Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
You're listening to Big Raise, Garage Grind. I want to
bring awareness and my voice to something that's meaningful and purposeful,
more than just who's the best football player, who's the
best football team. The intersection between life, football and mental health.
When you need help and you ask for help, you're
operating from a position of power. When you need help
(00:21):
and you don't ask for help, that's the weakness. Now
here's your host, Seahawk's legend, Ray Roberts. What Up, What Up?
What Up? What up? FAMI. This is a Big Ray
with Big Raise, Garage Grind Mental Health Edition presented by
the Mindful Therapy Group. So we found ourselves a sponsor
title Sponsors. Is good to have them on and we'll
(00:44):
have some more information about them a little bit later.
But as I said, I'm Ray Roberts, I'm the host
of the podcast. I'm excited to always get on and
share my thoughts and my experiences around mental health and
my own journey and hopefully to have some impact on
some individuals. And so you know, we've had I think
(01:05):
five this is six episode and just been around town
and listening to people and talking to people that have
tuned in and listened to the podcast. We're having some
some tremendous impact and so it's and for me, I
love it because if you know me, you know I
love to talk to anybody, and so I get to
have these really cool conversations with people that are very
(01:26):
interested in some of the conversations and some of the
things I'm sharing. One of the things that people ask
me the most, though, is the name of the podcast,
and they want to know where did the Big Raise,
Garage Grind title come from? And I know it's a
little bit long. Probably you know, some marketing experts would
(01:48):
probably want something else, but it just kind of became
part of just kind of came part of who I
am and how I communicate, and I try to do
things a little bit differently than than other people. So
I'm a little bit off the board a little bit
with some of that stuff, but essentially this is how
it all came about. So during the pandemic, my son
(02:09):
was in My youngest son, Price was in ninth grade,
tenth grade, and are going to tenth grade, and he
wanted to He decided, after not playing football but maybe
half a season up until that point, that he wanted
to be the best football player in the state of Washington,
and I looked at him and I'm like, well, you
(02:31):
kind of got some spaghetti arms and you're not a
very big dude, so we're gonna have to kind of
get to work doing that. Well, all because of the pandemic,
all the gyms were closed, so we didn't have anywhere
to We didn't have anywhere to go to work out,
and so I came over to his house one day
and in the garage, I think one of his older
(02:52):
brothers had purchased like maybe one bar and maybe two
forty five pound weights and a couple dumbells, and so
I said, okay, this is enough for us to kind
of get started. And so we started out doing that.
And then as we progress in our workouts, I was like, man, like,
we need other things, and so I looked around and
(03:12):
there were paint cans. So we used the paint cans.
It's like the kettlebells. You know, you can hold the
you can hold the handle, and you know, do all
the little movements you need to do with the kettlebells.
And then they also had just like some straps for
strapping down stuff when you're toring things and trucks and
all that kind of stuff. So we started using those
as kind of some resistance bands to do to do
(03:34):
some resistance training. And then I'm like, man, like, we
need to do some explosive type stuff. And so I
had in their in their garage stored some some tires
and some wheels, and so we use those as like
step ups and like the box jumps we would do.
And so this whole workout thing for us started in
the garage and it was a kind of a cool
(03:55):
bonding moment too to be able to do this work
with my son with my broken down body and trying
to encourage him to push through when he thinks he
can only only has one more rep in him, trying
to push him through to get two more reps out
of it. And then we even they live kind of
up on the hill. So what we would do we
would do the circuit training where we'd do three or
four lifts of movements in the garage. Then we'd run
(04:18):
to the bottom of the hill and back and then
we then we go through it again. So those are
the different rounds. And we would do that for maybe
like forty five minutes. So my big old self was
getting tired, but my son was loving it, and so
to let his high school football coaches know that he
was actually doing work and not just send it home,
I would take pictures of us and then we post
(04:40):
them on social media and tagged Woodntville High School football
and the offensive line coach just let them know that
they we're doing stuff. And so I just started saying,
this is our garage grind, and then our garage grind
turned into Big Rays garage Grind. And the reason I
liked the idea of garage grind is because in the
garage this all the tools and things that you need
(05:01):
to get stuff done. There's food in there, but you know,
I'm gonna dig into their to their freezer deep freezer
and take some of their snacks and stuff home. There's
wheels and tires, there's paint, there's stuff for your garden.
