207: How to Build the Mental Strength You Need To Reach Your Great Potential, with Amy Morin

Self pity is when you exaggerate how bad your life is. When you start to get helpless and hopeless and think there's no hope for you and life can never get better and you dig in your heels and you stay stuck. So if you were to say, I'm gonna work on not feeling sorry for myself and instead I'm gonna work on gratitude, it's one really simple way to start changing your life and building mental muscle.

Hello everyone, this is Kathy Caprino and welcome to my podcast, Finding Brave. I've created this show for everyone who longs to create something bold and brave in their life. To rise up, speak up and stand up for who are and to reach their highest and biggest visions. Each week I'll be speaking with inspiring guests from all walks of business, leadership, entertainment, the creative arts and the entrepreneurial world. And they'll be sharing their intimate stories of Finding Brave and offer their best strategies for building your most rewarding, joyful and meaningful life, business and career. Hello, everybody. Welcome to this week's Finding Brave. So excited that you're here and I absolutely cannot wait to share our guest, Amy Morin with you. I think you're in for quite an amazing treat and we're going to be digging in about, how do we put it? Your wonderful title for this was how to build the mental strength you need to reach your greatest potential. And we're going to be talking all about best selling book. That was a viral post first, wasn't it, Amy? It was that how it started? It was a viral post on Forbes.

Yeah.

Cheryl Snap Connor interviewed you, right?

That's exactly it. So I wrote an article called 13 Things Mentally Strong people don't do and it went viral. It blew up.

What is it at now? 50 million views? 20 million.

Yeah, it could have gotten. And then Forbes picked it up maybe, maybe a week after I wrote it or a few days after I wrote it. And then it got 10 million views on their website and it just ballooned from there.

It is, Amy. You hit a chord. You.

Five years later, I'm still talking about it.

Oh, and we're going to talk about how your life has changed since then, because I think people would be interested to hear that. And then we're going to dig into what mentally strong people do not do and why that's important, to have that framework.

So I can't wait.

But I want to tell you all all about Amy. Amy Morin is a psychotherapist, a lecturer at Northeastern University. I think you're an international speaker at this point, aren't you?

Yes.

Yeah, there we go. And international best selling author. And it's three books. I hadn't realized that, of course I know about and have 13 things mentally strong People Don't Do. But you also have a book for parents, a book for women, and now you have a book coming out for children soon.

Yes. A lot of, you know, when my first book came out, I kept getting questions from people saying, how do we raise mentally strong kids?

Wow.

So I thought, great, I'll write a parenting book. And that was my second book. And then, wow, I had so many questions from women saying, well, you know, when we talk mentally strong people, we often look at Navy seals or these elite athletes. What does it look like to be a strong woman? And so that was my third book, How 13 Things Mentally Strong Women don't do. And then I had so many parents and so many people talk about kids like, oh, if I just had learned this sooner, my life might be different. Or how do I teach this to my kids now? So I decided I'll come up with a kids book so that kids can learn this stuff.

Amy, so I've got to ask you just from the thought leader perspective, the writer perspective. So you were a psychotherapist and you did some coaching. I am really interested in understanding. How did this come to you? How did this idea, this framework, and we all know, you know, there's sticky language, there's sticky frameworks and ideas, and this is sticky, man. This, this hit a chord and continues to hit a chord. How did you come around to 13 things? Was it what emerged in your clients and why did you choose to focus on what not to do? Can you tell us?

Sure. So, you know, I had been a part time writer for a while and my job as a therapist, I did a little bit of writing on the side.

Oh, I didn't know that.

Yes. But most everything I wrote was sort of academic. It was very, very much about sometimes mental health, but sometimes not even about mental health. It was just a way I earned extra income as a former therapist. You know, you can only be a therapist so many hours in the day. You can't do it at nights and weekends, partly because of self care, but also office hours. Just don't work like that. But this was the first article I wrote that wasn't, that was much different. And what nobody knew, the first one, that was not like an academic, you know, it was, what nobody knew when it came out was it wasn't even supposed to be published. It was a letter to myself and I found it helpful. And so because I found it helpful, I thought, I'll put it on the Internet, we'll see if anybody likes it. Never imagined it would change the course of my life, but I had gone through a series of losses. My mother passed away. And then on the three year anniversary of the day that my mother died, my 26 year old husband died of a heart attack. And I tell you, my interest in mental strength was no longer about being a therapist who taught people how to be strong. It was about how do I get through this as well. How do I, you know, what skills that I'm teaching other people do I want to learn in my own life and how do I apply them? And one of the things I learned from the people in my therapy office was it wasn't always about what people did. Sometimes the strongest people just didn't have certain bad habits. And so in the middle of my grief, I would just cling to that and think, okay, as long as you don't do certain things, you'll be okay.

