Episode 21: Who You Are: Find Your Capital "S" with Keith Bernardo
Caring for yourself does not pertain to selfishness. This is what Dr. Keith Bernardo, a clinical psychologist that specializes in perinatal psychology and human connection, wants to impart to his patients and to everyone else. Today, Amy Vetter interviews Dr. Bernardo to share his unique stories, including the impact his parents have had on his career and life and how that helped him live an authentic life. Furthermore, he shows us how we, too, can find the capital “S” in our lives.
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Who You Are: Find Your Capital “S” with Keith Bernardo
Welcome to this episode where I interview Dr. Keith Bernardo, a perinatal psychologist and one that specializes in human connection. Dr. Bernardo has a PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. During his Post-Doctoral training, he worked in the field of perinatal psychology, solidifying his interest in human connection from its origins, maternal-fetal connection. He works with a wide range of individuals helping them better connect to themselves, others and the world around them. During this interview, he shares his unique stories of the impact his parents have had on his career in life and how that has helped him live a more authentic life.
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I'm with my friend, Dr. Keith Bernardo. I'd like to start with Keith giving us a little background on yourself for our audience to learn about you.
I am a clinical psychologist via organizational psychology. When I was in high school, I knew I wanted to go into the field of psychology. By the time I was applying to colleges, I became interested in a large group dynamic work, meaning how group impacts our behavior, how I could impact performance or how I think I'm seen by the group. I got into my graduate work at Columbia. I was in the Department of Organizational Leadership. I realized that there was a missing piece for me, which was I wasn't understanding intrapersonal psychology.
I asked my beautiful husband if I could go back and get a second PhD. I went back and got a clinical PhD. During that time, in studying Clinical Psychology, I had this incredible re-ignition of what human connection is. I'm a reductive guy, so I was like, “When does it start?” That prompt me to perinatal psychology. I became interested in all the research on maternal field connection and how that connection impacts the development architecture and the baby's brain and therefore, how they enter the world. It's a nichey little field. I apply it broadly.
This is where we met and talked for hours once we delved into what you did because it's so interesting. It coincides so much with what we talk about on this podcast about these belief systems that we hold true of where do they even come from? Could they come from the womb and the environment that we were in even before we knew we were alive? It's fascinating.
A lot of people when I begin talking about this thing, they think, “The deck is stacked against the little infant,” but it's not true. We look at it as a way of protecting against anxiety-induced architecture. There are strategies that we employ that helps the parents understand who they are during the pregnancy and how to correct any iterations following their child. It's a good field.
Before we get into that, I'd like to delve into you a little bit to understand how someone even wants to go into psychology in the first place. What drove you? As a little boy that's what you had thought you wanted to do from day one or was there ever another thing that you wanted to do besides that?
It's so funny because when I look back on all my eighth-grade yearbook and my high school yearbook, it always says psychology. It also says computer science. I don't know what I was thinking about that. Thank God, I didn't help the world with my computer skills. I've always been a curious person to tell stories of me writing to different religions when I was in fifth grade, when I was ten. I would show up on the Mormon Church, I was curious about comparative theology, philosophy and psychology. We always say psychologists go into the field because they have a journey to understand themselves more. That's true for me. It has been a fit, not based on my own experiences of myself, which is useful. Becoming curious about the world and how we view it and how you could make people's lives better by changing how they view it. I've not wanted to be a psychologist.
That is cool that you're living your passion. I know we've talked a lot about your parents and your parent's influence. What influence or support did they give you as you were making these decisions?
As a spoiler alert, I have the best parents ever. I'm the world's biggest crier. I was luckily born of these two astonishingly open-minded, caring, loving and supportive people. What they wanted for me and my sister, our whole lives was for us to find ourselves.
Why? Was there something that drove them in their history?
