Finding Strength in Your Struggle

There are some people that make their work just another thing they have to do, and there are those that make their work something that they want to do. Welcome to Working on Purpose with your host Elise Cortez. In our program, we provide guidance and inspiration from those people who have found deeper meaning and personal connection to their work life. It's beyond nine to five. It's working on Purpose. Now Here is your host, Elise Cortez. Welcome back to the Working on Purpose Show. Thanks for tuning in again this week. I'm your host, Elise Cortez, joining you live from Dallas, Texas, which is home based for me. If you've been tuning in for a while, you know this program is about helping people create more meaningful and purposeful lives and equipping leaders inside organizations to cultivate meaning and purpose that listits passion, inspired contribution, innovation, and persevering performance. I talk with my guests to draw on their expertise and share my own experience consulting, speaking developing workforces across the globe. Each week. In these conversations, I hope you'll walk away with something you can immediately use in your life or your work. And if I can do anything to help you along your journey. Go to my website at a least Cortez dot com and use to contact me feature to message me. Let's open a conversation to explore what's going on for you and how I might be able to help you. Whether you want to learn more about how to develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused culture in your organization tolstit your team's best. You want to see about joining a catch fire online community to stoke your own passion, inspiration and purpose discovery and gain access to tools and support to help you get on your way and get unstuck. Or you'd like for me to speak for your company or your conference at any rate. I'm glad we're connected, and thanks for listening. Now on to this Sweet's program. With this today is doctor h. Genewright, a transformational, highly experienced and professionally trained clinical and forensic psychologists with over twenty years of experience in behavioral health. He's the author of Find Strengthen Your Struggle, Discover the Miracle and You. We'll be talking about some pervasive ailments we all face in today's sty like trauma, stress, depression, and anxiety. The work he is doing on government, private practice, and academic and behavioral health. In some ways we can all apply what he shares with us today. He joins to today from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Doctor right, welcome to Working on Purpose. Thank you at Lise, Thank you so much, so great to have you. Know, as I said before we got on air, you know our listeners will love listening to that voice of years and then of course learning from you. So if I doze off on that beautiful voice of years, you bring me back. Okay, absolutely good. All right, Well, let's open this conversation, doctor right with something every single one of us listening can absolutely relate to, and that is stress and trauma. None of us gets out of this life without dealing with these things. And I know you have a particular perspective on this topic given the work that you do. So from your vanished point, doctor right, what's the role of stress and trauma in our lives? Well, I think you touched on a stress is inevitable and it's something that you're if you live in this life long enough, we find ourselves going up against stress, and so the one thing to look at is what causes stress, which I know we'll get into more in depth later, but basically, you're looking at three things. People, places, and things are the major stresses we have in our life, and that's why it's inevitable. And so what I like to write about and talk about and help people is how to find strength and their struggle or strength and their stress. And I definitely have a perspective on that before we get into that, though I do find it. There were so many of the phrases that you used in passages that I found so compelling. But you write that trials come with blessings and that renovation is a painful process. So my question to you is do you believe that growth is possible in human beings without pain. I don't think it's possible without challenges and stress. The word pain, depending on who uses it, maybe has different connotations for everybody. What I would say is growing pains. If we use it in that way, then I would say you are correct. It is not possible to grow with the growing pains. If you think about physiologically and how we go from infant to youth and childhood, and you think about the bones and development, there are stressors and growing pains in your knees and your joints that take effect. Because you're growing, and you think about professional growth as you like to talk about with purpose, you have to have challenges and conflict, And to me, conflict is another word for growth. And so yes, you must have these challenges. You must have pressure, you must have situations that put you in places where you have to stretch to reach your full potential. And so if we want to identify those things as pain, then I would say, yes, it's inevitable and it's necessary we're aligned on Then I'll say more about the in just a second, but before we get into my perspective in this, I also want to call out a couple other metaphors that you used in You talked about taking down a condemned building as a release to trials in our lives, and I found that to be quite compelling. So the idea, and I know our listeners if you haven't read the book yet, listeners, this idea. Imagine the wrecking ball that brings down the building and then implosion as the two methods that are often used to bring down a building. Think about how they relate to what we experience in the trouser lives. Don't we feel sometimes like there's a wrecking ball slamming up against us that is never ending. And then of course this idea of implosion very compelling, doctor write yeah. And the reason I chose those metaphors perfectly, perfect example from the personal experience. What I would say is, as I was looking at the old method of tearing down a building, which depending on your age group, you may remember, our wrecking ball would slam into the building periodically. But the key was that the building did not crumble with the first two or three blows. It was a cumulative effect that eventually pour down the building. And so if we use our life as the