Embracing Authenticity: A Deep Dive into Self-Reflection, Purpose, and Meaningful Connections

Have you ever stopped amidst the hustle to ask yourself - 'why'? Why are you doing what you do? Are your actions reflecting your true values and aspirations? In this enriching conversation, we invite you on a journey of self-reflection and purpose, exploring the profound question of why we do what we do. From my personal story of celebrating uniqueness and building harmonious connections to understanding your role in the world, this episode promises to be a catalyst for self-discovery.

We're also turning the spotlight on leadership - not as an exercise of authority, but as a role model. Discover the significance of leading by example and embodying what we teach. Then, we take a deep dive into my personal journey of overcoming an abusive marriage and how it's fueled my passion to empower others, create safety, and foster deeper connections. Join us on this path to understanding your 'why', staying true to yourself, and forging meaningful connections in your life. Let's embark on this journey together - towards self-understanding, integrity, and connection.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:36

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Amanda Quick Show. I'm your host, amanda Quick, today's episode. I want to talk about things a little bit differently than I have before. I spent this last week, and especially this last couple of days, really sitting with myself in a way that I haven't intentionally done in a while. Really sitting with what am I creating, what am I putting out in the world, why, what is my why, what is my reason behind what I'm doing, why I'm doing this podcast, why I've written my book, why I share the things the way that I do, and sitting it with a sense of what are the values that hold true to me and everything that I'm doing, and identifying that for myself so that I can see the threads running through everything I'm doing. And I want to share that with you guys today.

Speaker 1: 1:30

I want to share what's true for me and invite you to start thinking about what's true for yourself, because I think a lot of times we focus on who we are and from a what, from an identity's perspective, from a mom, wife, daughter, employee, business owner, whichever identities we connect to and we don't stop to think about what that actually means and what that, what drives us, in a sense that why we get up every morning, why we do the things we do and I think it's really important to step away from the hustle and go and the repetition and the obligations and sit with ourselves and really check in is what we're doing, aligned to our values, to our sense of self, to who we desire to show up in the world as and what we desire to create, so that we can participate in a world that feels to us like what we want to be in? And I think there's a lot of different reasons to do exercises like this, and for me, this was very specific about launching not just one business, but actually two businesses, and I'll get to that in a little bit but wanting to really sit with what I'm creating in a different way. And I think for anybody, whether you're launching a business, whether you're writing a book, whether you're searching for a job, whether you're searching for meaning, whether you're wanting to move physically, anything you've got to come back to this sense of what's the meaning in it for you, what's the why, why do you show up, why do you wake up every morning, why do you do what you do? And for me, for a very long time, for a very long period in my life. I didn't have an answer for that. I did what I did because, well, that's just what you did. I did what I did because I was supposed to, because that's what I was told when to make me happy or successful, and I did find value and joy in parts of it.

Speaker 1: 3:42

Absolutely, I loved being a mom. I loved the meaning that it felt like it gave my life. I loved the connection with my children. I'm one of the weirdos that really likes the newborn period. Every time I tell people that they think I'm nuts but I loved the baby period. It is still to this day.

Speaker 1: 4:00

My favorite season in motherhood is that really short time where you're not really two people yet, even though the court is cut. I love that connection that you have with another person and I think it's in a lot of ways, related back to me and my why. My why is about creating, co-creating with others into a world that we all benefit from. And when you do so and you have a child, you're co-creating with this other being in soul and they don't have a voice like you do, but they definitely have an energy and they have an importance and they have needs, certainly, and we're working together to meet those needs and to understand each other. And it's like a very simple example of what it's like to co-create with another energy. And I wanna take it on a bigger level, because my why is bigger than motherhood, my why is bigger than joy for myself. My why is bigger than anything really that we've talked about thus far. My why is really about creating an experience that I am proud to be a part of creating an experience with other people where every single person is celebrated for their uniqueness, that every single person knows who they are and loves themselves for it, that every single person knows where they fit into society in a way that feels valuable and supportive for whatever their specific gift is. Every single person has the freedom to have the choice to explore themselves and to learn about themselves and to feel like, no matter what they choose, they will be safe and secure and supported and connected and loved and valued.

Speaker 1: 5:56

In all of the things we all want, I believe there's a future where that all exists and where there's a harmonious connection between all of the different types of people and energy, structures and truths that exist in the world today and where, rather than repelling people who disagree with us and saying that you're right or you're wrong or there's only one way to do things, that we start to realize that there are so many different ways to do every single thing we wanna do and there's so many different options and opportunities and creative approaches and there's so many different ways to collaborate with one another and to celebrate how the things that are in my zone of genus are not in your zone of genus and that together we can even do more faster because we can be aligned to our own specific zones. And I see this as huge potential in so many different avenues and so many different facets, and I love that. Because I hold this belief, I start to experience it in small doses, start to experience it as I start to bridge into my creations. But I see a world where it's beyond me, it beyond my little bubble of universe here, but that it's celebrated far and wide and that I get to now sit in an example of what is possible. That feels really, really important to me.