Can I just stop you there just to understand your brain?

Yeah.

What do you think made you look at the absence of versus what mentally strong people do? Like what, what made you see that?

You know, people would come into my therapy office and I'd see some who were still hopeful, they were still, still optimistic about the future. They had drive, they had goals, they wanted things to change. But then I'd see other people who got stuck and they'd come in and they'd be like, you aren't going to believe what happened to me and now I can't have a good life. And so I thought, okay, what separates these people from the people that just are staying stuck? And when I examined it, I thought, you know, a lot of these people all have the good, same good habits. They're all doing a lot of the exact same things, so what's the difference? And it just occurred to me, well, they aren't doing this, for example, they're not feeling sorry for themselves, so therefore their good habits are much more effective.

Wow. And so brilliant.

After studying that thought, okay, I'm a social worker, I'm supposed to, I was trained to tell people, okay, this is what you're doing. Well, keep doing that. But I thought if I weren't to a physical trainer because I wanted to get physically strong and they said run on the treadmill, that'd be great. But I'd be awfully upset if they didn't tell me to quit eating jelly donuts. Right. I want my Work on the treadmill to be effective. So just tell me, quit eating so much junk food so that you see results. Otherwise I'd get tired and think, well, this isn't working. So I started doing that in my therapy office. I help people identify what's sort of the worst habit, what counterproductive thing are you doing, how do we get rid of that? And then all your hard work becomes much more effective. And so I saw it work. So then I applied it to my own life. And you know, it took a long time to heal my broken heart to come out of this fog of grief. But I finally did and I got married and life was looking pretty good again. And then my father in law gets diagnosed with terminal cancer. And I thought, you know, I'm grieved so long, I can't go through this. I dug in my heels and I didn't want to do it, but it wasn't like I had a choice. And so in the midst of my pity party, I sit down and I remind myself that mentally strong people don't feel sorry for themselves. And that was number one on the list. And I went down and I wrote down all of the things that I'd learned as a therapist about what mentally strong people don't do. When I was done, I happened to have 13 things. Wasn't meant to be 13 as a magic number, really. 13.

It wasn't 20 and you whittled them down?

Nope, I have you. You kept it. And I would read it to myself and I found it helpful. And so I thought, well, if I find it helpful, maybe somebody else will too. And then I. That's when I published it online. Never imagined that it would go viral.

It's almost like this might be too spiritual here, but it's almost like it was given to you. Do you feel that?

Yeah.

Do you feel like. Like sometimes I think. And it's funny, my most viral posts are like that. It's almost like they're downloaded. I don't mean to freak anyone out, but it's just delivered to you. Do you think that that's important?

People ask me, how long did it take you to write it? I bet 10 minutes. I mean it was.

And then I'm interested as a writer and then we'll get into. But in your book where you flesh them out, was that harder to do or was that just all there as well? You know, it's one thing to list it, it's another thing to, you know, here. What we need to know was that.

It was, it was definitely Harder, because A, I wasn't an author, B, I didn't even know. I had no intentions of ever writing a book. A literary agent had called me. So I thought, I don't know how to write a book. I don't know what I'm doing. And then I was used to writing 600 word articles, not chapters that were 3,000 words long. So I thought, how am I now going to talk about this one thing for 3,000 words and still make it, you know, make sense? And I wasn't used to doing a lot of research and talking about anecdotes and carrying stories through. So as a writer, there was a steep learning curve that I had to figure out how to do it. I didn't have a lot of time. My publisher wanted the book to come out within the year. So I had a very short amount of time to figure out, how do you write a book?