It's interesting to me because my dad grew up a Roman Catholic. I even know Venus every morning was the church organist. My dad would go to confession three times a month and my mother would too. My father at the age of 34 had a near-death experience. He had a pericardial sac injury that stopped his heart from beating. He became rather Buddhist after that. He’s this big like an Italian guy named Dominic. I was not expecting a Buddhist bell to be in his office. He began asking us children, which informed my psychology practice by the way of who we are and how he was misperceiving seeing us. How he wanted us to be seen by him and challenging us on perhaps why we weren't seen like that.
I want to pause on that. That is unbelievable because it sounds like such a small thing, but how many parents sit with their kids and say, “I'm not going to put what I think on you or what my perceptions are or my belief system and what I think you should be. Tell me who you are.” That is such an important question.
It’s unreal. That’s why I'm in business because you get people to be more like my parents. This is a union psychological belief that when a person is born, we have a capital S-self that resides inside of us. While we grow up, we have all these little S-selves and we call them interjects. My aunt Mary told me I was stupid or my fifth-grade teacher called me a cry baby. My eighth-grade teacher said, “Boys don't cry,” all those things. Before the prefrontal cortex is developed, it starts to run. We believe those for ourselves. Our job in life is to cancel those out and to find the capitalist self. For some fascinatingly lucky reason, my parents always wanted to get us to the capitalist self as fast as we could.
If he sits down with you and asks you, “Who are you?” How did you even understand how to answer that question at that age?
It’s very badly.
That's a hard question even at any age.
I would say, it started with cursing even. It’s like, “I'm a boy or I love tennis. I'm an athlete,” or whatever it was. As I grew, I started understanding what my father meant. Not what I did, but who I thought I was. That's when my dad taught me the word, “I'm curious.” My father said, “Maybe you're a curious person.” I said, “That sounds right.” My dad was more vocal, a little bit shyer. He would instruct me about how to think about myself. When I was in college, we started talking about my orientation. I'm married to my husband, Rob. He said to me, “Maybe you're a gay person in the world.” I was like, “No. I’m not.”
Self Care: When a person is born, we have a capital "S" self that resides inside of us.
He was so supportive. They both were about every aspect of my sense of meaning. That's the only thing that they always talked about. They never talked about their personal happiness. My dad always said, “What is meaningful about that?” Life is going to throw you some curveballs you are not going to feel happy about. Happiness is a fleeting thing. The vicissitudes of life can negate happiness sometimes. What we can do is find meaning. My dad was the one who taught me to search for meaning regardless of what the event that life throws your way may be. That was the greatest other than curiosity gift he gave me.
We also talked about them helping you to come out.
That pulled me out of the closet.
That's probably the most unique story anyone's ever told me. I've thought about it a million times since. I would love for you to share it because it's such an honor to your parents and again, pulling away from what they want versus what you are and can be.
I was born in 1965, so when I was growing up, being a gay person in the world had three strikes. It was criminal, it was a sin and it was psychological deficits. The idea of identifying with being a criminal, being sinful and having a disorder, is not a cool path for me. I was fairly a non-sexual person. I wasn't promiscuous or I wasn’t acting out. I met a girl and I decided, “This is it. This is how I loved her.” I thought maybe I could commit. My parents called me to dinner and they said, “It's great, but we think you might be homosexual.”
It blows your mind especially at that time in the world.
Especially given their Catholic upbringing. It's an amazing thing. I fought it for a while, which is a testament to my failings and not my parents.
Why did you fight it? If they saw it, why were you fighting it and your belief systems?
I felt it was a strike against my happiness in the world. I was fearful that it would mark my success in some way. Would it matter if I was gay? If I was going to try to get into a PhD program, would it count against me? Certainly, hitting the jackpot on all the other identities, white male, middle-class family. I was very nervous that sexual orientation gay would hinder me in my life. The truth of it was, is that the opposite was true. Owning who I am and owning the power in that and the beauty in that and letting it be created the avenue for my success. I can't imagine what it would be like to feel fraudulent all the time. I lived a fraudulent existence for a while.
