WGNU Radio → on Cultivating Wholeness

and now let’s meet our guest for today Judy Ryan is the owner of expanding human potential a training and consulting firm specializing in Cooperative practices with corporate education family and government settings she worked as a trainer consultant executive mentor and coach she is also a frequent conference and radio presenter has a regular column in the St Louis and St Charles women’s journals has written managed and delivered large-scale community school and family Grant projects and helped organize youth contribution rallies she is in strategic partnership with Lindenwood Webster and park universities and the Missouri Teachers Association Judy Ryan is also an executive board member program chair and facilitator coordinator for the networking organization espw welcome Judy I’m so glad to be here I am so excited to talk with you today and we are talking about wholeness yes and I was so glad when we decided on this topic because it’s everything if we all only understood how we are so magnificent and we are so whole and we spend so much of our life looking for the evidence of that and it’s right in front of us but we just don’t see it so it’s a great thing to be able to Proclaim that you already are enough that you have done enough that you have everything within you to know that you’re enough and you just have to take the time to really discover that about yourself and remember it I mean there’s so many people walking around this world and feeling separated and disconnected and you know trying to grasp why am I here what are this what is this all about and I know your company has done just tremendous work in this field so where do we start well I can tell you just a little bit about what my first thoughts are about wholeness is that we adopt a particular psychology model that really is about wholeness in fact we as your company expanding human potential yes and that we use a number of psychology models that are all very strength based and encouraging models the primary one is based on the work of Alfred Adler and there were five things that he discovered about human nature that I believe are coming into their own our culture has been so dominated with fear and force and win-lose Dynamics where people don’t feel very whole but now we’re coming into awareness about what it really means to be a human being and what is really needed for happiness and I’m just going to take a little aside for a second here just when I said the word happiness it reminded me of an article I recently read about a study on the happiest country and I unfortunately can’t remember what country was some small country on an island that was very happy out of 178 countries the United States was 150. so that doesn’t say a whole lot even though we are one of the largest consumers in the world we do so much we bring so many of our problems and even our work into our vacations for example but we don’t necessarily have the happiness that we’re seeking so happiness and wholeness are not something that are really outside of ourselves and yet we spend so much time seeking that what I love about Alfred Adler’s psychology model is that he understood that human beings first and foremost are social beings that everything we’re doing is in relationship to our social needs with one another beyond our physical survival needs once we get past that point and there are some very basic core needs that all of us have to feel whole and a lot of those we come into the world feeling whole knowing our magnificence and we think that we’re kind of the Kings and the queens of the world when we’re first born yes yes and then we kind of get that sort of pushed out of us us over time unfortunately by well-meaning parents by well-meaning adults but that’s one of the basics is that even the hermit who’s withdrawing from the environment is responding to Something in the social order so that’s first and foremost second we’re self-determining we are always creating our own reality we’re creating our own experience of what our life is what our personality is how we’re going to operate in the world all of that the third thing is that we’re purposeful which is a little different than self-determining purposeful is on a day-to-day Moment by moment basis I’m doing things to achieve certain goals that I may or may not be aware of I might not be conscious of those goals like if I’m late all the time that’s an area where I may want to look at I wonder what my purpose is for that because there’s something unconsciously going on for me that is tied to that everything has a reason the fourth concept was that everything we do is subjective so I could be born as a twin and I could be seeing through what looks like the same lens as my twin and see the world very differently and Adler and some of his followers said we’re great observers but very poor interpreters and then the last one which is the most about holism is that we are holistic and what that means is that everything we’re doing is to try to get to a state of what Adler called a felt plus that means we’re always trying to feel that sense of belonging and significance through those core needs of feeling powerful and influential feeling lovable feeling connected and feeling that we have contributions to make so what happens is for example let’s take the worst case scenario that some of us might think say a drug dealer on the corner doing a lot of damage okay but if you look at the fact that that person has been trying to find belonging and significance and maybe the first place they found that belonging in insignificance was in a gang where they felt like