. Okay, so after a certain age, men, if men have procreated and they're married, like that's that's done. You know, like me, me, I was SNP, right? So no more procreation happening for Anthony, right? So a lot for a lot of men, especially grandfathers, like procreation, that's not really an issue now. So we're down to the four PRs, right? To produce, provide, protect, and prove themselves. Well, if you're retired, if you're not working, or if your children, they've already left the house. They don't really need you to provide and protect as they used to. You're not working, you're not producing as you used to. The opportunities to prove yourself are more and more challenging to discover. Then what's left? And that's why so many men, older men, are giving up on life. And whether it's getting into like drugs, meth use, alcohol, or other addictions, or suicide or suicidal ideation. What I think a lot of older men need to really realize, and all men actually, is that what we call feminine in society is really just human. So these all those C's, right? Connection, collaboration, cooperation, community, building relationships with others while us guys were off on the on the hunt with our you know hominid ancestors, and we just had to, we didn't necessarily talk with each other as much as we sort of strategically aligned ourselves so we could capture a prey. Well, while we were doing that, what were women doing to survive? You know, they were foraging. They were finding, like, okay, well, this woman is like the is like the medicinal woman, and she knows how to find medicinal plants and herbs that can save our children from illness. So I better get to know her really well. And there are all these other ways that women also maybe her man doesn't come back at all. Maybe he comes back, but but there's no there's no meat to share or food to share. But they so they had to really collaborate with other women. And so Shelly Taylor is a is a social psychologist at UCLA, and she she has this wonderful concept, which is really speaks a lot of truth to me, which is if you look at the studies about stress responses, you know, we've Well, this is we've all had this shoved down our throats, right? Fight or flight. Like that's what we do when when we feel threatened, right? We fight or we flight. Well, what Shelly Taylor came out with was like, hey, guess what? All those studies on fight for fight or flight have been done with adult men. What about adult women? If you've got children, either fight or flight is is putting your children's lives at risk. Why would you do that? That's not what women do. What women do is what she calls then befriend. Tend the children and befriend other women. And then that's how women claim their power. Now that's now that that was different on the on the wide open plains and the dark forests that our ancestors were managing, right? But today, what we're finding is that especially with technology, with AI, for men, if you're just focused on, you know, to procreate, produce, provide, protect, improve yourself, well, there's just less opportunities to do that than there were a hundred years ago, 50 years ago, even 20 years ago. And so that's where I think for a lot of men, we have to realize that actually, you know, to sort of embrace both the masculine and feminine parts of ourselves, especially when we say feminine, is really about human and about connection, but then that changes the game completely. Leads to more harmonious marriages. It leads to uh our grandchildren, our children growing up much healthier. And that's what we need to move toward, in my humble opinion.

SPEAKER_00 24:03

Before we move into deeper systematic questions, I want to make sure to, Dr. Silard, that I highlight the incredible mission behind your work. Your book, Love and Suffering, Breaking the Emotional Chains That Prevent You From Experiencing Love. 100% of the proceeds of that book go to education programs for children in Africa and Latin America. This book will really help you embed this information about acceptance and love. The systematic question I have for you today is you've worked with the world's largest nonprofits, like Save the Children. In your view, what do you think is the primary flaw in our institutional story about trauma that prevents our systems from accepting the reality of why we have so many of these kinship families?

SPEAKER_01 24:50

I mean, I think we have these kinship families like you and I have, Laura, with each other. You know, I think we do this because we we need each other as human beings. And that's what that's what we that's what we don't pay attention to. That's what we miss. Especially that's what I was just kind of sharing about a lot of men. They don't want to make overtures to other men and say, like, hey, why don't we grab why don't we grab lunch together? Because hey, maybe he's gonna think like I'm weak or I'm not as autonomous as he is, or I'm I'm dependent, or I'm hitting on him, or whatever it is. And I think we need to get over that.

SPEAKER_00 25:23

Our families are not autonomous. We as human beings are not autonomous.

Hosting dinners in Kenya village

SPEAKER_01 25:27

We're not autonomous. And you know, I tested that. So this is an interesting story. I was in the Peace Corps and I went to Africa back in 1990. I went to Africa with three shopping bags filled with books. I'd been in every used bookstore I could find in Washington, D.C. and Key West and other parts of Florida for like the month before I left. And I thought, okay, that's what I'm gonna do. I'm going to work through my own trauma, which is another story, by reading and and and just learning more about life and the world. And so for six months, it's what I did. And I remember I went traveling by myself, hitchhiking through Kenya and Uganda on the back of pickup trucks and and so on. And at one point I was in this national park, and I'm there by myself and just looking out at the at this beautiful scenery. And it hit me. I'm like, I can't do this anymore. I think this is it. Like, I need people. Is that probably the most pivotal transformational realization of my life? I need people. And I went back to my site in Kenya where I was a teacher, and I started inviting other teachers to come over for dinner. I and I learned something really interesting, Laura. I realized that in Africa, you don't invite people to come for dinner because they they they may not show up, but they're not, it's not like a custom like it is, at least back then when I was there in rural areas in a village. It wasn't like that. So I would make this spaghetti and and apple pie and all this other really food. And then this other teacher wouldn't show up, and I'd be like, oh my god, I am the biggest loser ever. And what I realized is that other people just started showing up at my house. And and what if I started doing what others did, which is if someone shows up at your house, you just invite them in, and probably they are gonna stay for dinner, and you give them some fruit, some cookies, uh, some tea, just hang out and talk. I started doing that. My life became a lot kind of social life was very fluid.