building and life as the wrecking ball, we do not crumble under the first two or three incidentss of pressure, of laws, of challenges that happened in It takes time, and so the cumulative effect of stress and pressure, unresolved trauma, all those things that life has to offer sometime, if we do not check it, if we do not address it, eventually will crumble us. The other a metaphor that you mentioned was the implosion, and that's the one that is more modern people think about, and that is simply setting dynamount around the foundation of a building that you want to tear down, and it's simply either a match to like the wick, or you push down on the machine and it blows up immediately. And that, for me is when you're walking around tents, when you're walking around with unresolved anger or stress or pressure waiting to explode. All it takes is that next individual, that person, place or thing that stressor that ignites you that allows you to unthinkingly and unintentionally sometimes explode. And what that does is causes you even more stress because now you have your inner workings of that, but now you may have an external result depending on what you do. And so it's not anger that causes us problems. It's the unresolved stress or rage, the uncontrollable response to stress that sometimes gets us in trouble. So that's why I use those two metaphors. They're brilliant. They're just brilliant. And listeners just think about that for a second, right. Don't you all feel that at some point the wrecking ball will not let up on you, or that you know this volcano inside is about to implode you? I think about that, doctor, right, because you might laugh at this, But first I'll say that I do believe why. This is why I ask you the question. I do believe that we do need those catalyzing elements to help us respond to and become our best version of ourselves. I think we need that catalyzing agent. And you'll laugh at this part is that for years in my life, I used to walk around saying that I probably wasn't going to amount to too much in life because I really hadn't gone through very much, and so I was like, you know, was just willing to accept that, Oh, I'm going to live just a you know, an average, under the radar life because I haven't had to deal with a lot. Now that's changed over time. But I'm sure you're probably you're probably laughing at me. Yes, not laughing at you. I'm laughing with you because because I think other people have said that, not about themselves necessarily, but about other people. I've talked to folks who are on the outside looking into somebody else's life, saying, well, they haven't had any stress, so they haven't been under any pressure, they haven't had any losses, they haven't suffered any challenges, and so boy, it's going to be really terrible for them when something FONDI confronts them, and I understand what people are saying and what they mean. I understand what certainly what you meant about yourself. What I would say is that life has a tendency to put forth in us what it is that we need to make it to the next level. So if you use the example of being born with a quote unquote silver spoon in your mouth, Oh you have everything, you have money, you have this, you have that, that does not absolve you from stress and pressure. If you have a situation where everything is going well and you have two parents that are great and of a great childhood and all that, it doesn't mean that something is not coming around the corner. And so it's not to live life in paranoil you're waiting for the next shooter drop. Is to simply be prepared to understand that as we grow and as we navigate our way through life, there will be challenges. And it's not for other people to look at our life and determine whether we've had enough challenges or too few challenges. It is for us to look at our own life and say, how can I be better than I was yesterday? Beautiful and compelling? I love that and I'm aligned, absolutely, except you just say it much better. All right, Well, let's talk about the next thing. We talked about stress and trauma. Now I want to talk about two other familiar situations that many of us encounter. Anxiety and depression major problems in the United States. In fact, you say in your book that they're the most common mental health diagnoses, followed by substance use disorder. And I was shocked, to be honest with you, that you report that an astounding fifteen million Americans suffer major depression. And that's five day percent of the built population. You say, so, I just was really confronted by that. Yes, an unfortunately, at least that has increased since my book was published in twenty sixteen. And so now we're looking at words of eighteen percent anxiety of the United States prevalence anxiety and right around fifteen percent for depression and anxiety. Depression tend to flip flop when it comes to statistics, which is why I kind of pair them, and most people to look at treatment tend to use things like cognitive behavioral therapy for both anxiety and depression because they tend to go together with folks. And then substance use disorder actually kind of leap frog over bipolar disorder, which used to be number three. And so when you think of that, what are the challenges that are going on in the United States? The richest country in the world, the most successful country in the world, the one with the most resources. So what is going on in our society that we have the highest prevalence of anxiety, the highest prevalence of depression, the high prevalence of substance use disorder, and we have a high prevalence of violence in our communities. So that's the question we have to ask ourselves. When you think about how blessed we are in this country, what does it say about the challenges that are out there? That is incredibly compelling? And I know we don't have time to really talk about that, but do you have a perspective as to why that's so for us as a country? Well, I'm glad you as I do have a perspective. And my perspective is not one weighted end research or anything. It's based on what I hear from people who come to me either at the university for treatment or during some of our research activities in the past, and certainly what I did when I researched the book, and that is that if you look at the United States and Northern Europe and Canada, and probably I would say Australia, any Western culture, we have something. We are in the individualistic culture, if you will. And if you