Episode 85: What Would You Say?

Welcome everyone to episode 85 of the Weekly Yes and Podcast. I'm your host Travis Thomas, the creator of the Weekly Yap as well as Live Yes and, where you can reach me at liveyesand.com or follow me on social media @LiveYesAnd. This is episode 85. I'm coming to you, I would say live, but this is recorded in the Toyota Prius sound room. Which is just my Prius. And I'm not even coming to you today with my fancy schmancy blue microphone. I'm coming to you using voice memos on my phone. And so hopefully the quality is still coming through, but I don't have my microphone. I'm getting ready to go into a presentation, a staff presentation for Felix Williams Elementary here in Stuart, Florida. This is the 4th time that they've brought me in. So They're either really slow in realizing that my message has nothing to offer, or they're far ahead of the curve in realizing you need a little more yes and in your organization. I'm going to go with the latter because the former would be really self-deprecating, and I don't really believe that anyway. So thank you, Felix Williams. Tomorrow I'm jumping on an airplane to Flint to do a, like, a 3, 4-hour workshop with the Krim Foundation, which I'm so pumped. The Krim Fitness Foundation and all the great work they're doing in my hometown of Flint, Michigan and excited about that. And also, um, just, uh, overall excited. Had a great— you guys know I love sports. It was a great sports weekend except for the Lions. The Lions ruined it on Sunday. But besides that, it was a great sports weekend which started with Shepard and I driving to Orlando for the U.S. Men's National Soccer Game World Cup qualifier against Panama. We saw Mr. Boy Wonder himself, Christian Pulisic, get a goal and an assist and completely set the tone and dominate that game. We got to see Michigan State Sparty knock off Michigan again in the Big House. Sorry Michigan fans, but Dantonio is 8-2 against Michigan, which was a little shocking to see. Got to see Georgia football, Kirby and the Dawgs, go Dawgs, move up to number 4 in the rankings, which puts them in the college football playoff right now. Obviously got a lot of work to do. So it was a good weekend of sports. So, episode 85. I lied. I said this would be an interview. I've got like 4 or 5 interviews lined up. They just haven't happened yet. So, this is the weekly yap, not the every so weekly yap. So, here we go. And plus, I went for a run and it got me thinking. And today is called What Would You Say? I tend to do my best thinking on my run. I don't listen to anything so that I can be present, so that I can be aware of my thoughts. I can be clear on my thoughts and my best clarity tends to come when I Yeah. And I was running, because I'm great at distracting myself. But I was running and I was thinking. And this idea came to me of what would you say. And really, because at the end of my run, there's usually this euphoric feeling of, really, of love. And I was thinking about my kids. And I was thinking about my neighbors. And I do this thing where I just fully mentally wrap them, engulf them in love. Their protection, their safety, their happiness. And I just surround mentally them with love. And I was doing this for my friends. I was doing this for my neighbors. I was doing it for my family. And my thought immediately went to this situation in Las Vegas. And I got thinking, especially with a situation like this, no true motive has exposed itself yet. I'm sure mental illness is going to pop up on this. There's going to be a self-medication. There's going to be something that popped up. But regardless, and I talked about that in the last episode, again, wasn't trying to be political. I know I talked about Trump a lot. Wasn't trying to be political. But again, for all of us to take a deeper dive here. And I got thinking about what, what would you have said if we could all have gone back in time now? What would you have done? What would you have said if you had spent some time with that Las Vegas shooter the day of the, of that event? What would you have said to him? How would you have reinforced his worth, his value? How would you have surrounded him in love in a way That doesn't make this sort of desperation exist, of hopelessness, of helplessness exist. And I think, you know, what would you say to someone who has committed suicide, someone who's contemplating that? What would you say? And I thought of myself just wrapping loved ones in love. And just wanting them to feel valued, to feel seen, to feel heard, to feel truly loved for who they are, not what they are, for who they are, not why they are, for who they are, for their existence. And for them, for each of us to feel that sense of love, not only for ourselves, actually first of all for ourselves. If we felt that for ourselves, we would never intentionally do anything And if we felt that for others, we would truly never do anything harming that would harm another because we truly felt and valued our brother or the other like a brother. A little shout out to Euphrates. And so we wouldn't do that kind of thing if we were seeing ourselves and seeing others and just surrounding them in love. And I don't mean that in a weak way. I mean it in a— to value somebody To value their differences, to value their existence and what they stand for and who they are and their mistakes and their flaws, but to still love them anyway. Like you do with a child. You love them through all of their flaws and you still love them unconditionally. So again, I know last week I got into what is it about our culture that feels so disconnected, where people feel so isolated even though we're so technologically connected. And I just feel like on a day-to-day basis, are we doing enough to let to let people know