What’s up, what’s up, what is up? And welcome to the Dr. Ali Griffith Show – Mindset, Meditation and Motivation. This is the show where you will get to actually sit back, relax and get poured into. Yes, welcome to the Dr. Ali Griffith Show where we are constantly working on our mindset. We are constantly self motivating ourselves and we’re learning something every day. Every time we listen, we always walk away learning something new. I don’t know about you, but every time I do it, I am always learning something new and I’m hoping, and my goal, my mission is that you are too. Today we are talking about keeping it real. Oooooh child, keeping it real. That is a one thing that has been a struggle for me initially, right? Because of our constant wanting to keep things to ourselves and not truly letting people into our lives. Keeping it real with something that I struggled with.
I mean, I told you for up to eight years, I walked around not really telling many people that I had a son with autism and I would hide it, or I would just not talk about it. I would avoid speaking about it or avoid going places, and it felt like I was walking around with this heavy, heavy monkey, not even monkey, like a big gigantic refrigerator on my back. because when you are – when I was, let me speak about myself – when I was trying to fit in with the Jones’s or trying to be this professional, you know, this speech pathologist and audiologist and I was helping everyone else with their child, but then yet coming home and still trying to figure out how do I even connect to my own child when I couldn’t even connect to my own self. So I was not keeping it real at all.
To me, I was walking around with a mask on and this mask felt like it was heavy makeup that I’m putting on my face. No judgment to those who wear heavy makeup, but it was just something that was just pasted onto me that didn’t feel like who I was really intended to be in the world. My work of my self discovery with doing personal development work and getting coaches and really tapping into what my fears were, what was holding me back from being myself, and then why was I so afraid of the other side of what people would say or just, you know, my own fear of just talking about it not being quote unquote “perfect” anymore? Like if I was ever really perfect, right? But in my eyes I thought I sure was. So I began this journey towards trying to find out who was the real Alicia, who was the real Ali inside of all of the circles and all of the things and all of the people that I knew.
I really wanted to just tap into who am I? And I do have a podcast, I think that was the first podcasts or the second podcast that I put forward, with who am I. Take this time now or when we’re finished, you can always go back and listen to that and hear how I came through that journey. Now as we talk about keeping it real, you know, I’m an acronym chick, so I took the word real and I just took each letter and I just let it resonate within myself to see how did keeping it real really begin to amplify my life? And it just felt like I took that huge gigantic refrigerator and lifted it up and threw it away or threw it off of me having to hold all of that on my shoulders.
So the first thing I had to do was just begin to raise my own awareness, like really tap into who I was before. Who am I when no one is watching and how can I start to let that out more often? How could I let people see the inside Ali, the one who is not always talking, the quiet one, the observant one, the one that’s really, really silly? And I started to realize that I can be a professional and just be myself. I can be Dr. Ali or Dr. Griffith and still get to bust jokes or say my words of slang because I totally enjoy just using them. You know, not to say that I can’t speak without them, but when I choose to use them, there are choice because they’re part of who I am or what just truly makes me smile on the inside. So I have to start raising my awareness of who I am when no one is watching. And then beginning to like open up the blinds a little bit of the windows and let people in, let them look into my inside world without fear of what they would think.
Now that’s the huge one, right? And we’re always going to come back to that because that’s the society. I don’t know about you, but I know I constantly use that as a barometer of whether to or not. Well, I did before, not so much anymore. So raising our awareness is key. We want to figure out how do we elevate what may not be seen as the beautiful thing, right? What may not be perceived as the perfect thing. How do we elevate ourselves with it? So for many, having a child that does different things that’s not what they want. You want a child who does what everyone else does, or you want to just start a business and the business just does immediately well. That’s not realistic because everyone has something, everyone has a challenge that they have to overcome. I don’t know what made me think that we don’t have challenges that we needed to overcome and why would I think my child wouldn’t have the same? Everyone’s challenge is just different.
So I had to start elevating the concept of what things really, really were instead of always putting it down and placing it into this depressed state. I started to elevate the thoughts of what things could be and that being different or having a business that requires additional work. Waking up early in the morning, going to bed late at night, pushing through adversity was all part of being an entrepreneur. Then I had to learn how to just accept the good, the bad, and the ugly. And I have a different podcast for this one, definitely go and find out one. But accepting the good, the bad and the ugly really helped me to just open up and take off those levels of makeup and those masks and those things that were just covering the blemishes, right? I started going live sometimes without make up, without always being put together and just allowing the world into who truly I was. And when I began to do that, besides just having the freedom of don’t need to cover up anymore or be afraid if someone truly finds out the real deal, it started helping me to just be free, walk light, put less emphasis into what others would think and hear more about what I would think.