compare that to Africa or Asia, or South America, parts of southern Europe, they come from more of a collectiveness environment or culture, which means that the collectivist culture environment is geared more towards the group or the community. It's not the individual that is most important, whereas in individualistic cultures like the United States, it is the individual that is most important, is one that is put forth. And so it's like it's often said in sports and the United States, second place is just the first loser. You know, we're all about women, we're all about competition, we're all about mean first. And you know, from the time you get home from from the from the hospital, your your parents put you in your own room if you have that kind of resource, and as soon as you turn eighteen, you're supposed to go out and be an adult and live and then they turn your room into an aquarium something like that. You know, it's always about getting further and moving on, as opposed to in collectivist cultures taking in elderly parents, making sure you have several generations that look after one another. And so the pressures the stresses are different from the individualistic culture versus the stress of pressures from a collectives culture. Beautifully render, doctor right, I do know about these different kinds of cultures. I completely agree with you that that is a very strong contribution to what's going on. So thank you for that. So the next thing I want to talk about before we go on to our break here is really what I consider to be a message of hope in your book, And a part of the big reason I wanted to have you on my show, doctor right, is that you know this show is about inspiration and education, and so if I can't give my listeners hope an inspiration, what am I doing. So one of the things that you say in the book is you say you hope that the readers in the readers in reading your book will become enlightened as to how the trials and tribulations tribulations of everyday life can impact our mental and spiritual health, and that we should all embrace how the miracle in us can become a powerful energy to off say, the debilitating effects of spiritual depression. So what I love about that, that's catalyzing, that's that's that's a place for all of us to stand in and I'm for that. So can you see a bit more about what it is you hope that readers get by reading your book? Yes. Absolutely. What I'm basically saying is that to build strength. And of course the title of the book is Find Strength and Your Struggle, And so I make a comparison that any time you want to build strength, there is struggle, there is pressure, there is a challenge. And so if you want to be a bodybuilder of weights and build muscle, you have to stress the muscle. You have to break it down, and then you have to feed your body protein to build it up, and then you have to do this same in the next day. If you want to be a marathon runner, you have to put in the miles, and it's excruciating at times. You get shin, splints and all kind of things happen, but eventually you make it and you do your twenty six miles. If you want to be a swimmer, you have to get in the water and you have to. You may not be swimming like a fish at first, that you keep at it. Before you know it, you know you're right behind. You know Mark Spitz and some of those that I have an old reference, I probably should have came up with the normal. But you get the point that anything worth achieving, anything worth having, anything worth doing learning how to play an instrument. Even if you're born with artistic talent, you still have to practice on canvas. All of those things render the strengthen us. And so finding your talent often comes because you have been challenged. You have been faced with some obstacles. You have barriers that you must negotiate and navigate around, and so finding strength in your struggle. The miracle in you is when you recognize that you have the ability, when you recognize your talent. One of my favorite sayings at least is from Mark Twain. He said, they're the two most important days of your life, the day you were born and the day you find out why. To me, the finding out why is the major part of living on this earth. And so the stressors, the struggles, the things that build up our spiritual muscle, to build up our physical muscle, our psychological, emotional muscle come because we've been challenged that we've had to not just survive, but to fry. You must know your ability and then you put them into practice, and then you start serving and helping others. And that's that how that miracle turns from just being about you to something else. And so your trials and tribulations are not just about you, and your success with then your being able to break through should not be just about you. Those things are to be shared so that we can understand and share a purpose with each other, and then together we can recognize the strength and each other. And that's the value in the book beautifully summarized. And listeners, those of you that have come to listen to the show today because you are struggling with something, you've got something really heavy on your heart, I really hope that you take inspiration, possibility, and opportunity out of what doctor Wright just said. It was beautiful and without Let's grab our first break. I'm your host, Alice Cortez. We were in the air with doctor H. Gen Wright, a transformational, highly experienced and professionally trained clinical and forensic psychologists with over twenty years of experience and behavioral health. He's the author of Find Strengthen Your Struggle, Discover the Miracle in You Each DGEs today from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. We've been talking a bit about some of the major problems we're all dealing with in today's world, especially those of us here in the United States and other industrialized countries. After the break, we're going to talk about the work he does across very different populations. Stay with us, we'll be right back. Alise Cortez is a speaker and engagement and development catalyst. She designs and delivers professional development, leadership and engagement workshops and can bring her expertise to your organization. She will help ignite meaningful development within your workforce that will increase employee engagement, performance and retention. To learn more or to invite Elise to speak to your organization, please visit her at www dot Elise Cortez dot