Leading With Love

Hello, Cadre crew. This is my first live stream, and I'm five minutes late. And I'm sorry, I was just wrapping up another phone call. Who am I? I hope this is working. I am Anila Adnani. I am one of the co founders of a company here in Minneapolis called Habit Aware, and I have compulsive hair pulling disorder. This is my first live. Welcome the bronze metalife. I am super excited to be here. I'm grabbing my notes. I wanted to talk today. Hey, JC, welcome. I wanted to talk today a little bit about who I am, why I'm here, why it matters, and hopefully will.

Hello. Happy Wednesday to you, too. Hi, Shannon. I see so many friends, and that makes me feel really good because I did send a message to Anna saying, hey, I'm really nervous for this, but I'm also really learning and enjoying the act of learning to be vulnerable and expressing stuff like that. Because as soon as I sent that email to Anna saying, I'm nervous, I'm not sure what I'm going to talk about yet. I felt so much better. But I am sure what I'm going to talk about. It is my life, my life story, what I'm doing here, why I'm here.

And really, it kind of comes down to the shirt that I'm wearing right now. And it says, love gives you strength to fight your fear. So the only change I would make to this shirt is instead of fight, it would say, dance with. Dance with your fear. And this really, I just noticed this morning that this really encapsulates my life philosophy. I'm 43 years old, and it took me this long to get to this philosophy. I grew up in New York. I'm now living in Minneapolis. And I did not like the person that I was when I was a kid.

I did when I was a kid. And even up through mid twenties ish, love is the answer. Love is the dance. I love that. So I have been through, like all of us here, many, many issues. Life just keeps throwing bricks at us. Right? But it's the way we catch those bricks or let them hit us that really matters. And so I have a mental health condition called trichotillomania, which is the compulsion to pull out my hair. It's a soothing mechanism for a variety of emotional dysregulation. Sister conditions include dermatillomania.

Sorry, dermatillomania, which is skin picking, anycophagia, which is nail biting, and then other things like cheek biting, lip picking, nose picking, essentially anything where, because the person may not have learned good, healthy emotional regulation systems and tools. The subconscious goes to these other tools, which are not as healthy, not as helpful. It's helpful in the moment because it feels good and it gets you back to that baseline. But then the aftermath just creates this vicious cycle of self hate, self anger, and shame.

A lot of shame as well. So it's been a lot of work to get to the point where I can say, I pull out my hair. Not a lot of people are ready and willing to say that, but that is actually now the work that I do. So the other lesson that I've learned in life is the pain that we're constantly trying to push away. It really is there for us to invite in to dance instead of fight with. And from it, we can. From that pain, we can find our purpose. So the work that I do is starting a mental health company called Habit Aware here in town, where we make a smart bracelet that helps people build awareness of their conditions, of their hand movements, of that physical behavior, so that then they can pause and start looking at, okay, what is the emotional dysregulation happening in me and the situation around me, so that I can then choose a healthy, soothing strategy, which for me is water or deep breathing, which I also took a breath as I was doing that.

So that's the work that I've been doing for about seven years. Those are. Those group of behaviors are called body focused, repetitive behaviors. In this work, I also recognize and realize that in the past and currently I live with anxiety. I have had depression. I lost my father to cancer when I was 17 years old. So also live with grief and loss. But again, now see that loss as actually a lot of huge gains where for so long it really hurt. It really was hard to live knowing that I. What I lost, thinking about what I lost.

But now it gives me so much hope, knowing what I've gained and knowing that my dad is still with me. And then most recently, I'm looking at my notes, my little list of all the things that are wrong with me. Most recently, I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2022. And really, this was the culmination and the turning point for me. This was the moment where all of the work that I had been doing on myself and even in my. My work at Habitaware and learning to take control of my own trichotillomania, which is mostly eyebrows and eyelashes, and learning healthier, soothing mechanisms and the lifestyle changes that I need to make in order to keep that condition at bay.

All of that kind of came to a head with this, with my own cancer diagnosis, and meeting it with love, and meeting it in that way of dancing, of saying, hello, breast cancer. What are you here for? We all have a list, 100%, in saying, hi, breast cancer. Come on in, sit down. Tell me what you want from me. Tell me why you're here. Using it as a signal in the same way that the hair pulling is a signal that, oh, I need something. I saw that breast cancer as I need something. Something is amiss here in my life.

It's trying to tell me I need to do something. What is it? Got quiet with myself, listened to the whispers of my heart, and realized I'm doing too much. I need to pull back from my perfectionist tendencies and my people pleasing tendencies to say, hey, I'm gonna just focus. And worked with my therapist on reevaluating my values. So now that's helped me create my boundaries. So if it's not those three things, I say no, and it's feeling really good. I'm finding ways to say no. And it's really hard for someone like me.

