Transforming Backlash into Growth: Lessons in Accountability and Transparency

Can you imagine what happens when our personal journeys take unexpected turns? As the host of this episode, I found myself in the middle of an unforeseen backlash arising from our first guest interview. It made me question my approach, and in time, I realized the importance of maintaining a delicate balance between sharing our stories and taking responsibility for our actions. This episode is a narrative reflection on the importance of transparency, vulnerability, and accountability when it comes to storytelling.

Adding a fresh layer to my personal journey, I also share experiences of being at both ends of judgment and how mindful understanding can lead to compassion and support. Amidst all the excitement of my recent TEDx event interview, I echo the sentiment that life is about embracing the thrilling and challenging moments alike. As an open letter to all listeners, this episode also includes the announcement of an upcoming live event - a safe space for community interaction. With gratitude and anticipation, I invite everyone to join in as we continue our journey of exploration and growth.

To join the live launch or watch the replay:
https://www.facebook.com/events/1395559714722547

To learn more about the community launching: https://www.amandaquickhealing.com/community

To work with me:
https://www.amandaquickhealing.com

Support the show

To learn more about Amanda and ways to work with her visit amandaquickhealing.com
To purchase her book visit thesextraffickerswife.com
To join the community visit amandaquickhealing.com/community

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:36

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Amanda Quick Show. I'm your host, amanda Quick, and I am really excited, a little bit apprehensive, and it's time to dive in. This week has been intense, challenging, frustrating, exciting all of the things and I do not believe I'm alone in these feelings and I feel like this is as good of an opportunity as any to talk about it, because it's been crazy. This week was the first time I deleted an episode of this show and it did so in a way that I certainly don't take back. I don't regret, but it really caused me to sit and think and pause about what it is I'm putting out in the world and why I'm putting out into the world and what my values are, what exactly I'm doing with myself, with this show, with everything, because I certainly didn't expect this to play out the way it did. I had an idea a couple of weeks ago to start inviting guests on the show, but not in the way a lot of people do. Guests not in a way to just share their stories, but in a way to help them, and to help them share things they're going through and do some coaching or healing and allow other people to see what sort of transformations or shifts are possible, and it's felt exciting. I invited somebody that I've known for, you know, on the Facebook world for some time, and she shared her story and shared what she was going through, and I immediately received backlash from her family, who was part of the challenges that she was sharing, and if you listen to the episode, it wasn't even really about the family, it was really about her feelings, but they were really upset and they threw around a bunch of accusations accusations about things that I'm directly against and I don't even believe they were being entirely truthful. But it just left me in this place where, well, what do I want to do Now? A media and podcast and everybody were fairly protected from slander suits because we're not the ones saying things, we're not verifying anything, and yet that's the threat, and I'm not somebody to back down from a bully no, not even in the slightest bit. But you know, very first guest on your show, you take pause. What exactly am I doing with myself here? Do this? How do I want to support people? How do I want to support people in a way that's really supportive for them and me and those who are listening? And so you know what I've come around to. What I've come around to is that I want to continue to support people to share their stories and it may not necessarily just be on this show, maybe there are other avenues to do so but I want to continue to applaud and help people who are set out to do that 100%. But I also really want to focus on people sharing their stories when they're sharing their stories from a accountable, transparent place, because the thing about coming on a show is it's really easy to say this thing happened and not want to give a bunch of details to protect everybody, and not in a bad way. But if we're not being completely transparent, then it leaves a bunch of questions in the air. And one of the things that I find sets myself apart from many people is that I tend to be overly transparent, overly sharing about all of the gory details, but I do it on purpose. It's an intentional choice to lift up the hood, to dig into the dirty stuff, to share the darkness, because we all have some and transparency, vulnerability and accountability are big values of mine that I really want to help shift in the world. I want to help shift people from sitting in. This is happening to me to. I'm playing my part in this. No, I'm not responsible for other people's choices. I am not responsible for the choice that people made to hurt me, to hurt my family, to throw accusations no, 100% no. But I am responsible for my part to participate in that relationship. I am responsible for how I respond to such accusations. I am responsible for how I show up after these things happen and what I do going forward. And none of us are going to get it right every time, the first time, the second time, the tenth time. It's not how it works. It's a lesson and a learning and a growth for us for what we set out to do and learn, and that's what I want to support in people people unraveling, not sharing their truth from a place of victimhood, but sharing their truth from a place of accountability, sharing the truth of. I really messed this one up. I didn't do the best thing and yet I'm standing here today with a huge amount of lessons and a huge amount of learnings and I got myself out of this situation because of that. That's what I really want to support. And sitting with all of that, how do I do that and what does that look like? And so I stand by taking the episode down because I wasn't clear in my intentions when we started. Maybe I will bring that guest back on to share, with different intentions. We're going to see because I have a bunch of like legal pieces I need to put in place just to make sure, should somebody come at me with slander suits, that I've got my ducks in a row. But it's not even the point, because this isn't about sharing our story and vilifying anybody. This is about sharing our story and our truth from our perspective, of what we learned, the choices that we made and how we made changes in our lives. I really want the reflections in anybody's storytelling to be themselves. You know, I tried really hard to not villainify my ex-husband in my book. I could have I definitely could have, I definitely could have shared more details about his personal journey that I knew, but I chose not to. I chose not to because this wasn't about his story. If he wants to write his book one day, he'll do so, but this is about my story and my awarenesses and my learnings. And, yes, he was a character in that story, but in the end it wasn't