com. She would welcome the opportunity to help get your employees working on purpose. This is working on Purpose with Elise Cortez. To reach our program today, send an email to Elise Alis at Elise Cortez dot com. Now back to working on Purpose. Thanks for staying with us, and welcome back to working on purpose if you're just joining us my guests, Doctor h Genewright. He has a highly experienced and professionally trained clinical and forensic psycholoist with over twenty years of experience and behavioral health and proven success in passionately leading people and managing projects and initiatives in government, in private practice, in academia as an adjunct professor and clinical faculty for Tipple University, and in rehabilitation in correction as a clinical consultant, facilitator, and trainer. Doctor Wright teaches the subtleties of human interaction to successfully embrace and celebrate the variety of personalities in the workforce and community. I'm your host, Elise Cortez, doctor Wright. Really, it's such amazing work that you get to bring who you are as a very very well trained profession to do work across a very very different population. So that's very compelling. Most of us usually pick a group of people to focus on, but you know, you have a whole variety, a gamut of people here. And when we first spoke on the phone about you coming on the air, you told me something quite interesting. You told me that you describe yourself as a servant leader and that you find great joy and purpose, and especially in serving the most oppressed people with the least resources, who need the most help. You call them the invisible people. So first I want to know how did you become interested in this population and why are you called to help them the most? Well, it starts with my parents. By my father who is now deceased, but served as a minister and a Protestant of religion, and my mother worked at a at a Christian college at the time on all of the kids, and so they had particular values that really were really focused on the community. And as I got older and traveled around with them, I noticed that my father in particular was serving many types of difference in diaments regardless of his religious affiliation. I found that he was in communities that did not match his religious affiliation. I thought, well, that's that's cool, that's interesting. And then as I got older, in steid of asking him questions, I discovered that he saw himself as a man amongst the people, or a person who had a particular service to render, and it was to encourage, to provide hope. And so I really patterned a lot of my youth after my father. And then as I got older, I saw opportunities to put into practice what he and my mother had taught me, and so it was a natural affiliation, if you will, simply by growing up watching the adults in my life, the heroes in my life, if you will, serve others. And then when I went to college and had to choose a profession, I found myself really looking at service and ways to help. At first, I wanted to be an orthopedic surgeon because I was an athlete, and you know, I wanted to help athletes. And then I went through a couple of surgeries where I was observing and saw that I wasn't really pretty. I didn't like blood, so I had just see something else, you know. I almost passed out a couple of times, and I did try it. I was very good with cadavers, but I was not good watching human beings under the knights. And so I eventually found my way into graduate school in psychology, and it just it just like I took to it like it was like it was nothing. And I saw that there were people who were ostracized and that were not being treated well. And I saw that when you did not have certain resources or go to a certain school or have certain contacts or network abilities that you were marginalized, And so that kind of gave me an opportunity to kind of ask, you know, well, what is it that I can provide that not makes people feel better about themselves, but makes people feel better about serving others? Because I discovered early on that if you can't change your immediate situation, you feel differently about it when you're able to help others. And so I wanted to teach other people how to rise above their own situations by helping people. And that's what got me into the field as a servant leader. And how beautiful that you're the example of your parents who you wanted to emulate. It doesn't always go that way, as you know, doctor, right, So I appreciate that you had the ability to appreciate who they were and the example they were giving to you. And the other thing I want to call it to what you just said there is going back to how you distinguish the individualist versus collectivist cultures. When we do serve other people, we do transcend from ourselves, and that it is a way to be able to access well being and you know a step away from anxiety and depression, and I love that you are literally a living, walking, breathing example of that, you know. And it's been a blessing elite because the more I give and the more I serve, the more I received. And I know that sounds kind of cliche and maybe kind of corny to some people, but when you put it into practice, it has paid off a hundred fold because you're not looking for a payoffs. You're looking for an opportunity to change the life that's in front of you. And if you focus on that, one life at a time in front of you, the blessings you receive and the purpose that you're able to carve out for yourself becomes clearer and clearer and clearer with each smile on that young face, with each thank you that may come down the road, which each opportunity that the individual that you have put forth some effort to interact with finds a way to then pay that forward, you know, And to me, that is the ultimate intrinsic value of doing something, because inside it feels good and that's the payoffs, and then the other things come. Blessings come when you serve others well, doctor, right. A big reason that I host a show and do. The work that I do is that I stand to make a difference in one million lives before I drop into the ground, and I want them to be able to get present to their passion, their inspiration and their purpose and live it because I know that the world is a much better place when they do, and there's a ripple effect that happens when they live that way. So that's why I'm doing what I'm doing. That's a beautiful thing, and I applaud you for that because it's selfless. And to me, when