It was just on another call where we were joking because we both said, we're people pleasers, and they said, and I probably have adhd as well. So we were talking about people with ADHD, and he said, statistically, I believe it was statistically, people without ADHD. If someone says, hey, can you do me a favor? Their first question is going to be, what is it? Whereas people who are people pleasing, can you do me a favor? The first thing you say is, sure. And then you say, what? And then you ask, what it is.

Right. So that people pleasing is, I'm working on learning to say no gracefully. And I think that that's a really huge lesson to maintain boundaries and maintain healthy mental health. And so my goal with being here on Cadre is to really talk about this idea of leading your life with love, of always. Always looking at challenges, looking at problems, looking at conflicts, and not saying, how can I beat that person? But more so, how can I answer this issue with love? And that's just what I believe in.

Even within the trichotillomania dermatillomania, that world of habit aware, our tagline is love, strength, and awareness. But it's backwards. It's the awareness to summon the strength to choose love. So we often see love as a weakness. We often see kindness as a weakness. We often see, you know, we've. Our societal culture is blaze up. You know, our societal culture is fight, fight, fight, win, win, win. And I believe it's the opposite. I believe that we need to meet a fight with a hug. We need to be, and that's what takes strength.

What takes strength is saying, nope, I'm not going to respond to you punching me in the face with another punch. I'm going to respond to you punching me in the face with a. What's going on? What's wrong? Give me a hug. It's hard to do, but that's the work. Is that moving slower so that you can have that presence and awareness to pause and build up that strength to choose love? So that is. That is how I try to live my life now, even within ourselves. 100%. Right. I think most of the fights are within our own head, and that's a lot of the work.

In trichotillomania and in the habit aware world of changing, reversing, and reducing these behaviors is we get so angry at ourselves for pulling our hair or for biting our nails or for picking our skin, when the reality is it's not us, it's our subconscious trying to talk to us. Right? Trying to talk to the me that we think of when we think of me, and when we can kind of separate the two and again meet ourselves with compassion, like, oh. Instead of, oh, Anila, what the f***'s wrong with you? Why are you pulling right now?

What's wrong with you? Which is for 20 years, what? I asked myself, what's wrong with you? Why are you so weird? You're gonna make yourself ugly. You are ugly. Those are all the things that I used to tell myself when really, it's, oh, Anilo, what's wrong right now? What do you need? Meet myself with love is the transition I had to make and the transition that we help people make day in and day out with the work we do at Habitaware. And that's what I hope to bring to the table here at Cadre over the next however long the Cadre team will have me.

So, yeah, I don't know. Any questions? Anything else that feels lagging? I'm checking my notes here. Oh. So the last thing that I have on my notes is also around spirituality. I grew up in a Hindu Sindhi home, so indian culture and indian religions, a few different indian religions, so Hinduism and Sikhism and something else that is neither of those, but doesn't really have a name. I also grew up with Christianity being around me, so my mom went to christian boarding school in India. So when they came to the US, they also took to some of those going to church as well as going to our spiritual centers, if you will, and also became engrossed and became introduced to Buddhism in my twenties and to buddhist chanting.

So all of that, to just say that they're all saying the same thing, I don't know why we're fighting. And that my religion really is my own, taking from kind of all of these different places as and when I need to and also looking to the universe and tarot cards and looking for signs and calling on my spirit angels. So I kind of just want you to understand that, because as I talk about things like dealing with a challenge in your life and, oh, it's so hard. And yes, there's. I still feel those ups and downs of, like, this is hard, regret, grief, loss.

But I can pull in all these different tools to help me know the path that I'm supposed to be on and know that and to guide me on that path and all of those things ladder up to this principle of love, strength and awareness and dance with life challenges. Don't fight them. Because when you have all of those tools and those belief systems and being able to look around and see the signs and know that the universe is communicating with you, it helps you know that when you're starting with love and dancing, instead of fear and fighting you, it gives you kind of like those, those check ins that.

Yep, keep going. You got, you got. You're on the right track. You're on the right track. You're on the right track. Shannon, thank you for what you're saying right now. All the parts of the. Thank you for being. Oh, thank you. I'm really, really glad to be here. The dance within the head is. I'm writing that one down because it is a dance. There's many dances going on. It's the internal one, it's the external one. It's the one with your relationships, the one with your relationship with work, kids, everything around you.

And, yeah, I mean, dancing takes stamina, right? So it is time consuming. It is hard. It takes effort, it takes love, and all of that takes work. But as we say in the habit of work community, it takes joyful work, because it's all about creating the lifestyle changes that are going to make you feel like you really want to be here on this earth. Which for a while of my life, I didn't feel that way. And I was moving toward acting on that 20 plus years ago in my post college years. And so I'm grateful to be here, here, and I'm grateful to be here in the Cadre sphere.

And I look forward to sharing more insights and getting to know you all and learning from you as well. Because I do believe that when we can lead with love, when we can lead with the dancing instead of the fighting, we can create a new culture and we can create a new culture that is more loving, more positive, more healthy for everyone. So with that, I will sign off and wish you all love, strength and awareness. See you next Wednesday. Bye.