Eight Percent (Start With Yourself, Part 1)

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FEATURED SWEETNESS

Start With Yourself by Emma Grede: https://amzn.to/43C5asj

Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin (referenced)

Emma Grede on She's So Lucky podcast: https://youtu.be/oma_Hz85a0s?si=1G94n0eFIvn3USTg

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Ink & Spine Playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37eRVB6i7cDAhNF2rZHJUz?si=ce21d36ae1694c40

Pruning by Colin Carbonera and Blessing: https://open.spotify.com/track/6YeqMaNbwvLKlqyqkPTD09?si=2b145a710a37474f

SWEET REMINDERS

Hillary Dawa Sherpa Coverage: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ZwBI-TYwLn8

Prentis Hemphill: Boundaries (referenced in Emma's book on Pg. 23)

Fritz Perls: Fear is excitement without the breath (referenced in Emma's book on Pg. 27)

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Door Stop Alarm: https://amzn.to/4vMbutg

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Transcript

Speaker 0:00

I'm Kaeyae Alo, and welcome to Ink and Spine, a space between words and sounds, where each week we sit together with a book, an album, a film to connect. We savor each piece slowly at the sweet pace of honey. Today, I'm really excited about our very first episode, our first book, our first, our first, our first, our first. And before I continue, I want to say thank you so much for joining me. It means a lot. Inc and spine is intended to be a small pocket of sweetness in your day, so it means a lot that you would spend some time with me. Today we feature the very first book in episode one. Woo-hoo. And that book is Start with Yourself by the incomparable Emma Greed. Emma opens Start with Yourself by saying that she wrote the book that she wished she could have had earlier in her life. I feel so much resonance to the way she speaks about her upbringing, her grit, her tenacity, her perseverance, and all of the challenges that she's had to overcome to be where she is. Now I want to be really clear with this podcast and its purpose and intent in that I'm not interested in critiquing any of the content that I'll feature. I choose things where I feel like there is sweetness to extract, sweetness to savor. This is a positive space because there's enough I don't even know the word, enough hardship out there. I don't know about you guys, but in my everyday, it is so much rejection I can't even tell you. So many no's and Inc and Spine is a place where possibility exists, goodness exists, a really helpful and grounded reminder, loading up on that honey and that energy to take forward into your week, whatever you need. I just really hope that this is a restorative and replenishing place. And creating this feels like such a reciprocal gift that in the creation, in the reading, in the watching, in the listening of whatever we're going to explore together, I'm nourished, and in return, I hope that it nourishes you. I'm definitely not a self-help podcast. There's plenty of those. I think I just want to keep things really simple. Sweetness, enjoying art, books, films, just to be reminded of the goodness that exists in humanity and out there. One of my favorite quotes of all time is The World I know is not the world. Give thanks every day for the internet because without it, I don't think I would have any examples of people that look like me who are not just surviving, but are actually thriving and living beautiful and full lives that are not we shall overcome. So without further ado, let's get into the book together. I could not be more excited to start. I remember when I first read this book, all I could think about was how much I wanted to share in its insights, in its pearls of wisdom. And I'm doing that. I remember when I first read this book, actually, even when I first came upon Emma Greed many, many, many years ago, I was so fascinated by this woman, this force. And though I understand and there's so many differences in Emma's story and my story and yours, but that when we can strip all that aside and focus on the nuggets, on the sweetness that we can apply to our own lives and the ways that we can do the Missy Elliott reverse it, how this applies to you is so unique and individual, but just creating a space where we can be in dialogue and inspiration, even just thinking about it, I smile. At the beginning in the introduction, she talks about her upbringing and understanding as the eldest of four girls, that she became the father figure in the dynamic with their single mother. She says, I recognized at an early age that it would be best for me to assume complete responsibility for myself. Rather than looking for people and factors to blame for why everything in my life was shaky and unstable, I decided to get on with it and do everything differently from the people around me to create safety and security for myself. I didn't have any mentors until I'd already become successful, but I looked for teachers everywhere. I followed my curiosity into as many books as I could, and I questioned everything, and I learned from every encounter. I love this because if this is not the most resonant part of the book at the very beginning, I don't know what is. I think for me, I'm so grateful because I don't have a mom, a sister, a dad, or anything like that to be able to ask, how do I navigate this? How do I move forward? There's no mango or blueprint or boomer. I