Speaker 1: 7:19

So many people out there, when you're building businesses, talk about becoming an authority. You wanna be seen as an authority in your field. You wanna be seen as the person who knows the things. I don't actually want that. I actually really struggled with this concept of leader for a long time. I've rejected it. I pushed against it. No, that's like, yes, I can feel the energy behind it and yet, no, that's not me. And the reason it's not me is, at least previously, the leader archetype has held hierarchy. It is held authority where I know something and you don't, and that's not truly what I think leadership is about anymore. It's not about authority. It's about being an example and being an invitation for others. It's about potentially going first, yes, but it's not about withholding knowledge or knowing more. It's just about showing up as somebody doing something a little bit different. It's about becoming more of myself and inviting you to do that exact same thing too, and that your version of that is going to look different than mine, and that's super amazing. It's about celebrating all of that and being an example, without shame and judgment, without all of the shoulds and have tos and supposed tos that we put on the way we're supposed to operate. It's about being an example in a very different way, and to me, that's today what I look at when I think of what is leadership.

Speaker 1: 8:49

Leadership is about being vulnerable in our stories and our experiences and honoring that we didn't always know everything we did. We may have judged ourselves before, but now we know new things and we have new lessons and we have new bridges of understanding and instead of sharing it in a way to vent it or get it out, we're sharing it so that we can share the lesson and the learning and the opportunity and we can find gratitude for ourselves and our journey and our experiences and also offer that perspective for everybody else. I was talking to somebody today quite extensively about a lot of different components, about what I want to create, and it was a really fun, fun exercise for me to get it all out and hear myself think and put it all kind of out there into the world and think through it all, and this piece about not being an authority but being an example and an invitation for others. But the other big piece that came through was about what it means to be integrity with myself. I'm somebody who has to walk my walk. I have to do exactly what I teach other people and I have to do so in every facet of my life. If I don't do that, I can't teach it, I can't talk about it, because if it's not true for my experience, how am I supposed to share it for somebody else? And it's not just something like oh, we teach this and we learn it, but we have to embody it, we have to be it. And so, because so much of what I talk about is unraveling trauma, traditional marketing tells you to deepen their wound and set yourself up as an authority and build in scarcity and urgency so that they buy. None of that ever worked for me. Being an integrity for me means not deepening people's trauma, not pushing those buttons, not hurting them or harming them or making their nervous system spike just because they better hurry up and thinking through everything that I'm doing and everything that I've led up and what's worked and what hasn't worked.

Speaker 1: 10:51

A lot of the times is when I've tried to do things because other people have said this is how we do them, and I'm curious if this is true for any of you listening, if you've felt like you've done things because other people have told you and then you've been frustrated when you didn't get the same results. I think a lot of people have this experience. I think everybody who's ever purchased numerous digital courses there's a small percentage that get those results? Yes, but a large portion gets told that you didn't do the work, you didn't do the thing or whatever reason. It didn't work for you and you don't quite know why. And I'm wondering if you ask yourself if some of that is because it wasn't an integrity with your soul, your values, your way of operating. Perhaps it wasn't an integrity with your orientation of energy and the way that you actually operate, what's important to you, what feels safe to you?

Speaker 1: 11:47

And so, as I'm unraveling all of this and thinking about all of this and I'm finding the common themes for me and what I want to share with the world, what I want to share with myself and my family, what I want to embody and experience, it really comes down to a couple of themes, and I expect these themes are already very present in this podcast, in this show, but I want to call them out and talk about them a little bit, because I think they're going to be even more present now that they're in. My awareness is such specific things and I've talked about I've definitely talked about one of them quite a bit, and that first theme is safety. I come back to safety every single time. Every single time I come back to finding safety in ourselves so that we can begin to Trust our self, trust our guidance system, trust our way of operating, trust our knowings, trust all of that. And if we're not safe in ourselves and our experiences, we're never going to figure out how to do that. But if we are safe in ourselves and we do trust ourselves, we start to take back the reins in a different way. We start to be the bus driver of our experience. We take back the pen and write our own story. Whatever analogy here works for you. But when we trust ourselves, we operate differently. But if we're not safe, that's what hinders that trust.