There's stuff to wash the car and clean the car.
I mean, it's all kinds of stuff in the garage
that you can use as tools and things and as resources.
(05:24):
And so this idea around connecting my passion around mental
health with my really long title of Big Raise garage grind,
it just made sense because for mental health, there's a
lot of resources and a lot of tools. It's things
you can use. So it's kind of like, hey, we're
gonna house this mental health work inside of our garage.
(05:47):
So this whole kind of garage grind thing kind of
kind of came about. And so then I started getting
a lot of response on social media where people liked
the idea of the way I would say Big Raise
garage grind, you know, Seahawk addition, and then they knew
that what I was going to talk about was something
around the Seahawks, just based on the title. And so
(06:08):
I've had actually a couple of people call me or
reach out to me on social media and go, hey, man,
can I use that? And I'm like, well, no, not really.
You can't be Big Ray, so you can't have you
can't have Big Raised garage grind at Big Gregg's house.
So that's my thing, and so it just kind of stuck.
And so I think my followers on especially on Twitter,
have gotten used to seeing it and maybe have even
(06:30):
tagged it so that they know when they pop up.
And so this whole idea around the garage grind came
from having a place to work out during the pandemic
and then realizing that the garage is a symbol of
having tools and resources and things you need to get
to get work done. And so it just kind of
fits with the whole mental health thing. And so that's
(06:51):
kind of how I how I came up with it.
So hopefully that wasn't a long winded answer that kind
of confused you any even more, uh, And that you
understand it, And I hope that you know, people kind
of gravitate to it and like it. I kind of
like it. It just kind of has a different little
ring to it. So that's that. But moving on along
(07:14):
with some of these conversations that I've had with folks
that have come up to me and and been very
appreciative of of of us really attacking this issue and
keeping it at the forefront. Uh. And a lot of
the previous recordings episodes, I kept using the word trauma,
and some folks were getting caught up into, you know,
(07:36):
getting stuck, I would say with the word trauma because
they would say, hey, well, Ray, like I haven't had
any trauma in my life, Like I haven't been and
they are associating trauma with something physical. So it's like
you no, like my parents didn't beat me I wasn't
bullied in school. I haven't been sexually assaulted or abused
or anything like that, and so it was kind of
(07:57):
hard to always say, like, hey, well trauma, there's a
wide spectrum. There's everything from just witnessing and viewing trauma
to actually experiencing some physical trauma and uh. And so
I did a little research and came up with h
came across this idea around adverse experiences, and so to me,
(08:19):
hopefully this will be a way for more people to access,
you know, what it is that I'm trying to do,
and and how you can then go back and maybe
investigate some of those adverse experiences in your life and
see how it's planned out in your life today and
then go back and heal some of that stuff and
(08:40):
be you know, have a more joyful, pleasant, you know,
uh life moving forward. And so when you think of
the adverse experiences, I just kind of wrote down a
few of them. So adverse experiences can be any thing
from physical abuse to emotional abuse to sexual abuse, so
(09:05):
all physical things. It can also be emotional neglect. It
can be physical neglect. It can be the like having
a lack of food, or it can be not having
a you know, not having a place to live. It
can be substance abuse, it can be uh, you know,
kids experiencing divorce like their parents are divorcing. So there's
(09:25):
no like physicalness about that, but there is a trauma
in that there is an adverse experience that's happening in
that it's it's and for a lot of kids, especially
if you're young, it's the most impactful, uh thing that's
gonna happen in your life up until that point to
see your parents separated. And so for even the parents
(09:47):
as a as as adults, that can also be you know,
adverse experiences, and you can have mental health issues around it,
whether it's feeling that you're good enough or maybe that
you're lovable or you know, those type those types of
things that you can experience, you know, been in having
been divorced, having commitment issues you know, you know, and
(10:11):
and usually in divorces, if you get married again, the
second time of divorce is even higher rated than the
first time, or higher probability than the first time, and
then the third time is even the higher probability of
the second time of their divorce happening. Because there is
adverse experiences that you're carrying from one one relationship to
(10:34):
the next relationship without going back and healing that adverse situation.