they mattered where they felt connected and all of a sudden because that need was being met they accepted that that’s the way they’d find their breadcrumbs and what’s happened is that when we’re able to take those Concepts into say prison systems and people in prison are often there’s a very high rate of people in prison that repeat offend and that’s the recidivism rate it’s like 60 or higher well when they become aware of the fact that they in fact did have a positive intention behind their very negative choices they can then wanting to feel like a part of a group yes right knowing that they were striving for wholeness and when they really get that then they can start to remember themselves as whole because before that time they’ve already bought into the illusion that they’re not whole that there’s something broken that there’s something bad about them and and most of our society would support that illusion with them and that’s the danger that if we continue to support the illusion that people are not whole that they’re broken that they need to be fixed if there’s something wrong with them then they will buy into that illusion and then there breaks down the wholeness that’s available to all of us not only individually but collectively so let me go back to summarize those key points and this is Adler yes Alfred Adler okay wanting to belong having the social significance is that what you call well wanting a sense of connection and belonging and significance are kind of the the catch-all but the four ways that we feel that belonging insignificance are through a sense of power a sense of power all right and that by power we’re not talking about force and control like we do so much in war and all kinds of things where we’re one power over something not power over it’s that intrinsic power of knowing that I can influence that I have an effect on things and that that effect is potent and it’s welcome that’s the kind of influence that we all crave and sometimes we’ll take the cheap substitute which is force because we haven’t been given the opportunity to really Express fully and expand fully into our power that is a god-given gift so that’s one okay another one is a feeling of knowing that our uniqueness who we are Delights others that it’s that we are lovable and a lot of times it’s very interesting when we work with people they may have started to emphasize more around helping people to feel appreciated and loved but there are so many places where we don’t even recognize that we tear that down if you think about even your own self-talk how much of your own self-talk is around helping you to feel lovable I love the phrase our uniqueness Delights others because that is the whole energy of this radio program Awakening to yourself Awakening to that gift right that authentic gift that’s only yours to share with the world right and for people to really internalize that that gift will truly Delight others yes is such a paradigm shift right and first you need to delight yourself it’s so interesting to me because what I see is how much a mere life is for us and when you Delight in yourself and when you fall in love with yourself you start to see all the other people that are around you that have fallen in love with you too and it’s amazing and that that feeds a whole set of Attraction into your life of what you want to further see it’s it just it’s a building process I had a great example just coming over here I got lost and I pulled over and I asked a man to help me with directions and he was a maintenance guy that was doing weed whacking and he said you know what I don’t know how to tell you but mine parked way over there I’m gonna go all the way to my truck and get in it and take you all the way to where you need to go and that’s the kind of thing that you attract in your life when you fall in love with yourself when you see your wholeness it’s it’s if the whole universe is supporting that that view of you and it’s it’s an amazing place to be to live then you know just individually and just imagine a city or Society a country we would be very happy then absolutely absolutely if we only knew up on that chart absolutely if we only knew how amazing we are and so we don’t we’ve got this sense of of power which is a self-power not a power over the people we have um our uniqueness Delights others as a what do you call these Concepts or I call them the core needs they’re the core social needs for belonging and significance of course social needs okay so then so what’s the third one then the third one is that we have a sense of connection and a sense of community all institutions are basically communities most of them are very dysfunctional because we’ve set them up on an old model but Community is critical it’s part of our social nature so we’re always operating in some sense of community but if we don’t feel that as a pleasurable thing then we’re going to be seeking a way to feel that as a felt plus so that sense of connection is very important and that word felt plus expel that because I’m well it’s it’s like what you feel felt as a positive so CLT with a plus sign yeah okay yes all right that’s a very interesting little visual um we were talking about having a sense of connection and community so let’s expand on that a little bit well the problem is it’s so interesting when you think about how we’re talking about wholeness and that we’re all whole human beings and we have this magnificence And yet when you look at our communities in our schools in our corporations in our world and our families they’re not very they’re not very successful they’re not very healthy overall that’s why we have