Radical Self-Acceptance: Interview with Therapist in Training, Amanda Callen

Jenny Swisher 0:05
Welcome to the SYNC Your Life Podcast. I’m your host, Jenny Swisher, certified personal trainer, nutritionist hormone health expert and girl mom. I believe all women should be able to understand how our bodies are designed to feel. And I teach you how to sync your lifestyle to your cycle to reach maximum energy. You deserve to feel your best and this podcast is going to teach you how. Let’s dive in!

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Welcome to this episode of The SYNC Your Life Podcast. I am grateful to be sitting here today with my friend Amanda Callen. She is a mom of three. She’s also a wife. She loves to read nature, food and wine and is also an avid runner, which I know we’ll talk about here soon. She’s dabbled in the podcast arena herself. She has one season of The Therapist in Training Podcast that began in 2020. I will link that up in the show notes. She is also a former teacher turned school counselor who spent her favorite professional years in the nonprofit sector working as a Program Director for a grief support group for children and their caregivers. After taking off several years to be home with her kids. She’s now halfway through her Master’s at Syracuse University to become a Marriage and Family Therapist, where she hopes to someday work directly with LGBTQ adolescents and their families. I’m so grateful to have her on today we are going to be covering this topic of radical self acceptance. And if you’re like me, and you were like, What does that even mean? Then you are in for a treat? Because I really feel like in this episode, we go through so much pertaining to what this really looks like, like what is self acceptance? And how does it impact our society? And how does it impact our world. So without further ado, Amanda, welcome to the podcast, please give our listeners a little bit of background about you. What brought you to marriage and family therapy. And we’ll go from there.

Amanda Callen 2:16
Yeah, it’s fun to be on here, Jenny, and good to see you. I am excited to do this interview too. I have lots of thoughts swirling. So I have a few notes here because I might have to rein it in. But yeah, a little background about me. Like Jenny said, I’m a wife, a mom of three, former high school teacher for a year and decided no, not my thing. And then ended up going into school counseling where I did. Probably my most favorite professional work was in the nonprofit sector, where I worked with a group that runs support groups for grieving children, ages three to 20. And their caregivers did that for a while, had our first child had our second child and then decided I want to be home and so have been home for a while with kiddos now and our third child is now now in second grade. And so I started a program through Syracuse University to get my marriage and family therapy license helping to get back into the therapy world just in a different capacity. So I’m right in the middle of that getting ready to start internship. And I’m excited about about what’s coming this summer with that.

Jenny Swisher 3:26
Awesome, well, let’s dive into this concept of radical self acceptance, we kind of had a little bit of a pre conversation about this. And I know I’m interested in just the topic in general, I can’t wait to see where you take it. Obviously therapy is not my background at all. So hearing from you is gonna I know help so many women today. So just let’s start off with something basic right? We’ll talk from a definitive perspective, what is radical self acceptance?