It goes back to your father's original conversation with you, what brings you meaning in life? You were concerned about the titles, the PhD, the outward appearance of who you are versus what creates meaning. They lived the lesson they were teaching you by helping you along with that too.
They certainly were. There's a theory in psychology that’s called social learning theory. It's Pandora where kids learn more from behaviors than words. If your parents are smoking and they say don't smoke, you are likely to smoke. My parents not only were supportive verbally, but through their actions. My mother died. My dad remains an amazingly authentic guy. He's in a lovely facility in Connecticut now. Every time I go up to see him, everyone's like, “Your dad is a great guy. Everyone loves him.” It's true. He's not afraid of being my dad. He's not afraid of being tempered.
He's not afraid of being expressive. He's not afraid of demonstrating sorrow. He's an 83-year-old Catholic Italian guy. It was a beautiful model to see. The most beautiful story about it was when my mother died. She died very unexpectedly. She was very healthy. She died in her sleep. At the funeral, my dad was so sweet and instead of sitting in the pew, he decided to go up and be with mom's ashes during the whole thing. He wasn't embarrassed about kissing the ashes and freedom to care about the community, what it meant for him in his past life.
It broadens out to so many things wherein the business world or organizationally, we're so worried about our titles or the outward appearance or a lot of times in corporations when you're talking about organizational behavior, leaders will say, “We create this work environment. This is the type of culture we want.” Even working into business life, if you're not living it, your people don't believe it and it creates more friction.
When I was an organizational psychologist, one of the greatest challenges I felt was to do a culture change initiative. An organization that had a dysfunctional culture, change it. That’s a difficult thing. The reason that's a difficult thing is that people join an organization because a culture either aligns with them or doesn't where they stay or able to stay. There's no attrition. There's no firing because there's some alignment. There are some streams of the theory that means because authenticity at work breeds fit at work if the culture is correct. That applies broadly to life. If we're authentic, working on it all the time to be as authentic as we can.
Yes, there are constraints. Yes, no limits on ourselves. We can be as authentic as we can. I believe this is a personal belief. We will find ourselves attracted to those environments that support authenticity. It's so odd how I met you at the conference with thousands of people. We have synchronicity and alignment. That happened because we were both being ourselves. We weren't trying to put on something at this conference or trying to come to this conference that we weren't. We were us. That's a fortunate thing because not connected to you in a real way, in an official way.
People, especially in work environments, are so afraid to expose who they are. That's what connects people. I know it took me a long time to figure that out because I grew up as a CPA. I had this impression of what was accepted as a CPA and how you had to act or what you could say or couldn't say. By accident, I have this other life where I was a yoga teacher that no one knew. I had a client walk into a class I was teaching. The whole class got thrown off because the people that took the class had no idea that I was a CPA. The client was like, “You're the teacher.” We were all connected more because I was more multidimensional. I was like, “I can bring this into my life and not feel like it's a bad thing.”
It's amazing how many of us, not all of us grow up with the lemming’s syndrome. We become lemmings. We think, “If I become the lawyer that I'm supposed to be in the world or if I become the CPA that I've been told. If I get that PhD, whatever or we compensate or overcompensate for personal feelings of a deficit. I'm sure being gay forced me in some odd way to overachieve because then I'd be okay. That's not true. The truth is that the more you sink in your own skin, the more yourself, the more unique you are to the world and the more you can give the world. The more people respond to that because they see in your authenticity that they can live themselves. That's what I think.
I do think when you can use your experiences to relate and connect with others and even see yourself in somebody else so that it's a reflection back. It's healing both ways. It's also connecting where you have a better understanding of how to nurture someone else. It’s how to give them space or find meaning and that thing rather than trying to understand something that maybe you don't understand. Going back to your father, even asking that question, even if you don't have related experience, is giving someone space to be able to communicate that to you.
Self Care: People join an organization when the culture aligns with them.