recently saw a post that featured some clips of Virgil Abloh, May He Rest in Peace, where he's talking about how as long as he has an iPhone with above 8% charge, he has the world. And I'm trying to really change my perspective to see it that way because that is true. With the internet, I'm able to connect with people, to find resources, to find music, inspiration, watch a sermon, or one of my favorite things, a sports doc, because God knows I love a sports doc. We're gonna get into that throughout this podcast because I don't think I'm anything without sports documentaries. There's something so incredible about watching an athlete or anybody really overcome what is seemingly insurmountable odds. I use the reference of 2% viability or probability. And that's true for sports or anything. I give a shout out to the Knicks. They play game four, and 29 points down, it could have been over. And they returned. And not only did they return, they came back and ended up winning game four in the NBA finals. I am not a longstanding fan of any particular team in basketball. I think I just love the sport in general. I'm also so excited about what is happening in the WNBA. But the Knicks coming back from a 29-point deficit is something to celebrate. There is an incredible podcast that I'm going to link called She's So Lucky. And the host of that podcast did a really great job of asking Emma great questions about entrepreneurship, being a woman in business, being a woman of color, just being a human in general who is striving and has ambition. And I think that that podcast does an incredible job of focusing on that facet of things. But I want to focus on the softer side of things, the more um human side of this. And I think that in reading the book, I do believe that Emma is clear about the world. And she does not pretend that the world has any kind of rose-colored tint on it. Still in the introduction, yes, the world is typically more difficult for women, for people of color and poor people. And yes, I am and have been all three. And I just pause right there to say, Lord God, being all three, I would love to be relieved, especially of the poor part. But as I'm building, I am grateful to return back to starting with myself. What do I have and how can I make the most of it? Emma makes a consistent choice inside of the difficulty, in the rooms that she walks into, and that before she walks into the room, she is aware of the difficulty, but then she also focuses her energy on possibility. On page 27, Emma talks about fear and she says, I've developed the ability to use my fear as a signal that there's something important on the other side. Psychiatrist named Fritz Perls, who puts it in a really helpful way. He says, fear is excitement without the breath. When I pause on that, I don't know if you can relate, but I can't tell you how many times within the space of a minute, even, I have to remind myself to breathe. That I'm living life so much like this, and I'm holding my breath and worsening my blood pressure. But when I remember breath, I can come back to myself. The trueness of myself. And I feel like that is the work of half this book is how do you come back to the trueness of yourself? I want to relate this to sport because hello. There's an incredibly inspiring docu-series on Netflix called Breakpoint, and it's about tennis. And I relate so much to tennis because ultimately nobody is a singular being. No one is ever self-made. We are made by our villages and our communities. But with tennis, after all of the physio, the training, the coaching, when the tennis player walks onto the court, it's just them. And they are the ones that have to bring in together all that they've learned and all that they've been taught into this match to make something happen. I'm thinking about a scene in season one of Breakpoint with the tennis player Matteo Berrettini. And he's talking about fear and will. And he says, if there is no fear, there is no will. And I think that relates so beautifully to what Emma is talking about with fear, that fear is a helpful signal. I think fear can also be a helpful driver in doses and healthy amounts. I have a fear of I can't even tell you. I'd need a lot of days. But I think, of course, with any human being when everything is destroyed, there's so much fear about will I be able to become whole again. And instead of that being something that draws us down spirals of rumination, it can actually be a helpful catalyst, a helpful driver for change. I say all that, and I'm challenged every day by that. But I think the more and more I can resonate with fear being such a helpful signal that fear can be one of the drivers for my will, for grit, for persistence. I think good can come of that. As we round off on fear and emotion, on page 17, Emma shares, our emotions are often our best connection to the intelligence of the body if we know how to listen. That part, if we know how to listen. Oh my gosh, as I am building to move forward, I think about the importance of using the right amount of fuel. Like, although rocket fuel is powerful, it might not be the most conducive for this level of growth or this level of change and evolution. So understanding which type of fuel is I'm doing a better job of checking in, listening to fear, listening to the emotions that arise, and asking. And I invite you to do the same if you can. You don't have to close your eyes or do anything crazy. But