You are listening to My Freedom Grove podcast with Gretchen Hernandez, episode 118.

Welcome to My Freedom Grove Podcast, your calm space for practical help to get your dream business up and running while being authentically you and taking care of your mental health. I'm your host, Gretchen Hernandez. I'm so glad you're here!

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Hi, my strong friends. Hey, it's been a rough couple of weeks, even a rough month with everything that's been happening in the United States. I just wanted to address this because I know how painful it is for everybody that sees all of the gun violence that's been unfolding. So many families have been destroyed by unnecessary gun violence.

We have people that are having some emotional crisis and they feel that a gun and violence is their only way to get relief from their emotional crisis. As a population, we look at this and we feel helpless.

Is it the guns? Is it the mental health crisis? Who can help? And a lot of times we feel helpless. Like there's really nothing that we can do other than calling on other people to fix it.

I really believe that we all have capability to contribute to the solution on this problem. There are billions of people in the United States and throughout the whole world that are experiencing an emotional crisis. All of the people that can do those bigger changes like gun reform or, or big system-wide mental health support. There are a limited number of people when you look at the massive amounts of people in the world.

But all of us, we have boots on the ground so to speak. May not all be boots might be tennis shoes or flip flops, but all of us are there. We're with all of our fellow humans. We can see them. There are so many of us that have eyes that can see things that are happening.

What we usually don't have are the skills to know how to help somebody. Or the right approach. We have no idea what the approach can be, but here's where I can help you is that I can share with you the approaches that I use with people. Because I approach people that are in emotional pain all the time. I specialize in helping them to reduce their triggers so that they don't have that emotional pain. And all of us have that capability of learning these skills, applying it to ourselves so that we can tell, okay, yeah, this actually does work. And then how can we help our fellow humans so that they don't suffer?

Because if people aren't suffering, they're not going to act out by hurting other people.

Acting out and hurting other people is a psychological defense mechanism. And all psychological defense mechanisms come down to two things behind those actions. And it's the pain that's caused by a fear of losing love or losing status. Or thinking that they never had it to begin with.

There are so many different psychological defense mechanisms that we can view. There's actually 26 of them and violence towards others is a very small amount of those. We can start to pick up on some of those other ones earlier and know that, oh, this is just someone acting out in pain.

So for example, this latest gunman, someone had observed him cutting his face. Cutting is one of the psychological defense mechanisms to try to relieve pain. When we can detect that somebody else is in pain. They're something that we can do to connect with them so that maybe they can feel some love. Maybe they can feel some status, like they actually are important to at least one person on this planet.

And that's where developing your skill of human connection is really the first and easiest thing that you can do decide now that you are going to make time for other people in your life. There's this song by Modern English, that's called I Melt With You. And that's how I view my fellow humans. When I see someone out there suffering, or it looks like they might be suffering because people are really good at hiding it. So sometimes we need to do a little bit extra to try to get them to talk about it, but being willing to stop your world for a minute, all of the busyness and help your fellow humans.

Because your small amount of effort, not only makes a difference for that person. It can have some serious butterfly effect of healing that person, or at least making them feel better so that they don't act out in these bigger ways that hurt more people.

Human Connection Steps

There's a five step customer journey that we learn about in business marketing, but it's something that also applies to just about every human. You don't even have to think about these people as a customer that's going to be a paying customer. Although of course you never know, you may create programs that people can purchase from you that would help them. And they would be more than happy to have a program that's available. So don't factor that out of the equation, that's still possible, but at least connecting with them at first as a fellow human and helping to relieve some of that pain.

So your five steps of the customer journey is.

1. Pain Aware
2. Problem Aware
3. Solution Aware
4. Product Aware
5. A customer of yours, ike a raving fan!

But in this instance, we're really just gonna focus on those first three.

1. Pain Aware
2. Problem Aware
3. Solution Aware

You know, solutions can be a whole variety of things. It might be a solution that you know of or a solution that you've heard of. There can be 10, 15, or 20 different solutions. All of us know solutions to some type of problem. There can be multiple problems, right? But we always know some kind of solutions. So even if they're not our solutions, we can at least let other people know about the availability of other solutions.

Connecting At Their Pain Level

The first thing though, is connecting with them at their pain level. When we see people that are acting a little bit strange, there's just something a little bit off. And some, it might be pretty dramatic that they're off, but there can be somewhere it's just subtle also.

Connecting up with their pain. If you think about symptoms, right? If you have a cold, you know, that your problem is that you have a virus in your body that's not supposed to be there. But we don't go around walking around saying, Hey, I've got a virus, I've got a virus. No, we talk about our pain symptoms. Stuffy nose, watery eyes, you know, maybe some body chills or coughs or whatever.

Somebody that is out there in pain, you can see their symptoms, or you can hear them talking about their symptoms. When you can connect with them about those pain symptoms and show them empathy, just acknowledge that they're having these symptoms or that you noticed that they had this symptom.