So I hope that that can help bring us all
closer to a conversation where we can all kind of
look at our lives and figure out sometimes when we
respond in ways that we don't know why we responded
a certain way, and a lot of times it may
(10:55):
be connected to a trigger or an adverse experience you've
had in your life. As a matter of fact, looking
at some of the research and this one stat I
found sixty four percent of the US population UH has
experienced at least one adverse childhood experience. And so that's
just as a child. So it doesn't mean that your
(11:17):
adverse child adverse experiences stop after your child. It can
happen throughout your life. But to say that like six
almost seven out of you know, all every ten children
have experienced at least one adverse situation in life. So
if you're not healing that, you're just caring that you know,
throughout your life, and then that's multiplied by all the
(11:39):
other adverse experiences you have throughout your life. So I
think hopefully that's another another another way of saying it,
another school of thought of thinking about it, because if
you even if you think about the the definition of
the word adverse is to is it prevents success or
development or its harm or as unfavorable or as hostile,
(12:02):
or as acting out against something, or you feel hindered.
So not everything is this this idea around something like
physical that you had to have, or you had the
unbelievably worst parents in the history of the world, or
you know, whatever it is. It just it can it
can be representative of all of those things. So I
think by focusing less on the word trauma and more
(12:26):
on the phrase adverse experiences will allow people to maybe
access those things and maybe identify those experiences in their
lives that are that are causing to causing them to
respond a certain way or be triggered a certain way,
and you can work on healing them and conquering them.
(12:47):
So as I was, you know, thinking about this today,
you know, being able to go back and investigate these
adverse experiences and go back and heal them. And I
know I'm not gonna I'm not the best at this either,
but it made me think of the song that in
Vogue saying about free your mind, and it goes free
(13:09):
your mind and the rest will follow. And I don't
know all the rest of it, but I know that
part of it. And I know I'm not I'm not
a good singer, so I'm mis stick to talking and
but but that's kind of what this whole experience is
for has been for me, is free in my mind
of either the trauma or adverse situations and things that
(13:30):
have impacted me in a way that they that they
trigger in my life today that causes that has a
negative impact on me, and so being able to go
back investigate those things, find out what the healing is,
whether it's you have to forgive or you have to
let go, or or something that you really need some
work to get through is worth doing. And I think
(13:53):
you know if to me it is a used to
use the word trauma response, but I'm gonna say it's
an adverse sperience response when people when someone tells me like, oh, no,
nothing ever happened in my life like that. To me,
that's a that's an adverse experienced response right there, because
no one has lived. We're in perfect human beings and
(14:13):
so you've so whether it's like being bullied at school,
or teased at school, or or you know, even your
older siblings may have treated you a certain way. I
have three older sisters and my dad. We didn't have
a whole lot, but my dad used to give us
all a quarter, like every week and with a quarter
back in the day. I don't know, I'm sure we
(14:34):
have some listens. I'm fifty four years old. You could
get a load of candy with a quarter, like you
can get a bag full of candy with a quarter. Well,
my sisters would come and I would hold it in
my fist like like I would bawl my fist up
and they would pinch me until I drop my quarter,
and then they take my quarter. And then and then
(14:54):
because I was this dude, like I couldn't fight my
sisters cause my dad would get mad at me for
fight for fight, they would take them. And so our
house was my dad built our house, so it wasn't finished,
so we had all these exposed beams and stuff like that.
So my dad would give me the quarter and then
I started taking it and squeezing it in between the
two by fours that were exposed in the house so
(15:15):
that they they wouldn't come and take them from me.
So even that experience can be an adverse experience because
they're basically like robbing me. They're like freaking like taking
my quarter, and like, so I don't get to get
my Chicko stick, I don't get to get my my
my sweet and sour tarts or my now lads, like
I didn't get I didn't get to get any of
(15:36):
those things because they would take my quarter. So, uh,
the adverse experiences can be anything from that, you know,
all the way up to something more physical. Uh. Like
we said earlier, though, we do have a title sponsor
Mindful Therapy Group and Mindful Therapy Group, based in the
Pacific Northwest, is a diverse group of qualified mental health
(15:58):
providers offering both in person and virtual care, whether it's
talk therapy or medication management. You can book your first
visit within one week visit Mindful Therapygroup dot com to
start your journey to better mental health today. So it's
important that you start to understand where resources are and
(16:21):
because the time is so different now, I can remember
my dad passed away in nineteen ninety seven, a night
before the first regular season football game. I was playing
with the Lions and we're going to play the Atlanta Falcons,
and in less than twenty four hours after I heard
the news, and so I could have gone home, I
(16:43):
could have not played, but I went and played, and
the emotions were so crazy. I got into a fight,
that's surprising, and got kicked out of the game before halftime.