just internally to ask if I could allow myself to listen to my different emotions and reactions, how could I use them as helpful guides? Before we move on from feelings, which I gotta say, I think Emma does a great job of talking about them, but in a way that I think is very useful. There is a powerful quote that she includes in the book, and it talks about boundaries in a way that when you read it, it sounds so simple. And I think I'm learning the distinction between simple and easy. That simple doesn't always necessarily mean easy, but simple can definitely be clarity. And Prentice Hemphill says, boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously. There is a way that some of us were taught that being worthy of love meant being available without limit, that the more that we suffered in service to others, the more worthy of love that we would become. The apprentice hemphill sentence, I think, rearranged the furniture for me of how I move forward in a better way in a better direction. That love can be made possible by having a limit sometimes. The self can be included with purpose and on purpose to be in harmony with the other. I am, as a wise friend would say, new here. And I'm learning what it means to factor myself as a being worthy of love in the same ways that I value those that I love. As we continue in the book, on page 37, Emma shares, to move forward, I had to prune a lot of relationships and then cauterize those wounds so I wouldn't feel too much pain about moving on. But those wounds still needed to heal. There's a lot of sadness that comes with slowly tending to that pain of loss. Wow. I just want that to sink in and just to sit. There's a song that comes to mind written by two artists that I admire very deeply, Colin Carbonera and Blessing. And in their song Pruning, every time I listen to that song, it reminds me of the gardener's shears as they're taken to the branch that is dying so that sap can move on to branches that are still alive. As this tree is being more efficient and wise in how it is moving its energy and its sap. The cut is still a cut. And I think of another friend who shared some beautiful wisdom. Shout out to my homie Eddie. Eddie shared one of the most powerful things I've ever heard, and it relates to pruning and gardening. And he said to me once, if we walked past a garden that was being pruned, and flowers and plants and trees had voices and made sound, it would be a very unpleasant thing to walk past. It would be a lot of screams, a lot of painful sounds because it is surgery without anesthesia. But it's necessary. It's necessary to remove that which is sapping of energy, that the parts of us that have died, the relationships that are causing us to die, it's important to acknowledge that there is a necessity for pruning to happen. But I think that on page 37 in this quote, Emma does an incredible job of acknowledging the necessity to move forward, to prune, while also honoring the present when she says that there's a lot of sadness that comes with the slowly, slowly, because healing, no matter how hard we try, is never on our schedule. But that if we can honor that the tending is slow to that pain, that we can be mindful, intentional, and even loving in that pruning and that release to make way for new life in ourselves. I jump backwards a little bit to page 10, but on page 10, I reflect on another simple and powerful sentence that Emma shares, where she says that the chasm between vision and reality have become her bridge to build. That is the part of the book that I resonate with the most, is what it is to take such to quote another reference. There's a book I read a couple of years ago called Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, Navy SEALs. And the whole point of the book is kind of what Emma's talking about, on a different level, of course, in a different context, and taking ownership and envisioning what lies ahead and where we are now, that we are actually the bridge, the bridge that passes between, that brings life forward with us and for us, that is really powerful. The sweetness that I appreciate in this book is the acknowledgement of what is, what was, but clearing space so that the future can be filled with possibilities beyond our imagination. And for me, that is so powerful because I'm creating something I've never seen or experienced, but that doesn't mean that it's not possible. Something that Beyoncé said in her Renaissance film that was so poignant and powerful. And she talked about how so much of her life and her drive and her growth had come from trauma. And how in this next phase of her life, as the Renaissance tour was coming to an end, we witnessed Beyoncé experience this new evolution, this growth into another dimension, growth that is accessible to all of us. And she says, in this next phase of my life, I want growth to come from peace. I encourage you to continue reading. We're going to cover the second half of the book in episode two, but I think this is a really great stopping point on chapter five, Joy in Emma's book, Start with Yourself. I can't wait to continue reading along with you guys and hearing what you think, but I'd love to hear what your thoughts are so far on the parts that we've covered. And if you haven't already, that's a good one. We move on to one of my favorite segments of this podcast called Sweet Reminder, a place where I feature acts of human grit, tenacity, greatness, impossible