It's really inspirational. Everybody here, I mean, what I get from this is you, you know, the best material comes from our life experience. You know, it's one thing to tell people because you see it in your client's life. It's another thing to say, I applied this and it helped me get through the worst tragedies. You know, it's so powerful, right? So can you talk about what is mental strength versus mental health? How do we know what mental strength looks like? What is it?

A lot of people ask that because they'll say, oh, I'm depressed, so therefore I must be mentally weak, or if I have anxiety, I'm not strong enough. But that's not the case at all. It's sort of like, again, if we were to look at physical strength and physical health, two separate things, you could.

Have physical strength and physical health, right?

You could have a physical health problem, maybe have diabetes, but you can still choose to go to the gym and lift weights. Mental strength and mental health is the same. You might have a mental health problem like diabetes, but you can still still make choices every day that help you become stronger. And so mental strength is a choice. It's all about what you choose to do every day, about getting control of the way you think, feel and behave. So how do you respond to self doubt? How do you deal with negative thoughts? How do you deal with those catastrophic predictions? How do you deal with a bad mood? Do you get yourself out when you're angry? How do you calm yourself down? And then our actions that we take. So maybe you don't feel motivated, but what do you do? Or when you're struggling with Something, do you just and hope it goes away or do you take action? So those are the three things that make up mental strength, what you think, feel and behave, and it's all the choices you make on it.

Do you find that, how would I put this? There are some people that so desperately need more mental strength, but their mental health problems, how would I say it makes it hard for them to accept accountability.

Yes.

Do you see that?

Of course, absolutely. Because your anxiety and depression affects the way that you see the world, the way that you see yourself, the way you see other people. And so people who are struggling with depression or anxiety or some other mental illness, it's harder to believe that you have the power to change your life. It's harder to believe, okay, if I get up and do this, even though I don't want to, I might feel better. Or a lot of people think, well, if I do this, something bad is going to happen. So it takes a bigger leap of faith because you're going against everything your brain is trying to convince you not to do. And while all of us experience self doubt and negative thoughts, mental illness causes you to think exaggeratedly negative thoughts. It causes you to doubt almost everything you do and it makes you feel bad. And the worse you feel, the harder it is to get up and take action.

So true, Amy. So clearly said. And I also see, truthfully, if I can be honest, I noticed, you know, I believe that we co create our life, we co create our situations, we co create our relationships, but often we're not aware of that. So if we've been, you know, in my book coming up, I talk about mistreatment and the whole angle is, yeah, we get, many people get mistreated, abused, sexually harassed, but are we going to stay in the victim place or are we going to say there's something potentially that I can do to either stay away from this situation, to remove myself from the toxicity, to not be attracted to the toxicity. And what I find is mentally strong people are drawn to that because they want to believe they can have a change, that they can have an impact in their own life. That buoys them mentally. Not strong people get pissed at that.

Yes.

Are you actually people will say to me, you are blaming the victim. And gosh, I'm not blaming the victim, I'm helping you rise up from being the victim. But I find that there are some people who are not mentally strong who want to stay the victim. Because if, in a way, if, when I ask them to articulate, why do you want to stay where you are here, they'll say something like, I don't want to let them off the hook. Yeah, there's some. Tell us more about that. What is that?

Yeah, I think for a lot of people, if you play the role of the victim and you get stuck there, it's about, well, that's not my fault.

Right.

You get attention because people sympathize with you, and it prevents you from having to take action. It sort of gives you an excuse to dig in your heels and say, well, you know, it's not my fault that my life is bad. And that's not to say people aren't really traumatized by things that happen and it doesn't affect them. But, you know, we know certain kids are to be bullied, so switching schools doesn't necessarily solve it. The parent will be like, well, we went to a whole new school, and guess what? My kid was the target again. Well, sometimes you need to look at, well, what's your kid doing? Maybe it's their body language, and they walk down the hall, they're hunched over, Maybe they don't make eye contact. Maybe they're doing some really weird things. And that's not to say they have to change, but it's about just identifying, what can I do about this? We want to empower kids. We want to empower ourselves to say, what can I do? And as a therapist, sometimes I'll have people come into my office and they'll say, I had a woman who came in and she said, you know that all the men around here are drug addicts. Last seven men I've dated are all cocaine addicts. You know, there's plenty of people who aren't cocaine addicts. What are you doing to attract these specific men or people who will say, I've only been in abusive relationships? Well, where are you meeting these people? Or how are you getting to know them? Just taking a look at how do I change the dynamic to break out of this cycle? It's hard to do because we don't want to think about that. It's much easier to think I'm a victim of a cruel world and the cruel people in it, rather than I have the power to change my life.

