Leading With 💕 Love

Hello, Cadresphere. Not sure if I'm having technical difficulties or not. Known publisher. Hey, cadres fear. I hope this is working. It doesn't. Hmm. Well, hopefully I'm live, and if not, we will try again. All right, this is Anila. Hopefully this is working. I see Lindsey has joined, so hopefully it's working. I'm getting some notifications that are popping up with some errors, so I hope that you can see me. My name is Anila. I am the co founder of Habit Aware, and I have trichotillomania, which is the compulsion to pull out hair.

And I help people with trichotillomania, as well as with skin picking and nail biting, take control of those conditions with the work that I do. I am not a mental health treatment professional. I do the work that I do through my lived experience and in helping tens of thousands of people and in doing so, have come up with a way of looking at life which is leading with love. And today I wanted to talk about and how funny my little note paper is gone, so that's okay. Today I wanted to talk about coulda, woulda, shoulda.

And this actually came up in our conversation in the habit awares online community for people with these mental health conditions. Body focused repetitive behaviors. Hi, Lindsay. If you're there still, please let me know so that I know that this is working, because last time, last week, we did this, I did this, and it didn't seem to go through. So I'm hoping that we are not in the same place again with that. But, yeah, this idea of coulda, woulda, shoulda is a mentality that I think keeps us stuck.

It doesn't keep us, keep us stuck. It keeps us stuck in the sense of it makes us constantly look backward and not able to move forward or move forward with fear. And so this idea of coulda, woulda, shoulda came up in the online community that I host through Habitaware, where one of the folks said, I wonder who I could have been. I wonder if I would have been a better swimmer if I didn't have hair pulling. And the reason she then she went on to share that as a child when she was hair pulling, she was really, really scared of going underwater during swim lessons because it would most certainly show the bald patches that she had.

And so that fear led her to cry and cry and cry until her parents said, fine, you don't have to go to swim lessons anymore. So now she's a 40 something adult that doesn't really know how to swim. And so, you know, even in my own life, just last week, I found out. So backing up a little bit, I lost my father to cancer when I was 17. And during that time, he was sick. The four. About three or four years that he was sick with leukemia. One of the things that we had to do was try to find a bone marrow match.

And I still remember a volunteer from be the match coming to my temple and lines and lines and lines of people doing the cotton swabs in hopes of being a match for my dad. And we never found that match, unfortunately. And just two weeks ago, my cousin, who, you know, this was 20 years ago, so he was probably in his twenties, my cousin shared that he had gone to the hospital in India, in Bombay, to see if he was a match. And he was a pretty close match is what he shared with us recently with my mom and me and my sister, and the hospital in Bombay.

Talked to the hospital in New York where I was growing up, and they said it was too late. And my head immediately went to a coulda, woulda, shoulda moment of if those doctors coulda done something different in that moment, or shoulda done something different in that moment, or if only they would have done something different in that moment, that maybe my dad would still be here. And that was a coulda, shoulda moment that took me into a very negative thought spiral, that as I was talking to my mom on the phone and she's telling me all this, I start crying.

And my husband sitting at his desk across from me is like, what's going on? Like, thinking that something happened now to someone or something. But it was all coulda, woulda, shoulda in the past that was impacting me. And I realized it right away, and I recognized it, and I shared with him and I said, but it's okay. Because all that actually did happen was supposed to happen to get me to where I am today, that I wouldn't be doing the work with habit aware if my father wasn't sick, because that was part of the reason that I started pulling out my hair in the first place.

I wouldn't have met my husband if my father wasn't sick, because that is, his sickness led us to meeting a few key doctors on his care team who had friends my age who eventually introduced me to my husband. And so just trying to think through what are the coulda, woulda, shoulda's in your past that you're still holding onto with, like, a grudge, with heaviness? Um, it's holding you back. It's holding us back from seeing what is. So instead of looking at what if XYZ happened, we need to move to what is land?

And maybe that's why they spell it island. Because what is land? That we move to what is land instead of what if land? And in doing so, it allows us to stay in the present moment and reduce that anxiety and reduce that depression from worrying about the past and from thinking too far into the future and worrying about the future. So when you catch yourself in a kuda woulda, shoulda spiral, please remember to switch from what if to what is. And in doing so, you are choosing love for yourself and choosing love for what the universe is putting in front of you.

If I had stayed in that coulda, woulda, shoulda mindset, I could have seen myself getting angry at my 20 year old cousin for not pushing hard enough, you know, to say no. What do you mean it's too late? Let's. Let's at least try, right? And, you know, we didn't know, so we couldn't push or being angry at him for not communicating it with us so that we could push. But I'm not gonna go there. I'm going to choose love, and I'm going to choose not coulda, woulda, shoulda ing that moment and instead acknowledge what is that it happened.

And now we will go forward. We will move forward with what we know. And now the beauty of it is he is now a doctor. He is now probably in his fifties, and he can take that lesson to his patients, to not be one of those doctors that says it's too late, but to think through and to act with love, to at least try. And that's, to me, amazing, because I know he's a very amazing doctor. He's gotten tons of recognition for the work he does in India, and I'm certain that his experience with my father's sickness has impacted his skills and ability and practice as a doctor.

So, again, that bad thing. There is always a good thing. We just have to look for it again. Thank you for being here today. I sincerely hope that you can hear me and that you, this records, and I will see you next Wednesday. Wishing you love, strength and awareness. Bye.