Dr. Ali:
What’s up, what’s up, what is up? Welcome to the Dr. Ali Griffith Show: Mindset, Meditation and Motivation. So we have a special guest today and it is Dr. Laura Lewis who will be here sharing a little bit more about the psychology of mindset, meditation and motivation. She’ll be giving us some of her amazing tips and strategies that she’s used to help her through the challenges that we all go through life – she’s been through some also. So today we welcome you, Dr. Louis. Welcome to the Dr. Ali Griffith Show.
Dr. Laura:
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I am so excited to be here and talk about this important topic.
Dr. Ali:
So tell us a little bit, if you were to do that quick elevator spiel, tell me who is Dr. Laura Louis?
Dr. Laura:
So I am a psychologist and couples therapist. I teach couples how to stay together when life and the outside world is trying to pull them apart through stress and all the other things that couples just have to manage. So that’s my jam. That’s what I do.
Dr. Ali:
So we have a lot of listeners out there that are trying to figure out how the heck do I balance or manage being a mom, being a dad (for my few dads that do listen), figuring out how to manage having a job or a business, I’m going to start parallel-preneurs like myself and still get their business on and popping. So how do you create that balance where you don’t feel like if, and I don’t like to call it balance anymore, I know it’s harmony because we definitely can’t put the same amount of time into one thing than we do into the other. What is it that you tell your clients when they come in feeling like they are so stressed out they don’t know what to do next?
Dr. Laura:
So I have three major tips that I would recommend and the first one really starts with mindset. And there there is something called limiting thinking patterns. And so limited thinking patterns are any thoughts that we tell ourselves that are not in alignment with the future that we want to create. So we have to be mindful of limited thinking patterns and really focus on just speaking life into what you want to happen
Dr. Ali:
I’m all about mindset and that’s what we always speak about here on the Dr. Ali Griffith Show guys. If you have not by now make sure you are subscribed, make sure you’re following, share this with a friend. Someone’s going to need to hear this today because they may be going through that moment where they don’t know what to do and it always comes back to our mindset. If we are not balanced in our mind, if we not working on how to create that Zen, that place of you know, alignment with the best sense of self, then how can we handle everything else – which is the external world? What’s number two?
Dr. Laura:
Number two is self care. So busy moms a lot of times just taking care of everybody else, taking care of the kids, taking care of their extended family, taking care of like work and business and taking care of every single thing else except for themselves. Like a lot of times I see busy moms that are like, okay, I got the kids doctor’s appointments but then you haven’t gone to the doctor, so let’s have a doctor’s appointment on the list. That’s part of self care. Another part of self care is just having fun. Like once a week I have my massage therapist comes to the house and it’s my time to just relax and just get my back like straight and down and just get my spirit right. And my husband knows that like when I’m having that weekly massage, just come off me, give me my moment. And so maybe it’s not massaging for you. Maybe it is taking a hot bath, lavender candles, having some absence all in just letting everybody know when I’m in this town don’t come to this home. And so I just think that it’s important that whatever the thing is that you do, you get clear about it. You make time forward, you do it consistently and you don’t let others, things that get in the way of you taking care of you.
Dr. Ali:
Moms, you need to hear that. You know that too. We get so caught up in making sure everything else and everyone else has set up that we completely, completely, absolutely forget ourselves. I am a huge proponent for setting that time up for that massage. I am a huge, huge advocate for taking that time out for self. That’s why we do the meditation part of the Dr. Ali Griffith show. I’d like to call them au-meditation where even amidst the storm, even through the chaos, even through the cycles and the circles of life we can find, we align ourselves and go back to our breathing and really get connected to source just by ourselves in the midst of storms. Which many people have asked me, “Dr. Ali, I don’t get how you stay so calm and balanced?” When Zachary, my son with autism, is running around then business is going this way and my first job I make my business and all these other things that are happening all at once. Because of that realignment, because of finding some time for self care and self love and self alignment so that I can then go out there and pour into others. I love your tips. So give them what is your number three, magical number three?
