Things We Aren't Supposed To Talk About

Cadre, good morning. Hello. It is Shannon. It is a Thursday morning. I am here on caregiver down Cadre. Listen, I just held up my coffee cup, I guess, as though I'm welcoming you with it. m. here, central standard time in St. Paul, Minnesota. I'm gonna take a drink, actually. Okay, guys, good morning. It is caregiver day on Cadre. Okay, for those of you who don't know me, who I have never met, my name is Shannon. I'm actually part of the Cadre team, and I am here on caregiver day to join you as a human with a lived experience.

Experienced. I'm a human with a live experience. I have no clinical background. I am not evidence based. I am a person who is a caregiver for a child with autism. I am a person who lives with anxiety and a person who lives with CPTSD. So I come here today with my, with my words of wisdom, if you want to call them that, from a lived experience perspective, a peer perspective. Okay, so what am I going to talk about today? Number one, I want to talk about the beautiful live that our new contributor, Steph Irwin did this morning.

Steph is someone that we met at. For those of you who know Doctor Charryse Johnson, who's also part of Cadre. We met Steph Irwin, our brand new Cadre caregiver contributor, at Doctor Rezi's event back in March. Recalibrate 2024. And so today, Steph joined us now as a Cadre contributor. And if you go back and you watch her live, you will see why it's prompting me to talk about today. I'm going to talk about connection and why does it matter? So I'm going to jump around. There's a couple thoughts in my head, but number one is recently Luke.

Luke Wendland of Cadre fame. Shared, shared. Or maybe it was JC. One of the two shared a video with a couple of us that said, all it takes to feel better is eight minutes with a friend. And so it's a Simon Sinek video, and he was talking about a friend of his who needed support. And it's one of those things that, again, as caregivers, we all need support in a multitude of ways, but it's one of those things that it can be hard to ask for it, right? Even with your friends who care about you, who you care about, and who those folks who are closest to you, sometimes it can be hard to be like, hey, I need help.

So he was sharing about a friend and she needed help, and it was hard to ask for it. And he's like, hey, why didn't you reach out? Why didn't you ask for help? And she was like, I did. And he went back and he looked at his texts, and it said, like, hey, you know, want to come over today or want to go for a walk? And so while she was reaching out and extending sort of a, you know, a drive for connection, she also wasn't explicit in the ask, and that's absolutely not her fault. But what was interesting is what Simon Sinek said is there's research that shows that eight minutes is all it takes to feel seen, to feel better with a friend.

So I think of Steph Irwin's live this morning, our friend here in the cadres fair, who I was lucky enough to meet in person in March, who lives in the Georgia. I'm probably even gonna get it wrong. That might not even be the state. She lives in the south southeast United States, and I live in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and we've met each other once for a couple hours, but I spent probably about eight minutes with her this morning on that live, and I felt connected and I felt better. And that's pretty amazing.

All it takes is. Is that eight minutes to feel connected, to feel better. Good morning, Jules. Good morning, Colleen. I see that I might be having some connection issues, so I'm actually gonna go into my home now so we don't have to deal with that. But I'm sharing that number one, just to say that if you listen to Simon Sinek, who, honestly is a great person to listen to, that's all it takes, right. It's not a lot of time to connect. So they're shorthand. Now, Simon and his friend is, if they need each other, they text each other, and their message is eight minutes.

Do you have eight minutes? And I love that because, listen, we all have eight minutes. If you pay attention to your day, I guarantee whoever you are, you have, in some way, shape, or form, spent eight minutes doing something unintentionally having a snack, maybe scrolling social media, doing whatever it is that you could have spent in connection with someone else. And so I just think that's so important. And as caregivers, we need that more than ever. And so I think that's my message today, is like, find those eight minutes.

Find those friends, find those people. Maybe it's eight minutes on Cadre. That's amazing. Maybe it is eight minutes with someone you don't know yet, as JC Lippold likes to say in a Cadre video. Maybe it's just someone that. Honestly, if.