Now you probably aren't going use the word symptom. You're going to pay attention to whatever it is that you observe. If you see someone that has a cut on their face or on their arm, you can show some empathy for them about the pain that they must have by having that cut. If they seem to be having a hard time speaking, that might even be a symptom.

If you can think about any time in your life, where you also have the type of symptoms that this person is exhibiting, that can help you get back into that frame of reference of when I had those kinds of symptoms, what was I feeling emotionally? What was I feeling? And you can go and empathize with that person from that perspective.

And don't be afraid if this is a complete stranger, it's perfectly okay to go up to somebody like at a grocery store or out for a walk and just say, Hey, are you okay? I noticed this about you or that about you. Are you okay?

I've seen this with people in the grocery stores. Like they might be having a hitch in their giddy-up. That might be a way that I would phrase it, but like a pain in their hip or a pain in their leg. And it's making it hard for them to walk around. I can strike up a conversation with them about the physical pain that it looks like they're in and asking them, how are they doing today? It looks like they're having a little bit of hip pain.

It's amazing how people will look up at you and their eyes might get a little bit of a twinkle. Oh my gosh, somebody noticed me. They recognized me. They wanna talk about me and what's going on in my life? That can be life changing for people, especially people that have withdrawn from others because they are in so much emotional pain.

They typically don't wanna be a burden or they think nobody else out in the world cares about them. So the fact that you're stepping forward and you're showing that you care, it can be life-saving.

Like I said, it can make a world of difference in that person's life. And you just start a conversation. And not through any endpoint that you're trying to get to. You know, I know as entrepreneurs, a lot of times we're thinking about creating a sale for our business, but having that true compassion for your human being, that's really where it all starts.

Your business will do fine. If you don't have compassion for your fellow human being, it's gonna be really hard to ever even get to a sale. But when you have compassion, you're not even thinking about the sale. You're just thinking about that human being in front of you, that's having pain. And what can you do to show them that they matter, that's gonna change everything.

So when you can get that person to start talking about the pain that they're in, then it opens up a conversation. And sometimes they might have a lot of anger going on.

Creating Space for Vulnerability

How can you create a space where they could express their anger? Because that's one of the hardest emotions to have to deal with. And you can really overflow like a pressure cooker. If you don't let your anger get expressed. But anger scares other people because we never know if anger's gonna go somewhere really bad, really fast. Is there a way that you can create a safe environment where maybe you take that person off to the side where other people won't even notice that they're expressing their anger and allow them to just get it out?

And it's not that you're gonna react. You are just creating that space. That non-judgmental space where it's like, yeah, get that emotion out. It's almost like a poison, like, get that poison outta your body. Let it fall to the ground where it's not gonna hurt anybody. You're already deciding I'm not gonna get triggered by anything they say, I'm just giving them an opportunity to get the anger out of their body. And then when you can start to hear and listen to them, what do they think the problem is?

Problem Aware

And a lot of times they're going to think that other people are the problem. And we know from all of the mindset tools that we look at, that it's always our thinking about the other person or the event that causes our anger. And we have that opportunity to help them see that. But at that moment, when they're expressing all of this anger, that's probably not the time to tell them, Hey, it's just your thinking about this person.

But what you can do is you can share your own personal story of when you thought somebody else also was the center of your problem and all of the anger that that caused you. Now you're starting to really connect with that person. But what you're going to do is now start to bring your story around to how you started to realize that it wasn't the other person, that it was really something else going on in your life, and what the real problem was.

So if we can help them to see other problems, like if someone's feeling like they're not included, and they're thinking that someone in their life has excluded them in some way, the problem isn't the person that's excluding them. The problem is that they're not feeling included anywhere. If we can redirect and get very specific to, they're not being included anywhere, there are so many solutions that we could provide.

And so if we shared a story about how we felt that somebody else was excluding us and how we were so angry at that person, but then we realized that really what the problem was is that we weren't being included somewhere. We just needed that human connection somewhere where we could feel a part of, and that there are all of these other solutions. And you might even share some of the different types that you've tried.

All of a sudden that person has one processed their feelings by expressing it, getting it out. They may now be a little bit more open to a slight shift in their perspective about what the problem is. And they're starting to trust you because you've gone through the same thing. And they're like, okay, this person gets me and they're listening to me. And they genuinely care about me because you're taking your time with them.

You're giving them the gift of time and your attention and letting them know that you see them, you hear them. And that they're important as another human being on this planet. So then when you're sharing all of these different solutions, it gets somebody into a more creative outlet as opposed to anger and let's go out and hurt people. It gets them into problem solving and that there's lots of solutions and that it doesn't have to be through anger.

Being Part of the Solution

One thing to consider is when you're talking about the different solutions, try to think of some that are easily accessible.