When you were talking, I was thinking too that I love the saying and I use it with parents all the time, which is, when you're on an airplane. They say put your own oxygen mask on before you assist your child. The first one I heard of that I was like, “You are letting the child suffocate.” It's the most generous act a parent or a friend can do or a spouse can do, is to know and understand and live who they are first in order to provide for another person, a friend, a colleague, a son or whatever. I always try to live by the motto of mine, saying, “Put your own oxygen mask on first.” I am the king of self-depletion. I will run myself ragged. I will drive twelve hours to see Dad, come back to DC with no sleep. I am good to know one. The big challenge I have in my life and I'm trying to negotiate this with myself, is that self-care first. It's not selfish, it's generous. We officially moved to Virginia with a beautiful lake out there, eleven acres and bunny rabbits and deer everywhere. It like an amazing sense of renewal every morning rather than living in this big concrete jungle. I was done with that.
What have you seen as far as your experiences, your belief systems shifting over time from your learnings, how they've affected the people around you, whether that be your patients, your relationships?
I was thinking about this prior to our talk. I would have to say the biggest shift I've had and it's not been linear. The biggest shift has been to be okay with caring for myself first. I initially thought that meant being selfish or self-involved or I don't know what it meant or that people are not going to like me. I like to be seen as too isolated. The opposite happened. Self-care begets almost less self-care. If I take a half an hour every morning and meditate. This is my thing, I write in a gratitude journal. I get my head on straight that day. By the way, there's great brain science around the mental state of gratitude. It's not a fluffy Oprah idea. That half-hour I take for myself before I touch my pups and say good morning to Rob makes me require less self-care. When I'm running myself ragged, I used to be the guy who saw fourteen patients a day.
That's a lot to take, not only the work but to take in everybody's hardships as well.
I thought, “This is so cool because I'm helping many people.” I was useless to patients by the end of the week. I had to have a talk with my staff going, “How do you be more useful? You'd be more useful by caring for yourself a little bit more.” That's the trajectory that I've noticed a change. I was a workaholic. I was a school-aholic. I used to brag. The fact that all I would need was four hours of sleep at night. No sleep is everything. That shift has not only allowed me to enjoy life more to slow down a bit, but it's maybe more effective at what I do and when I do it.
You were saying if you weren't busy and you were trying to fill that, did you feel that you weren't as successful if you weren't busy or that you weren't achieving something or you had too much time alone in your head? What was it that why you had to be that busy?
It's all of the above because I felt like if I wasn't running myself a little ragged. It felt like I was not on the achievement wheel. There's a thing in psychology I'm sure you've heard of this called the hedonic treadmill. It’s the pursuit of the constant need for more and more. We become this little on this wheel, running and running. I thought that was the way to feel successful, to feel accomplished, to feel self-identified, to feel purposeful, and to feel validated by others. That was a big one for me. I used to love it when people say, “You're like Superman.” The truth is, “No, I'm not. I'm not Superman.” I'm terrified that if I stop, I'll be nothing. It was informed by all those things you suggest and probably a big marker of identity for me too. I don't know what it's like to be anything other than I am in the world, white, male, gay, and middle-aged. There are not 110-year-old people that are around the world. I knew that for me, being male meant to be productive, providing. For me, being male meant no breaks, work and work. That has changed dramatically for me.
When you say that term about people would say, “You're like Superman.” I've had people say that in my life is like, “I don't know how you do everything you do,” but it was an insult. When you were looking into it, you're like, “I don't think they're looking at it like “That's great that you're doing all that stuff.” It's like looking at you like, “Why are you doing all of that?” I know it took me a while to realize that I needed it. Not to feel bad about some of it, know when my limits were, but some of them were outside activities or whatever. I realized it was something that filled me up that I needed to do in order to be better during the day or with my family or so forth. It took me a long time to not be hard on myself as well.