we focus more on how we can change the conditions of humanity, then our situations, our individual situations failed into comparison with some of the things that we are confronted with and some of the challenges that we are then called to serve. And so when you seek it, you will find an opport to change those lives. And I have no doubt in my mind you're going to get you one million and have plenty of years after that to enjoy it as well. Well. Thank you, Thank you so much. It's it's a great, great privilege to get to live this kind of a purpose. And I know you know, and along those lines, I wanted to talk with you about some of the different populations that you serve. It's really quite incredible. I do not know how you sleep or whin you sleep, but one of the populations you serve is in government, and so it would be interesting if you could share just some of the work that you find most fulfilling as a director of behavior of Health and Justice related Services at the City of Philadelphia. Can't even imagine how big that job must be. It's huge, and I get pleasure from it because I get to impact systems and so in this particular case, I am not impacting directly individuals. And so when I first got into psychology and went to graduate school, you know, I want to help people with problems, and you had the old stereotype of you know, stigma floys sitting in a leather chair talking to somebody on the couch and you're helping one person at a time. And you know, I was young, I was naive, and I did that for many, many years. But what I found by coming to the City of Philadelphia, the city of brotherly Love and sisterly affection, as they like to call it, is that you can help more people by impacting systems and communities and so that's what this job gives me the opportunity to do. And so what my you know, to summarize, my main responsibility is I will perceive the resources for treatment and supports for anybody returning back to Philadelphia from either jail, prison, or psychiatric hospitalization. Now that's huge. You know, we're the fifth largest city in the nation, and so you can imagine that we have a large population that fits into the category of having behavior health challenges. Add into that we are one of the higher poverty have one of the higher poverty rates for the top ten cities, and so you're dealing with people that qualify for Medicaid, which is services that would be for behavior health challenges as opposed to Medicare, which is for physical medicine. And so it gives me the opportunity to really look at what people that are falling into those categories the target populations need and so we take a population health approach, and what that really means is that we do not try to impact one individual at a time. We try to impact communities, which then impacts individuals. And so we are not a direct care organization. We are a managed care organization that also is affiliated with the government, and so we contract services out to providers who actually provide the direct care. And so my job is to oversee the programs and to make sure we have creative ways to deliver services efficiently and effectively to that target population, those with mental health challenges and substance use disorder. And so that's what that job for the government actually affords me to do. So I hear scale in that, which is fantastic. That's the reason I created my online community doctor, right was I knew that I couldn't make a difference in a million lives if I was only doing it program my program or on occasion one to one coaching. So I really appreciate that. And then along those lines, I'd love for you to share just a little bit about the work you're doing on criminal and civil justice issues, especially as it relates to anything you're doing in the prisons. Yeah, this is I'm going to tell you, at least, this is the work of my heart. This is what I would do for free and often do. But this is where I get an opportunity to go inside the prisons. And I usually go inside the prisons that hold the most Philadelphians. So the too closest prisons to Philadelphia is where I go. Obviously, people are spread out all over the state, but those two prisons that I go to are the ones that hold the most Philadelphians. And what I do is I do programs. One is called Fathers and Children Together, which we contract with a provider that has bands and we take children of incarcerated parents up to the prison to visit their fathers and sometimes grandfathers, and we have a program that vets these individuals behind the walls to make sure that there are no legal challenges, that there are no issues with fathers being in contact with their children. We obviously let the primary caregiver to make sure that he or she or the guardian is okay with that. We do all that stuff before we get started. We start with about fifty gentlemen that sign up for the program. We whittle it down to about fifteen, and then we have about eight weeks of programming where we do psycho educational groups behind the walls. We make sure that the children have ice breakers. We at least mural arts, which is very huge in Philadelphia. We are We're a city of murals, and so we have partnerships with the mural arts to come in to the prisons with us, and we teach their fathers how to love themselves first and then how to interact with their children. We teach the children how to how to love themselves and how to interact with their father, and then we take us separate. We have a separate group where we take the mothers or primary caregivers. We don't go with them and they don't go with us into the prison. We take them to our restaurant close by the prison so that the focus for the father and the child is on each other. And then we have parallel psycho educational groups for the mother to support the mother or primary caregiver, and then we have graduation at the end of those eight weeks for all the parents to be together in the room. The state of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania supports us and doing this, they provide space. And the key thing about this elast is that it is the prisoners, the inmates, if you will be incarcerated individuals who partner with us on this program that actually pay for the dinner that we take the mothers too. Every week we take the mothers to dinner, but it's paid for by those gentlemen earning eighteen cents an hour doing whatever it is they do behind the walls, and that's who pays for the dinner. They have their own