And I remember about halfway through the season, I was
struggling because I could not stop thinking about my dad.
I didn't know how to grieve. I didn't know how
to mourn the whole thing. And I talked about this
a little bit in one of my first episodes, but
(17:06):
I went to the team to get help. And at
the time, obviously this was nineteen ninety seven, which is
not how it is now. To say that you needed
mental health. Health therapy meant that you were broken, and
if you're broken, your damaged goods. And if you're damaged goods,
that meant like, man, if we need to trade you
ain't gonna be we won't be able to move you.
And so it was no, it wasn't their fault. It's
(17:31):
just kind of how the culture was at the time.
And so I remember having to meet with a therapist
in the middle of the night in downtown Detroit because
I didn't want to be seen going in and out
of this therapy, out of this therapy business. And so
about halfway through the season, I was driving home and
I just broke down and stopped at the red light,
(17:53):
couldn't move, crying really hard, and I had to call
my wife to get a ride to come to where
I was to then get the car and drive us home.
And so it's important these days, because the times have
changed so much, that we make sure that we understand
that having mental health challenges are not a weakness and
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it doesn't make you broken, it doesn't make you damage goods.
It makes you human because we're all imperfect and we
all experience things in ways that that trigger us in
a way that that manifests itself in ways that that
we need some help to do that. And so also
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speaking on this these this line of thought around adverse
situations and how mental health and wellness can present itself
in so many different ways. The spectrum is wide. Just recently,
Tristian Worth, who is one of who is the He
was a thirteenth pick in the draft a few years
ago to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and so he's a
(19:03):
big offensive line and six six or six five is
three and twenty pounds. Phenomenal athlete. I think he's already
made the Pro Bowl. He's only been in the league
probably less than four or five years. Really good football player.
But the Tampa Bay Buccaneers asked him to move from
right tackle to left tackle. And first, I will say
(19:23):
this for people that watch football and they people don't
know much about the offensive line, and they think, like, oh,
well that you should be able to do that. You
play tackle on the right side, just go play it
on the left side. Well, from a skill setter, from
a body position and all that kind of stuff, it
is a huge difference because the angles you use are different,
(19:45):
the way you see the field is different, the way
you use the power on your on your body is different.
When you're on the right side, you're usually left hand strong.
When you're on the right, when you're when you on
the right side, you're left hand strong. You're on the
left side, your right hand strong. And so you have
to like even your muscle merriment memory is different. Well,
that is a challenge in and of itself. But then
with Tristian, he was also saying that like just the
(20:09):
pressure of being a left tackle, like you're you're on
what they called the blind side. You're usually going against
the other team's best pass rusher with no help. And
so all of that stuff combined put him in a jam.
And so he felt like the fear of failure, like
been been not able to do it. So all of
a sudden, this dude, who is an all pro tackle,
(20:29):
unbelievable talent, big strong dude, has had great success, uh
in an NFL. Uh, it's starting to doubt himself, and
doubt can lead to other you know, mental health, mental
health issues. And so he spoke out about it, and
I thought that was pretty impressive. And so some people,
(20:50):
some of our old school peeps, will we'll look at
this and say, uh, this is a weakness, or they'll
look at as a as a focal point for for
jokes and things like that. But for me, those are
the people that are operating in weakness. It takes unbelievable
strength and courage and mental toughness to say, hey, I
(21:11):
need to talk to somebody about this, because you know
that there's a chance you're going to get all this
onslaught of, Like, oh man, look at this dude. These week,
big strong dude. They expect you to be this gladiator,
gladiator all the time. And then he's had all this
success and so that people are trying to figure out, well,
why are you struggling with moving from one side to
the next. So it takes unbelievable uh, mental toughness and
courage to do to do what he did, And like
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I said, it kind of reminded me a little bit
of what happened, you know, when my dad, when my
dad died and I had to figure out, you know,
what to do and how to do it, and all
those different kinds of things. And so to me, just
listen to him talk about why it was important for
him to get it off his chest, to be able
(21:56):
to say it to someone and to go to someone
who is just like him, he's an expert in football,
to go to someone who's an expert in mental health
and be able to trust them that they can help him,
you know, get from one place to the next place
without without a whole lot of criticism. And I think,
(22:17):
you know, I haven't seen anything online or heard anybody
you know, joking and stuff about it, which says a lot.