Speaker 1: 13:07

And so safety is something that I will continue to talk about and I will continue to harp on. I will continue to ask is that something that feels safe to you? Is that something your body feels safe to do? Is that something your mind feels safe to do? Are your emotions feel safe to experience, whatever this is for you? Coming back to safety is something that I think every single human on this planet should be asking themselves. Is this relationship safe? Is this experience safe? Is this whatever piece safe? Because, as a human, our body will stop us, our nervous systems will stop us if something doesn't feel safe and rather than judging ourselves for that, we need to honor the fact that our body is trying to keep ourselves safe. And how can, instead, we make this experience that we're trying to create safe or answer and respond to ourselves and why it doesn't feel safe, and start to unravel that safety in our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual selves has to be the first thing.

Speaker 1: 14:09

You know, I believed for a period of time that we could give people that safety. I tested this out in real time that if we could provide physical safety in a lot of ways like shelters, homeless shelters, women's shelters try to do. They provide a very physical, safe place for people experiencing deep unsafety in their lives. They provide a roof with their heads, they provide food, they provide some base level of safety. And the belief is just as in the hierarchy of needs that many people have seen out there, that is, that those basic needs are met. Once that that baseline happens, that people can then move on to the next set of needs.

Speaker 1: 14:52

And I used to think that if I could build a structure, if I could move people into my home I used to literally have this conversation with people if I could just move people into my home and they could feel what it felt like to be safe, really safe, feel seen and safe and connected to somebody who could see them, that they would have the space to figure out what else, what they needed or what else was next. And while I wish, I wish that that had worked out, because how easy would that be? I mean logistically not, of course. We can't just I can't just move the whole world into my house. No, but if I could, I could build a community or a space or a place that people could go, or something that I could find. I could help people feel safe, maybe for the first time ever in their lives.

Speaker 1: 15:42

But what I learned through my own direct experience is that, as much as I wanted that to be true, as much as I wanted the people who could just live with me to all of a sudden get what safety meant and they could get this level of trust in themselves and they could get what I had been trying to explain to them through their, through my mind that they could. They could pick that piece up and they could start to create it for themselves and they could start to bridge into what it felt like to be safe and other connections and what it felt like to be safe in other parts of the world, and I had this belief that it could happen that way. And what I have since learned and what I have since come to understand is that safety is not something somebody else can give you, as much as we want to believe that it's an outside of self thing. As much as we want to believe is, I wasn't safe because my parents did this, or I grew up this way, or I had this childhood trauma, or I had this experience or this relationship or all of the things as much as that's the potential origin of why we never feel safe. Safety isn't external. Safety comes from inside of self. Safety comes from knowing we got us. We got our back, no matter what. We will never let such and shuts happen, because we know who we are, we know what we need, we know what's important to us and we will never let ourselves down. Safety comes from that place, and if somebody else is solving your safety needs, your basic needs, you'll never see the fact that you got you. You'll never get that. You could create this, and when I let that idea go and when I realized I couldn't save people as much as my heart wanted to, and I let those people experience their own things and then eventually learn how to create safety in their own ways. I have seen them shift in different ways, I have seen them blossom in different ways and be able to have some level of financial security, to have some level of connections in a way that they never thought they could experience, and I think that's a really important thing to think about, because the next part I want to share with you guys is One of the businesses that I'm starting, and I've actually started this business a year ago, but it's only now that it's coming more to fruition, because in the United States, a non-profit has to be registered as a 5013C before you can accept non-taxable donations, and that process is not simple.

Speaker 1: 18:17

And so I started this business about a year ago, first filing the actual state pieces, and then I just this week got back that the IRS has approved my 5013C application, which is amazing news, because I've actually had a donor trying to give me money for the last nearly year since I've launched my book, and so what this means is that the Golden Haven Foundation is officially out there into the world and this organization. My vision for it is probably the most niched I will ever be. It's the most specific piece that I will ever have because it is directly tied to my direct experience with the legal system and the family court system. The Golden Haven Foundation's mission is going to be to help those who are fighting for custody from their abusers and their children's abusers, and it is directly related to the fact that this organization does not exist today. We have all of those shelters, we have all of the food stamps, we have all of the other organizations that help with this basic need safety. We do not have organizations out there helping with this legal fight, certainly not nationally. Some states have small pieces of support, but the majority of people out there. You're on your own. You can either get free legal help which doesn't support you. You cannot pay for evaluations, you cannot pay for the services you need and you just have to wing it with the family court system.