Sharing who you think are supposed to be in the world, which is before you have analytic powers to investigate that. The little credit card part of our brain, prefrontal cortex, doesn't come online until thirteen. You have a lot of time to believe other people's ideas of who you are that you internalize as you're wrong. To shed that, it can feel monumental. It can feel like the death of you, but it's the rebirth of you. People admire the experience anyway in my practice, clinical experience anyway. People do it on their own time and some people are able to shed their old skin quickly and some people take a very long time. I don't know if you agree with or not, but I think there's a lot of factors that contribute to that. There are cultural factors, familial factors, which are also cultural and they're self-identifying factors. There's like this whole slew of factors that count into why that is. I was on the slow side. I felt in search with me for years, despite the cultural support, I had to be myself. What if I had parents that didn't tell me to be curious? I’d still be an unhappy slave to the corporate world. I’m married with three kids.
Going back to the beginnings part, which is a big part of what you do, even in utero, I would love you to explain a little bit about that effect. It's an experience if a mother is in a traumatic experience or stressful experience and they don't have you. It's something you can't control. How do people even identify that might be some of the beginnings of what they have to shed as they get older as well. Maybe you can explain a little bit about what you do more in-depth and get to that.
I always go back to this one study that I read that's completely tunnel vision to me on this field, which was a study that was done at Columbia when I was there during 9/11. This study examined women who were pregnant at the time who experienced a similar loss, loss of someone during the World Trade Center disaster. They followed these women for ten years longitudinally and their kids with everything else statistically the same. Their children were born with an increased baseline level of anxiety simply because their mothers were anxious during the pregnancy.
I was like, “That's powerful.” The biochemical neurotransmitter juice that was fueling the mother was doing the little growing person. At first, I thought, “That's a downer.” That's not good. The truth is this is good because what it helps people do and parents who experience, there are going to be things that happen. It helps them understand how to manage, understand themselves, manage their stress, manage their anxiety in a helpful way. When the baby's born, there are corrective parenting experiences that help the child learn how to self soothe or modify.
The brain is very aplastic with a problem when the kid is young. It's all corrective. The mistake is when people don't think that those kinds of things matter. It doesn't matter. Depression during pregnancy doesn't matter. Isolation from pregnancy, in fact, does at the neurological construction of the brain aspects. The neuronal oxygen of the brain is shaped through all of that chemical juices that's been around in there. I find that when parents understand this, that's a light bulb moment for them because they go, “I have the control even if things go wrong to manage this better.”
My favorite case was when I was living in Dallas and this fantastic young couple with who I was enamored. They decided to finally have their child and they did everything right. They got their lives in order. They were both successful. They knew themselves and did a lot of internal work on themselves and they finally decided to get pregnant. During the pregnancy it was determined that the baby had dwarfism and it kept vacillating between deadly dwarfism. The fetal length and hip ratio and all of those measurements and non-deadly dwarfism. I've never seen him a couple working so hard to understand what to do about this tragedy that they were saying. When it became official that the child, they decided that they were going to have to terminate the pregnancy because it was deadly dwarfism.
At the very end, they did have the child. It was tough for them and they decided to have the child. It was beautiful to see how they're helpful management through the struggle with the pregnancy informed how they were as parents and how they could deal with this challenge that this little person was going to have throughout their entire lives. It was a great thing because other people would have not managed it or been conscious enough to manage their own feelings during the pregnancy. They would have been concentrating on the little baby.
We talked about some examples in your work before too, where if the parents changed their mind. They felt no love for that baby that they were going to give birth to, how you get that parent to accept and love that child even if the child is going to die or whatever it is going to be so that they're okay once that baby is born as well?
I had a question about this case. This amazing young black woman had conjoined twins. She had made these beautiful little fetuses, monstrous in her head. She was terrified of them. She’s very nervous about giving birth to them, yet she couldn't abort. She didn't believe in doing that. We had a real journey together through a good six months of how to reconceptualize these two babies and how, if at all possible, could they be separated. It was an amazing experience for them. She became through our work together, softer and kinder and more caring. The most beautiful thing happened. I got paged and she's asked that I come for the delivery because she's going to deliver. I was in the delivery room. We had all this prep work like, “Do you want them wraps? Do you want to see them? Do you want to not see them?”