I love what you're saying. I want to make one point that I'm guessing you'd agree with. We're not at all saying you deserve bullying.

Right?

Nobody deserves to be bullied. But there are behaviors that attract the bully. If you are weak and insecure and awkward, sometimes the bully, who's also broken in some ways, will seek. They're like a heat seeking missile. And they will find the people that they can, they can bully and where it will be effective for them. And you know, part of my chapter on mistreatment is it's important to adopt an internal stance of don't mess with me, don't think of messing with me because it won't go well for you. And you know, I've been one that. Why do people treat me like this in the past? Because I kind of grew up with some things that made me not able to see my own power. So I do think we can adopt and feel a stance of I'm strong here.

Yes, Agree with that. Absolutely. If you look like a victim, if you act like a victim and you feel like a victim, guess what? People are going to treat you right. So, yeah. And people can feel that when you feel like, okay, I'm strong, I deserve to be treated better, I can handle this. Or you can't, you can't do these things to me anymore. People know and they always go for the weak link, the person who they think that they can get away with mistreating. And so it's really important to send off that vibe. No, I'm strong enough to stand up to you.

Oh, I love it. I love it. So tell us more about how we build that mental muscle. What steps? You know, I love this to be very actionable, that people listen and then they have some things to do. Amy, what can we tell folks about? How do you develop that mental strength, that mental muscle?

One of the simplest, most effective things you can do. I'm a huge fan of it. Is just gratitude. Every study will show that being a grateful person does everything from you'll sleep better, you'll have better quality sleep, but you'll also sleep longer, you live longer, you take better care of your health, makes you 25% happier. I mean, the list goes on and on. And it's free. It costs maybe 60 seconds of your time to think, what am I thankful for today? So I think to make that a habit, every day, maybe on your drive to work, you just come up with five reasons that you're thankful. Maybe you have a journal and you write down three things before you go to bed or you around the dinner table, talk about the best part of your day instead of complaining about the worst part of your day.

So good, so true.

Incorporating that into your life makes a huge difference. And then on the flip side, make sure that you aren't feeling sorry for yourself. That's the habit to get rid of. And then it's okay to be sad, it's okay to grieve, it's okay to go through tough times. But self pity is different. It's when you exaggerate how bad your life is. When you start to get helpless and hopeless and think there's no hope for you and life can never get better. You dig in your heels and you stay stuck. So if you were to say, I'm gonna work on not feeling sorry for myself and instead I'm gonna work on gratitude, it's one really simple way to start changing your life and building mental muscle.

Hello, Kathy here and thanks so much for tuning in today. I hope you love the show. One quick thing I'd love to share with you is my new video course, the Most Powerful youl. This course is the companion to my top selling book, the Most Powerful seven Bravery Boosting Paths to Career Bliss, which is now being published in Arabic, Chinese and Polish. I'm honored to share that a division of the United nations has sponsored the course for members of their staff. What a powerful leadership demonstration that is. This course has emerged from 16 years of coaching and training with women around the world, helping you learn how to ask for what you want and get it to speak up for yourself. Lead more confidently to network with amazing mentors who connect you with exciting opportunities and to help you overcome career disappointments that keep you from feeling valued and respected. If you're ready for a more inspiring, successful career, this is the program for you. Please take advantage of it and close any power gaps you may be facing today. Learn more@mostpowerful you.com thank you so much. Well, I have, I have something I want to add here. See what you think. I think that gratitude changes our life for a number of reasons, those that you mentioned, but also, you know, people will come to me for all walks of life and share what isn't going well. And I think this is a spiritual concept. It's a Buddhist concept too. But I really, when something doesn't go the way I think, well, I will try when I'm mentally strong to say, wow, let me get curious here. What could this mean? So my podcast isn't going well. Someone called me about that yesterday. I didn't get that job. I didn't get that acting gig, I didn't get that promotion. Rather than it's black and white terrible. I think it's important to be grateful for that stuff too and say, I mean, I know it's hard when you've lost someone. Gratitude is not what you're thinking of, but the other stuff in life you can say, huh, I'm going to get curious about this. If this is the eighth person I've gotten involved with who's a drug, you know, drug addicted. Let me get curious here. Let me be grateful for what it's teaching me to do, to change. Would you agree with that?

