Getting By On The Mostly Good Days

Hello, friends, and happy Thursday. I think it's Thursday. I'm gonna play with my hair for a while while we wait for people to catch up to us and possibly hydrate. And be very proud of the fact that I finally got around to ordering stickers with my logo on it in case you're joining us in the replay, everybody, I am miss Shannon Paul, and I am a variety of things, as most of you probably are as well. I'm a comedian, corporate speaker, radio and tv host based here in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Hello to Tab Gilbert.

Happy Thursday. I hope that you are well, wherever you are chiming in from, you are joining me on our caregiver Thursdays that we have here in the Cadre app, and I hope that you've enjoyed all of the content that all of my counterparts have shared with you thus far. If you like me, it has been a robust day. A very robust day. And it's interesting, while we wait to see some more people join us as well. Hello, Amanda Williams. Thank you for joining us. I was just kind of getting everybody up to speed.

I will be honest with you in full disclosure, what I have meant to talk about today is I was going to go over giving yourself a high five for the medium things part two, because last week. Hello to you as well, Lou. Last week the conversation was a bit truncated because over here at our household, we were on spring break and my kiddo decided that I needed to pay attention to him. Yes. Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, Amanda. So even though I kind of started the conversation with sharing a story that for us was a pretty big win, but for a lot of people, would probably seem like a very minor thing.

One of the things I've shared also is that I am very proud to be the parent of an adorable 16 year old boy who I call Cyclone kid who also happens to be high supports on the autism spectrum. Shout out to all of our parents out there and all, all of our wonderful human beings who are also in the autistic landscape, especially this month, because we are in the middle of autism acceptance awareness month. And so I know there's a lot of information that is being shared with all of us. So last week, in the midst of our conversation, Cadre family, my family, family, my kiddo decided that he needed full, undivided attention.

So I hopped off our livestream a little more abruptly than I normally would. Hello. My friend Tiffany is in the chat. What's up, Tiffany? I don't think you even heard this story. So instead of going through high fiving ourselves for medium wins, part two. I changed it to the topic that you saw today for a very specific reason, and it's really the reason why I thought I would help shepherd this conversation about being okay with the okay days and talking about how a day can go from it was pretty good to how our brain will just snap us to now it's a bad day.

And somehow we sometimes do that prematurely. And yesterday was a great example of that for me. Like, I had what was really setting up to be a good day. Like, I had some client meetings. Those were clicking, you know, talked to a couple of friends. I'm like, oh, I'm feeling cute about myself. I had an appointment with my hairdresser. That's why I keep touching it, because I got this done last night. So I'm just going, maybe I should have made it more blue. All of those things. Hello, Alec. Thanks for joining us as well.

But, you know, honestly, if you had asked me how my day was going, it was a pretty good day. It was a pretty good day, and I was a excited about that. And then yesterday afternoon, I went and I picked up my kiddo at school, and I found out that he had a rough afternoon. And it was a complex conversation to have with the assistant principal at the school. And we worked it out, and we had a good day. And he had a mostly good day, just like I had a mostly good day. But it really just occurred to me so how profoundly our brain can look.

Wipe out, like, all of the good things that happened throughout the day because of that bad thing, that negative thing. That may be something that you were able to deal with. It may be something that you like on the grand scheme of negative things that can impact you. Maybe it was kind of a medium deal, but it's amazing how much our brain can wipe out all of that goodness that we had the whole rest of the day because of that one negative thing. And personally, like, I really had to sit with that for myself and go, well, how am I going to categorize this day because of this situation?

And to really be honest with myself and go, you know what? Even though this negative thing happened during this portion of the day, if you ask me, the overall, encompass way I would describe yesterday, it was still a good day. You know, it was still mostly good. And then there was a speed bump. And realizing that when we hit those speed bumps, that's sometimes what they are. Yeah, you had to slow. I had to slow down, had to navigate that bump that was in my road. But if you go through the whole day it still should not be a situation where I needed to let myself go.

I'm going to throw out all of the goodness that happened today and only focus on the negative thing and use that to redefine the whole situation that I had. And, you know, I don't know about all of you that are in the chat. I understand if that happens to you, too, because it's very easy to do and our brain is very programmed to focus on whatever that negative is and use that to really just wipe out all of the work that we did to have a good day, and especially as a caregiver, it's very difficult when you're like, I was feeling cool, you know, maybe you were at work and everybody at work thought you were great.

Maybe you got all these accolades and you're hanging around people who you're not caring for. Sometimes it's very easy to sit there and go, well, all these other people like me, how come the person that I care for, one of the people that I care about most or I love most, they can't feel that way, or they don't see how cool I am, or they're not giving me the pass on the back because of whatever situation it is that you are helping caretake and caregiver for. And so it's very difficult to sit there and go, but I still had a good day, and I'm really glad that I was able to kind of take the moment for what it was, which was a moment, and it was a hard moment.

