Aloud: Normalizing Taboo Topics

Happy Friday, Cadre friends. It is Shannon from aloud. I was trying to be outside today. I live in St. Paul, Minnesota. I was trying to go live outside. And this is the beginning. Okay. And Friday, November 10, this is the beginning of me talking about how cold it is. Can't do it today, so I'm coming to you live. I'm from my kitchen in St. Paul. So again, I'm Shannon from aloud. Thank you for joining me. And we are here to talk about taboo topics. And so who I am is someone who has been in therapy for seven and a half years, who parents a child with special needs, who has anxiety herself and who has CPTSD.

And so I'm sharing with you my lived experiences and what I've learned by talking about things that are hard to talk about. So today is Friday, and we're going to talk about the idea of talking to ourselves. What if we started talking to ourselves and reframing ourselves as humans before any other of the things we are so that we can help each other be imperfect. I'm going to say that one more time. So what if, by me, Shannon, talking to myself and reminding myself that among all the other things, that I am a caregiver, a parent, a friend, a professional, first and foremost, I'm a human.

So what would happen if we did that? And what would happen in our actions, in our interactions with each other? So I'm going to give you an example. There are a lot of shoulds that we all have when it comes to who we are in the world and the roles that we take on. So a professional should look like x. A parent should do this, a teacher should behave in this way. All of these shoulds can end up taking first place when we show up in interpersonal interactions. Hi, Luke. Nice to see you. So I'm going to give you an example from a conversation I had this week with a friend whose child has special needs and who is navigating the IEP process.

For those of you who don't know what that means, essentially kids with disabilities have a specialized education process and a specialized education plan that you work together with a teacher on. And sometimes that can be a rough process to navigate. So when those two individuals entered into that interaction together, one first shows up as a parent and one shows up as a teacher. Right. And I can speak to my own experience. I just had my son's IEP this week. I show up as a parent. And so what a parent should do in an IEP meeting is advocate for their child.

What a parent should do is be knowledgeable about all the things that your child needs. What a parent should do is walk through this process in a very specific way. Now, the other side of the table is a teacher. And what a teacher should do to show up as their best self is to be knowledgeable about everything. What a teacher should do to show up in the best way is to have that IEP ready and tight and be able to speak to it, right? So when I'm saying all of these social norms, that's what they are.

They are norms we've assigned to how people should show up in the world based on the role, based on if they're a teacher or a parent. So I want to reframe this to say, what if we both just showed up as humans first? And so what I mean by that is, as I go into that IEP meeting, what I could do is say, listen, I'm going to go into this meeting. I am imperfect. I'm going to go into this meeting, I'm frustrated with some things with my child. I'm going to go into this meeting as the person that I am and the human that I am that is imperfect.

So if I show up in that way and I start that interaction with that teacher in a way where I am able to say, listen, I am imperfect, I'm coming to you with the best of intentions. I really wanna create this great plan for my kid, and I'm also not always gonna be perfect. And so I might get emotional at parts, and I might do this, and I might do this. So if I can start by reminding myself that I am imperfect, that I am human above all else, I set a tone for that conversation that's so different. And then what I'm doing is I'm also giving that teacher space to show up as human first.

So I am letting the air out of the balloon, letting the air out of the room. I'm taking away those roles that we each have that come with shoulds, and I'm replacing them with, hey, I'm a human and you're a human. And I would love for us to work together to get to this outcome. So I say all of that again. It's top of mind this week, coming out of a conversation with a friend and just reminding ourselves that no matter the role we take on, all of us are humans first. That's it. And we're messy and we're emotional.

Sometimes we don't want to say that. We don't know. Sometimes we want to show up as strong when we're not feeling strong. There's just a million things, and that's just what being a human is. So on this Friday, I just encourage you, remind you to talk to yourself about how you're imperfect, to talk to yourself and remind yourself that you can just show up as a human, and that's enough. And that if you can do that, the folks around you that you're engaging with will be more likely to do that, too.

That's it. Friends, I hope you have a beautiful, beautiful weekend. Cadre. Friends, we will see you on Monday and Tuesday at our wellness event. If you don't know what it is and you want to learn more, dm me, and I'm happy to tell you, we'd love to see you there. So hope everybody has a beautiful, beautiful weekend and we will see you soon at Cadre and aloud. Thanks, everybody. Have a great weekend.