She said, “I want to see them.” They were conjoined at the head, but they were born so beautifully. They almost looked like they were praying together and she was so tender with those kids when they were born. They lived a few minutes and she gasped. We gasped and they passed away. She held them on her heart as long as she could. She didn't want them gone. That experience of loving and letting go stopped her from going into a trauma state. She could have had those children, though they were horrific and never saw them. That impact on her life would have been tremendously negative. She did it. She found a way to reconceive of who these little babies were in her life and how to love them. I figure about it because I saw this terrified person become loving to whoever that was inside of her.
Self Care: The brain is very plastic when the kid is young. It's all corrective.
It's such important work because then she can be peaceful as well. One of the things I took away from a personal standpoint, listening to some of the work because a lot of situations you're in is extreme situations. When I think about my life and my parents and knowing probably a thought process while my mom was pregnant and so forth, living my life, believing those belief systems and when I got pregnant, what I was struggling with being pregnant. By the time my son was three or four, when you say take care of yourself, I went to therapy and said, “I don't want to repeat what happened to me. I don't want this to be the type of family that I have,” and the breakdown that I had to go through in order to change that trajectory.
I had two preemies. I'm not saying it's my fault. You have no idea. I was very stressed about having my own children and worrying about, would they be in those same situations and so forth. Not that I was the same person, but you never know. The work that you have to do to undo that. Those are experiences that they don't even relate to because that hasn't been their life. When you say take care of yourself first as a parent, it's important to work. It's hard work. You can't deny that you're not having those emotions and feelings while you're pregnant or becoming a new parent. Even if you've had no trauma is traumatic.
What you said is true. I want to take it one step further. It's to do your child a disservice if you don't take the time to understand what you're feeling and why you’re feeling it. Feelings are not a training cognitive state. They are a biochemical state. A whole bunch of former reactions and your transmitter has changed. It's a medical phenomenon and feeling something right. The only way through something is to feel it. You have to be in it to get through it. One of my most challenging aspects when I'm working at Baylor Hospital in Dallas was terrible. When a family was all set with their nursery and the name picked out, they would suddenly have a stillbirth for no expected reason, no medical reason. My first job was to help them grieve. It felt terrible because your human instinct is to comfort. My job was to help them talk about what this meant. It was horrific tears. Through the feeling of it, comes the healing. Will they ever fully be the same? No. You can't deny an emotional state if you were to get through the emotional state. You got to open the closet and see the monster. That's a service you have to do, not only to yourself but to your child or children.
It's the gift your father gave to you. Even though it came a little bit later, he still had to break through his belief systems. You don't maybe know all the details of the work that he went through to do that, but in order to change the experience in life that you have else, you repeat that through the generations. It was horrible. I would go to therapy for three hours a week. I was like crying all the time. I went to the therapist one day. I'm like, “I heard there are drugs for this. Please give me something.” He's like, “No. There's a place for drugs if there's something wrong. There's nothing wrong. You have to feel this. You have to go through it. Find another therapist that will give you the drugs you want.” I'm like, “I'll go through it.” It was important that he pushed me because it is our natural inclination when things are tough to back out because it's too much.
As a little bit of a doctor's responsibility, that does not say that there's no such thing as clinical depression. A listener feels like their emotional state is creating feelings of self-harm, isolation, sadness, most of the time, etc. Go seek help because you may be in clinical depression and that may often do require medication, which is great. It’s not taboos for people in it. It's a three-legged stool. It's medication, psychotherapy and social support. If one of those is missing, the stool falls over. For the worrying will, we don't need to medicate. We need to feel. If we click over to a clinical state, do not be embarrassed about going to your GP. I need to put that cap.
