Life has its way of revealing who we really are inside. Sometimes, it throws us a number of curveballs, making us hit rock bottom. When we do pick ourselves up and climb over the mess, we find ourselves discovering the potentials we have overlooked. In this episode, Amy Vetter sits down with the host of the popular podcast, Mind Love, Melissa Monte. Having gone through her own share of struggles, Melissa shares her raw journey of hitting rock bottom to transforming her life by finding happiness from the inside. She gives tips for how to overcome shame and unhappiness by being intentional with what you want to cultivate from the inside.

This episode talks about sensitive topics that may affect you or those you love. If you or anyone you care about needs help from any of the topics discussed in this episode, there is a national helpline to support you, or you can find locations near you for recovery - SAMHSA 1-800-662- HELP - or find a preferred support center near you.

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Create Your Self Image From The Inside Out: Pull The Threads That Give You Joy With Melissa Monte

I interview Melissa Monte, who is the host of the popular podcast, Mind Love. Through her raw stories, personal experience and inspiring interviews, Mind Love highlights the incredible role of the mind, happiness, health and success. Melissa is an entrepreneur, yogi, former corporate VP and self-proclaimed seeker. She has spent the last several years exploring methods of improving the human condition and learning what makes us humans tick. During my interview with Melissa, she provides her raw journey from hitting rock bottom to transforming her life by finding happiness from the inside. On this episode, I do want a precursor to this because we talk about many sensitive topics including suicide, drug abuse and rape.

If any of those topics are too sensitive to you, this may be an episode you may want to skip. If you are more interested in these topics of how they affect around you, yourself or the people that you care about, Melissa gives some great tips on how she was able to overcome her own shame and unhappiness by doing intentional things that would help her cultivate happiness from the inside. If you or anyone you love has any issues with the topics that we discussed, there is a national helpline. It is SAMHSA. It stands for Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. They have a helpline where you can call them on a national basis to find a place near you to get help. I hope you enjoy this episode.

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I'm here with Melissa Monte. Melissa, do you want to give a little background on yourself?

I have a podcast called Mind Love. The journey to getting here was pretty intense. There's a lot of self-exploration that happens when you start to come to terms with your purpose. It's either the story that you're creating or the background that speaks to that or maybe that's how it was supposed to be this whole time. That's what I've been figuring out. I was a good kid. I was an honor student. I had all the potential in the world. When I got to college, I squandered what I thought all of my potential was. I made mistake after mistake. I ended up in a position where I was heavily bulimic. I was doing party drugs five nights a week. I was in terrible relationships, one that even landed me in jail for a while. All of a sudden, I was like, “What do I do? Not only do I have people say, ‘You have an eating disorder for your whole life.’ I've somehow broken my brain. I now have a criminal record. What am I supposed to do with my life?”

If I never thought I was going to be anything, maybe it would have been an easier pill to swallow. At a point where I reached my absolute rock bottom and thought I wanted to press the reset button on my entire life, I realized that either I could do that or I could climb my way out of this mess and find some meaning in it. It took me years and years and the meanings evolved over time. Now, I'm thankful for everything that led me to this. Because of everything that I've been through, I've been able to relate to so many more people than I would have been able to before. I have a lot of tools for coping with whatever life throws at me.

Why I thought it was so important for you to be on this podcast is because of your story. A lot of people that ended up pivoting along the way down the wrong paths whether intentionally or unintentionally can feel like life is over. These belief systems that we create in our head can get in a way of our potential. You are such a great example of living to your potential. I want to start backward and come back to when you were young. You said you were an honor student. What did you dream that you were going to be when you grew up?