And that began to be my process, my journey of moving through and moving towards who I truly was and letting others see that now, honestly, I realized when I became more authentic with myself when I started to keep it real, I mean really real – then I started to have many who were gravitated towards this realness, towards the authenticity of who I was. Guess what? I started to realize that people see through the fake. Anyone of you guys realize that out there? People see through the fake, they see through what’s not really real. They know the ones that are just there just for you know, the glam. They know the ones that are just there, the coaches that are just there to just make their money.
What I started to realize if my tribe, my au-mazing tribe is that what they loved about me more than anything else was my ability to show the good, the bad and the ugly. My ability to show that things weren’t always perfect. My ability to show my climb, my stride, the fact that I have to get up early in the morning to record these things while my son is sleeping because sometimes it didn’t allow me to get to the podcast recording place, or sometimes it does not allow me to do it in the evenings. But I created where I just do it when I can and accept that it’s not always going to be perfect of the perfect of the perfect. It’s the real deal. What I loved about showing my first podcast when I first came out with the Dr. Ali Griffith show and I made that big blooper, and you can go back and see it because I kept it. I actually pressed play and released my first podcast with the unedited version. God, I’m still gasping. I mean, people were able to see all the flaws of starting the podcast and of course, yes, I went back and I placed the revised version, the edited one because I did want the world to get out of it what they needed to.
It was also a lesson to me that sometimes you can’t hide the fake. Sometimes you can’t always hide what’s what the unedited version, right? And sometimes you have to let people into that unedited version so that they can appreciate at times the edited version. Or they can start and realize that I can do something also. And the unedited is also okay. It’s not what you all went to be, but it’s not so bad. It didn’t make me go in and make me not, you know, don’t make me go and throw the covers over my head and said, oh my God, I can’t put my face out anymore. Being real all the way allows you to walk through your mistakes and allows you to walk through when things are not always going your way. And it allows me to feel that I’m still being the best Ali I can.
And it doesn’t matter if sometimes it comes off with a glitch, it doesn’t matter if sometimes it comes off with an extra fuzz in it or extra static in it. It’s what the content is that matters. It’s what the true person of who I am. If you’re one of my listeners, you’re going to hear the blips, you’re going to see the glitches, you’re going to see what’s not perfect because I want you in on the REAL real, not the fake real, but the real real.
And the last l was for me to just learn how to like myself, like love myself. Love and like, cause we gotta like ourselves too. Because we’ll go around liking and liking on Facebook and liking everyone else. But do we ever stop and just like our own stuff? Pick today and just like YOU. Like go back to one of your pictures and press like. Take some time out and tell me that you like this, by the way. Use the opportunity to start pouring into your own self so that your realness, my realness, our realness can truly shine through into where we’re going.
It’s another Dr. Ali Griffith Show. I hope you are able to get the message and get what it was that you needed. Your comments matter and it really makes a difference to me when you stop, take a few minutes out and just let me know what, how this resonated with you, how you needed to hear this today, how maybe you didn’t need it to hear today. I mean, even the comment is not so good, or if it’s something where you’d like for me to get better in, leave it! I’m open to suggestions and I won’t take it personal. I’ll just know you’re keeping it real and this relationship that we have is going to be the real authentic relationship. Thanks again for listening to the Dr. Ali Griffith Show. Remember in all the that you do, be all au-mazing in your thoughts, in your words, and in year actions. Catch you next time. Peace.
This blog post is a transcription of The. Dr. Ali Griffith Show. If you’d like to listen to this episode and others, click here: bit.ly/dralishow
P.S. My nonprofit Smart Fit Fam is hosting our 5th annual Smart Fit Family Fitness Fun Day on July 28th and I’d love for you to attend! This is a free event for ALL to attend (especially special needs families!). We’ll have lots of fun activities, including limbo, potato sack races, egg and spoon races, face painting, dancing, and so many more wellness/fitness activities, games, and food. The event will be at the Wyckoff Farmhouse Museum in Brooklyn, NY from 11am-4pm. It’s totally free to attend! Check it out and get your tickets here: bit.ly/fifthfitfun
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