Amanda Callen 3:52
Yeah. So I quite selfishly chose this to talk about because I feel like it’s where I’m at. Personally, right now, I’ve been thinking a lot about this concept. So I’m going to start with just a general definition of radical acceptance, and then kind of go into the self piece that I’ve been thinking through a lot lately. So in the mental health world, in general, this idea of radical acceptance is the ability to accept things outside of our control, to not judge these things, and thus to reduce our suffering. So radical acceptance comes from this idea that suffering doesn’t necessarily come directly from pain, but from our attachment to the pain. So if we were to define pain simply as a feeling of hurt, bother trouble, or even on like a higher level, agony or distress, suffering would be defined more as this longer state of experiencing that pain. So the definition that I mentioned earlier could also read something like suffering doesn’t happen because of a painful experience, but because of the way we relate to that painful experience or fasten ourselves on to that painful experience. So with this idea of suffering coming from our attachment to pain, some of those in the mental health field pave the way really well to, like incorporate this into their therapy. And Carl Rogers is one in particular who did, and focused in on the idea that acceptance of the things we can’t control is the first step toward change. And for a lot of you listening that might resonate with you, depending on like, where you land with faith, it’s very much like a central part of the Buddhist faith, or the Christian serenity prayer that some may know like, God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. And so just talking about radical acceptance in general, a lot of this is focused on things that are happening to us, or situations in which we find ourselves, I’m going to take like a pause and step outside that for a second, because the therapist in me wants to say, this works well with some things, and some things not at all. For example, if anyone has ever been harmed, mentally, physically, emotionally, radical acceptance of that reality is definitely not the route to go. But we’re talking more about things that are not causing extreme harm to us, but maybe just like this distress, or pain or frustration, and being able to just accept those things and like, move through them so that we’re not suffering. There are a few arms of therapy that have come out of this, in particular dialectic Behavior Therapy, which is like a form of the more commonly known cognitive behavioral therapy CBT, and this DBT, and then there’s Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, just throwing those out there, lots of organizations or support groups will use this idea of acceptance, that’s one of the tenants of AA. So it’s kind of like becoming more entrenched in our culture, I think, thanks to the path that’s been paved in mental health, going into the self radical self acceptance piece. So I think all of these concepts of acceptance work well, when we consider that things happen to us, I feel like a culture is a okay with saying bad things happen to everyone. Culture very sneakily, doesn’t so readily jive with the idea of radical self acceptance. Or in other words, like less than ideal things exist within each one of us. Like, I feel like when we start to recognize Oh, less than ideal things, we can go into this optimized mode, like fix, like change, like that behavior doesn’t feel right to me, we’re gonna change it. And sure, there are times in places where that is definitely appropriate. But I think what that can do often is lead to this place where we are thinking more and more about avoiding discomfort, avoiding uncomfortable things about ourselves, or even if you’re a parent, our children, instead of like this ability to move slowly, except what’s currently happening. And then if we need to make goals surrounding the things that we can control and change, let’s do that. Does that make sense?

Jenny Swisher 8:11
Yes, yes. And I actually was just getting ready to say, so I have a five year old and a one year old. And hearing you talk about this, it’s interesting, because there is no, in my opinion, there’s no self awareness, quite like a self awareness that a parent receives when they when they have children, because your children emulate who you are. So for me, I know, you know, I was I’ve been into personal growth and self awareness for a dozen years or so. And it’s, it’s become part of who I am and what I enjoy about life. But at the same time, it’s funny, because when you have a four or five year old, that’s like mimicking every little thing you do, you start to realize, like, Oh, I do that, you know, or things that you say, I have a group right now on Facebook that I’m leading, and it’s called Creating Healthy Kids. And it’s just a free group, I can link it up in the show notes. But it’s basically just a way for me to help parents instill healthy habits with their kids. So the conversation that came up yesterday was about diet culture, and raising girls, especially in an era of diet culture, and what that looks like. And, you know, yesterday, I was sharing that, a variety of things that my family does, and the way that we talk about food and, and all that, but one of the things that came up was, you know, women who were realizing the way they were talking to themselves, whether it was out loud or internally and how that was being received by their children, or being emulated by their children. So I think that’s a good example of kind of what you’re saying, right? Like, and also just wanted to point out that sometimes our kids are our best teachers. But it’s also interesting because this brings about another thought in my mind to I just saw this I think it’s a Tony Robbins quote. I don’t know that for sure. But I think he shared it last week. And it’s something to the degree of like, seek peace, not happiness, and you’ll be the happy You’ll be the happiest you’ll ever be all the days of your life. And I think that’s so such a beautiful concept. You know, I think so many people are out there seeking happiness. And in reality, it’s peace we’re after, right? Like if we can, if we can have that sort of self acceptance, not just for ourselves, but just for our, you know, our circumstances, of course, like you said, like, not in abusive situations, but just in general, like how much happier we can be, you know, that’s something that, that yoga has taught me, you mentioned, the Buddhist faith and whatnot. But I, you know, when I first started yoga, and by the way, anybody listening, I don’t, I don’t necessarily see a yoga practice as necessarily being a religious practice. For me, it’s about movement, it’s about connecting my mind and body and my spirit. And it’s just, you know, when you when you start a yoga practice, and you start just an hour long class, or you’re doing it on your own, or whatever, and you start that with this, you know, setting your intention, at least that’s, that’s how I’ve always done it, right is like you start the class with setting your intention. And even that can translate into life, like how can you start each day with intention, right? How, and then the class itself usually surrounds this concept of peace, finding peace within yourself finding peace in your environment. So I just those are just some thoughts that came to my mind. But I’d love to know, you know, this is the topic that you wanted to talk about today. So what what is it that brought you to radical self acceptance? Or what’s your journey like with us?