fundraisers to make sure that the mother's dinner is paid for by them. And the purpose of this is they say, we played a part. We played a role in destroying much of our community. We also want to play a role and restoring our coumentity. And so that program Fathers and Children Together has been going on about twelve years and then as an excellent one, and it is one that we kind of highlight in the Commonwealth. And so I can tell you about other programs that be interested. But that's sort of the beacon of one of the programs that I like to do. There's gorgeous work and I can see how that goes back to how we restore ourselves in service of others. That's amazing. I wish we had more time to hear more, but let's grab our next break. I'm at last Cortez, your host, Even in the Earth. Doctor H. Gen Wright a transformational, highly experienced and professionally trained clinical and forensic psychologist with over twenty years of experience and behavioral Health. Here's the author of Fine Strengthen Your Struggle, Discovering the Miracle in You. He joges to day from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. After the break, we're going to talk more about how we can apply just what it is doctor Wright does and what he knows. Stay with us, We'll be right back. Ease Cortez as a speaker and engagement and development catalyst. She designs and delivers professional development, leadership and engagement workshops and can bring her expertise to your organization. She will help ignite meaningful development within your workforce that will increase employee engagement, performance and retention. To learn more or to invite Elise to speak to your organization, please visit her at www dot Elise Cortez dot com. She would welcome the opportunity to help get your employees working on purpose. This is working on Purpose with Elise Cortez. To reach our program today, send an email to Elise ali Se at Elise Cortez dot com. Now back to working on Purpose. Thanks for staying with us, and welcome back to working early Purpose. If you just tune in on my guest is doctor h. Genewright, a transformational, highly experienced and professionally trained clinical and forensic psychologist with over twenty years of experience and behavior of health. As a clinical consultant, facilitator, and trainer, Doctor Wright teaches subtleties of human interactions to successfully embrace and celebrate the variety of personalities in the workforce and community. I'm your host, Alice Cortez, So, doctor, right before we went on break, we were talking about some of your experience. We have time if we will. We can't talk about all your experience, but just briefly, will you talk about your work in academia at Temple University supervising graduate students in clinical psychology and what that really means to you getting to steward the next generation. Yes, Alice, thank you for asking that question. I really love the work. I've been at Temple for nine years and I'm on the clinical faculty there and I'm also an adjunct professor, so i peace some undergrad classes as well, and for the graduate students, it gives me an opportunity to teach multicultural classes from a clinical standpoint how to best serve diverse populations, and that's important. We do not have a lot of diversity, and the doctoral program attempt be transparent with you there. But we have willing and eager students who recognize that to be effective in the world, they're going to have to be able to and to serve all people, but also be familiar with some of the unique cultures and organizations that they may be dealing with as well as individuals. And so that is something that I, again I love to do. I supervise probably for students per semesters. You know, doctoral programs tend to be small, and so I get an opportunity to give really face to face individual or attention both in a group format. I meet with them at a group a week once a week, and then I also meet with them individually so that they get their individual hour by themselves. And so it is a work of love. It's something that I really enjoy doing. Working with young people, whether undergraduate or graduate. Population keeps me young and keeps me motivated and energized. And again it speaks to the purpose that I believe. I'm here. It's so beautiful, doctor right. And again I wanted to ask you those questions because I wanted your presence for our listeners. Just what it feels like, what it looks like, what it sounds like when you do get to live your purpose and you really get to make the difference in the world that's worthy of your one precious life. And I knew that you would bring that to life just as you did, So thank you for that gorgeous So I want to go on now if we can't doctor write, just because it's so important to me that our listeners walk away with something they could just put to use and chew on and just make it part of their lives. So I want to talk about being able to apply some of the concepts that you know from your work. And one of the things that I found so interesting that I know our listeners can really relate to, is you write in your book that we can all fall prey to becoming so discouraged by our struggles that we just lay down and believe there is no hope. So what can you share with our listeners to give them more insight and hope on this topic. Yeah, that's an excellent question, and it's one that I've pondered myself over the years, which really was a motivation for me to write the book, because I certainly experienced many of the things that I write about and what I would say is sometimes when you're in the midst of your struggle, you have blinders on if you will, and so if the listeners, and you can put your hands up by your eyes like you would if you had blinders on your eyes. And that's how it feels when we are in the midst of a struggle and all we can see is the problem straight in front of us. And so I tell people, you are may be difficult to pull your hands down so you can get peripheral visions, so you can see everything around it, that there are other possibilities, there are other choices, there are other things going on, And so what I teach my students, if you can't pull your hands down from around your eyes, if you simply back up, you get more vision if you back up. And so metaphorically speaking, if we can back up away from the problem, that we're not so close to it that we're not living and breathing it every day, looking at the problem, going to sleep with the problem, waking up