It says a lot of how far we have come.
But I'm sure there there are some people that are
doing and saying things. But the important thing about him
being able to come to the conclusion that he needed
(22:38):
to not hold this in but to share with someone
that can help him is because if you hold it in,
when you're holding these things in, and you may think
it's that it's showing toughness by holding it in, But
if you took if you took an evaluation of your life,
if you took an inventory of your life, you would
recognize that by holding it in, it is manifesting itself
(23:00):
in other ways. And usually in those other ways it
can it's usually harmful ways. Even if it's like, oh,
I'm gonna work harder, that can be harmful because that
may mean he's spending less time with the people you love. Uh,
And it can it can manifest its way in more
too much, you know, drinking or driving fast or taking
unhealthy risk. Like it's gonna manifest itself in some way
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if you don't, if you don't take care of it,
even though you may be thinking like, hey, I'm just
I'm showing toughness by by holding it inside it and
I'm just dealing with it, but just dealing with it
can lead you to even more harmful uh and in
a more harmful situation. And then by him saying that
it was important for him too to get it off
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his chest and be able to share with someone, it
also made me think of my experience that I had
when I did therapy UH in the in the Eisenhower
Center after the Impact program that the NFL provided for
me last year. And so, like I said before, it's
a thirty's it's a month long program, and so some
(24:09):
dudes are coming and going. Some guys may have been
there for three weeks, and when you show up, they
only have one week left. And so you get a
new crew of dudes and you meet a different group
of people. Well, I got there right almost right at
the end of the of the group that was there.
They were ending as I was as I arrived. And
then about two weeks into it, we got another group
(24:31):
of dudes that came in. And then that second group
of dudes. Man, I met a couple of dudes that
have really been impactful in my life. And it made
me think of Tristian saying that you need someone that
you can share this stuff with. And these two dudes
became my people. This was my crew, this was my tribe,
(24:53):
this was my team, like whatever you want to call it,
because I met I met two dudes that were we
came from all vastly different backgrounds, we were dealing with
vastly different issues, but we connected in a way that
we could support and encourage and provide insight stuff for
each other. So there was one guy there who was
(25:15):
also an offensive tackle, and he showed up. His wife
had found a way for him to get there because
he showed up because his wife found him in his
den writing apology letters to his kids and to his
wife because he's about to take his own life. And
so she recognized he was taking a little bit too
(25:38):
long coming to bed, went and found him, saw him
doing it, and then found a way to get into
the Eisenhau Center. And then as we were sitting there,
this dude his the way he would look out into
the into the yard, it was like he was even there,
like if you've ever seen like the zombie movies, his
eyes were completely black. He just had to stare and
(25:58):
something about him I felt connected to. Maybe it's because
he was a left tackle, Maybe it's because he's a
you know, another six foot six African American dude, you
know whatever it was. And so one day I just
sat next right, I just sat right beside him, and
he didn't say a word. He was looking forward and
I was just looking forward, and I said, hey, man,
your life matters, and your life matters not because you're
(26:22):
a dad or a husband or a friend or whatever,
but because you have life and you have something the
world benefits from. And I'm going to roll with you
for however long it takes for you to work through this.