so many amazing Innovations in businesses and yet for many reasons that have to do with the sense of community those businesses Fall by the wayside they fail and lots and lots of problems occur around the sense of community because of the way that we have operated in our institutions even as old as the family institution which is an interesting point because one of the things that we love to talk about is that most of our institutions are based on win lose and on Superior inferior Dynamics and it’s not that we want to treat each other so like dog eat dog yeah doggy dog we believe in God dog I like to believe in dog feed dog yes yes and yet we want that in fact an interesting story that I like to tell is that when we came over from Europe not all that long ago less than 300 years ago we came with this amazing idealism that we wanted to have equality for all people and in writing we put that down perfectly that we wanted you know all men were created equal and we were going to have this checks and balances and it was beautiful conceptually yet what did we do in practice what happened was there was this whole group of people that were immediately in this sort of superior I’ve Got The Power position and who were in The the lower Echelon that were in the inferior I don’t have any power position and maybe even believed it about themselves who were those people when we first came over from from Europe oh I didn’t know this was a touch those people are the we’re the Native American Indians they were the women that didn’t have the vote they were definitely children they were definitely the groups you know the slaves and all kinds of people fit into that lower category so right away we set up this win lose dynamic in our actual practice and what happens is that whenever you have a win-lose superior inferior Dynamic the result is anger hostility Revenge resentment fear and it perpetuates itself absolutely becomes its own vicious cycle and so what happens is over time those people in that inferior powerless position they may still feel inferior but they’re going to by God band together and help themselves to feel powerful and connected and all of those things and what they’re going to do though generally is go into sort of a retaliation mode we’re going to now overpower you and that’s what happened in a lot of the movements trying to balance the scales the women’s movement the Civil Rights Movement the Industrial Revolution where the unions formed we think of those things now as sort of like these sort of heroic moments that were so valuable and they were but they were actually often fraught with a lot of pain and dissension and disharmony and what happened is a lot of times that group of people that were gaining power often use that power over you know the unions sometimes were corrupt and would overpower the owners and sometimes the women would take advantage of their situation because they were so angry and resentful for so long and the same with the minorities and now we’re seeing with the children and a lot of people will say well why don’t we just go back to the good old days when kids knew how to mind well that wasn’t the good old days that was when we had slavery and when women couldn’t vote so I mean we don’t want to hold with that so we have this archaic way that we set up our organizations and we still operate out of those same ways of doing things so our sense of community is very skewed to what wholeness requires and one of the things that I just recently discovered is an organizational model that is exactly what my company does but I had never heard of this term and it the term is K ORD it’s a chaotic model and it’s an evolving model that’s starting to it’s very aligned with what they’re finding out in physics and in mathematics and all kinds of Sciences are coming together what chaotic means the first three letters k c h a stand for chaos and the second three letters order the ORD so that’s where the Kord word comes from but what it is is it’s harnessing the natural chaos and by chaos I’m talking about a good thing the creativity the initiative kind of the raw materials of people’s purpose and their vision and all those seeds that they’re bringing in their wholeness to this whole table and that chaos is a very important thing to allow but not on its own it also requires a firm purpose and a strong sense of direction and a trajectory that’s set in place so that people can then within that purpose within that Vision operate in a way that is flexible and that’s creative so what that means is that it’s the type of institution if you will Community where power is shared to the maximum degree where I’m shift in and of itself oh my gosh absolutely in fact most people are afraid in fact most people are afraid of chaos because it seems so negative and to think of power being shared is also a lot loss of control I want to go further into this chaotic model but I also want to get the fourth core social need down oh yes yes so after the sense of connection and Community what is the fourth one the fourth one is actually knowing that we have contributions I’ll just say a little bit about that because that is so important if you think about any group that wants to enlist more involvement just for example let’s say you’re part of a networking group and you want more members what is the first thing most people do when they want more engagement they’ll usually give some sort of an incentive oh let’s offer them a free this or a free that or give them a gift if they come or a gift if they sign up that’s a typical way that we try to get people to be involved but what’s often unrecognized is