how valued we think that they are? And I think every day is that opportunity. You know, I shared I share this in my presentations all the time about Alfred Nobel. You know, we all know the Nobel Prizes is actually the week that the Nobel Prizes are coming out, and we all know Nobel. because of the Nobel Prizes and the good. But not a lot of people realize that Alfred Nobel was an Austrian physicist who invented the technology for dynamite. He got really, really wealthy off of his invention of dynamite. But midway through his life, his brother died, and, uh, they screwed it up and thought that Alfred had died. And so they wrote his obituary instead of his brother's. And so Alfred got to read his obituary, and it said Alfred Nobel inventor of dynamite was something like, you know, they coined like, will be known as the Merchant of Death. So Alfred saw this. This was his legacy. This is the legacy he was leaving behind. And he decided, that is not the legacy I'm leaving behind. He made some major changes in his life, including obviously by the time he created the prizes and when he passed away, his foundation was set up to make sure that those Nobel Prizes existed forever. That's the story as I understand it. Somebody can fact-check me if you want. But that's the way they understand it. That's the way that I share it. Because each of us on a day-to-day basis is creating our legacy by the choices that we make moment by moment, right here, right now. And I like to say it's by the interactions that we have moment by moment. Think about how you treated that coworker today that you passed, or how you sent your kids off this morning, or how you treated that person on the road, or the cashier when you went in to buy some gum. These are the interactions that I mean. What would you have said to someone? How can each of us get our heads up off of ourselves? And I say this completely self-aware of myself. Off of ourselves or off of our phones. How about that? How can we get our heads up off of ourselves or off of our phones and see the namaste, see the divine in the person across from us, and give them our full attention so that they feel seen, they feel heard? Every interaction has that capability. I think of banana slugs, right? When you go for a run or just slugs in general, you see the slime trails before you see the slugs. You know where they have been based on the slime trails. And we all do that. We all leave a slime trail where people know where we've been based on the decisions that we've made. And we can do that day to day, moment to moment. What is the trail? What is the legacy That we are leaving behind, but we have to be willing to get out of ourselves. I love this story, whether it's true or not. I think it's maybe an urban legend. I'm sure it's based on some real story, but there was a gentleman, I want to say he was at Duke University, gave his valedictorian speech. And during his speech he said, he's not going to know this, but my best friend is here and I want to thank him. And just to let you know, when I was in high school, that I was bullied, constantly bullied over and over again. And on this particular day, I decided I was going to take my own life. So I was taking all of my books home from my locker, a big stack of books, and on the way home, I got bullied. Someone knocked me down, knocked off all my books. And as I was sitting there on the sidewalk picking up my books— What happened? Someone crossed the street, came over, helped me pick up my books, was nice to me, helped me walk him home, and we were friends from that day on. And that was his best friend who was sitting also at graduation. And he says, you saved my life that day because I was going to end my life that day. And this— obviously his friend had no idea that that's what had happened. So when I think about Every interaction, we just can't discount the impact that we can have on someone by just being nice. By a compliment. By asking them how they're doing. By asking them anything. By just seeing them instead of just seeing our own problems and our own needs in everyone else. And spewing our own frustrations onto everybody else. And Obviously, I feel the reason we don't do this is because I think so many people feel that they're in survival mode, that they can't get their head up long enough to think about someone else. But the catch-22 is, is that as soon as we get our heads up and start thinking of others, of what we would say in improv, right, to make your partner look brilliant, as soon as we make— we shift our mindset from what can I get to what can I give, how can I make someone else's day today, We start to have all of our needs met in the process. And it is a catch-22. We need to flip it. We need to get out there and love our brother. We need to do our self-work on ourselves, our own spiritual self-work on ourselves to get our own junk out of the way so that we can be present with other people instead of again spewing our junk onto them. And we can't see them when we can only see our junk. And so This isn't major changes, guys. This is something you can do right now as you stop listening to this podcast and turn to the person next to you or the next interaction you have and say, did I make that person's day better, worse, or indifferent? There really is no indifferent. You either made it better or worse based on the interaction that you just had. What would you say if you knew you could have that impact? That's episode eighty-five, everyone. Thanks for listening. If you like this, go ahead and share it. If you find value, go ahead and leave me a review or a rating on iTunes. And thanks for listening to the Yap, everyone. Have a wonderful, wonderful yes and day. Love you, Juju. Run you a fire when you burn out. Give you the future you gave away.