Absolutely. When you're going through tough times and in the moment, you're not going to be grateful for what you're going through. But sometimes after the fact, I think, well, what did I learn from that? How did it make me become stronger? How did it change who I am in a healthy way? How can I use this as an opportunity to, to grow stronger and become better?

Love it. So when you say, stop being sorry for yourself, what can we consciously do? What do we have to do? Do we have to listen to our thoughts and say, ha, ha, there goes one of those self pitying thoughts. What tactics do you give your coaching clients now?

Yeah, so that's one big one is to catch your thoughts to think. Is it exaggeratedly negative? Am I blowing this out of proportion? An easy way to figure it out is, well, what would I, what advice would I give to my friend who had this problem? If your friend came to you and said, my life is horrible, awful, I'm stuck and it will never get better, you'd probably have some kind words of reassurance of, no, you can do this, you can dig yourself out, here's what you're gonna do. You'd probably be a lot nicer than you are to yourself. So sometimes just asking yourself, what would I say to my friend who had this problem? And giving yourself that same advice. And another great tip is to say, I'm gonna behave like the person I want to become. So if you want to be a mentally strong person, get up, act like a mentally strong person. You don't just sit on the couch and binge watch Netflix and wake up tomorrow and think, I'm so strong, I feel so much better about my life. You got to get out there and do something. Whether that means you volunteer, you start tackling that pile of bills, you go back to school, you just start doing those things maybe that you're scared to do. And you don't have to feel brave to be brave. You just go out there and do it and take that stage step and, and then you become mentally stronger. But sometimes you have to act it before you feel it. We call it acting as if, act as if you were mentally strong and go do those things. And then guess what? You'll become stronger.

I love it. My friend who's Australian best selling author and a guru for entrepreneurs calls it be it until you become it. Yes, love that. Because I feel like fake it till you make it doesn't work for me. Faking feels fake. The energy of faking is fake. But be it, be it. So one other thing I want to talk to you about. You know, one of my favorite quotes in the world is Einstein, you can't solve a problem on the level of consciousness that created it. I think that doing what we're talking about here is infinitely harder alone than getting help. Because I think we're so you tell me what you think. But I think we're so comfortable with the habitual way we're operating in the world that we don't even see a window where we can change it. We just don't see it. So when you're talking about be it till you become it or act as if, would you agree that having a mentor or a role model or a coach or a therapist, I'm a fan of all of those where you can sit down with someone who can be a mirror for you. I think that getting help is essential is what I'm saying. What do you think about that?

Absolutely. I think, you know, we figured that out with physical health. If you want to be a healthier person, you have to surround yourself with healthy food, people that make healthier choices and that helps them physically healthier. But when we talk about things like mental health, mental strength, we don't really have a guideline for it. A lot of people, you know, we don't have mental health checkups the same way you have physical health checkups. For a lot of people, the thought of seeing a therapist is embarrassing. There's still a stigma attached to it. And we don't really walk around talking about our feelings as adults. When's the last time somebody said, I'm really sad? Here's what I'm going through occasionally, but more often than not, we don't do that. We hide it, we stuff it. We pretend like we're doing great on social media and we never actually come out and say, you know, I'm really struggling here. But as a therapist, I know everybody that walks into my therapy office is struggling with the same problems, just none of them are talking to each other about it. And so I'm a huge fan of saying, how do you find a community? If you want to be strong, you have to surround yourself with strong people. But a lot of Us don't have that. It's not your family, your friends necessarily aren't working on self improvement. It's not a priority in their lives. So what do you do? Sometimes it's about hiring a coach, sometimes it's about hiring a therapist. Maybe you do have a mentor, maybe there's somebody in your life. Sometimes it's just about let's unfollow people on social media that are giving unhealthy messages and let's start following more positive people that are giving you messages that aren't just popular but ones that are actually helpful. I think that community is huge component as to hold you accountable, to point out problems, to teach you new things, to inspire you, to motivate you. The list goes on and on. But it's about creating a life that is conducive to building mental strength too. You're not going to do it on your own or in a vacuum. You need people. And when I give talks about mental strength, the line of people afterwards, a lot of them don't want to ask a question publicly, even when I do a Q and A. But the line of people and my answer to so many of them is the same thing. You should really talk to somebody about that. It's not a question I can answer in 30 or 60 seconds. It's something that these people really want to ask a therapist and I'm standing right there in front of them. But they don't necessarily want to go talk to someone, but they could really use it. And so I try to encourage people, let them know there's new things you can do these days. You can go to online therapy. If you're not comfortable seeing someone face to face. You can have a coach you talk to over the phone. There's lots of options, but by all means, talk to somebody.