to the possible, similar to the Knicks coming back from a 29-point deficit to win. I think I was reading that that's the only time that a team has been able to come back from a 29-point deficit to win a game in the NBA Finals history. Please correct me if I'm wrong to any sports experts out there. This is a part of the podcast that I have been the most excited to share because this is what I lean on when I'm moving through my day and there's so many no's. How do I stay reminded that impossible is nothing? My first feature today is none other than Hillary Dawa Sherpa as an incredible mountaineer who got lost on Everest while helping climbers on an expedition. Hillary Dawa Sherpa survived six days. Six in the death zone of Everest. Now, six days in the death zone of life is one thing, but six days in the death zone of Everest is something unheard of. The team had thought that it was over for Hillary Dawa Sherpa. And I encourage you to check out a creator who goes by Michelle versus Humanity, who did an incredible job of documenting the search, the rescue, the miracle that is Hillary Dawa Sherpa. To think about six days on Mount Everest alone with a few biscuits and eating ice to survive. I can't even begin to understand. After Hillary Dawa Sherpa had fallen into a crevasse that was very deep and had caused injury, an avalanche occurred. And instead of this avalanche burying Hillary Dawa Sherpa, it created enough leverage out of this crevasse so that Hillary Dawa Sherpa could get out. Eventually on the sixth day, folks that were cleaning up garbage on the mountain saw this figure in the distance crawling down not just any mountain. This is Mount Everest, y'all. The Mount Everest. Limited oxygen. I am so happy for Hillary Dawa Sherpa's family and loved ones because I cannot even imagine what those six days must have been like for them. on the other side. But I would love to one day hear from Hillary Dawa Sherpa himself to understand what was going through his mind in those six days, what kept him going, what kept him believing. Because I can imagine how easy it would have been to just sit and quit. But instead, Hilary crawled down Mount Everest. I hope that this is a helpful, sweet reminder for you, though it's quite extreme. But I hope that you are reminded of the Mount Everests that are in your life, the things that seem insurmountable. And as you return back to the authenticity that is you beyond all that seems impossible. What is in you that can keep you going? That's today's sweet reminder. Alright, how y'all doing? Y'all doing good? Y'all alright? As we near the end, thank you for spending a little bit of time with me. I want this podcast to not just be helpful sweet reminders for the soul and the spirit, but I also want to offer practical produce because being practical for anyone that knows me is one of the anchors of what makes me. My first recommendation is a doorstop alarm. Very practical and I have it right here. Ta-da. This is she it is it I recommend this doorstop alarm in alignment with the theme of the book start with yourself. For me, I have to think about safety in a lot of different ways in this phase of life. It slides under the door of whatever room you're in, whether it's a hotel room, whether it is your home, if the door is opened against the wedge. So this is the side that would face the door and then this is the side that would face away from the door. There is a sensitivity component to this. It has high sensitivity, medium or low. I have mindset to medium, which I won't test this today because I respect those around me. I have it on medium sensitivity which essentially would set off an alarm loud enough that it would wake up probably my whole street. And then on the back there's an on and off switch. So right now it's off when this is activated in on mode what would happen is when someone would open the door this side of the door wedge compresses it creates a stop to the door an alarm that will wake up the whole street will be ignited because this button right here in the center would be engaged and activated. Not only does it allow you to be alerted to wake up if you're sleeping and also to alert those around you of any danger or any harm it pairs so well with the book to start with yourself to take care of yourselves. I'll make sure I link this in the description in the Substack newsletter. I hope you'll subscribe subscribe you better subscribe. Thank you. But I'll make sure I link this so it's easily accessible. I got this one on Amazon but I feel like there's probably many options out there. If there are other tips that you guys have to stay safe I would love to hear about them. Please drop a comment send me a DM whatever the case may be I'd love to hear from you. As we wrap up our very first episode together thank you again for joining I hope you'll subscribe follow like share do all the bits your support means the world I leave us with something for you to carry forward a question for reflection I return back to fear and with this new context that has been shared of fear from Emma's book Start with yourself as well as the tennis player Matteo Berrettini about fear how can you use fear to be a helpful catalyst in whatever challenge you are facing? Can it be supportive? Can it be helpful fuel? Can it even be a friend? This has been episode one of Ink and Spine again, my name is Kaeyae Alo. Thank you for joining me. See you soon, Sweetness.