Unknown Speaker 11:22
Yeah, yeah. So I, I don’t know how many of you are familiar with the Enneagram. It’s like one of those personality tests, it’s my favorite. And we could do a whole episode about why, but I’ll just state this. And for those of you who aren’t familiar, maybe you can look it up. But I am a nine with a one wing, which means I definitely want peace in my life. Like, whenever there’s not peace, and there’s disagreement or disrest between individuals, I want to like bring it back to equilibrium. But I have this one wing side of me, which is more like the perfectionistic tendencies wants to do things, right, which can serve us really, really well if channeled in the right direction and in a healthy place. But I find that often, if something comes up, like in my life, where I’m like, gosh, wish I would have handled that differently. Or, I mean, parenting is always the example I’m going back to like, gosh, that didn’t feel right didn’t like that interaction need to circle back around with that kiddo, like rediscover this, like I often, especially as an early parent would go to this place of extreme self criticism, to the point where I was just beating myself up about like everything and having these outrageous expectations for myself, which part of that I think is my personality, part of it, I think, is our culture. So I’ll take a little tangent here, as a marriage and family therapist, technically, I think we should be called systems therapists, because people hear the word marriage and family and they think, Oh, you’re a couple’s counselor. Yes, sometimes that that’s definitely not all, we are trained to look at all the systems that a person who comes into our office is a part of, so we never looking at just the individual to assess a problem and help them set goals surrounding it and work through it, we’re looking at the individual who’s a part of many systems. So who is a part of a family of origin, a part of if they’re married, and have their own family or have a partner, part of a different system there, if they’re working, there’s a system there, if you’re living in a community, those systems can all look a lot different. Our culture at large, like all of these bigger systems, that were part of that we do not operate in a vacuum. So we can’t treat problems, or hang ups as such, like, we have to consider all the systems so all that to say, definitely, part of it is my personality. But I think part of it is the culture that we’re raised in where there are these high expectations that are put upon us as moms. And we start to you know, to factor in social media in comparison, like we start to put these high expectations on ourselves, and not give ourselves a moment to just like, sit with the fact that we are growing learning humans who are on a journey ourselves too, and trying to raise little ones. And it’s unrealistic to try to figure it all out before you go in. Because like you said, our kids are our best teachers. So some of the best learning we’re going to do is in that, like family dynamic. So for myself, my own journey with radical self acceptance is that I think we start to like put things into categories pretty naturally and start to view the world is like pretty black and white. And then as we get older, we start to realize, oh, there are things that don’t fit into these categories that I’ve created. There are people who operate differently and who express themselves in different ways and you That doesn’t necessarily fit with these systems that I’ve been a part of. And so as I started to go through life, really in probably the last five to 10 years, I think it’s been the most growth for me and recognizing, like, wow, I want I want to be able to accept people and learn from them for where they are, even if they’re not like me. And I can’t do that, unless I’m looking at myself, and having a radical self acceptance for me for my own being. Because I believe that our own radical self acceptance can lead to radical acceptance of others around us. And I think that can lead us to the liberation of all people if you want to go really, really big there and yeah, I think it’s necessary. So it is a daily struggle. I have a love hate relationship with my own radical self acceptance. And some days, I’m like, there you are. Thank you. It’s good to see you. And then other days, I’m like, why are you following me? Get away, I want to be hard on myself right now. I want to be a perfectionist. The last thing I want to do is accept where I am, because today felt like a sick day. And I wanted to do it differently. But I, it’s where it is. It’s reality. And if I want to stay mindful, and in the present moment, I better be ready to accept the good and the bad.

