Leading With Love 💕

Hi, Cadre family. Anila, here I am coming to you with my lived experience with a couple of different mental health conditions, as well as my work at habit aware, where we help people with compulsive hair pulling, skin picking, and nail biting take control with a smart bracelet that we invented that uses gesture detection. So when I engage in my hair pulling behavior, it just went off, it just vibrated, telling me, hey, you're playing with your eyebrows. That's my pulling area. And that awareness is the key to behavior change.

And hello. And there's a host of others, like lip picking and cheek biting and nose picking and finger picking and feet picking. And there's, it's essentially what's happening with these conditions is people are leveraging their body as that soothing mechanism for the instability, the emotional, physical, or physical dysregulation, that nervous system dysregulation. And so through that work, come to understand that these behaviors are exactly what I just said, a signal that the person is dysregulated and the brain is subconsciously trying to get back to a state of calm.

And the way to really do that in a healthy way is by choosing love. And so that is why my topic here on the Cadre sphere is all about leading with love, because that power of love transcends even these body focused, repetitive behaviors. And today, specifically, I wanted to talk about a little technique that I just tried this morning. My noise is my. My noise. My brain has been very noisy the last few days with a lot of negative self talk and a lot of chatter that I just don't need in my life. And has anyone ever been there with that?

Let me know in the comments. I would love to know where your brain's at and how noisy it gets. Mine is through the roof right now. And so today, as I was getting up and making my way to start my day, making my coffee, getting my medications out, I decided that I am going to try to lead with love and quiet my brain from the negative self speak not by talking to myself with love, but more so by lingering in the present moment and narrating the present moment. So I was telling myself, I'm taking out my little medicine cup, I'm taking out these pills, oops, the bottle fell.

And instead of judgment around oops, I dropped the bottle. Or ugh. Anila, why'd you drop the bottle? It was just a statement of fact. Oops, the bottle fell. And that narration of what's happening in my mind, right, doing that narration in my mind helped me stay a little bit more level and clear and quiet because I can't have two voices in my head, can I? Oh, gosh, I hope not. But in that way, it kept the voice in my head not on. Oh, my God, I got up late. I have to do this. I have to run to this meeting.

I have so much to do. And getting frustrated with myself. But it allowed me to stay in the present moment of, okay, I'm pulling out the mug right now. I am pouring my sugar into my coffee mug. I'm pouring the coffee. It allowed me to stay in the present moment. And that, to me, really is leading with love because it keeps you in the present moment. Whereas if we lead with fear, we are leading ourselves into anxiety of the future, and if we lead with anger, we are leading with looking back in the past.

Right. And so when we lead with love, it really helps us stay in the present moment. And so that is kind of what I wanted to leave you with today. I don't know if anyone is there and wants to provide any feedback or any thoughts around this. Have they? Have you used this idea of being the narrator of your life, just observing the simple things that are happening around you to keep your mind centered and focused on the present moment so that that voice in your head doesn't trail off into the what if land that I've talked about before.

It is really about staying in the what is land of the here and now. And that is how you can lead with love. So I hope that you enjoyed this conversation and this idea that you can put into practice now that when you see, when you hear or notice your brain chasing and racing, that you can say, hmm, I'm going to notice what's happening right now and I'm going to narrate what's happening right now. And in doing so, slow down and lead with love. I'll see you next week. Thank you for being here, Christine and Stefan, and all the best to you.

Bye.