what people would be more satisfied with is an opportunity to contribute and we actually sort of buffer people from having to give more and yet think about some of the most meaningful times in your life even some of the most tragic times like 9 11 that’s where people really came forward and had tremendous opportunity to make contribution what did it do it created a lot of love and Community you’re giving and contributing absolutely well you’re actually not even thinking it about it a lot you’re just getting because the need is right there and it’s who you really are and it brings out this huge sense of wholeness and well-being and yet we don’t tap that so many times we miss that opportunity so if I were to give recommendation to somebody that’s trying to get more engagement in any kind of organization or in their family ask for more help isn’t that an interesting reversal it is because most people that’s one thing that yeah it’s very hard for a lot of people yeah absolutely there’s there’s a um it’s interesting because when we ask for help we think of ourselves as inferior when we’re asking for help and we’re not it’s just another uh it gives somebody the opportunity to be superior which in that moment might be the balancing of the scales of wholeness and this is really being Superior or is it really being able to just share from that place well here’s the great that’s a great question because there is no Superior and there is no inferior it’s important to use those words actually choose the inferior position and allow someone to be superior because by using that concept you actually break down the illusion of it if I say you know what I’m going to let somebody give to me today because I want to feel what it feels like to be in the inferior position what that does is it starts to break up that whole thing that it is inferior and Superior yeah I mean just those words just make me uncomfortable yeah I mean I do I hate the words positive I hate

all right let me get really clear with my language here um those those dichotomies for me it’s every because I see everything is connected anyway so Superior and fear just puts a little thing in my gut but I understand what you’re saying once we get past that that’s exactly we see it for what it is there is no Superior inferior contribution is a big part of what we don’t ask for because we are afraid to feel vulnerable we are afraid to feel in the inferior position that’s why it’s such a given in our culture that it’s better to give than receive why why is it we’re more comfortable when we give something but if we were someone said that we would be superior exactly exactly even though we don’t like the word and we’d like to think that we’re not prone to that it’s just part of our culture is so driven by um I’ve got to be better than my only way to feel lovable is to be more special than you and all of that stuff and it’s just child’s toys because I think it ties back to this chaotic model if I understood that correctly um so how does this how does this all work together well that’s a great question and it does tie back and it is even Beyond Superior inferiority which is just a piece of it one of the things is that we have set up the way that we operate in the world based on sort of a mechanistic model that’s really seen its last days we can’t continue with this model because we have a global economy now we’re so connected now and we’re so fast in our Evolution that it’s time that we move into a model that is consistent with where we are evolutionary wise and and also consistent with these human needs so what does that look like what that looks like is an environment where we stop being focused on mass production and efficiency and productivity and we start focusing on how do we take the raw material of all of the collective gifts that people are bringing and use that more quickly and part of what has got to happen for that is that we have to start allowing self-organizing to take place I’ll give you an example yeah I’ll give you an example to kind of put some flesh on the bones when we had the big disaster in Florida and the Coast Guard had some amazing training where they’re trained in what are their primary purposes for the tasks that they do they’re very Purpose Driven as opposed to activity driven so they’re not given a set of rules that these are your activities and you can’t step out of that box they’re focused on understanding why they’re doing the activities that they’re doing and how to have flexibility within their purpose I mean like when the hurricane hits yes when the hurricane right to save people to have certain levels of priority and safety and responsibility and so on and they had those that those boundaries around their purposes and what happened is because they had the flexibility for each person to self-manage and to have governance in the situation that occurred they were one of the most responsive groups because they didn’t have to go through this bureaucratic red tape to get permission for everything what has to happen is if you help people to Define their purpose and you give them the freedom to be self-managing that allows them to be creative and you have to let go you have to let go of that control you have to know that people can manage their purpose if you give them the right support you give them the right tool set you give them the right encouragement I can really see how there’s a lot of old belief systems that are addressed in that process because as say a supervisor maybe they have issues with letting go of control maybe they see giving responsibility to somebody else as a as a sign of weakness it’s almost