A Recap of the Good: My Year in Gratitude- 2020

Bettina M Brown: Greetings! And welcome to In the Rising Podcast. My name is Bettina Brown and I am the host of this show, and this is the platform I've chosen to talk about living a life that's in alignment with your dreams, your hopes, and your goals, and leaving behind the shame and blame and disappointment from your past.

And so I welcome you to this show, as I like to start off by saying, I am not a licensed counselor, psychologist, or psychiatrist, anything medical of that sort. But I am a healthcare professional who loves to figure out what makes people tick, and I love to just be a student of life and learn through that.

Now, typically, I have kind of a script, an outline of what points I really want to talk about. And what is important for me to relay during my podcast show. But today I did not really want to follow a script or that outline direction. I wanted to have a little more free flow and. In the US where I am living, we have a special week, and that is the week of Thanksgiving, which has some negative connotations and rightfully so.

But what I love about the overall message is about being grateful and being in a place of gratitude no matter what your current circumstances are. What you wish your current circumstances to be. And that can be in anything from relational to financial, to living to health. This has definitely been one of the more challenging years, kind of nationally and internationally.

You know, there's certainly years where. You know, certain people, friends, families are like this, this, there's a definite black cloud, hanging over them and they're like, you know, or this time, you know, 2008, 2007, those were rough years, but then it got better. This is definitely one of those years where we could feel the community.

Shift and not always in the best way possible. This has been challenging in so many ways on a healthcare front. As a physical therapist, you know, there was a time when I wasn't sure if I had a job. There was a time I couldn't even get into the job because of delays. There have been questions. I have coworkers who were laid off and.

Now it's a, a phrase of and and a place where they're like, how many hours are you willing to dedicate? We'll just keep throwing money at you and keep coming to work. And seeing the exhaustion and the stress and the fatigue among my friends. Yeah, my friends and my coworkers. But what I like about it being the week of Thanksgiving is that it does take a pause and it makes us think about what we are grateful for and.

One of those things that we can be grateful for is. This internet, you know, as much as it can be villainized, and, and pushed to the side and ostracized as something that has disconnected us. We have also seen how much it can connect us. You know, I have listened, and listened to other people's podcasts.

I've watched their YouTubes. I've still had my brain going and my heart filled. With conversations, zoom meetings, zoom meetings that went poorly. You know, I'm not alone in that, but just the experience itself. And so having said that, having a place of gratitude is a huge, huge deal breaker for anyone wanting to just grow internally and in their life.

I've been super blessed to have great conversations with people, that are my quote unquote students. As I'm going and almost finished, I'm about to complete my coaching certificate through the International Coaching Federation and, learning to ask questions and allowing people to come up with the answers themselves.

Ultimately, because we do have the answers ourselves, we do have. The wherewithal inside us, we do have it together, even though we may think we do not. But how are ways that we can really pull that up? And one of the universal ways, it doesn't matter what our religious view or anti-religious view is, is looking at it from looking at any situation, but looking at our life from a place of being thankful.

We don't know how many minutes we have ahead of us. We may have 30 minutes, we may have 30 years, but what we do know is at this moment right now, we can be grateful. And what are we gonna be grateful for when things have been very hard? You know, that's a very personal question. What I have noticed from the people I've had these conversations with, and also patience is just being grateful for having so many stories in their past that gave them the strength and the courage they needed today.

So those are those moments when you can be grateful for that storm. And some of those storms were really big, like they were, they were like hurricanes, category five. That lasted for a couple years. You know, it just depends on the person, but some of these storms were quite large and, and, and some of 'em just blew everything out and took almost everything from you, including your dignity and your self-respect.

But out of that, you've learned that you're able to rise back out of that situation that no matter what storm comes next, a, it will not be a category five. You'll move out of the way, or it will move out of the way, or you'll be able to weather it. You'll have the tools you need, and that is such a blessing.

That is such a blessing to recognize all the strength you have because of being tested before. And a lot of this can really come about when you come in contact, you know, either in person or virtually with someone who has absolutely not grown whatsoever. Like you, you are really shocked and, and just the breath comes out of you just realizing how much they have not grown and how childish they were to begin with.

How infantile, how, how their behaviors weren't even behaviors. They were just ridiculous acts and that you almost can feel sorry for them. You almost can, but what you're grateful for is that storm and that person are no longer a part of your story. They had a place in your story, but it can really raise you up.

And so being grateful for those trials to get you to a place that you know you can conquer anything this year has ahead of you. Another thing people are often grateful for or can be are for the relationships they've built with themselves. Like, I love to talk about self-esteem and self-worth and realizing your self-worth, but that's not a, an instantaneous, you know, flick of the switch or, you know, snap of the fingers.

That's a process, and it's a process that can take some time. It's a process that can take years and years and years, and rightfully so because we are such amazing deep, deep creatures. Yeah, as you go on your adventure of learning yourself today, well, by the time you figure that out, you've already aged another five years and you're very different again.

You have different values and different goals, and so just being grateful for that opportunity to be aware, to be awake when so much of the world is asleep, being grateful for. Our mental health as well as our physical health. I think that's something that's really been pushed this year. You know, I read through some of the, some of the people who passed away in it constantly with underlying conditions, underlying conditions.

Well, who doesn't have an underlying condition? But let's face it, many people we know have them, the heart disease, the diabetes, the obesity, the respiratory issues, it doesn't matter if they were from birth or later acquired. We know a lot of people that have underlying conditions, and what I find amazing.

Is that even despite all these underlying conditions, how many of us are able to still thrive in the world? Yes, there are certain illnesses or situations that, you know, you're definitely a little bit more of a pinpoint, a target, so to say. But how much you can still go through with all of those underlying conditions, with all of those health issues, with all of those health trials, how much your body will still pull it together to advance forward, how much stress you can really go under and still make it.

I find that just incredible of the human body, but more incredible of the human spirit. Is really an amazing thing to observe and to know about. And lastly, I think the thing that I can be most grateful for this year is just the opportunity to have this podcast and to have the listeners that I have, because when I started this podcast last December, I did not know.

You know, I was like, okay, I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna read this and I'm gonna put this out there. And it took me over four and a half hours y'all to do a 20 minute segment. I thought I'll never get this done. But what I'm really grateful is to all of you, because I have walked, into people. That have just said to me, you know what?

I listen and, and I, I really like it. I feel a little bit more lighthearted afterwards. I feel like I gained something. I like that it's not too long, that it's short enough to just get some information and move on. I've had people, kind of quote me, my beginning of my story, I of my introduction here, and I've had people send me messages either through email or text.

And having the opportunity to want to put my hand out there to reach other people and actually have that happen, to have that manifest into reality and to just have that be a spring form for many things to come. And, you know, yes, I don't have 10 million listeners, but do I need to have 10 million listeners to be effective?

Does anyone need 10 million followers to actually be influential? So I think those are the things that I would just like to share and, and in gratitude with Full Heart. Just thank you. Thank you for all of that time that you have given me. Thank you for the feedback. Thanks for tuning in. Thanks for starting.

Maybe not finishing the podcast. And thank you for dedicated, listeners that I have that listen week after week and then let me know. So I'm so appreciative of that and I wish all of you a very good week. I wish all of you a time where you can reflect in your own gratitude and know that that storm will eventually pass.

And I also wanna just be grateful and thank you for all of the feedbacks that have really poured into me and helped fill my cup so that I can continue to fill others. So again, thanks for all the minutes that you have shared with me today. All of them are very valuable and we don't have a whole lot of them because there's a lot going on right now.

A lot of attention has to be moved left and right. So until we meet again next week, let's keep building one another up.