Jenny Swisher 16:26
Yeah, I mean, what a what a powerful thought. And I think I was kind of a mic drop moment. It’s hard to follow that up with another question. But I just think, I think you’re so right. And you’re so onto something, you know that it’s sometimes it’s interesting, because it’s when I think about this in terms of health and fitness, right? When someone comes to me, and I want to transform their life, and I want to transform their health, they come to me and they you know, they don’t realize that it’s a lot of simple steps in the right direction to get them healthier. Same thing goes for your mental health, right, like understanding your relationships with other people, understanding your relationship with yourself. Last week, we had a podcast episode that I can link up in the show notes with my life coach, Amy Snow. And she talks about how John Maxwell, her mentor talks about how the hardest form of leadership is self leadership. Like right, and the same thing goes for, I think you could say the same thing is true of of self acceptance, right? Or of acceptance. In general, like, the most important form of acceptance is self acceptance, like how can you accept others, if you aren’t accepting of yourself? It also makes me think of, I know, for me, some of the most powerful personal growth books or subject matter that has made such most of an impact for me is not just the stuff that’s focused on me and how I can get better, but how it’s focused on other people and how I can improve the relationships with other people. For example, The Five Love Languages, right? I mean, that’s, that’s a book that is so simple in as far as from an idea perspective. Or there’s a book called Personalities Plus by Florence Littauer, right. So both of those books come to my mind as being some of the most impactful books for me, with five love languages, it helped me understand not only like what my husband’s love languages, and how he feels most loved, and how I can now perform that, you know, for him, it’s physical touch, and quality time. So how can I dedicate some of my energy towards spending time with him and sitting closer to him, like, those are things that matter to him. I’m also learning the love languages of my children, right, which are different for each of them. And so it’s been huge. And it’s such a simple concept book, but it’s been such a, it’s made such a radical difference in my life. And then with personalities, plus, you know, I lead a team of health coaches. And so when it comes to mentoring people, or even just in friendships in general, family relationships, that’s an old school book, but it’s really you take a quiz, and it helps you identify it’s very similar to like, Enneagram, or the DISC profile, but kind of an old school version helps you kind of figure out like, how do I best interact with someone who’s more of a socialite? How do I best interact with somebody who’s more of an introvert, like, what are the different ways that I can then serve them? You know, and it’s not, it’s not about me, right? It’s not always about me. So how can I make those relationships better? So that’s awesome. I want to I want to kind of take this into, you know, how we can use this for our own improvement. How can we turn this into something that is tangible that we can really act on to improve for ourselves? So my first question for you is, why is it necessary that we embrace self acceptance in order to build our best life? But also, can you tell us what that looks like? Like what are some tangible things that we can maybe incorporate?

Amanda Callen 19:37
Yeah, I think that our lives move so fast. I think for me, as I get older, I feel like there is moving faster, faster every day. And I know there are some theories surrounding like it actually is speeding up and I don’t know a lot about that, but it just feels like time slips away and we fall into the rat race of do more, achieve more experience more on and on and on and on. And, like, I think it’s beautiful to hear you talk about these things that have been helpful for you in establishing strong relationships with your husband and your children. And I think it’s great that you could take that info in and it’d be life giving for you. I think that sometimes we have to watch that we’re not making another checklist, you know, of things to do. And I think sometimes it is like this slowing down. And if we believe that our kids are our best teachers, and if we believe that others around us are not just around us by accident, if we believe that as a human species, we are way more interconnected than we can even imagine. Like, I think we are so much more interconnected than our minds would be blown. If like the curtain was pulled back, and we could see the big picture, then it really requires that we are not only thinking about what we can do next, but how are we being in a moment? Like in a moment with myself? How am I embracing the moment? How am I at peace? Like you said, because it’s for sure, really, what we’re striving for is peace in a moment versus happiness? When I’m in a moment with someone else, how am I hearing from them? What are they teaching me? And it may not be an immediate Oh, I got that. And now I’m going to take it and do a step. I think sometimes it’s more of a sit with it. Let it like resonate. circle back around. Brad, my husband and I were just talking about this the other night? How about the idea of growth and how I think a lot of times we can view growth as like a ladder, right? Like, okay, got that check, done. Another one got that check done. And I tend to view it more circular, but like three dimensional, so like a spiral, maybe, where like, I think we circle around a lot of the same issues in our life over and over. Like one of my common themes that I feel like I come back to often is, in a variety of situations with my kids, with my spouse, with my friends in school in my profession is I’m not enough. So I think I circle that theme a lot. Like I’m not enough. But I think that there’s a depth to it each time I circle it that like I’m seeing that in a different way. I’m learning from it. Sure some things are changing. But how am I like relating to that message? That I’ve been telling myself that I know isn’t true, but it’s still there. And I can’t just push it out, I got to have that radical self acceptance to believe, hey, it’s there. How am I interacting with that? What am I learning from it? So I don’t think growth is two dimensional. I think that it’s this three dimensional, like circling, I wish that we could like have a whiteboard and draw it. But does that kind of

Jenny Swisher 22:55
Yeah, I think you did a great job of describing it. I think yeah, I totally understand what you’re saying. And as you were speaking, I made me think yeah, I you know, I can pick up on some themes that I’ve that have been there for me to like, whether it’s been through business, or through relationships, or whatever, certain things that continue to pop up. So what do you think then, as it pertains to just society in general? You know, you were mentioning earlier about this being both small scale, right, like within ourselves, but then also bigger impact and how it could change the world? What is society need to be doing? I guess, how are we missing the mark? On radical self acceptance?

