The Real Gifts

This is episode 268 of the Empowered Team Podcast. Guess what? You can start your year strong by deciding what you want and creating a plan. We've bundled our Values Creation and Empowered blueprint courses and provided a holiday discount to help you do just that. Check the show notes for the link and coupon code. Welcome to the Empowered Team Podcast where we explore how to optimize your performance in career, sport and life. And now your host, executive coach and life strategist, Kari Schneider.

Today I would love to say to you, Happy Holidays. From the bottom of my heart, through all the corners of my heart, through all my spirit and my soul, Happy holidays. Whatever those holidays look like for you, whether it is a quiet time alone to reflect, whether it is with a lot of people and noisy, and from event after event, whether it is Hanukkah or Diwali or Christmas or whatever it is for you, whatever your holidays or your beliefs or your traditions entail, I wish you the most wonderful, wonderful holidays. This podcast today is what I'm calling the Real Gifts. I've endeavored to be a person of growth and learning for my entire life. Well, that's not true for my adult, my entire adult life. And I've learned, especially in the last few years, how there is so much more than the gifts that we think that we're going to get or the gifts that we think we're going to give in our lives. So I'm going to highlight what I think are some of the real gifts that I've noticed that I couldn't have seen several years ago, I wasn't aware of several years ago. And that's what this episode is. It's called the Real Gifts. First, I'm going to share the gift of, The gift of our physicality, the gift of our bodies, the gift of our health. I always thought that I approached health. I approached training to be in the highest optimal performance possible. Loved optimizing performance, loved creating that for other people. I still love optimizing performance. It is so much fun for me to help people grow to a new level. I don't do that for people on a physical level anymore. I do that with their leadership or their companies or their cultures. But for me personally, even though I wasn't working, I haven't been working with Olympic level athletes for a few years. I still have endeavored to have top 1% type of physical performance. Whether it comes to my lifts, when it comes to my. When it comes to my running, my fitness, I still have had Olympic level personal fitness, personal Physical strength, personal power. And I, in having been diagnosed in this last year with Graves disease, this autoimmune illness, I've discovered the real gift. And the real gift. And I've discovered this over and over. So it's, it's kind of time. It's not kind of. It is really time for it to land for me, and that's that. The real gift is just the ability to breathe. The real gift is the ability to, for my body to just exist, to be alive, for it to have these incredible abilities to regulate the blood pressure for my heart to beat. The real gift is just the fact that I am alive. That is the real gift. The real gift was never that I could run a really fast 5k half marathon, Spartan tough mudder, place in the top three, place in the top ten. That was never the gift. The gift is that I get to go through life with this flesh bag of bones and body that just continues to do its best. And that's the gift, is just to have this body, not even to have health, just to have this body and be able to work with it. That is the gift. Another gift I'd like to point to is my partnership with my life partner, my husband. And I think I have thought of it in the past as a, you know, being lucky enough to find the right person, being lucky enough to find someone that I could share my life with, being lucky enough to find someone who I was really compatible with, with so many common interests, and I say had, because my interests, my level of growth has all changed. Who I am has changed. So whoever he thought he got together with in the beginning, many years ago is not, I'm not the same person. And the gift in this spousal relationship, the gift is the choice. The choice to choose day in and day out to keep choosing that person. Keep choosing whoever your partner is, your boyfriend, your girlfriend, your spouse, your business partner, keep choosing that person. Because I think we go into it with this idea that, that we've chosen someone who is compatible. We've chosen someone who has certain skills. If it's a business partnership, we've chosen someone who makes us laugh or we like to be around. But the truth is, is that that person could be different in a year or five years, or 10 years. The truth is that life circumstances could cause something that changes everything for the trajectory that you had planned together. So every day is simply a choice. So the real gift in marriage, in long term partnership, is that you have a choice. You get to choose that person day in and day out. And it is an incredible gift to be able to have that choice and consciously choose, not feel stuck, not make anything that's happening wrong, but to consciously choose to pick that person day in and day out. That is the gift number three. The gift is, is family. Except the way I saw this gift of family, it was that I was lucky enough to get pregnant years ago with my partner at the time and have a wonderful, wonderful child, my first daughter named Raina. And I chose to make my whole world adapt to this being that was now my most important family. And then my family changed in that I met. I began a relationship with my husband, and he was a package deal. I called him because he had three sons at the time. And when we fell in love with each other, my daughter and his sons became the package deals that we gave each other. We didn't come just as a single person, we came as a package. And the beautiful gift at the time was that we both embraced that package like it was this wonderful gift. We weren't just getting this one person, we were getting this family coming together and blending this family. And then as time went on, the other gift was making an addition to this family called our fifth child to the family, Maeve. So my family has been an incredible, incredible gift. But the real gift is something different. The real gift is the learning that they have taught me, that my children continue to teach me day in and day out. They teach me about my capacity. They teach me about patience. They teach me about how massive my heart is, that I never knew it could be that big. They teach me the real gift in my family is the continual lessons, the learning that they've been able to bring to my life. That's the real gift. The fourth gift is my purpose, my business, my mission that I'm up to in the world. And I've seen and helped so many humans who have been on big missions. Missions from building a company, starting a company, selling a company, going to the Olympics, qualifying for the Olympics. Big, big missions. And then my own missions of helping others get to their goals, helping others optimize their companies, their performances, their leadership, their cultures. And it is a gift. It's a gift to be able to be involved in business. It's a gift to be able to be up to these things. And yet it's not the real gift. Because on every one of those missions, everyone is so focused on that far vision. Everyone is so focused on that goal, on that outcome, on that result, that we lose touch with what the real gift is. I have seen so Many people sell the company, retire the company, make it to the Olympics, win a gold medal. I've seen so many people make their most outrageous, incredible dreams come true, only to discover that it wasn't the gift that they actually were looking for. The gift, the real gift was everything that it took and everything that they had to become in order to get to that goal. The real gift is the journey. And that, for me, is a lesson that I have to remind myself of. This real gift, that it's the journey. It's the journey I'm on with a company. It's the journey that I'm on with a client. It's the journey that I'm in in my own business. All these missions. It's the mission. It's the journey. It's the learnings, it's who we're becoming along the way. That's the real gift of our purposes, of our missions. And then the last one, it's. It's friends, the gift of community, the gift of other people, the gift of. Of the connections and the relationships that come up in our lives. And I think that I've been excited to be part of new communities. I have learned that the connections can be shallow, the connections can be deep. I've really, really embraced and been grateful for lifelong friendships and lifelong connections that I've had from my childhood, from high school, people who you really feel that you know them, and yet there's a real gift. And the real gift that I see in friendships and in communities is the contribution. It's the being able to support those friends, give to those friends, and that's the piece that I think feels the best. It feels like warmth. It feels like the contribution you can give those communities. The contribution I've been able to give to my friends or my communities. That is the real gift back to me because it's my way of really being so grateful and so thankful to have these people, these communities, in my life. So this episode is a little episode, and it's to remind myself and to share with you and perhaps be lucky enough to remind you of the real gifts of what we. What we might take for granted. Just being alive, having a body and being alive, being able to choose the learning and the love that comes from our families, the incredible journeys that we're actually on. That is so much greater than the gold medal, so much greater than selling or exiting the company and the contribution that we can give our communities, our friends. These are the real gifts that I've discovered recently and over time. And I wish these gifts for you in this holiday season in your future year to come, and I'm sending you so much warmth and love. I hope you have an incredibly connected and empowered holiday season.

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