That was his point was if I thought you needed it for some medical reason, I would give it to you, but this isn't that.
I've told a lot of patients to say they were happy with me. I helped them get an explanation about why that is. It's because it's hard. It's hard facing your own emotional states. It’s not fun feeling grief. It's not fun feeling chaos for lack of control. It's not fun being anxious. Your management of it over the long haul depends on how we manage it now. If you have the capacity to feel it, to tolerate it, it'll hijack you less and less and you become a different person in the world. You understand what your emotional life means, how to manage it, what not to be terrified of. For the nonclinical population, I've never seen an emotional state hijack someone to the point of disability when we all fear it will. If I started crying about my mother's death, I'll be lost forever. It's a real feeling, but the truth is if you feel like that, it's not true. Get social support.
I love that three-pronged assessment and it is important to get help. It took me a while to get over my fear or belief system that it was a weakness to go ask for help. It's important.
There’s something about expectations. This is a specific drill, but if I had to boil it down with parents and becoming pregnant, parents of having a baby, parents of raising a family or parents dealing with themselves. It's all about how many and what expectations we have and how we diminish those. There's a saying, “Expectations are inversely correlated to serenity.” The more expectations we have, the less possibility that we'll be serene. I always use the example. Rob and I were taking a vacation. We rented out this hotel. It’s expensive. It was like the best and our expectations were so high. We got to the hotel.
The next vacation we took, which happened within the same week, we drive somewhere. We found his little bed and breakfast. It wasn’t our expectations. We had the greatest time ever. We’re not expecting to have blueberry muffins. The same applies to how we raise our kids. Most parents expect their kids to be straight. That's what happens. When the derailment happens, it's often painful. If we can examine what our expectations are about ourselves, about those around us and diminish those expectations and get to the core of who someone is or wants to tell us or identify as or who they are, that's serenity. It's hard because it's hard to get rid of all of our expectations.
When they first started talking about non-attachment and no expectations, when I started yoga, I'm like, “I don’t know what they’re talking about.”
Maybe I should go into CrossFit. When the expectations are diminished, things seemed better.
I would say that in my life when I finally let things go because you can't have expectations of life because you cannot control things that happen around you. The biggest thing as far as that I've learned over time with yoga that's helped me is to step back, pause and breathe. This isn’t a point to respond to. I need to obsess, assess and observe what is happening right now, how I'm feeling so that I still put out the energy that I want in the world rather than it let me take me to a place that I'm not proud of myself. I could talk to you forever, obviously, but I'll ask you a few questions that I like to end these episodes with rapid-fire questions. You pick a category, family and friends, money, spiritual or health.
It’s family and friends.
Things or actions I don't have that I want with my family and friends?
I want Rob to live here permanently. Everything else, I got it.
Things or actions, I do have that I want?
The most wonderful, supportive friends. My incredibly rock-solid, funny, sweet calming to husbands and the experience with my dad passing gently and beautifully.
Self Care: When you discover that capital "S" self, your life will lead you to places that you can't even imagine.
Things or actions that I don't have that I don't want?
I don’t want more stuff. I don't feel like I can handle more intimate friendships. I know we all think, but I have a core. I never want the feeling of isolation. I feel deeply connected to my friends and family if there's a rift, I’ll correct it.
Lastly, things or actions that I do have that I don't want?
I know that sounds like lame complaining, but the over-scheduling of clients. I feel pressure to need to attend to everybody all the time. I trust that if I don't call Brenda every single day, all is good. The pressure to be seen as the best friend.
I know what you mean. As we close up, is there anything that you want to make sure people take away as a message from this conversation?
Who you are, capital “S” self matters more than anything you've ever been told about who you should be in the world. If you can do one thing for yourself and your family and your world, discover what that Self, means to you because then there's only one and the world leads you not a performance of you. The world needs you. When you discover that capital “S” self, your life will lead you to places that you can't even imagine. That will give you a sense of purpose and meaning despite the vicissitudes of life that you wouldn't expect. That's my take home. You pass it on to your children.