It was a difficult moment. It definitely was not my favorite conversation to have, but to be able to pivot that back into instead of using that energy that I got from a difficult moment to be able to reset once my kiddo got home and go, well, what he needed is for us to have the rest of the day still be a good day. So, yeah, so that's how it went. I had a friend that text me in the evening said, how's your day? And so I was honest. I said it was mostly good. It was mostly good. It was not perfect.

It was not all good. I wish I had more days where I got to say it's all good. Wouldn't that be great if we just woke up in the morning? It was all good. Instead of so far so good. Just gashing made it from whatever you wake up to whenever your head hits that pillow. If you could have it be one of those days, you're like, it was all good. Every once in a while, that happens. But I think for most of us, it's mostly good. Mostly good. And being able to accept it when you're in that position and in that space and use that to fuel you so that you can stack one mostly good day onto the next mostly good day.

And hopefully you have a bunch of those in your life. If you follow me on the socials, I've been very proud got of the fact that my kiddo has been championing new foods and got those back in his diet. And that's part of the reason why we had a mostly good day. He's making better choices, you know, he's sleeping better, and so am I, which is why I have a little less makeup on. Because the circles under my eyes that I earned as a parent are less pronounced today. So I felt less of a need to cover them all up.

Plus, I was busy talking to somebody. But when you're in that moment, giving yourself space to go, I'm going to deal with this e bump that is in front of me and fully feel all of the emotions that are involved with that particular speed bump. I think that's how you can also cross. Getting back to mostly good again, instead of what I used to do a lot, especially with my particular variety of high functioning anxiety, is kicking those emotions. And that negative part, that part of the day, that negative part of the moment, it was rolling it farther down the road and saying, I'll deal with it later.

I'll get to it eventually. Let me get to this part first. And not fully, you know, allowing myself to go through that pinwheel of emotions. And so now being able to go, all right, here's the part of the day that sucks and actually process it a little more quickly, I think overall, has really helped me get back to, as we said in the chat, mostly good, a lot faster because I'm not sitting there waiting for that negative thing to pop up when I'm trying to wrap or when I'm focused on something else or when I'm trying to be present with my kid because I let myself go ahead and get through it in the moment instead of allowing it to just turn into, like, an actually even more difficult thing to break through later because I didn't address it when I had the space.

And hopefully that's something that you continue. Since we're focusing on with our caregivers in this particular journey, hopefully that's something that you are prying space into your life to be able to do. I know from experience how difficult it is to go. I have enough time to do this as well, or you keep putting off the things that are for you and the things that we hear and read about and tell ourselves that we're supposed to do to be able to sustain ourselves as fully functioning caregivers and human beings.

We say we need to take care of that. We say we're supposed to hydrate, we're supposed to take time and. And it's gonna make us a better person because we made space for ourselves. Do we actually do it? I know I don't. There's lots of days where I put on my gym clothes, don't make it to the gym. There's lots of days where I say, I'm gonna take a more involved adulting shower today. And then I'm just sitting there going, I guess I'll just wash my face. So whatever your version of giving yourself space, I encourage you to steal that time back as much as you can.

And maybe it's just five minutes here, maybe it's just seven minutes there, but allow yourself space to do all those things and not look at it as if you're being selfish or narcissistic. If you think that you're being narcissistic, don't self diagnose as your mental health practitioner, and I'm sure they will let you know if you actually fall into that category. So, yeah, that is what I'm doing for doing for today. And if you ask me how today has been so far, it also has been mostly good. I am. I'm running about as on mostly good as I possibly could.

So if my mostly good was my water bottle, you can hear it's pretty full today. So hopefully you are out there. You are refueling yourself with goodness. You're allowing yourself to appreciate the goodness that you have in your life and you are taking care of yourself and the people that you care about and love. If you need to find additional resources, we have so many things that are going on here. In the Cadre app. You can check out all of my buddies that are continuing to share information on Thursday for our caregiver Thursdays.

And then we move on to a variety of content for the rest of the week and through the weekend. So there is always time for you to pop through here and see what it is that you like. And you can always not only let us know in the chat, but feel free to just reach out if there's something that we can do to help support you on your journey, to help meet you where you at you're at and provide an additional resource and let us know. I mean, that's what we're trying to do here in Cadre is really reframe the way that we build community around discussing certain topics and the way that we build community about the hard things that we have to deal with every day.

And knowing that you have some people that have your back, that's really important. So, everybody, I hope that you continue to have a mostly good day, and I will see you, you guys, next week.