Amanda Callen 23:33
Yeah, it’s a good question. I feel like we’ve been circling it a lot. So in a way, I feel like I’m repeating myself, but I think we put a lot of pressure on ourselves, like we’ve talked about to have it all figured out, especially around self like, we need to know ourselves, right? Well, why think knowing ourselves in a moment, can be true, like I know myself right now. But we’re shifting, changing, learning, growing people. So the person that I know right now may not be the person who I know in 10 years, five next week, you know, like there are things about us or things we’re experiencing in life, we’re living life wide open and taking things in and recognizing those around us as teachers to us as a part of our own journey, then we’re constantly changing. So I think it is I think we should just throw it out. It’s unrealistic to think that we have to, like, have everything figured out about ourselves. And I think that there’s power. I think there’s shame surrounding that initially, and I’m sure Brene Brown probably talks about this somewhere because she is the shame goddess expert in our world. Just a plug for her right there. She has great stuff. She actually has a I think it’s on Netflix, a documentary of her latest book coming out March 31. So she’s like an intense researcher. I love her because she writes in this beautiful way, but like her it’s very research based She has researched shame to the nth degree. And I think we have a lot of shame surrounding. Admitting that we don’t know, you know, like, we’re supposed to have this figured out, I’m an adult, I’m this old, I should have it figured out. Because our society puts such a high value on knowing yourself Uber Uber well, and not being able to say, Well, yeah, I know myself now. But that could change, right. I also think as a society, we’re missing the mark in that we tend to weed out and ostracize those who are really, really good at self acceptance. I think some of our most amazing leaders in this area are those who are causing the most controversy and simply existing and living their lives boldly and beautifully. And unashamed. The message of our culture is fit in blend, don’t stand out, don’t be too different. And I was having a conversation about this the other day to where it makes sense, right? I feel like we have this herd mentality. We as humans thrive on connection, we flourish when we feel known, and we find others who have shared experience and things in common. And then we tend to diminish and decline when we’re in isolation, or around, maybe you know, constantly around everything that’s new and not the same. So we tend to find like, there’s so much language around it. In our culture, we find our people, our tribe, our team, our squad, and we stick with them. And typically, these groupings are based on some sort of similarity. So the similarity that drew us together begins to naturally have a higher value in our eyes. And I’ll use a silly example. I have a dear friend, we run together regularly. And really, between our kids and running, that was what started our friendship. And now I have this amazing friendship with her. So it’d be really easy like, right, it’s centered around running, we love running, we joke about running and how much we like, feel the adrenaline and like, all everything looks brighter and more beautiful today, it would be really easy. This is a silly example again, but it would be easy for us to be like, Oh, those weightlifters? Oh, my gosh, what are they even doing? How do you even gain it in like, ostracize right? And weed out? Because it’s different? And how could you not experience like the best hi from running? And I think that we’re doing that on way bigger levels systemically and politically. And yeah, and so I think that I think we need to accept that it’s okay, that we we center around commonality and that we come together around that, but to not let it then become like those things that we have in common as more valuable than others. Because I think what that does, is, it creates this fear of what’s different, right, and then we encounter someone out on the street who’s so different than us. And it makes us feel uncomfortable, and it makes us feel scared. And I think some of those people who are living their lives, so boldly, beautifully unashamed with who they are trying to express themselves in these ways are some of our greatest teachers, and that we’re really missing the mark.