When I was going through one of my worst emotional times and I was feeling very suicidal, of course at work, they'd say, Hey, there's this employee assistance program, or just call a counselor or a therapist. What they didn't know at the time was that I had been trying for over two years to get into one, but that the system was so impacted that there was nobody that was taking on new patients.

The only solution that was being provided to me was something that was not an available solution, which just added to my pain.

So when you are trying to help people and you're thinking of solutions, keep in mind that there may be a barrier to entry to a lot of the solutions. What are some solutions that are accessible to them that are available right away? I'd also encourage you to follow up with this person or to ask if you can talk with them again, at some other point, maybe ask if there's a way that you can get in contact with them to share some of these specific solutions, some resources, some links so that they know that you 

continuously care about them.

Important Note of Caution

You may be the only person in the world that has extended this amount of compassion to that person. Now I wanna give a note of caution also because it wouldn't be responsible of me if I didn't. I have definitely experienced some dangerous people in my life and I love to help people.

For the longest time I would help everybody that I encountered, even the ones that were dangerous because I wasn't recognizing how much of a danger they were to me and my own physical and mental safety. I'm sure you've heard the term rose-colored glasses before. When we wear our rose-colored glasses of love and compassion, looking out at the world, we're going to see all of the opportunities for all of the people that we can help. And the love is just pouring out of us to them.

And that's how I prefer to live most of my life. I love sending love out into my community, out into the world, having compassion for my fellow human being. But I know that in order to keep myself safe so that I can continue to help other people, I need to occasionally drop down those rose-colored glasses just to do a quick safety check to make sure.

Is this going to cause me any physical harm?

Is this going to cause me any mental harm?

And if it does that person may not be the one that I can spend time with. And it's not that I don't care about them because I absolutely do. But I know that I need to keep myself safe, too. There may be somebody else that is a better fit for them. And I may even be the one that introduces them and connects them because I still want this person to have the compassion and have that help. But it might not be the safest thing for me to be the one.

Consider that too, as you go out in the world and you are trying to do your part of being the solution in the crisis that we're facing, how many can you help? Who are the ones that are safe for you? Because there are safe ones out there for you. There are plenty of them. It's just, if you're willing to take the time to do it.

Right, like we all have that opportunity to be part of the solution. And if there's others where it's not you, who do you know that you could help connect them with that way, you are still being part of the solution. Even if you are not the exact person to give them all of the help at that moment.

Creating that connection with people and especially talking with strangers or even people that you know, that are having some type of an emotional struggle is not always the easiest thing to do. You don't always know the right words to say or exactly how to say it to guide them, to even wanting help.

In the connection factor course that I just created. And I'll have released here in the next day or two. Although the intent of it is to help entrepreneurs that have a service where they're trying to get clients, it's teaching that exact connection of how to talk to strangers and use your own experiences to connect with their heart and with their mind and guide them to wanting help. Now for the entrepreneurs, this will be guiding them to wanting help with them and the services that they provide. But this course might be something that is interesting to you too, because you may have free help that you wanna give. It might be your own help that you wanna give, but you can't get people generally to even want to accept your help.

This course goes into detail About all of those things and teaches you specifically how you can connect up some of your mindset models that you've been using. Some of the experiments that you've done throughout your life, how you can use those to connect to people at their heart and at their mind so that you can guide them to even wanting help. I invite you to consider that this course might also be for you, even though it is intentionally geared towards entrepreneurs. But I just want you to know this is available for you, too.

Like I said, we can all do our part in being part of this solution to help our world to be safer.

My strong friends, I wanna make sure that you are taken care of too. I know there's a lot of emotions you must be feeling during these last couple of weeks. I wanna make myself available to support you. I've opened up my schedule for the next two weeks from May 30th, all the way until June 10th, I'm offering you a free-30 minute appointment just to come in and be supported. This will be time for you to get emotional support, to be able to vent, to cry, to share anything that you need to. If you'd like some coaching during that 30-minutes, you can have that too. I'm here for you to support you in whatever you need for processing your emotions around all of the tragedies that have been happening lately.

I'm going to put a link to my calendar for these special 30-minute appointments on the webpage for this podcast episode, you'll find MyFreedomGrove.com/podcast-118. Please only sign up for one appointment. Let's make sure that there's enough space so that anyone that needs that extra support during these two weeks can get that.

My friends I know together, we can all be part of the solution and we can make this world a safer place for all of us, have a safe and peaceful and loving week. And I'll talk with you soon. Bye-bye.

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Thank you for listening to My Freedom Grove Podcast. When you are ready to make your dream business a reality and take care of your mental health, I invite you to join the Unshakable Business Co-Lab. This is the mastermind membership you've been waiting for. There's no limits on your imagination, nor your timeline. We're with you every step of the way. To learn more, please visit www.myfreedomgrove.com/join. I'll see you there!