with the problem, worrying and perseverating over the problem. We end up finding ourselves so close that we can't see the options. We can't see the hope, we can't see the strength. And so by simply backing up, if you will, your vision broadens and you're able to see that Wait a minute, I've been through some difficulties before and I survived to the day. Okay, what did I do before? Okay? I have the strength to get through this now. And so when we're in the middle of it, we often forget about the successes that we've had in the past. And I'm not onting to grow on the past, but I think the past has some very important information. One we can learn from mistakes, and two we can remind ourselves of success. And to me, that is what you can do in the moment when you feel like you're just getting beat up by life. You can remember the fact that you didn't make it to the day without having some triumphs, without having some victories, and you certainly didn't get to the day by giving up, and so reminding yourself of that and speaking faith and strength into your life and get you through those moments when you're focused too much on the problem instead of focusing on focusing on the fact that you've been here before and you survive and now you can thrive. That is very actionable. Thank you that is just what I wanted for our listeners. Thank you for that. And then next along those lines, you talk about how doubt crushes faith, and I find this also true. And we are pursuing our purpose and trying to live it fully. So can you share your perspective on this? What can we do to stay on track when we feel that doubt? Yes, once again, it's kind of related to what I just stated in terms of the focus. Doubt really comes from us replaying over and over and over now in our mind our failures. And so by replaying the failures over in our mind, we start to convince ourselves that we can't do it whatever it is we Okay, well, you know I haven't any success. So everything I'm sorry I recently has failed and so I don't have confidence. I've lost confidence in my ability to do what I want to do. And so that's the first thing that doubt does. And so when doubt gets you thinking that you longer have abilities or that you never had abilities, then it's hard to have faith because faith cannot coexist with fear and doubt. That's why you have to remove fear and doubt to exercise faith. Now, sometimes you have to exercise faith while you're still afraid, you know, and so you have to move toward the goal. And so you don't think that you're qualified for the job, but you will never know if you don't put forth the application. And so that's the faith. I'm going to put the application in even though I don't think I'm going to get it. Okay, put the application in. Okay, I'm not sure I'm going to get into the program that I want at the university. Okay, that's your fear, that's your doubt. Fill out the application. You have to do the very basic, minimal thing that exercises just a smidgeon of faith to start being away at the doubt. And so when we are able to do that, then we have now a coexistence that's not proper. You cannot doubt and have faith at the same time. And so practicing those small little steps of faith eventually chips away at the doubt, and eventually doubt will have to leave because doubt cannot coexist with faith. I find that so encouraging listeners. I hope you do too. That's why I ask him that question, because we all need this stuff. And the next doctor Wright, oh my gosh, listeners. For some of you, this might be a real wake up call. So I'm going to read this passage that you put in your book here, and then I want you to talk about it, if you will. I found this so profound, doctor, right you say quote, Those who find themselves at the lowest point in their lives are usually shocked and haltingly surprised that it came to this. You do not arrive at a point of helplessness purely by accident, and not usually overnight. More likely a succession of circumstances accumulated over time, red flags when unnoticed and sirens of warning when unheated, or we're not taken seriously. End quote. So I want to talk with our listeners about how you suggest we get more present and more attentive to these signs so we can more quickly respond to the deteriorating situation and get back on track more quickly. That would be incredibly useful instead of years and years of decline. Yes, and I think again, these topics are related, and so what usually has most people finding themselves at a place that they would not have predicted is that they first lose sight of who they are and so slowly Over time, people start compromising their values. You compromise your wants, your preferences. Sometimes that happens in our relationship. Sometimes it happens because you're trying to please others. Sometimes it happens because maybe you had a failure here or something happened and dalcreep then and now you can't shake it because now you don't believe you have abilities. Than it just goes on and on and on, But it really starts with ignoring that still small voice that gut in you, that says I can do better, can be better. This doesn't feel right for me. I may not know what's best, but I know this isn't what's best. This doesn't feel right, and so we ignore, and we ignore, and we start to push down, if you will, we start to push down our feelings inside and ignoring that voice in us that says, you don't like this, This is not how you want to live, This is not want you, This is not what you want in your life, and we ignore it and we know it, and we make excuses either for the people that we are allowing to harm us, or allowing to take away our joy, or allowing to minimize our desires or we're telling ourselves about our own value, and we're depleting our own energy by not adhering to the voice that we hear inside saying you can do better, you want more, you can have more. And that's when we really start to just throw our hands up and say, well, you know what, I haven't demonstrated anything so far. I've been in this relationship too long, I've been at this job so long. At doesn't matter. I have to pay my bill, and we go excused after excused after excuse, which may be a legitimate thing. Just because it's an excuse doesn't mean it's not legitimate. But when I use the word excuse, I'm simply saying we are telling ourselves reasons to stay in the misery. We are giving ourselves reasons to not try a different route. And so to me, that's what I mean when I say we wake up