It depends on what age you asked me at. If I was three, I would have been a baby animal trainer. I always thought I was going to be a baby animal trainer and a writer. I remember when I was about eleven years old, my dad signed me up for an acting class because I loved being the center of attention. I still do, to be honest with you. If there was something going on at a birthday party and the clown was like, “Can I take a volunteer?” I was the first one to shoot my hand up. I was like, “It makes sense. I'll go do this acting class.” There was a play at the end of it. I remember after my first class I told my dad, “I was not in the spirits you thought I was going to be in.” He's like, “What's wrong? You've got to be on stage all day.” I said to him, “It's weird pretending to be somebody else. I feel like I have my own story to tell. Why can't I be on stage and be me?” That was the first hint of me becoming a public speaker. I've gone up and down with everything that I was doing. I was an enrollment counselor for a school for a while. I got into digital marketing several years ago. I worked for startups as a vice president and all this stuff. I was doing all this while going through the worst times of my life. I was able to balance looking like I had things together while inside I was crumbling.

That's important because we were at work every day with our coworkers, maybe people that work for us and we see the outside. How were you able to hold down a regular job with everything else that was going on in your life? What were you doing?

During the times I had a regular job, I was partying about five nights a week. It was like I needed to escape. I've always been also good at hacking the system. I remember when I had a job as an enrollment counselor, I basically filed a complaint with HR and said that I needed my own office because I had ADD and people were distracting around me. Did I need my own office? Probably not, but I was good at like what was the end result that I needed to get? In college, I went to disable student services and I used ADD to my advantage. That's part of the reason. They're not allowed to get mad at you when you don't attend class. They can't grade you on your attendance.

I would have realized the little life hacks about how to get what I wanted. It's funny because I did that even with like, “Why did I take so much Adderall for so long?” It seemed like a miracle drug and it was a little hack. In finding these little hacks, what I was doing was skipping a ton of development. All of my hacks did catch up to me eventually. When I became an entrepreneur, I had to learn like all these hacks are going to be a disservice for me. They worked when I was working for somebody else, but for me, it was doing me a disservice. I was at a point where I thought I was the happiest that I'd ever been. When I was making good money for a company I was working for, I was able to get everything done. Honestly, employees aren't working the full eight hours anyway, so I was able to be effective for three hours.

I was being super-efficient during a three-hour window and doing whatever I wanted the rest of the time. I was still over-delivering. I was good at doing that. What's interesting though is that as much as I thought that I was happy during that time and I was saying I was the happiest I'd ever been. I loved my roommate. I made a lot of money, I was also partying five nights a week and doing party drugs, not treating my body very well and pushing myself through everything. The universe will often set you back and force you to face the reality that you're in denial of. All of a sudden, I found out my landlord was selling our place. My company was shutting down during a one-week window and I crashed my car during a three-day window of not having insurance.

Everyone around me was like, “How are you not freaking out?” I had already hit my solid rock bottom. This was still during my climb out. I don't expect you to hit bottom and change everything around. I changed some things around. I didn't change all the things. It was interesting because that was in December. I ended up having to move. I ended up meeting my husband that week in Big Bear and moving up there, quieting my life down. He was the person that was also on a growth path. I was able to reconcile these two worlds. One world where I was like pretending to be this spiritual Yogi but then also pissing it away in the evenings. All of a sudden, I was able to surround myself with people that were on the path that I wanted to be on. It was like the last step for me.

If I'm your boss, put yourself in the leader's shoes. How would they have noticed something was off? What would have been the cues for them? Everyone has these fronts, but in order for true progress to happen in business and so forth, we have to pay attention individually to what's happening with our team members. It sounds like you had a call for help even though you were going through all of these having fun. What could they have noticed that they didn't notice or have helped you during that time?

What I find very interesting about this is part of the reason I was able to get away with what I was getting away with was because I was partying with my boss. There's something to be said about setting the example that you want to be shining through your company. I didn't realize that what I was doing was numbing a lot of my life. I thought I was living it up and it's easy to be in denial of the things that we're not ready to face yet. He was doing the same thing. It caused a pretty toxic relationship even at work because it was difficult to respect somebody when they were telling me to do something when I had seen them do a line of Coke off their bathroom counter the night before. That was something that I talk about a lot was even overcoming that situation because I put myself in that situation as well.