Speaker 1: 19:40

And I had the privilege of having the social and economic status that meant that I could have this fight that was required for me to actually prove my case against my ex-husband. That fight cost me $75,000, took over 18 months and caused a hell of a lot of trauma. It was a hard flip and fight, and yet I had the ability to begin to have the fight because I had the funding and the economic status and the social status to be taken seriously. So many people out there don't. That was loud. The moment I finalized my divorce, I realized that people in poverty, women of color, people in other economic situations, could not even begin to have the fight, let alone get to the place where they were mentally and emotionally prepared to have this fight and go to bat for their safety and their children's safety, and that pisses me off. And so what am I going to do about it? I'm going to make an organization where we're going to make change in this way. We're going to fight for that level of safety. But one thing that this organization is never going to do is provide basic needs, and this is why Because you have to be at the point where you can provide the basic needs yourself. You can create at least that for yourself.

Speaker 1: 21:03

The legal fight is a ridiculous amount of money. It infuriates me that every single victim, at their expense, must educate each judge and jury on trauma and trauma bonding and the victimization that happens, and mental health things and everything else that infuriates me, and that's where I can help. I can help by providing funding, I can help by providing resources. I can help by providing access to legal counsel and access to evaluators and access to professionals that understand each state's legislator, and so my goal is to partner with legal firms and evaluators and mental health professionals in every single state and every single province so that I have enough resources that, no matter where you live, I can help. But I don't have that today. We're starting at the beginning. We're starting at the very beginning with a dream and a vision and, officially, 501 3C, and I'm very excited that this is happening because I know that with this vision and with this dream that things can start to change and people can get access to the resources to find safety, not just in their basic needs, but in this next layer, where they don't have to live in constant PTSD fight or flight, fighting with an narcissist, fighting with somebody who's physically, mentally and emotionally abusing them and their children.

Speaker 1: 22:24

That is not okay. I'm not trying to rip people from their parents, not at all. Children belong in safe, safe households on both ends, and if the parent is not safe and they're unwilling to get the help that they need. That's when we need to step in and that's where we need to give these parents an opportunity for rehabilitation and opportunity to get help and support and when they, if and when they potentially choose not to, that's where we need to put the child's safety and the healthy parent safety first, because parents need to come first too, like our needs matter.

Speaker 1: 23:04

If we're not safe, if we're not at a place where we're okay and the other parent is really not okay, who's got these kids back? Who is able to be their voice when they can't? Some of these kids are really really young and can't even speak for themselves. That's where I get all worked up. So, before I go too deep down that rabbit hole, I just want to share that piece of news because it's very, it's very exciting and a bunch of people are messaging me and commenting and I know that this is going to be something big, because it already feels big. It already feels very important, and so if you're somebody out there listening and you have a connection to somebody who helps with funding and nonprofit startups or has a heart, and space and time to be a part of something like this, please, please, get in touch. You can email me at Amanda at the goldenhavenorg, and I would love to chat. So, moving on from that conversation, the other big piece this is a part of this the other thing beyond safety that came up in this last week is connection.

Speaker 1: 24:07

Connection is something I have chased after. I found safety initially after my divorce. I wanted people who could see me and understand me. Connection to somebody else, connection to a community, is eventually what we all seek. We want to feel seen, no matter what energy type you are, no matter where you are in the world. You, everybody as a human, seeks this. Everybody seeks feeling seen, understood, being physically present with people, connecting with people, sharing with people, understanding people. Whatever it is for you, we all seek it, and I saw it so much that I moved my family around a bunch of times to try to find where my people were, where was my tribe, where was my support system, and eventually I learned that my tribe was with me. My tribe follows me no matter what and whether, no matter where they live in the world. They're always with me. But I still have to keep the connection to myself and my own safety at the forefront, while also experiencing safety in those relationships and the more that I do that, the more people who find me and can collaborate with me and can build with me. Things like my nonprofit organizations, things like my for-profit organization, which is also being relaunched into the world very soon, can also very exciting for me to think about how I can create in a way that isn't just reliant on me. This is something new for me.

Speaker 1: 25:35

I'm one of these kind of people that doesn't ask for help. Very well, I don't like asking for help because, from a trauma perspective, I do it all by myself. I don't need to help because if I ask for help, that's where things go south. And so I have been that way since I was a very young child. I was a three-year-old that refused to get help dressing herself. I was me do it. As a teenager, I refused help. I didn't want to live at home, I wanted to be a grown-up. All of that is my journey and my story, but it's taken me 36 years now to realize I do need help sometimes.