Dr. Laura:
Okay. Number three is to ask for help. Ask for help. Sometimes I’m black woman and sometimes we get super woman syndrome. We put out on our cape, I got it, I’m good, I’m fine, I don’t need any help. But no, ask for what you need from the people in your life and be clear about it. Like sometimes I may see that people get tired. Sometimes as women we may get tired, exhausted and we need to just ask for help. Like, I need you to watch this, I need you to come here and cook twice a week, can you fold up the clothes? And sometimes we need to release the need for it to be perfect and just say, you know, “however the clothes get folded. I don’t have to have all the corners lined up. If you could just fold them the best way, you know how and put them away. I’m good with that.” And so I want to really encourage people out there to make sure that you’re asking for what you need. Don’t just expect for the person to know you’re tired. Tell them what you need and be specific about it. Kids up in the morning -can you get them dressed in the morning? Can you make break like these specifics?
Dr. Ali:
I love it and now this is the perfect thing for couples, for those who were the husbands and the wife or the boyfriends and the girlfriends or whoever living together, the girlfriend, the girlfriend, the boyfriend, and the boyfriend’s been out to live somewhere else. So whatever works best for you, but whatever way that you need to ask for help, ask for help and be specific. Be clear. Don’t expect them to read your mind. Like Dr. Louis is saying, we don’t want them to keep saying, “well you should know what I think, or you should know what I like.” No, the heck they don’t know. I don’t know what you want or like, why don’t you just tell me so that we could make this a lot easier and save us sometimes frustration and get back to the good stuff again? I learned with my mom, who has been helping me with co-parenting and co raising Zachary. Yes, Zachary’s dad is in his life. Yes, we do have a co-parenting relationship. However, with my mom who sometimes comes in and helps out, I had to learn to ask specifically for help because she knows me. I am that person that loves to throw a cape on. My cape may be very, very big or it might be quite invisible, but there is a cape on. That’s what we do as moms. We want to handle it all. Especially as autism moms, we think no one else can understand. We think we don’t want to give anyone that’s extra burden of taking care of our kid or having to deal with the breakdowns. They don’t know how to handle it. So I used to try and do everything by myself until my mom was like, “hey, why don’t you ask me, why don’t you let me do this?” And I’m like, hmm, I forgot people actually want to help. So that was one of the you just turn around or my parenting, even in my business when I learned to just say, “hey ma, can you just hop by just making some dinner on these days? Can you make sure that you know, if you’re here that you can help Zachary with homework on some of these days so I can see some clients at this time without feeling guilty?” So that’s that.
Dr. Laura:
That is so good. I’m so glad that you spoke on that without feeling guilty because we will throw some guilt on myself in a minute. Like I’m like, I should be, I need to be doing this, that and the third when sometimes we just need to sit down and let the people around us, the poor us. I know I’m so guilty of this, of like micromanaging all of the things when I just need to let, let the people around me, like my mom, like my husband, let them just support because sometimes I do need that support and when I don’t take it, that’s when the stress and the worry starts to come up. My cousin ended his life, and he was kind of close in age to me. And so I kind of felt like responsible. I felt like I should’ve known. Like I felt like, why didn’t I check in on him more? I went through kind of a depression of like just kinda beat myself up about like I should have asked, thought I have more time and Oh, I’m gonna call him. Oh, I’m gonna. And then before I know it, I hadn’t. And so I really had to just get in therapy. Like I had to enroll myself in therapy and that really made a big difference. But I had to just kind of first acknowledge that I wasn’t okay. You know, I really had to do that.
Dr. Ali:
That’s, that’s huge. And my condolences and I salute you. This is definitely one of those shows that I am so glad we have a psychologist here that can share with us the importance of when we are going through those moments and knowing that when we’re not okay that it’s okay to seek help. It’s okay to have that person that you can talk to, that person who just may not judge. That’s just right there to listen to kid. It can be your parents, it can be a licensed therapist, it could be a coach. It could be someone who just can make it easier and help to get through. So remembering that you are not alone and that when you ask for help, it actually gets rid of that guilty feeling. So many of us who walk around with this guilt of, you know, what will others think of me? Or they can’t see the other side of me that’s weak. Let’s just admit the fact that we’re all week. We have weak moments. We are allowed to cry. We’re allowed to not look like if we got all our ish together. It’s okay. And like Dr. Louis mentioned earlier, it’s okay when things are not done perfectly. Give yourself permission to not be perfect anymore so that you can throw that cave of guilt out of the closet and just be yourself.