Jenny Swisher 28:11
It makes me think of that there’s a statement or a question that I’ve heard repeatedly, that says, you know, do you love yourself when you’re by yourself. And I think you’re right, when it comes to how easy we are to ostracize others who are different than we are. And earlier you said, you know, that you’d like to seek out relationships, even if their people are different from you, right. And same thing, for me, it’s, I you know, and this is an interesting example, but you know, both of my children are biracial. And when my husband and I decided we were going to go through adoption, and that was going to be part of our story. We did all these several hours of education surrounding what it would be like to adopt a, you know, trans racially. And I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again, that it’s been one of our greatest teachers, as far as you know, I’ll never forget somebody telling us, probably the number one piece of advice we ever got was someone telling us, you know, make sure that you and your husband are putting yourselves in the room, where you are the minority. And so, you know, making that intentional effort for ourselves to do that and to get to know people that we otherwise would have never probably sat next to right or, or would have never otherwise started a conversation with. But it all it all does come back to this idea of how I don’t want to say confidence, but how at peace are you? I guess is the best phrase like how at peace are you with yourself, that you can then be open to experiencing like the peace of other people? And I think you’re right, that there is more that connects us than divides us. But we’re so so quick to be like, I mean, I’m the same way. You know, I mean, I’m, I’m interested, I’m the opposite. I’m in the strength training. I’m not a runner, so I can easily say Oh, I would ever want to run and I say it to be funny. A lot of times like I’m sure I’m trying I have a sarcastic personality. But it’s true though, right? Um, I think in our society, especially, I see it almost just exploding since the pandemic started, you know, if you’re, if you’re on social media at all, you know what I mean? Like, whether it’s from a political perspective or whatever with with the pandemic, you know, regardless of where you stand, everybody has an opinion. And this, you know, everybody is so quick to just this canceled culture idea, right? Like, if you don’t agree with me, that I just just blocked me here, I’ll block you and keep you out of my life. And it’s like, well, how is that serving us? And how is that you know, and then yet, we’re the first people to see right now what’s going on with Ukraine, Ukraine, and Russia. And we’re like, oh, we just want peace. But here we are at home saying, Well, you’re not allowed to be my friend and step into my space if you don’t agree with me. Right? And it’s like, what? What a dichotomy there, right? Like, that’s such a huge, it starts small, but it goes back to this concept we’ve been talking about, right? It’s everywhere, from small to large. So the other thing that I wanted to say, and I’m sorry, I’m kind of just rambling with my stream of consciousness. But I think coming back again, to children being our greatest teachers, you know, I think about the questions that I asked my daughter at the end of a long day, right? Like I asked, we have conversations at the dinner table. And a lot of times it’ll be in the bathtub when she’s in the bath. She likes to get really chatty when she’s in the bathtub. So I asked her questions about her day, and her her little friendships that she has a preschool and, and sometimes I when I’m asking her the questions that I asked her, I realized, am I asking myself these questions? Right? Like, my, like, I’ll say to her, and I wrote this down while you were talking, I’ll say, I’ll ask her, you know, like, Well, what was your favorite thing about today? What was your least favorite thing about today? And I’ll ask her the question, this has been a new one lately. I’ll say, Well, who challenged you today? Who gave you a challenge? And then when she answers me, I say why, like, why did that challenge you? And usually, it comes down to the person, obviously, as we’re all different, so the person thinks differently than she does. And they were is different than she is. And so for me to ask her that question of like, who challenged you, and why did you feel challenged, I think helps her helps her realize like, oh, like, the reason is because of our differences. You know, but how can we bring it back to what what do you have in common? Right, like, were you? Were you both tired? When you had that negotiation? Were you both hungry? When you you know, like,

Amanda Callen 32:21
things like that? And so I mean, lawyer, yeah. grown women, right? It goes for