That toxic environment caused me to put up with a lot of things that I wouldn't have put up with. He was definitely a toxic boss to everybody because he went through his own stuff. If you're not facing your problems, it's going to leak out in all the areas of your life. You had all these signs. Things are crashing down. Prior to that, they're signs of I need to accept what's going on around me and if this is the life I want to live. Besides the car crashing and everything else, from a human perspective, you set out originally in college to be successful and so forth. How did you get off track? What were the signs like during it where you decided to go against your gut? I know that I'm going against who I want to be and I'm going to push that aside right now. What happened was that it was more of a discovery of that. It wasn’t necessarily that I knew that's what I was doing. It's that I had a pretty charmed life growing up and not a lot of bad things happen to me.

Within a few years period of time, I was raped. I lost a friend to suicide and I lost my dad. When those things all happen at once, it was hard for me to find meaning from one to the other. It was like, “This is life as an adult. This is what I have to deal with now.” I identified with those things for too long or I felt like a victim in my own circumstances. When I felt like a victim, it was hard to take control of anything else that I wanted to do. What had to happen was I had to start finding evidence that I could turn this around. That's why it was so slow for me is because I identified with those things so much. It was like yoga. Suddenly, I was there for fitness, but all these little things that I was hearing started to infiltrate. I was given a good book and I did not all of it did I internalize, but maybe one thing. It was one thing at a time. I would take one step out of the gutter each time. Eventually, because of my actions, I started building evidence towards a new self-image.

It's important that we are aware of the people around us and our communities around us. As you were going through all of those tragedies, there had to have been people saying, “Melissa is going off the deep end right now.” There's some shift and it's hard being the people around because I've been impacted by drug abuse in my own family. I know that as a family member, you can't do it for the person. As you said, the hacks happen where they think they're getting away with it. The person that is sober knows exactly what they're doing.

Unfortunately during those periods, it’s like, “How do the two sides come together to still have compassion for what someone's going through?” I can tell you from the family member's perspective, what's hard in those situations is I am the one sober. I remember everything and the person that's not sober doesn't. It's easier for them to come back the next day and say, “I'm sorry it happened” or “This issue happened,” and you still have these images in your head. How would you handle that if that was in your life with somebody else and you see someone like you going down this path? Are there ways that because of what you've been through that you would reach out?

Yes and it is going on with the members of my family unfortunately. It's hard on all of us. One thing that I notice is my perspective with it is a little bit different than my mom's, for instance. When I was going through everything, I was a mover. I moved around a lot when things got hard. I have a bubbly personality. I was good at faking what I was feeling. Part of it was because I was taking things to override when I was feeling happy to the people on the outside, but somebody like my mom knew. Her instinct was to save certain things that would push me further away. It was giving those lectures and trying to be that mirror, “This is what you did last night. This is how you weren't yourself.” All that did was push me away even more. It was like, “That was my option. Internalize that or deny it,” and it was easier to deny.

When I'm watching some other family members go through this, a lot of my family members' reactions to this one particular member are to do those same things. They don't realize that they're shaming them but they are. Since I've gone through it and my perspective is so different. I know that those things didn't work for me. Unfortunately, a big part of it is allowing them to go through it. There are a few things that have been helpful. I used to be a suicide and crisis counselor. I was the person that you'd call on the emergency line if you were in crisis or you wanted to kill yourself. You learn a lot of the things in that situation because it's one of the direst situations.

It's never about, “This is what I would do. This is how you should do it. This is what I see that you're doing wrong.” It's about asking them questions that come to their own conclusions that allow them to see the perspective that they're currently turning the lights off for. One of those is first of all getting them to come to terms with the things that they're doing, how they're feeling by asking questions. They're leading questions. You want them to be blunt with what they're doing. In the example of suicide, you want them to say like, “How far have you gotten to the point of planning to kill yourself?” The way that this applies in a less severe situation is like “What are you doing right now?” Getting them to identify what are you trying to hide or what are your actions? What is the root of this? Also, where does it lead to?

That was a big shift in overcoming my eating disorder also. If I continue these behaviors, not what do I look like and feel like tomorrow, which might be thinner or whatever. I was in denial because it was never that. What does that look like in 40 years? What are you trying to create with your current actions? To be blunt about that, what are you doing now? What does that lead to? How do you have a conversation with compassion in your voice rather than judgment? That's such a hard shift especially if you haven't been through it because you don't know the toll that it is. It’s somehow finding compassion with yourself to put yourself in these shoes. Instead of saying like if somebody had control over their actions that you do, they wouldn't be doing these self-destructive things. That awareness that you might not understand what they're going through is an important thing to come at that perspective with.