Dr. Laura:
And you know what else Dr. Ali? I had to really give myself grace and you know, for this season I’m not going to be able to do it all. I’m going to have to say no to something. I’m a speaker, I love to speak, but I had to turn down some speaking engagements and it felt like a scarcity mindset came up. Like, “oh my gosh, if I don’t do this then…”, but I had to just be okay with just saying I’m ready for this season. I’m just going to take care of me, refuel my tank so I don’t be on side if the road, gas empty from just trying to do everything and that, that made a big difference.
Dr. Ali:
Yeah. So she’s leaving us with that amazing tips that au-mazing little tip that being able to say no, being able to – and my mom is so funny because she was over this morning and she was telling me how they asked her to do another job and how it’s so great to have a license. She’s a social worker and she just retired but always somehow getting back into a job. And she finally said no. She said it was so tempting and she finally identified the fact that because she’s worked all of her life, she has a “busy, be busy” worker mindset and she was like, I didn’t realize that this thing is actually a mindset. So she seeing me using no as a complete statement saying, thinking that I don’t have to tell them a reason why it’s okay. Just to say no was empowering for a woman who is close to 70, to be able to say no and feel quite okay with that. And I love the tools and tips that Dr. Louis shared with us today. She’s gonna tell us now how we can continue learning more about her and how if you need her, how she can provide support for you.
Dr. Laura:
So I am a couples therapist. If any of you are like, “I need some of this in my life, like I need somebody to help walk me through how I can say no? How am I to start our practice and self care? How am I to get some of this stuff off of my list and onto somebody else’s to do list?” If you need support with that, then you can connect with me. I have a membership program and it’s called, it’s at bit.ly/afterido and basically what you get is you get a Q&A session with me every month and then you also get an expert training every month. So inside the portal is already about 10 hours worth of training on communication on intimacy cause without getting good intimacy sometimes it can make us a little bit snappy and so we talk about that. We talk about that and especially communication because communication is one of the number one reasons why relationships don’t work out. It’s not finances, though finances is high up there. It’s communication. So that’s how you guys can connect with me.
Dr. Ali:
I love it. She landed it. You know we are so in alignment because we actually have not met each other. We met through other means and I love bringing you special guests because I always feel like you’re divinely assigned and divinely sent for whoever my audience is to listen to at that right moment. I don’t get concerned with, you know, the topic or the person and if they’re this or that, I just always feel he sends the right one.
Dr. Laura:
Mmhmm. That’s so good. I just want to say to you, thank you for creating a space for us to have dialogues like this because these type of conversations there’s not a lot of spaces that they’re being had, and so you have created a lane, a space for support to exist in a way that doesn’t exist in a lot of other spaces.
Dr. Ali:
Yeah. I started realizing that nobody was talking much about the combination of mindset and motivation, and they never tapped into the whole meditation aspect of realigning back to self and how to do certain things. And that any and everyone can meditate, that it doesn’t have to be all fun about it. It can be pretty simple and done anytime within the day. So I just created what I looked for that helped me to get through my crazy and my hectic after I created, people just started to listen and it became something that was for them. So the fact that your messages are so in alignment with what we speak about with what they need to hear right now just continues to prove that we need to just keep walking and doing how we were uniquely created to serve. And then when we do that alignment occurs. So guys, thank you for watching us, listening to us. Make sure you’re following us on all means of the podcast The Dr. Ali Griffith Show. If you are reading this on on my blog you know what to do, make sure you share it with other who just may need it. Make sure you catch us for more mindset, meditation, and motivation. Remember in all that you do be au-amazing in your thoughts, words and in your actions. Peace.
This interview is a transcription of my podcast, The Dr. Ali Griffith Show. To listen to this interview and other episodes visit www.thedraligriffithshow.com.
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