like how they’re perceived within a company well that’s the biggest impediment to this evolution is our own View and perception of who we are and what we’re here to do managers for example in most corporations they believe that their primary responsibility is to manage people to motivate them and to evaluate them it’s not their primary responsibility is to help transfer responsibility to people and help them to develop their own internal leadership most of us don’t take that job on because we think well gosh where does that leave me if I’m the manager exactly you know what you know what does that look like actually that’s a much harder job it’s a much harder job to share power with people and have them pick it up and have them set their purpose and to have them start self-governing have them start trusting that they can say what they mean and mean what they say and all those things that go with real responsibility and real self-governance and self-management and that is a much harder task but yet it’s so new that people feel like they’re losing some kind of status or they’re losing some sort of ground or meaning and once they understand that no this is a tougher more challenging way to evolve and they would probably be held in much higher regard by those that they’re working with because they’re able to do that the people that are receiving that power and that self-management they’re actually getting their four core needs met and that’s so they are going to appreciate that manager because they recognize that they’re being honored for the gifts that they bring I see it all the time in companies I see the front line people say why aren’t they giving us more responsibility we know what’s needed we’re the ones that have to day-to-day deal with this situation so why aren’t we given a little more latitude here it’s almost like oh they don’t think that we can do it well and it’s even from a very positive intention we believe that if we can protect people from uncertainty and we can protect and we can buffer them from problems as if it’s like dandruff that you have to try to get off your shirt you know we believe that that’s being helpful that’s actually keeping people from the opportunity to use all of what they have to bring to the table as you’re talking I’m also envisioning like parents of children absolutely I we do parent training that’s how I first got introduced to this model and the very first thing I was taught was your job as a parent is to do yourself out of a job as quickly as possible and I remember feeling the sense of a loss almost like well gosh isn’t that what I signed up for you know I actually wrote a song about that it’s about letting go and it was the moment that I realized that you know my responsibility is to teach my kids to be independent they already are right you want to set up the environment so that they can actually live with choices absolutely they could actually live without me and it’s yeah that’s a that’s a hard thing to do and you have to be able to allow sort of a healthy opposition as well to create strong cooperation and at the same time allow people to challenge the status quo to have new ideas and not have them be shot down all kinds of things have to happen in a chaotic organization what’s so amazing about it is it ends up being the much more efficient way here we’re trying to use this mechanistic way of treating people and treating institutions because we’re trying to go for productivity and efficiency and what we’re doing is we’re disheartening people where they’re giving less and less of themselves and ultimately it becomes much less efficient so all this wholeness is there here we’re talking about wholeness and we have not known how to harness that wholeness so that it can be in service to ourselves and to others and that’s the unfortunate part about it in our communities one of the things that um I will say about wholeness with our company is one of the first things we train our instructors in is that when you meet with any client remember that they are whole and complete that there’s nothing broken nothing that has to be fixed we are bringing in a toolbox of new tools for them to pick up or not but that in and of themselves they’re doing enough and it’s good enough and that’s important for us to always remember what an awesome philosophy I love them in this last section let’s go through these four core social needs and make them practical make them applicable to our everyday life well the first thing I would say about that is if you learn nothing else at all from this talk would be just to remember those four core needs that they are something that you want to start looking at your life and saying gosh is this thing that I’m doing in this moment is this making me feel powerful is it making me feel lovable is it making me feel connected for example let’s say you find yourself blaming somebody about something that doesn’t feel very powerful and it doesn’t feel very lovable a lovable about yourself you know or contributing all those things so you can start to use that as a measure for whether you want to continue something and what I would suggest is just interrupt it if you find you’re in the midst of doing something that does not satisfy those core needs in yourself or another person just stop is mid-sentence if you find that you’re doing that and just switch it that would be one of the ways that you could actually just use the four core needs as a whole kind of as a measure a lot of times we want certain things for ourselves or for other people but we don’t really look at the methods we have been using to get there yeah sometimes it’s