Oh, what a great suggestion. You know, I find that this might sound doom and gloom to people. I don't mean it that way literally, Amy. 99% of the people that come to me for career help and they can be illustrious making a million dollars running businesses or not, it doesn't matter the level of outer success. 99% have had some form of childhood programming or trauma. Now therapists are comfortable using that word. The rest of the world isn't comfortable. Some sort of programming, some sort of event, some sort of behavior programming, training that is perpetuating their problems today. And so, you know, I really do believe your childhood. I'd love your thoughts on this. Your child, you are what your childhood taught you to be. Unless You've addressed it. Do you think so?

Absolutely. That's when we develop our core beliefs, right? How you figure out who you are as a person, how you relate to the world, how you get along with people, whether you see the world as a scary place or a fun place. How do you. What are your beliefs? Money. You know, did your parents spend it? Did they save it? Did they hoard it? Were they anxious about it? Did they always complain about bills? I mean, really, all of your attitudes and things get developed early, and the skills that you learned to get by as a kid, you don't need as an adult. A lot of those things that got you through math class or helped you get out of trouble, we still use them as an adult, and we don't do it on a conscious level. So it's about figuring out, well, what am I still doing that's not serving me. Well, maybe you lie to get out of trouble with your boss as an adult because that's what you learned as a kid. Or maybe you were embarrassed about how much you weighed as a kid, and you still, as an adult, you find yourself buying clothes that are way too big or hiding. I mean, there's so many things that we do as adults that you think all boils down to how I was treated or something somebody said when I was seven.

That's right. That's it. That's it. So two other questions, then. I have to let you go. I know you're writing another book here now. Why do you think this. This book went so viral? What do you think it says about us, what happened here, that we. That, you know, you can't pump out your books fast enough, really? And for different segments. What's happened here in our world, do you think?

You know, I think people are finally comfortable talking about mental strength. They're not as comfortable talking about mental health, but who doesn't want to talk about mental strength? And it's something interesting, proactive that you can do something that says, you know, you're not just mentally ill or mentally healthy. We all have the ability to build mental strength. And I think for a lot of people, that gives them hope, gives them an idea of, okay, there are things I can be doing to make my life better. Sometimes it's little things, just small changes I could make in my. In my daily life. And no matter what my goals are, if I'm mentally strong, I can do it. Or if I don't reach my goals, I'm mentally strong enough to handle that. So for readers will send me emails Just telling me, you know, for the first time in my life, I'm starting to understand myself better. And to me that's, you know, makes it all worth all the hard work that I do to say, okay, reading this book helped change your life. Well, then by all means, I'll keep writing until they tell me to stop.

Did you know that framing it as mental strength was the key? Or did it just, I mean, what you just articulated is brilliant. It's, it's. How do we articulate a message in a way that people will hear it and not run away from? Did you know that calling it mental strength would do that? Or are you just. Again, it was given to you, you know.

Right? I think it was given to me. I think the. Had I attempted to craft it, I had to come up with something, I don't know that I would have.

Oh, wow. See folks, sometimes it's just there inside you and you gotta out because it's there to help millions of people. Finally, Amy, is there one more unhealthy habit that you see over and over that, you know, you're blue in the face talking about that? We haven't covered anything else.