Jenny Swisher 32:26
five year olds and grown women. Absolutely. So the questions that I wrote down that that I know that I asked her and that I need to start asking myself is, you know what, or who challenged you today? Why? Digging deeper into that question of why. And sometimes you have to ask why multiple times to get to the root of that. When did I talk too much today and not listen enough? I asked her that. And I asked myself that I started a process a couple years ago, journaling. I started out with just gratitude journaling. So every night I’m not a morning person, so I have to do everything at night. So at nighttime, I would sit down with my journal at my nightstand. And I would just write down quickly, three things I was grateful for. And recently, I’ve started adding to that. A couple of questions. As you know, Brendon Burchard, talks about who needs me on my A game today. And so I’ll ask myself the question like, did I serve who needed me today? On my A game? When did I talk too much today? And when it when should I have listened more? And did I do what mattered most to me today. So in other words, like, sometimes I can really beat myself up, like, you know, like, when, especially as a business person, like I’m, I’m very driven for what I do. And I mean, I could, I can work and what I work in all day long, like, I love what I do. And I have to make intentional efforts when it comes to relationships, relationships with my parents relationships with my kids, because I can do this all day long. And so you know, sometimes I have to tell myself, like, at you know, I have a thank goodness, there’s a, there’s a couple of the called High Performance planners that I started using, instead of just a good old to do list I used to be you kind of nailed nailed me earlier, when you said checklist, a checklist type. So I used to just have a traditional planner, and I would write down all the things I needed to do today. And it was very, like task oriented. And I started using this different kind of planner, and I can I can link it in the show notes, where it asks me questions like, What are my three goals for this week, and who are the three most important people that I’m meeting with. And then each day, I have to outline like, who matters most today. And so for me, I don’t work at all on Saturday, Sundays, and Mondays. That’s when my daughter’s off in preschool. We do family time, we have soccer practice, we do all that kind of stuff. And so for me, I’m okay with working Tuesday through Friday because I know that those three days of the week are fully dedicated to my family. And so I am Here I am here to show up for my business during those days. But then on those other three days when I’m with my family, I’m there to show up for them to write and so I don’t want to digress too much but I think journaling and have in being able to ask yourself these questions just like you would ask your your child helping them navigate their relationships at a young age helping yourself navigate relationships and helping you understand where you’re challenged. The other thing that I want to say is, this is a there’s a children’s book that we started reading, it was a recommendation from her preschool, it’s called in my feelings. I’m not sure if you’ve seen it or not, but it’s really cool. But it’s got like a heart shape on the cover. And then each page identify as a color that the child is feeling. So when I’m happy, I feel yellow, yellow, like the sun, you know, when I’m red, I feel this or whatever. And so it goes through that. And I think, you know, it’s interesting, because Ellory, and I can have a conversation for an hour about how she’s feeling. And we can go through those pages and talk about like, well, what does that make you feel like and she’ll say, physically, what makes her feel like, my stomach will start to my stomach starts to tumble, or my my cheeks get red, she’ll tell me, you know, so she starts to have these like, it’s like a physical awareness surrounding her emotional awareness. Yeah. So, you know, even if you’re 38, like me, and you’re listening to this podcast, check out in my feelings, which is a children’s book, it can go a long way to help you understand, you know, what you’re up against, I think a lot of times we just internalize it as stress. It’s just like, because something’s different, or because it challenges us we internalize it as stress, we don’t deal with it. And I think Brene Brown is the person who says sit in it, like, just sit in it. Right. So anyways, um, before I go off on too much of a tangent, I just wanted to say this, I love it,

Amanda Callen 36:24
I hope that you will list your questions, because I’m like, I didn’t write them down. And that’s a great list of questions, like you said, for kiddos. And for ourselves to journal about those were amazing. I love the one about who challenged you the most, or what challenged you the most today and how you were recognizing the theme of difference that was there. And then focusing back on commonalities what you’re doing, it’s beautiful, because you’re giving your daughter the ability to discover her own language for relationships with people. And I love like the idea of like, what, what is it the challenge to me? What do we have in common? Let’s strengthen that. And then if we could even take it a step further to say, what was it about that person’s difference? That could make me better, you know, or could make me into my best version of myself, because I think that’s where like to circle back to what I said at the beginning, I think our own radical self acceptance leads to radical self acceptance of others in the liberation of all people. And I’d like to share a story here at the end to maybe close it up that relates to that. But before I want to say that, I also love that your daughter was like, physically, I feel Boombah boom, because as kids, they can go there, right. And then as we grow and brush up against the world, we stop recognizing the somatic feeling like the feelings within our body that are connected to our emotion. And the truth is, it’s all connected. It’s not separate. And I love how kids teach us that, like, well, that feels like this pit in my tummy. Like, that’s beautiful. Like, I think if we could teach our kids to maintain that throughout their lives instead of from their bodies. That’d be amazing. So I think you’re aiming with her, which is amazing.