hard to step outside of our behavior and observe it absolutely so as much as you can kind of just use that as your bar and I always like to kind of make it easy with like one word things so could we use basically powerful lovable connected contributing okay so yes absolutely and and it just is a great measure and when you see somebody in a negative behavior they’re doing something that’s obnoxious or offensive to you ask yourself I wonder what core need they’re not feeling right now maybe they’re not feeling powerful maybe they’re not feeling very lovable or they’re not feeling connected or they don’t feel like they’re making a contribution I like that I’m glad that we brought it down to those four words absolutely it helps me yeah we keep that on everything we send out just about because it’s so key to what we do another thing that I do and a lot of people do affirmations I like to do affirmations around my sense of lovableness so one of the things I did for a long long time because I was a big having to prove myself kind of person so what I did for literally months is I would say to myself I’m doing my best and it’s good enough and what’s so beautiful about that is that everyone is always truly doing their best and sometimes it’s very tempting to believe we’re not or that someone else isn’t and just by reaffirming that I’m doing my best and it’s good enough it gives you the courage that’s one way that you can help yourself to remain aware of your lovableness another thing is that a lot of times when we start creating a negative feeling about another person it’s because there’s something we want that we’re not okay with asking for so if you notice that you’re starting to go well they should know better and they shouldn’t have done this to me and they you know they shouldn’t be you know taking this from me or doing this to me a lot of times it’s because you want to ask yourself the question what is it that I want that I don’t want to put on the table that I want and we do a whole lot of work in our programs around just putting on the table what I want is and are you willing to give it to me okay so give us an example well I’ll just give you an example that I’ve been doing in my own work because we teach this I’ve been really living it and when I talk to a customer and I know I want to work with them I say to them I want to work with you are you willing to give me your business are you willing to work with our company and they’ll say yes you know and it’s very exciting or sometimes no but most the time they’ll respond to it you can feel it in your whole system when you actually say the words what I want is and when we teach this there’s a lot of resistance to just this whole way of saying what I want is what happens is people want to say what I need is or what I wish for or they want to say well man she should have known already or he should have known men really understand this because women are pretty notorious sometimes for saying well he should have known that I wanted his help and all of that and and it’s because we feel we’ve got so many things that tell us we’re selfish and we’re bad because we say we want stuff we haven’t forbid you ask for what you want right you could get it you could or you could you would fear that you wouldn’t be able to handle a no yeah and we actually would do better to just say ask for it and have the no than not ask for it and be struggling and feeling so powerless about asking what I have found in my own experience is that if I ask even if I receive a no I feel more powerful so that’s just one because you honored yourself absolutely you honored yourself and you don’t waste your energy blaming the other person and focusing on them because you can’t change that story that story that mental story it really breaks people Parks okay so asking for what you want is definitely an act of of loving yourself expressing power it’s a powerful position to say what I want is and are you willing I can’t tell you how many times people are uncomfortable with doing that I even went on a retreat one time with my coach because one of the things that I’m real committed to is my own growth and the growth of my company so we have an emotional intelligence coach for our company and we went on a trip we did a big Retreat and one of the first things we had to do is everything we were asked to do we had to give an answer so if we were asked where do you want to go eat everyone in the group would answer where they had oh my God I felt like a deer in the headlights and I remember once I was talking to the coach and I said to her what are you having to drink with your dinner and she said why do you want to know and I said because I wanted to know if you might want to split a milkshake she said what kept you from just saying I want to split a milkshake do you want to split one with me it was almost as if I had to whey whether she would come halfway with me before I could even put it on the table and what I really learned from that particular situation was how invasive all my questions were even though were they invasive when I say no she perceived it that way she said you sang to me what are you gonna have to drink what are you going to do you know it was it was almost like why are you asking me all these questions it’s much more respectful and more powerful to just say hey you know what I want to split a milkshake would you like to split one yeah but that’s how how aware I became of uh how hard it was for me to ask for what I wanted I totally resonate with that I do that a lot with my husband yeah I’m sure he’s listening there was a woman on our Retreat that was beautiful