one day surprise that it came to all this because nobody saw it coming, because we ignored the warning signs which come from us, not outside of ourselves. The warning signs come from the internal connection with yourself, Knowing who you are, knowing what your preferences are, knowing what you like, knowing what you love about yourself and about your life. And so the key is if you do not have that self love, if you do not have that self presence, that introspective ability to look in the mirror and say I like what I see or I see where I can improve, that's when you wake up. And I use the word wake up as if it happened overnight, But that's why there that it doesn't. It is over time. Just like the humortive effect of the wrecking ball, it is the cumutive effect of ignoring your inner voice that gets you to the place of losing your purpose, losing your focus, and losing your ability to say I can get out of this. And that gives us so much access to right, doctor, right. Thank you so much for that. Now, coming towards the end of the show here, I want to take us back to again a key message in your book, which we talked about at the beginning of the show, but I want to bring it back home for our listeners. But many of us on this show, including myself, have been fired from a job and or gotten divorced that too at some point in our lives, and it's exceedingly hard to cope and respond at times with stuff like this, and you talk with us in your book about how we can find joy in our cross to bear, and all confronting it makes us stronger. Yes, it's a challenge. And as I wrote that, and as I read it now, I say to myself, Wow, I remember why I wrote that, and I remember when I wrote that, and it's still hard, even for me at least. It's hard because when life beats to south and when things go awry or we feel like we've got an unfair, you know, deal here, it's easy to point outside of ourselves and say, Wow, it's it's luck, it's powerful others, it's fate. And I don't believe any of that. I believe that we truly do have the internal power to change our lives. And that's what finding purpose does. When you realize why you're on this earth, then it doesn't matter if your salary is in the top five percent or in the lower five percent, because you know you're doing what you're put on this earth to do. And so when we have those challenges that you mentioned, and I use those as saying, we're all in recovery from something most people think with recovery as mental illness or substance use disorder. No, you mentioned the things that most people are in recovery from divorce, empty mass, kids go off to college. What do I do now? It's all relationship really building if you look at it. Loss. If we could sum up in one word, it would be lost. We experience laws as human beings. We experience loss, whether it's other people, jobs, And that's why I say stress as people, places and things. And so once we understand that avoiding the stress or trying to avoid dealing with the loss, all that does is perpetuated. It's like telling somebody, do not look at that pink spot on the wall. But what do you do? You can now you can no longer stop looking at the spot on the wall. Right. And so by telling ourselves do not worry about this, or I didn't need her anyway, or you know, he wasn't good for me anyway, I'm going to No, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about embracing the fact that, hey, I feel lousy about what just happened. I am not feeling good about this. Last, being honest and transparent with yourself gives you the ability to see yourself as you are, so that you can now make the changes that need to happen to get you back to your purpose. No, you're not dwelling in it. You're not wallowing in self pity. What you're doing, though, is saying, I'm acknowledging that I'm hurt. I'm acknowledging that this doesn't feel good. I'm acknowledging that sometimes I feel weak. Sometimes I feel like I don't have the ability or the strength. All of those are natural as human qualities. But at least we can't stay there. It's okay to be honest enough to say that's where I feel or that's where I am today, but I can't stay there. And that's how you can find the strength and your sofferings. That's how you can find the joy in your cross by recognizing all the things that we've said during this hour, and that is I do have the ability. I have to remind myself and it's not that far down, it's right there. I have to remember the victories and the triumphs that I've had before in difficult situations. I have to remind myself that I've been in good relationships as well. I have to remind myself that I was in jobs or I was considered excellent as well, and so all of the things that I may be building up as negative against myself, I often have parallel examples of successes of triumphs of strength that I also call upon, and so it becomes selective memory. Okay, got it, doctor right. Thank you. I've got to stop you really quickly because we've got to go. We got to close. I want to make sure the how to find you. So that is a beautiful way to finish. Thank you so much for that, and thank you for joining us, doctor Wright, and sharing your heart, your soul, and your promos with us beautiful listeners. If you want to learn more about doctor Wright, his book or the work he is doing, visit him at his website. It's doctor h Gen doctor doctor Hgen dot com. Let me spell it for you d R H J E A n dot com or dropping him an email to the right Method twenty twenty at gmail dot com. So that's the w R I g HT Method twenty twenty at gmail dot com. Last week. If you missed the show live, you can always catch if we recorded podcast. We are on the air with Karl Munger of the Gallant Few, which is an organization that helps veterans transition from military to civilian life with hope and purpose. We talked about one veterans experience trying to make this transition alone and how daunting it is. Some of the work Carlsization is doing to make that transition smooth, connecting, and productive. Next week will be on the air with doctor James Pogue talking about unconscious bias. You'll be surprised to learn just how pernicious it is likely even in your own life. See you there. Remember that work is at least one third of our life, So let's work on purpose. We hope you've enjoyed this week's program. Be sure to tune in to Working on Purpose, featuring your host, Alice Cortez, each week on the Voice America Empowerment Channel. This week, find your life's purpose at work.