AMA W/ A Clinical Counselor

All right, we are live here in a different location than usual. Happy holidays, everyone. If you're enjoying the holiday weekend, it's good to see y'all. Let a few minutes here to have people hop on and say hi today is ask me anything. And so if you're on here and you know who I am or haven't had a chance to meet me yet, my name is Eric, clinical mental health counselor here, hoping to get an opportunity for everyone to ask some questions as it relates to my work in the mental health field or anything else that may be relevant to my time on this, this app or in this community together.

So I'll let a few minutes for people to hop on if they get a chance to, and we'll go from there. But if you're on right now and you want to ask a question or have something on your mind, feel free to drop it in the comments. Otherwise, like I said, a few minutes. Let some people hop on here. I don't know about where you guys are from, but I'm from up here in Minnesota. So last few days, it's really starting to feel, feel like winter dropped down to about 30 degrees, so got a little bit of the congestion.

I don't know if you can hear it, runny nose coming. Adjusting to the winter months here. So I'm going to go ahead and dive into before we got any questions. You know, one thing on my mind here today that I wanted to bring up is one of the questions that that often arises during this time of year is, you know, what are you grateful for? What are you thankful for? You know, I think that's a good question for us to really ponder on. And our mind typically goes to the obvious answers. Right. Not that it's any less important, but, you know, the friends, the family, the things that typically are easy or can be easy to be thankful for or maybe not, or maybe you come from a situation where those things are difficult to be thankful for at time.

And I totally relate to that. But, you know, one question came up while I was celebrating thanksgiving with family yesterday. And, you know, they said, what are you thankful for besides the obvious? So you can't. Friends, family, kind of the general things weren't allowed as an answer. And so it made me think, you know, without trying to be, you know, too. I don't know if the word is pretentious. You know, I wanted to see where, where I could take this and find a sense of gratitude or maybe an area of my life that I've been trying to be more grateful for and for me this week, what came to mind and what's been on my mind as of late is finding gratitude, thankfulness for my failures, learning to be grateful for the ways in which the unexpected or the things out of my hands or out of my capacity come up in life, things that I want to be able to succeed in and yet have not quite.

And I think the reason that that strikes me so much here now, in this season of life and moving forward is just, you know, I think a lot of times in my life, I become discouraged when things haven't come quickly, when I didn't get something right away, or maybe I didn't have a natural skill or talent towards something, even though it was maybe something I wanted to do or found interest in or thought was really exciting or cool. And, you know, that can be a very trapping, difficult thing to face sometimes when you feel like, oh, if I don't have a natural inclination towards something, it's just out of my capacity to do.

And just recently really been focusing on allowing more of the failures, more of the things that get in the way of me being able to accomplish what I find interesting, allowing failure to be a part of it and, in fact, expecting it. Expecting that it's going to be a struggle to pursue the things that I want to see in my life. And, you know, on the opposite end, if we allow kind of those struggles or the struggles we imagine will exist in our path to distract us or dissuade us from going in a certain direction, we're also choosing another struggle which we don't often consciously recognize.

But these other struggles are often out of our control and in a direction that isn't really where we want to go. So going down to this idea of choose your struggle, right? And this ties into being thankful for failures, because when I'm choosing to struggle in the direction that's important to me, I can be thankful for the ways in which I don't always get it. I can recognize that my effort in a direction is worth something, even if right now, it hasn't come. Come fully to my life or what it's going to ultimately look like.

And the gratitude piece here is acknowledging that that is unavoidable. Suffering towards struggling towards working towards what's important to me is a much more exciting journey than allowing my struggles and suffering to find me, because they will. And so that's what I'll put out here today is just kind of, we're all gathering for the holidays, or maybe we're not. Maybe we're thinking, you know, I wish I had different circumstances over the holidays. The holidays can be a very tough time for people.

And so, you know, what areas can you be grateful for that are outside of what typically maybe come to mind? Maybe the easy things. And as a challenge for you this week, finding gratitude for the hard things, the things that maybe initially were really painful or difficult, and not that they're any easier now, but seeing how maybe those circumstances opened up the door for things that you wouldn't have expected and where you can find gratitude in between those lines. So it looks like we don't have much of a crowd here for the ask me anything today, and that's totally fine.

I think it's kind of a difficult week to do something like that. I'm sure everyone's busy with, whether it's shopping or getting outside, opt outside is today, so that's cool. I think I'm gonna delay the ask me anything till next week. So if you're watching this after lives and you're like, oh, man, I wish I had an opportunity to ask a question here or throw something out there, catch me again next week. I'm gonna do another round and try to gather a more consistent or larger audience here for this time and hopefully get some more questions.

m. If you have some questions for somebody who works directly in the mental health field, maybe you've been around the mental health field before. Maybe it's something that interests you as a career. Maybe it's something that you're not so sure about. Maybe others have talked to you about their experiences in counseling or therapy or whatnot, and you have some curiosities. And so that's going to be a great place for you to hop on, ask some questions, and get some honest answers from me as somebody who's worked in the mental health field for about three years now, so I hope to see you there next week.

Thank you all for hopping on. If you hopped on hereafter and have a great weekend,