How would you describe your belief system now versus then?

It’s that I have one. I didn't know what it meant to create my image from the inside out. This is natural too. When you're in high school, what do you want for Christmas? It's half the time the things that your friends want. What style is yours? It's because you heard that this was cool. Nobody shifted me out of that. Nobody taught me how to find my values, how to figure out my legacy. I was even afraid to commit to certain things because I didn't know for sure. Part of it is pulling the threads at what brings you joy now, the things that you do know and pull the threads on those, explore those a little bit. Through doing that, I'm still figuring out who I am, but right now I’m always going to evolve. I have a pretty good handle on, at least for the moment, what makes me happy, when I'm lit up, what my boundaries are, which is super important. I had no boundaries before so if somebody asks something of me, I was going to do it half the time. Now, it's coming from a different place. I know that I need to come to life from the inside out instead of from the outside in.

Setting those personal goals or purpose for yourself. What I'm hearing is like what's the longer-term objective of where you want to be and how do you see yourself? If you're going to get there, what are the little steps you have to do and next year and the year after that it's not going to happen like that? Disappointment happens a lot of times in careers because it's not happening right away or you're not a famous actress right away. Another thing that you said, if you pull the threads as you said, you knew who you were when you went to act and enjoy it as much. You wanted to be yourself. When you can tap back into that childhood, natural tendencies that come to you, how do you pull that into adulthood now?

I have been finding even more clarity through an exercise that I did. I was journaling. Journaling is helpful. I'm not the kind that found journaling to come naturally. It's been a habit that I've been cultivating because I have seen such value from it because suddenly whatever's in my head is on paper. It's this automatic way to shift a perspective. It's out of your head and onto paper. You're seeing it like this fact. You can question it in a way instead of allowing that subconscious to drive you. One thing that I've been doing is writing out all my happiest times in life. What are those things have in common? What feelings did I have during that time?

Many times, we're looking for this exact action to lead us to where we're going. What if we focused on our feelings? What did all of those feelings have in common? Was it an adventure, wonder, excitement or thrill? How can I make my decisions from that place? If you're trying to figure out, should I be a public speaker or do I want to start a blog or do I want to manage a team? Visualize what each of those would be in as much detail as possible and figure out what feelings it evokes and is that one of the feelings that you're trying to cultivate? A lot of times you'll realize like, “Maybe I only wanted to be a famous actress because I thought that's what people would think was the coolest or I thought that's what other people would be most impressed by, or that is the top of the chain on this current career path that I'm going down. That might not always be what lights us up the most or what drives our own motivation. To get in touch with the feelings that we want to feel and how to cultivate that through our actions has been life-changing for me.

That’s great advice. If your end goal is a certain energy level, no matter where you begin, you don't get to do that right at the beginning. Sometimes you have to keep that in your mind of you start out in your career. You're going to do some grunt work that you probably don't enjoy in order to eventually achieve that feeling and keep checking in with yourself. Am I getting closer? If you know the end game of why you're doing what you're doing, even when you're doing stuff you don't enjoy, but you understand where it's going to lead you, it can help you get to that end game place.

There was a moment where I was working for my last company and it was still the toxic boss only. I had made a lot of shifts afterward. We started to evolve a little bit, but it was still toxic. It was hard for me to work there. I knew that that's not what I wanted to do anymore. There was even a few-month period of time where I started my podcast on the side. There are a few different things that I learned from this. Number one is it's still important to figure out how to cultivate those feelings that you want the end goal right now. How can you bring that in? That's why people say there's so much power and having gratitude for what you have now and moving into your actions from that higher energy place.