Speaker 1: 26:12

It's still sometimes hard for me to admit, but I do need help sometimes. I can't do it alone, not if I want to do everything I want to do and what I'm finally understanding 36 years later, is that it's not that I need help doing the things that are innate to me. It's not that I need help doing the things that are most fun to me, because those are things I do. But what I do need help in is the things that I don't enjoy. There are places in parts in business, there are parts in life things that I don't like as much. They don't light me up, they don't bring me joy, but other people do enjoy them.

Speaker 1: 26:49

I'm a very big picture thinker person. I'm not a detail-oriented person, and that's okay, because there are people out there who love the details, who love to take notes of everything, who love to organize and database and catalog, and those people are fantastic at it. But if I ever want to collaborate with other people and be able to pass on information, I can't just say, hey, it's in my head, go, plug in and get it. It unfortunately doesn't work that way. We just don't quite have the telepathy where we need it for that to make sense. And so working with people who have a different level of emotional awareness and have a different level of detail orientation and bring something to the table that I don't have, and when I can bring my magic and they can bring their magic, we get to create something even more, and so connection for me is about finding the places that we can enable each other's magic. When we come together and we get to celebrate the ways we are different, they actually add more to this entire conversation. Whatever we're having, whether it's a business conversation, whether it's a relationship conversation, whether it's what we're going to make for dinner, doesn't even matter. When we celebrate how different we are and we come together, we actually are more than the sum of our parts. We are exponentially more powerful at our ability to manifest and create when we work together in that way.

Speaker 1: 28:18

If we try to assign things based on, you know, whatever our title is, say, in an organization, or whatever our title is in a family unit, it's not going to make sense unless we align specifically to that and that is exactly who we are. But almost none of us fit into assigned boxes. I don't really know very many people who enjoy the box of what mom and wife perhaps is supposed to do. Maybe I'm sure there were people out there that do 100%, but not everybody does, and there are definitely men out there who don't enjoy the label of what father and husband is supposed to do. But if we sit in the supposed two boxes, then we're going to continually fight against all of these pieces and we're going to struggle to ask for help because of all of the judgment we have about what we're supposed to be.

Speaker 1: 29:12

But instead, if we open up the doorway to things being different, perhaps, and we say what is my zone of genius, where do I shine? And what is my partner zone of genius? Or what is my friend zone of genius, or my child, or my coworker, whoever, and how do these fit together and what is the potentially low hanging fruit of things that neither of us perhaps want to do? But we can divvy up no problem, because the more we focus on our zone of genius, the more energy we create in the easier, perhaps mundane, set of tasks the taking out the garbage or the laundry tasks are, because it's not a big deal, because we get to focus on the things that really matter most of the time. You get to focus on the things that really matter to you most of the time, and so together we've created even more. And I think when we find those people, those people wherever they are, whatever those people are that really? They aren't the same as us. They see us, they get us, but really they compliment us. They compliment us and they bring something that we don't have that can be celebrated, and they can celebrate the things that we have that they don't have. And we get to come together in community and collaboration and produce something that neither of us could potentially have done on our own, neither of us even had the vision for on our own. That's where the magic is, and when we bridge that with safety and connection in this realm of possibility, that's where that's where the magic is. That's where the how the heck did you do that? Comes from. That's where this, this spark of genius, where this, this, that's where. That's where movements are started and that's what I, that's what I'm here for.

Speaker 1: 31:06

We talked at the very beginning about the values I have and the change I want to see in the world. I want the change that I want to see in the world to become a movement like that. I want to have that level of impact on not just my generation, the next generation. I want to have that level of impact on the planet, on the universe, on the potential for everybody out there. I want to have this level of impact. That is an invitation for every single person to step into their beautiful, unique magic. In come to a place where we work together to create a society that every single person is proud of.

Speaker 1: 31:43

I want to work together to stop the division of left versus right, red versus blue, black versus white, etc. Etc. I want to stop the division and the hate and the judgment. I want to come together, not just in unity and in absence of duality, but in seeing ourselves with not one, because we're not, we're not the same. We are all connected to every single person, every single energy. The more we recognize the power that comes from that and what stems in that and the potential in that, the bigger and brighter every single one of our futures, every single one of our children's futures, every single planet and universal being, and whatever your belief system is, the vaster and more beautiful it all gets to be, and so that's what I want to share with you guys this week.

Speaker 1: 32:37

Thank you so much for listening. I hope this was inspirational. I hope it gave you thought. I hope it gave you this idea of potentially thinking about your own why and what you were doing and why you're showing up and what that means to you and what the values are and what do you stand for. Why are you doing this every day? Think about that a little bit. Find somebody that you feel safe and connected and inspired by and share it with them, and see how it grows and how it evolves and how much bigger the potential becomes. That's it for this week. I'll see you all next week. Lots of love everyone.