SPEAKER_00 27:19

And people don't do that much. A lot of friends that way, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:22

It was a real game changer.

SPEAKER_00 27:24

Thanks for sharing that. You shared about your inner devastation after Carla left you in the book. In kinship care, there's just a big taboo around the grief of abandonment, feeling abandoned by the adult children, kids feeling abandoned by their families. How do we shift from that feeling of being abandoned to the reality of this is a natural trajectory?

SPEAKER_01 27:45

Well, this is really where acceptance comes in, which I think why you're asking it today, right? Because we have to accept that relationships have, you know, birth, growth, decay, and death. And and you know, it's like the Buddhist sense of impermanence. You know, and and not all relationships last a lifetime. And yet I really like the expression friends are as friends do. And I think that's true for all relationships. So we get what happens, what we do as human beings is we get it etched in our mind, okay, this person is my life partner, this person is my best friend. You know, the the word best doesn't even exist in Swahili. When I was in living in East Africa, you say best, people don't even use that word. That's a word, these superlatives we come up with because we want to convince ourselves that we're not alone in this world. And the best way to convince yourself you're not alone in this world is not by what you receive. It's not by others approving of you and saying how great you are, how much time they want to spend with you. It's by doing that for others. It's by giving. And that's the thing.

SPEAKER_00 28:44

And we base our self-worth on how other people reject or accept us.

Supporting kinship caregivers

SPEAKER_01 28:48

Yeah, what I realized back in my life is that is that the only thing, the only thing that we take with us is the love we've shared with others. Everything else, everything else will leave will is gone. Everything else disappears.

SPEAKER_00 29:02

Thank you. One more question before we go. If you were if you were COO of the country and you had to implement one non-negotiable rule to reduce the secondary trauma of kinship caregivers, how would you integrate the balcony perspective into our national support infrastructure? In other words, how do we remove ourselves from the drama of these situations? And how can we help these kinship caregivers be supported in these transitions in a healthier way?

SPEAKER_01 29:34

Well, first thing I would do is is is bring you in as co-director and say, you know, Laura knows way more about this than I do. Uh the next thing I would I would do is I accept the position. Yeah, okay, wonderful. The next thing I would say is, okay, well, we need to provide all kinds of support. We need to provide financial support for kinship caregivers. We need to provide, and maybe this is just as important, if not more, as socio-emotional support. We need to provide trainings. That's where you come in, right? Trainings, counseling. Um, make it make it easy for kinship caregivers to form support groups and and really just bring more national attention and international attention to what kinship caregivers are doing. And I think I think I would also want to bring in some kinds of trainings around uh around gender and kinship caregiving so that it it doesn't fall almost completely on the backs of women, really, and that and that men step up more.

SPEAKER_00 30:30

Yes, and because I think you've reminded us that the need for interdependence upon each other and in our families is normal. If you look at other social groups around the world, grandparents are very involved in the lives of grandchildren. That sense of autonomy in our country is is is unusual.

SPEAKER_01 30:53

Oh, yeah. The rugged, rugged, you know, American capitalism, that's for sure.

SPEAKER_00 30:58

Yeah.

Discussing personal identity and growth

SPEAKER_01 30:58

So or uh individualism. So maybe I could share this with your with your listen with your listeners, Laura. Please do buy Love and Suffering if you've enjoyed the conversation we're having today. Not only has it received three book awards and it has 99% five-star reviews on Amazon, but you're not the only one who will benefit. Again, 100% of the proceeds are donated to nonprofit education programs in Africa and Latin America. And hey, if buying a book is not top of mind right now, that's okay. I know times are difficult. I have a I have two free books for for each of you. So the first is the myth of happiness, how your definition of happiness creates your unhappiness. And the second is called The Myth of Friendship, how your misunderstandings about friendship keep you lonely.

SPEAKER_00 31:42

And I'll have those links in the show notes. Perfect. Dr. Solar.

SPEAKER_01 31:46

Yeah, and you just go to theartoflivingfree.org slash free happiness and friendship books. Again, it's theartoflivingfree dot org slash free happiness and friendship books. And you put your email in and you'll you'll you'll get a confirmation email and the download links. So yeah, Laura, I we gotta do this again. I always it's always like the highlight of my week to talk with you. So I appreciate your inviting me back.

SPEAKER_00 32:08

Thank you, Dr. Silard, and thank you for your generosity.

SPEAKER_01 32:11

Oh, thank you.

SPEAKER_00 32:13

Let's talk about what Dr. Silard spoke about when he talked about the prism, how we take on the color of whatever is next to us, whether it's a rose or something much messier. Ask yourself today, are you mistaking your current circumstances for your identity? Can you step into that emotion elevator and go up just one floor to where regulation and acceptance live? Please remember you are the author of your story. Even if you can't change the other characters in the book, what is one should you can let go of tonight? I hope you'll join us next week as we sit down with John Zell Anderson. He's a therapist, author, and most importantly, a grandson raised by his grandmother. We will be hearing from the living, breathing testimony of a grandson who's walked the path our grandchildren are on. John Zell is here to help us audit the trauma sound tracks we've inherited and teach us how to move toward a connection built on three essential pillars love, like, and understanding. We are 2.7 million strong, still nurturing and still here. We are the ones who accept the call, accept the challenge, and eventually learn to accept the peace that comes with presence. Your heart is the most important asset on the balance sheet. So I hope you'll keep nurturing, keep leading, and I'll look forward to seeing you in the next boardroom.