And that's that's all I said to him. And then
from that point on we were kind of connected at
the hip. And and this dude had a way of
(26:46):
talking to me that his voice and his the way,
his way of thinking and his thought was so like
had so much authority in it that if he told
me that I needed to, you know, go skip rope
for four days and it was to get rid of everything,
I'd probably go skip rope for four days. It was
just something about him that you knew that he was
kind of like a no nonsense kind of a guy,
(27:07):
and that what he spoke of he knew of. And
so that was really important for me because there were
days where I was doubting myself and I needed someone
to speak that into my life, and he was able
to do that. And then there was another dude that
showed up who was a running back, and he showed
(27:29):
up with in a lot of physical pain from playing
football and also feeling disconnected from his kids and his
family and his wife. He was angry. He was trying
to find his place in the lives of the people
that he loved and he was having a hard time
doing that. And I told him when he showed up,
I said, your journey is your journey. There's going to
(27:50):
be dudes here that you probably will never ever see
again for the rest of your life. And so say
what you got to say. Cry if you have to cry,
be angry, if you have to be angry, don't compare
your struggle with everybody else's struggle, because your struggle is
your struggle. And so that's how you that's how you're
going to come in and do this work so that
so that so that you can get out of it
(28:11):
what you need to get out of it. And so
then through conversation, it turns out that we both were
struggling a little bit with connecting with one of our kids.
And so one day he said, Ray, like, you know
when we're doing nine on seven, when you're just like
just the interior, Like nowadays, seven on seven it's a
big thing. Everyone talks about it, and but nine on
seven is where the is where the real deal happens.
(28:34):
That's like the offensive line going against the defensive front seven.
So the defensive line of the linebackers, and it is
just straight up headbanging because they know it's not passing,
you know what I'm saying. They know it's going to
be some kind of run. And so everyone is coming
off low, hard, mean and nasty, and so there is
a lot of hitting, hitting going on. And he goes, well,
(28:54):
you know, in that drill like offensive line full back,
this dude was a fullback, we kind of set the tempo.
And so he said, what you need to do with
your son is set the tempo. You set the tempo.
Don't don't wait for your son to come to you.
You set the tempo. And so anytime that he saw
me and he looked like and it looks like I
had like any kind of struggle on my face, he
(29:14):
would just walk by and be like, big Ray he
set the tempo, and I'm like, I knew exactly what
he was saying because I was letting the day defeat
me versus me conquering the day. And so we were
able to have the three of us, we're just able
to have this type of communication where it was very
few words that we had to say to each other
to support each other, but we became each other's We
became a team, we became a tribe, we became a crew,
(29:37):
like whatever you want to call it, that's what we became.
And it is so I can't even explain to you
how vital it is for me right now. I was
just texting him this morning, you know, because we checking
in with each other all the time through text messaging,
and then probably once or twice a month we jump
on a zoom call on Friday so we can see
the visual connection. We're planning some trips together, you know,
(30:01):
coming up in the fall, that kind of thing. But
it was important to have those those type of people
in your life that you can call them in the
middle of the night. They're not kind of judge what
you're doing. They're not going to tell you what you're
feeling is not real They're not going to ridicule the
ridicule you for for what it is that you're thinking,
no matter how big or small it is. But what
(30:22):
they will do is they're going to remind you of
the things that work for you. So we all had
a routine at this place. And so when I text
them and I just say, guys, I'm having a tough day,
the first thing they say, hey, Ray, did you get
your walks in? Are you getting your walks in today? Ray?
When's the last time you've been to the gym? Like
how's your How are you eating? I know you you know,
I have a routine that I kind of eat the
(30:43):
same stuff all the time. And they're like, you know,
are you are you eating your oatmeal like every morning?
Like like that kind of stuff. They knew my routine
and so I can just say, hey man, I'm having
a tough day and they go like, hey man, jump
back back on your routine. Or I may put too
much importance on one activity and life and it didn't
go to where I wanted to go. And then I
want to write off the whole day, or the whole month,
(31:05):
or the whole whatever it is. And they will ready
remember the small victories. Right, did you get out of
bed this morning, yep? Did you eat your breakfast yep?
Did you get your walk in yep? Did you did
you spend time with your kids? Yep. So it's like
all the little small victories matter because the small victories
always come before the big ones. Like even when you
(31:26):
think that you've like these people that win the lottery,
they go like, oh, man, I bought this ticket, Bam,
I want the lottery. You usually people that win the
lottery of people that play it all the time. So
there's these a little small and they may win ten
dollars here, five dollars there, one hundred dollars here, you know,
five hundred dollars there. It's all these little small victories
that keep, you know, they keep coming back, and then
they win the big lottery. So all these small victories
(31:47):
come before the big victories come. And so these dudes
remind me of that. And it doesn't matter what time
of day or night it is, I can send out
the text, I'm going to get a response. And so
it's important to have those type of people in your life.