There was a lot of power in starting my passion on the side and it doesn't have to be the thing. For me, it ended up pivoting to a whole new career path, but for some people, they might volunteer at their kids' Girl Scout camp or my husband volunteers at a kid's camp. We don't have kids, but he volunteers at a kid's camp every single year and it's one of his favorite things. It has nothing to do with his career. That helps him to have the balance during the grunt work. The second thing is, what is it that you're doing right now? It's so easy to get caught in, “Everything about this as mundane. I don't like this job and this isn't what I'm going to be doing in my future.” What can you take from that right here, right now that's going to help in your future?

During that interim of realizing like having the seeds of what I wanted to do with Mind Love and still working at this job, I realized I work at a startup. There are a lot of hats that I can wear. How can I position myself in the company to be cultivating the skills that are needed for my purpose later on? What do I have access to here? Maybe it's the ad budget or maybe it's the team that I'm managing or whatever that's going to help me over here and to find the alignment in whatever ways you can give you a different perspective on the current tasks that you're doing.

How have you seen the changes you've made in your life affect those around you? Whether it would be people you work with or whether it be friends or family.

There’s a lot. One of the biggest turning points for me with that company and realizing that now was the time I needed to make a change. It was a few months later that I started the podcast on the side was when I realized that my unhappiness was affecting not me but my relationship. Not just the relationship as an entity, but the person I was in a relationship with. If you allow yourself to be bogged down by all of your disappointment in your life, energy is contagious. Whether you believe that in the woo-woo way or in life. If you are around like you are an angry mother every single day, it's going to be hard not to let that affect you. I've realized so much that it's not selfish to turn inward and to focus on myself. It's the best thing that I can do for everybody around me.

Because not only am I a more pleasant person to be around in those tight-knit things but when you see somebody accepting responsibility for their life and leading from this place of light or the place of passion, that's inspiring to other people. Some of the people that made the greatest impact on my life, it's because they were being unapologetically themselves and fiercely following their own passions. Since I've been able to do that, when you have a platform, like I have a podcast, tens of thousands of people are listening to it every single day. Even the people that see me that don't listen to my show, they see a different light in me because I've chosen my joy over everybody else's.

That's important to emphasize to not feel guilty because you're right. You take your energy from one experience into another and if you don't take those moments to pause and go, “What is my intention of how I want to show up in a meeting with a friend, with a family member?” Ensure that you're proud of how you left that experience. It makes you feel better overall than letting people affect you. You're responding and not happy with yourself after.

The way you live, if you have kids and you're the type of person that puts everybody before and that's how you think being a good person is, your kids are going to do that and they're not going to focus on their life. The people around are going to think that's the expectations of them. When you give yourself permission to do what is going to light you up the most, it's what helps other people give themselves permission to live the life that they want instead of what's expected of them.

I like to end with some rapid questions. You pick a category. It's family or friends, spiritual money or health. Which category?

It’s spiritual.

Things or actions that I don't have but I want?

I've been cultivating the connection with spirituality. Through my journey of life, I was raised religious and I fell away from that. So much of what I thought was me finding the truth was me turning off the spiritual world completely and not thinking there was anything beyond this, which took away a lot of meaning for me. Now in the last few years, it’s redefining spirituality on my own terms rather than what I was fed by one book or one belief system or one, one thing. Realizing that because that was hard for me and I had to say no to that, I didn't have to say no to absolutely everything else. What does it look like for me? Where do I get the most value from that connection? That's something that I'm still currently working on.

Things or actions that you do have that you want?

I have upped my meditation practice in the last year. I meditate usually at least once a day unless something big is happening. That's been so helpful for me. Not even with that spiritual side, it's not even as spiritual, but the amount of processing and mind-clearing that happens when you find stillness. I notice a huge difference when I wake up and the first thing I do is check my phone and I'm looking on social media. What I've done right then is immediately infiltrate all of my thoughts with what's important to everybody else. To start the day with my own priorities is healing because I get to start it with what's important to me. What am I grateful for? It's almost like it recharges my energy. I go into the day from a completely new perspective.

How long do you meditate each day?

It’s usually twenty minutes but a minimum of twelve. There are certain days like I love binaural beats. It like drops me in immediately and I'll be like in another realm. I use an app called Insight Timer. It definitely has the best free plan for any meditation app. I drop in and it's pretty amazing.