Thank you so much for spending the time.
Thank you. I'm honored to be with you.
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It's time for our Mindful Moments. I could probably record a whole other episode on my takeaways from my interview with Dr. Bernardo. He's one of probably the most fascinating people I've ever met and immediately had a bond with him as soon as we met. I want to step back and maybe take in pieces of the story that he told because there is nothing more inspiring than the stories that he talked about with his parents. We come from this world where we've got so many different religions, ethnicities and ways of living our lives. A lot of times, there's not that place of understanding, that place of compassion. It is not necessarily that you have to agree with one side or the other, but you can be empathetic to each person and not have to put your own opinions toward it.
You allow someone to be who they are. These stories about his father are one of those things that make you stop in your tracks and think about, “How could I go about something differently or think differently?” I want to go back to when his father sat his sister and him down to ask them, who are they? There's such a big impact in that story that a lot of times, especially when we have children or people that work for us or work with us or friends that we decide who they are. We start creating that definition based on our perception, based on our opinion and our past experiences rather than sitting down with that person being completely open and not putting our judgment on who they are.
Allowing them to describe who themselves and when he talked about that story, when we get asked who we are, initially, we're going to say our resume, we're going to say our accomplishments or the things that we do in life, but not necessarily the meaning behind what we do. Why do we do what we do? The fact that his father kept pushing them to get to that point where he was like, I'm a curious person that I need meaning in the things that I do. When you get down to those core level beliefs and you might not even realize that they are there, it helps drive your decision making as you go forward in life. It's not about the title or about the career or some objective or goal you're trying to get to personally or professionally.
It's about what you are trying to feel or elicit from making that decision in your life. It is going to create something in your life that it's so much better than it is right now or continues you on the path of what creates fulfillment for you. If you don't understand that underlying layer, we start making decisions in the dark. Getting to that and creating that for yourselves is important. The other story and I could hear the story a million times, is the story about his parents bringing him in before he got married with their opinion that he may be gay. I don't know of a story I've ever heard like this in my life. This comes back to the theme of how we cannot put our judgment, our own opinions, our own feelings, but be there for the other person for what they need.
What his parents did was hard because they could have let him go down, get married, have grandchildren until he eventually figured it out later and had a lot of struggle. They let go of any selfish feelings of their own and wanted to be there fully for him. It's such an inspiring story. It can be applied in so many different ways. It doesn't have to be an extreme change in your life, but it is a way of going about life that we have to practice because it doesn't come naturally to any of us that our egos are going to come up. Our personal needs are going to come up. It's our survival skills. When we can put all of that aside and be truly there for the other person, not try to justify our position, not try to justify our feelings, but be there for what somebody else's needs. Isn't that what life is all about?
Going through life in this unselfish way that when we do that, that creates more for everyone that when we're generous, we will get that back. A lot of times, bad things happen to good people as well, but being okay with how we take care of others, but also not forgetting to take care of ourselves, which was a big point. What Keith was talking about is that we have to not feel like we're selfish if we take care of ourselves. When we take better care of ourselves, we're better for the people around us. We can be there for other people, not feeling like we're losing anything when we're there for somebody else. If we aren't taking care of ourselves and doing self-care as he talked about meditation, gratitude journals or whatever that is, walking, whatever you need to do to help you get that feeling of fulfillment and release so that you're not always busy in your day.
You're not running through your life ragged and not paying attention to the little moments or what somebody else may need. As you leave this episode, it's important to think about in the areas of life, whether that's at work or at home, what are the areas that you are trying to control too much? Where can you release that control and allow for people to be who they need to be, be there for what they need, create the space for them for what they need, but allow yourself to release those expectations. As Keith talked about, it's the inverse to the serenity that we need to allow ourselves to release this, be there for ourselves. When we do that, we can create so much more meaning for the people around us because of it.
Important Links:
Dr. Keith Bernardo
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