And it's also important to support people like that because
that also helps your growth and it helps your healing
because sometimes when you can disconnect your emotion from someone
(32:11):
in some fun someone else's struggle, you can learn from that.
You can learn from what they do or don't do,
or what they need to do or haven't done. You
can learn from that and be able to see it
because your emotions are not in the way of it.
So listen to Thetrician talk about the therapist. Initially is
his team the therapist, the psychologist that he used because
(32:32):
that was the person that he felt like he could
share this stuff with and that he was going to
be free of judgment and he was going to get
the help that he needed. And so having a group
of dudes that can or women, or I'll put it
this way, if you're a dude and you're struggling with
mental health, this is just my perspective, you should go
to other dudes. If you're a female, you should go
(32:54):
to other females, because sometimes when you try to do
it the other way, dudes going to women, women going
as a dude, like emotions and feelings and all other
things kind of get in the way, and it can
it can distract you from what the what the intent
of the communication is and so I tend to just
do it that way. Whether that's right or wrong or indifferent,
(33:15):
that's just kind of how I do it because I
don't want to. I don't want to add something else
on top of what it is I'm dealing with. So, uh,
build your team how you feel like you need to
build it, but put in it those people that are
going to be able to support you, those people that
are going to be able to encourage you. Those people
are going to remind you of the good person that
(33:35):
you are. Some people that are going to remind you
of what your routine is. Some people are going to
remind you to count the small victories. Some people that
are going to then maybe remind you, like, hey man,
this might be a situation where you need to like
really reach out to your therapist, you know, and and
and dig a little bit deeper in that work. The
thing that we all had in common, beyond our circumstances
(33:58):
and challenges, was that we were committed, purpose driven, hard
for other people. Men. I didn't have anything to do
with football. I didn't have anything to do with how
much money we made, or who lifted the most weights
or who had the best toys or whatever. It had
everything to do with their humanity connecting with my humanity,
(34:21):
and then all of us being brave enough to say,
hey man, I love you and I'm here for you.
And and so it's important to have those types of
people in your life. And so I know that some
of our podcasts are a little bit longer, but that's
kind of what I wanted to share with you guys today.
(34:45):
I hope that everybody is learning something from it or
starting to investigate and engage your life and those those
things that triggered you in a way that you can
heal some of that stuff and have a better life.
And that also sets an example for the people around you,
you know. For for me, my kids have all done
(35:06):
at least one therapy session, and they've done it in
response to me kind of leading away and saying like, hey,
I'm gonna go do this because it's important for me
to be able to show up as my best self
as dad and uh, and so it kind of there's
been It's kind of like getting a tune up in
your car a couple of times and like, hey, Dad,
I think I need to talk to somebody. And so
(35:28):
I said the calls. I set the meetings up for
them or find the therapist or whatever they go do it.
If they want to share with me what it is,
that's cool. If they don't, that's cool too. But but
it's also important if you're an adult with kids to
kind of show the kind of the show them that
that it's okay to be that, that it's okay to
not be okay. It's okay to to go to therapy
(35:49):
and don't feel like you're broken or crazy or or uh.
That is something that shows some some form of weakness.
So it's it's important to do that. So I want
to thank again the Mindful Therapy Group for coming on
as a sponsor. We'll here, We'll have more information about
(36:11):
them as we do more of these shows. I look
forward to meeting them and talking with them and sharing
some stuff with them. Thank you guys again for listening.
I continue to get great feedback from the people I
run into in the park, in the grocery store, at
the bars, at the games, and I'm moved by the
impact the podcast is having. As always, is okay to
(36:33):
not be okay. If you are experiencing mental health issues,
contact your medical provider for guidance and assistance with help
and with the help that they that you need. And
then the last piece is when you need help and
you ask for help, you're operating from a position to power.
Thank you guys for listening. It's been big. Gray, be
good and peace at back back BA