Yeah, the number one thing people always want to talk about when they read my first book is number two, that mentally strong people don't give away their power. That was really about, you know, how much power do you give other people over your life? Do you give your boss permission to ruin your day? Do you blame, you know, traffic on ruining your day? Do you say your mother in law makes you feel bad about yourself? Back that power and saying, you know, I'm going to change my language. It's up to me to set healthy boundaries with people. I'm in control of how I think, how I feel, how I behave, who I spend my time with, what I'm going to do today, and just sometimes just reframing that. So instead of saying, I have to go to work, remind yourself that it's a choice to go to work. Of course there's consequences if you don't show up to the office, but just reminding yourself, yeah, this is a choice and I'm choosing to do it because I want to earn money, or I'm choosing to do it because I like my career, even though I don't feel like it today, and just a new language and just then taking a step back sometimes and thinking, well, did I create the kind of life I want to live? If not make some changes. You have the power to do that.

I gotta tell you, Amy, you would be A therapist that I would run to. You have such a. To me, your energy is loving, but I'm not gonna let you off the hook. It's. It's powerful. It's not coddling. Right. Like I can imagine coming to you. I'm gonna hear some straight talk, right?

Yeah, I think that's an accurate statement. I don't want to waste anybody's time by, you know, just saying, that's great. How does that make you feel? I really want people to know you can empower them. Say, okay, like you feel bad, but let's do something about it. And I just want to energize people and say, let's change your life and here's how you can do it. And I can't change it for you, but I promise I can give you the tools that can help you change it.

Can you tell us a little bit about how your life has changed, where you're calling from now? Just, just so people who have a big message that that is going to help a lot of people, they can see how it. Doing that work changes your own life. Will you share that?

Absolutely. So back in the day, when I wrote that article, writing was just a part time side hustle that helped me earn a little bit of money. My husband was out of town for almost a year taking care of his father in law as he passed away. So he was unemployed. So I was the only breadwinner. So money was tight. And that's how I did it was by writing articles for $15 an article at the time. And I was living in rural Maine and it was cold and it was dark. But once this article went viral and a literary agent called and I got a book deal, life changed. I kept working as a therapist for about a year after the book came out and then decided to see where else I could take this. And so now I move to the Florida Keys. I live on a sailboat most of the year. You're calling from a sailboat, Right. And most of my time is spent writing and speaking. And I do coaching now, but it allows me to coach people by phone. I can coach them. I coached somebody at a beach resort yesterday in the Florida games.

Good grief.

And you know, I can add so much more flexibility. I can do this in the middle of the day. I can whenever. Once I can work on a book at my, at my leisure. And I get to go speak to audience all around the world. Mental strength.

Oh, it's so inspiring. I can't thank you enough. So where does everybody find your books? Where do they go to learn more? I'm sure you have a million free resources. Where do they go?

My website is the best place, which is Amy Morin, LCSW is in licensed clinicalsocialworker.com wonderful.

I can't thank you enough for being here with me. You're very inspirational, not only as a wonderful therapist and helper, but as a writer and an influencer in the way you craft your messages. Thank you so much for the great work you're doing helping people become mentally strong.

Thank you for putting me on your show. I appreciate that as well.

Oh, come back again soon. And I know I'm featuring you in my book. I'm so grateful for that. All right, everybody, I'm guessing this might have triggered some things, maybe some thoughts about yes, finally I am going to kind of take control, take my power back. But it might have triggered some other thoughts. We would love to hear from you. Wherever you're seeing this, please write a comment. Please reach out. We would love to hear from you and we pray that this is instrumental for you and it's really your time to build your mental strength and change your life because it is transformative. All right, everyone, have a wonderful week. Amy, thanks again.

Thank you.

See you next time. Hi, Kathy here, and I wanted to share some information about my new digital newsletter, your Path to Career Bliss. This monthly newsletter explores one key career, leadership or personal growth topic that is essential for building a happier, more successful career or business. Every issue offers a selection of the most read articles that I've ever written, along with riveting podcast interviews with some of the nation's top experts, as well as career assessments, resource recommendations, a subscriber highlight section and an Ask Kathy column and more. We've made it as affordable as possible with two tiers to choose from, and the first month is completely free and you can cancel at any time. I hope you'll join me in this program now. Check it out@kathycaprino.com newsletter and get your free issue today. Thank you. And here's to your path to career bliss. Thanks so much for joining us today. And please don't forget to check out findinggrave.org for more programs, resources and tips. And tune in next time for your weekly dose of finding Brave.