Things or actions I don't have that I don't want as far as your spirituality?

I don't want to feel boxed in. I don't want to feel like there are rules. I don't want to feel led by fear over love. That's an important thing that's shifted my own beliefs is what are the teachings of this and what is the feeling that it's trying to create? Is it fear and power or is it love and expansion? For me, I focus on love and expansion.

Last question, things or actions that I do have that I don't want as far as my spirituality?

I'm still working on sometimes identifying with different things. There was a lot that I overcame and a revelation that I had was that through creating, there was a self-image I had ten years ago. There's a completely different one that I have now that's much more empowered. What happened in overcoming that is I started to look at my past self with shame. It was like, I was ashamed of who I was and I started to recreate even store other stories. If I was this bad to myself, I must have been a bad friend. I must have been a bad roommate. I reconnected with somebody from college who I hadn't spoken to in almost fifteen years.

He wants me to be an advisor for his company, which is interesting. It was funny because I was like, “Why me and why now?” He's been following my journey. He’s like, “I've worked with a lot of people. There’s something consistent about you. I've been reminded of how good of a person you've always been.” Suddenly I was snapped out of this story that I had created about my past self and I realized that I was identifying with that too. Even as we shape our stories and as we evolve, don't box yourself into like this one view of yourself. There are so many different ways that you can look at every single story that we're telling. Always choose the most empowering one.

What do you want people to walk away with as your message, your biggest takeaways from this conversation and anything you want them to know about the things that you do as well?

My biggest message that I'm discovering about myself is to discover yourself. Allow yourself the flexibility and be intentional about who you create because that self-image is going to drive your actions and even who you become in the future. Often, I was either numbing or seeking outside of myself for my own satisfaction and wondering why I always felt so empty. Take the time to discover your triggers and to create the boundaries that you're comfortable with. In the beginning, it's going to seem crazy but that's why so many people are like, “I don't even know what my passion is.”

It's because we haven't started to pull the threads of our passion and to say, “Maybe all I know right now is that I like to cook, but I am a financial analyst.” What do you do? Start cooking. What do you get from that? How can you expand that? What else does that lead to? Take a culinary class. Find other people that are interested in this. What are they doing with their lives? You might not know immediately, but dive into the clues that you get about yourself. The more that living from that place, the more doors will open up. It might take a year or 2 or 3, but you're going to find so much clarity on how to take your next step if you first start with discovering who you are and have fun along the way. That’s the fun part about chasing joy is that you are in joy all the time.

Don't stress yourself out about it. You want to tell people where they can find you and the things that you do?

I have a podcast called Mind Love. Every week, I interview somebody else with a story to tell and a lesson that they've learned in their own life. You can find me on any podcast platform by searching Mind Love or MindLove.com. I'm always sharing inspirational messages on Instagram every day, @MindLoveMelissa.

Thank you so much for being on. I enjoyed our conversation and I think everyone will benefit from some of the lessons that you shared. Thank you.

Thank you.

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Let's take some time for the mindful moments of this episode. I honestly had many. I'm sure all of you had some for yourself. I do think taking some time to pause after a conversation like this is important if not only for yourself but people that may be affected by some of the things that Melissa talked about that are around you, that you work with or that you care about. One of the things that we talked about were ways that you may be able to notice when someone might be in trouble where you saw that Melissa was able to create a great front as far as the people around her at work and still be achieving while all of these things were happening in her personal life.

She called it hacking the system. She used it in order to help her continue down the path she was going without anyone else noticing. How she was able to use things in the workplace from an HR standpoint or making sure that her friends or family didn't notice things that were going on in order to continue the behaviors that were unhealthy for her. Until she got to a point of where things started to collapse, whether it be at work or her apartment and so forth, it brought her to a place of doing that self-exploration to see if this was the path she wanted to continue.

When she took those steps back in her life, she ended up without maybe wanting to see new glimmers of hope for herself. A lot of times we think when we need to transform, it's big things that we have to do. A lot of times it's the little things in our everyday life where we become more observant. Whether that being grateful for the sun coming up that day or going to yoga or finding some exercise regimen that helps you breathe a little bit or gives you some relief or maybe it's painting or knitting or taking pictures. It doesn’t have to be something active, but where your mind can shift from its current situation.