could have been a model and she had been wanting to find out why she wasn’t married because she had always wanted to be married and she hadn’t been and she was this whole thing about asking for what she went just kind of irritated her and she said to the coach you know why do we have to do this like when I’m with a man I don’t care about what I want I don’t care if I go to this restaurant or that or what movie I see and I like to be feminine and I think it’s feminine to sort of give way to what the man wants you know and our coach was able to show her that the that she does care about what she wants that she everyone cares about what they want and that if you don’t give yourself what you want when you’re with a man or in any situation what you’re doing is you’re subconscious is saying you know what it kind of stinks to be with another person if it means I have to give up what I want so I’ll just create it that I don’t have a person so that I can at least when I’m not with a person have what I want she was amazed by that because she had such a resistance to it so that’s one place that we can be it reminds me of the movie Runaway Bride that she did the same thing anyway okay the the connected core value feeling connected what can we do this week to help us get more in touch with that sense of feeling connected to our self-centered Community there’s so many ways we can do that but one of the things is just a simple practical thing is just be comfortable being in the physical space with other people a lot of times we’re so distant As Americans from even just touching each other or getting close to each other being willing to make eye contact with the people that you see this is a great little piece for this I met this man one time that whenever he would meet a big crowd of people he would remember everybody’s name and I said how did you do this do you have some kind of memory trick you use he said no what I realized is as soon as I meet another person this is true of everybody we put this guard up because we have this have this automatic is it safe that’s our primary question a lot of times so what happens is in that moment we put our guard up that’s when they’re telling us their name that’s why so many of us can’t remember their name two seconds later what was her name and and so what he would do is when he would meet anybody he would prepare himself by saying what am I afraid to see in me that I wouldn’t want them to judge and as soon as he did that he relaxed the guard and he could remember everybody’s name and I thought that was so interesting so one of the little tips that you could use is when you meet somebody take a breath and let yourself feel your whole body present when you’re meeting them and chances are you’ll remember their name a lot better that’s what I find is happening more and more when I remember to do that that’s an awesome suggestion I love that or even if you don’t even talk to them just making the eye contact yes even in the grocery store you know you’re going down an aisle just look yes well and in Europe I know that they touch each other so much more and we’re so conditioned that that’s a bad thing to do but really people crave just putting your hand on their arm or their shoulder or their hand or what have you that’s great suggestion I like that okay and then this idea of knowing we have contributions and and asking for help goes along with that yeah just start noticing that when you want more engagement from people instead of trying to give something to them ask them for something ask them how they want to contribute I asked them what the gift is that they want to bring to the situation or their advice people love to know that you believe that they have answers and solutions for them I asked my nine-year-old for for ideas all the time and she loves it and she comes up with some pretty good ones and then okay so that’s when you’re empowering somebody else for the contribution what about when you want to offer something when you want to offer something just do it and I think a lot of us we withhold our own ability to get that need met because we’re afraid we could fail go for the contribution if you fail you don’t know what failure really is anyway so so the kind of contributions that we could do this week would be go you know the Pay It Forward movie how popular that was it doesn’t have to be something mind-blowing just do something simple like that man getting in his truck and helping me get there that was a great contribution and he had the biggest smile on his face so simple acts of kindness absolutely so it doesn’t have to be huge well Judy you have given us some wonderful Food For Thought on wholeness and the core social needs and as we’re behaving and acting and and in relationship and Community with others you know becoming the Observer of our behaviors and asking the question is this powerful lovable connected and contributing yeah did I get those right yes absolutely Judy I’m sure there’s some listeners that are thinking wow how do I get in touch with this woman give us your contact information one way you can get in touch with us is to visit our website which is

www.expandinghumanpotential.com another way is to call our offices which is 314-878-9100 and we’ll be happy to talk with you say it again 314-878-9100 and we would love to talk with you we do work with corporations we work with schools we work with families it’s been a pleasure and we want to thank you for being with us today and just a reminder this program will be available to listen at your convenience again through our podcast probably in about a week we’ll have it up

thank you