Jenny Swisher 38:12
It’ll be interesting to see how sometimes, I think to myself like, Well, we’ll see how this gets translated. And what I hear back from the preschool teacher, sometimes, you know, like, waiting for her to be in a conflict at preschool, and then like, bring some sort of emotional awareness to the, to the conflict of some kind, you know, but she told me yesterday, this is just a side tangent before you tell us, she was telling me about she’s five and a half. So she’s on the older end of the spectrum for her preschool. And there are some kids that are just three. So she was telling me yesterday how she looks out for this little boy who’s two and a half or three and how he sometimes has trouble understanding his feelings. And I thought to myself, it was almost like this little pride moment for myself because I thought, you know, a five and a half for her to have that awareness that like, I help him with his feelings. I help him understand his feelings. I thought, yes. Like, you know, I might have had a very challenging day, she might have gone to a room like seven times, but that moment is a good moment. So anyways, carry on. I’d love to hear your theory.

Amanda Callen 39:09
Yeah, I just wanted to wrap up with this one story that was has been really impactful for me, I listened to Glennon Doyle’s podcast. I don’t know if you listened to her at all. But I think it’s called we can do hard things. But her podcast recently she interviewed a Loke, who is a non binary individual uses pronouns they them, and a Loke was talking about radical self acceptance, right? And what that looks like, and how they had been growing up, taught that they were to look a certain way, act a certain way, behave a certain way, and that it wasn’t resonating for a look. And so they took this different path and now like it kind of circles back to that what I said I think some of our greatest teachers in this area of radical self acceptance can make a lot of us feel super uncomfortable, right to see someone journey their life and figuring it out to that degree. And the thing that they shared was a story of their grandmother who, at one point, something had happened. And the grandmother had said, How could you do that to me, and it was nothing done to the grandmother. I’m forgetting what it was that happened. But it was something that a lope had experienced, had nothing to do with the grandmother, but it was very public and out there. And the grandmother was feeling I think, shame surrounding it. And a low, of course, was hurt by it and process through that, but then said, I want to take it to this higher level level thinking here. And I want to address what I think was going on internally with my grandmother. And what a look thought was going on internally, with their grandmother was that she had lived under this Indian culture that had said, your life looks like this. And I think Luke said, growing up, one of the things that was taught was that, like, of course, we’re all going to be depressed, but we’re just gonna deal with it. Like there was this unhappiness in the home that existed, but it was accepted as this is part of it. And Luke said that they like to think that what the grandmother was experiencing in that moment, and grandmother has since passed, so did not get to have this conversation with her. But what a look thinks was happening was the grandmother felt the freedom that Luke was walking in was like, Ah, how are you allowed to do that? And I haven’t been able to, even if she didn’t have the words to verbalize it, how are you allowed to have this radical self acceptance that I never could reach. And there’s something about that, that’s hard, right. And if we then sit in grandmother shoes, in this place of radical self acceptance of what has happened to me up to this point, my life and now I’m 80 something years old, and realizing there is more, and there and there are journeys that others are experiencing that are different than mine. And that’s okay. That we there might be a grieving process that happens surrounding our own radical self acceptance of how we’ve chosen to live our lives or where we are at a certain point. And that that’s part of it too, like accepting that grief, and then being able to like, feel liberated because of where others are walking. And now I’m not saying then that we should all throw out and like everyone use they them pronouns, and get rid of the binary gender, like completely, but whenever we see individuals walking that route, and it makes us uncomfortable, I think we need to stop and say like, what is it about that, that’s here to teach me and help me become the best version of myself. So that was a long story. But that’s what I wanted to share there

Jenny Swisher 43:03
at the end, you know, and that’s, that is a perfect way to wrap up. I’m so grateful that you took time out of your day to day to share, share all this insight with us. As always, it starts with self awareness moves to self acceptance, and then we can move on to accept the world. I want you to tell people where can we find you? And how can we get in touch with you if you want to?

Amanda Callen 43:55
Yeah, email me. Anyone can email me at amandanicolecallen@gmail.com. N-I-C-O-L-E.

Jenny Swisher 44:06
Perfect. Okay. Well, we will, we will link that up in the show notes. And then we’ve also linked to your therapist and training podcast. Again, thank you so much for spending time with me today. I I know we’re both moms so we’re off to just you know, to be a mom next or whatever the case is. So thanks so much for being here. I know we’ll talk again soon.

Amanda Callen 44:26
Sounds good. Thanks, Jenny.

Jenny Swisher 44:36
Thanks for listening to this episode of the SYNC Your Life Podcast. I hope you found value from today’s episode. If you did, please share it out to your friends or leave a review. Remember your cycles are your superpower and by aligning with them you can live your life with all the energy needs to be a mom, Wife, Daughter and friend to those you love. Until next time!