That’s important no matter if it's as serious as the things that Melissa was going through. There's no temperature on the pain. We can't say one person's pain is worse than another because we all have our own individual journeys that we are going on. We need to be sensitive to ourselves and give ourselves compassion to go on that journey of getting ourselves healthy. It could be something much less serious than what Melissa is talking about in this episode. Another big area for me, and you heard me talk about it with Melissa is this has affected my family of having a family member that was a drug addict. It is a hard thing when you're the person to support or try to get that person some help.

A lot of times, at least for me, I have found that there are not a lot of people talking about the people that are in these addiction situations, how to get yourself help and how to make sure that you are not enabling behavior or pushing someone further down a path where you heard Melissa talk about that when her family members would come to her and tell her that she needed to change or think about what she's doing instead she was denying. I know for myself this is a hard thing and as you heard me say on the show that you know the people that are sober and it may not be drug addiction, it could be physical abuse, emotional abuse or whatever. When the person that's inflicting that to the people around us because it's like we talked about that energy that we all take in from somebody else. When they're feeling better, it's hard for the caregiver to feel better at that point because you don't know when the other shoe is going to drop.

I was speaking at a conference about these internal stories that we carry with us because what happens is that not only is the person that you care about affected, but you're affected. These become your stories as well. The people that are the caregivers, the people that want those people to feel better, you want them to get better. The people around those people that are having these hardships a lot of times don't feel like it's their story. When we tap back and realize these internal stories that we are carrying are affecting us, whether it be at work, at home and different fears that we may cultivate inside of us because we're afraid of other people around us going down that same path because we've seen it before.

After this session at this conference, I had an audience member come up to me and tell me about their own brother that had died of an overdose and how that has affected him and how he's had to keep moving forward to this career without anyone seeing what's going on in the inside. I surface this issue because it's a hard thing from both sides. We obviously need to get help for the people that are going through any addiction or mental breakdowns or depression or so forth. We also have to take care of ourselves as caregivers or the people around us to make sure that we don't go down a path that we don't want to as well.

When she was talking about to not feel guilty when you do that self-care for yourself, that's important. A lot of times, we are so focused on what somebody else is going through that we don't necessarily take care of ourselves, where we might feel guilty taking care of ourselves because their situation in our heads might feel that much worse. Each of us is on our own individual journey and it is our job to take care of ourselves so that we can be better for the people around us.

Those little things that Melissa shared of not trying to do huge things in your life, but to understand and cultivate the happiness from within. What are the things that you can remember that made you happy, even if it was just a fleeting moment? What are the things but attached to that feeling where you felt that sense of freedom or release and trying to find the activities or the things in your life where you can get those glimmers of release and joy again? It's important that we figure out what are those things in our work life? What are those things in our family life and what are those things of just side hobbies or time for ourselves so that we don't look at ourselves like this is what defines us? What defines us is our own intuition, our own energy that we want to cultivate.

Another point that she said in there was to make sure that you're not looking at your past self with shame. That can be on both sides of the coin is that we don't look back and doubt any choices that we made. We understand that all of these choices brought us to the place that we are at and appreciate that present moment so that we can move into the future in the way that we want. Creating the energy that we want to create for the people around us.

Important Links:

• Mind Love

• Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration

• Melissa Monte – LinkedIn

• Insight Timer

• MindLove.com

• @MindLoveMelissa - Instagram

• https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/iammelissamonte/

• https://Twitter.com/mindlovemelissa

• https://www.Facebook.com/melissamonteee

• https://Instagram.com/mindlovemelissa

About Melissa Monte

Melissa Monte is the host of the popular podcast “Mind Love”. Through raw stories, personal experience and inspiring interviews, Mind Love highlights the incredible role of the mind in happiness, health and success.

 As an entrepreneur, yogi, former corporate VP and self-proclaimed seeker, Melissa has spent the last 16 years exploring methods of improving the human condition and learning what makes us humans tick.

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