about villainifying him. If anything, it was about empowering me to no longer be the villain or the victim in my story because, ultimately, we are this creator of our reality. We are the ones choosing to participate in the belief systems that are creating this environment around us, whatever it is, whatever frustrations we have, whatever challenges, on some level, we believe this is the thing we need to be working on. That's a really hard one for people to accept. It is really hard for me to still accept, sometimes today, because I've done the work right. No, well, there's always new uncoverings, and so this process of sharing my book to starting this show to everything has been that additional lessons and learnings. It's been new information about what's important to me, and I think it's important to share this journey with everybody out there, because anybody who has a story or who wants to start a show or who wants to bring things out into the world is going to go through versions of this what do you stand for, what are you doing and how are you showing up for that and how is your actions being an example of those values and that mission? Essentially and I think that that's an important thing to get really, really clear and sometimes, yeah, it's going to evolve as we learn, but being really clear is the lesson for me this week. It's the lesson for me about finding those values and making sure that I also am embodying them, and so the reflection that I took of this experience was is there any place where I'm not being transparent, where I'm not being accountable, where I'm still sitting in the victim's seat? And the truth was, there was, which you know again, we're human, we're learning, and in my relationship, in my marriage, there was places where I wasn't saying exactly what I was feeling, because my husband already knew it was the same things he was feeling. We had conversations, but I didn't actually own that. I was frustrated to. I just let it be about him and so I let him take on all of the weight of that, instead of saying this is how I feel and this is important to me. And, honestly, I wasn't looking forward to the conversation, but I still did it. I still shared where I was at. I still shared that I realized there was places that I was being less than transparent because I was trying not to make things worse. I've been trying not to make him feel worse or me feel worse, and so I was just letting things be as they were. But that's how we get into these situations where we have expectations of somebody else that we haven't voiced. So I wanted to make sure to voice it, and there was no surprises because, again, these are things we've talked about already. I just hadn't taken ownership of my feelings, and by doing so, I think it really helps make things a lot more clear. I'm no longer sitting in a well, it's all. It's only his choice what to do. I'm saying this is what matters to me, and there's already all kinds of versions of this in relationship. You know whether this is. You know how we share our emotions, how we share the. You know the labor of the household, who pays the bills, et cetera. There's all versions of this, and ours happened to be financial conversations, but it doesn't even matter the what. It's more about how we're showing up in that conversation and not just putting all of the ownership and the weight of the decision and the frustrations and the feelings on one person and instead sharing both perspectives, and that's how we come to the table as two parties in a relationship. And so I had to realize I wasn't doing that in my marriage in a way that I could be, and so I had to do so, and the conversation went well and I felt better and I realized this was a perfect opportunity for me to kind of button up what matters. What matters to me, what am I, what do I stand for and how am I showing up, not just in my public face, in my interviews, in my show and in my business, but in my life too, with friends, with family, with my children? How do I show up there? Because, really, that matters more than you know. Love you all out there, but they matter a lot more to me than you know the public eye and so embodying that, taking honest ownership and accountability of my life, of my relationships, was how I took this opportunity to shift. And so what I want to ask all the listeners out there is to think about your values. What matters to you, what do you stand for? How do you show up in the world, and are the things that you're seeing are important to you the same things that you are embodying in your everyday life? Are you embodying the integrity that you request of others? Are you embodying honesty and transparency, if that's what you request of others? Are you embodying kindness, love, appreciation, non-judgmentalness? Are you embodying those things, or are you still judging other people who think differently or look differently or see a perspective differently than you do. I find that a lot of people out there claim to be spiritual Christian, whatever the pieces are, and they claim to love their neighbor and love people and see perspectives, but they sit in judgment of those people who operate, think or do differently than they do. And until we've lived our experiences in anybody else's shoes, we really can't judge them. We can say I don't think I would make that choice, but we don't know their lived experiences and we don't know the level of trauma they're holding. We don't know what their childhood was like and even if we know pieces, we definitely don't know entirely and we don't know how it impacted them on a mental, emotional, spiritual and physical level, and we don't know which version of them is most traumatized, that they're trying to make up for and whatever they're doing. And so I think as people go through their lives, so many times we project how we would act, how we would think, how we would behave onto other people and we assume that they're rude, that they're wrong, that they're whatever if they don't act like we did or we think we would in those situations. I've definitely done this and it's one thing that I try really, really hard to keep a mindfulness of when I'm looking at the outside world and recognizing that somebody else's level of trauma and understanding somebody else's perspective and stories and things that they tell themselves is different than mine. And if I can see them and I can really see them in their stuff and I can see who they are the good, the bad and everything in between. If I can see the trauma they're holding and I can just hold grace and space for them to unravel it in their own time, in their own way. If I can see the struggles they have and the judgments they're facing and pushing against themselves and if I can see the challenge that that is for them and that it's really having them question in some ways who they are and their relationships, and I can see that they're struggling to make decisions one way or another and they don't want to keep the peace and they want to keep things the way they are. If I can see that in people and I can also see the potential of who they are capable of being and becoming and what possibilities potentially lie ahead. If I can see all of those things in somebody at the same time and I can love them enough to give them their choice, their the freedom that they have to make, to make whatever choice it is, and I can see them and love them through that transformation. In my opinion, in my perspective, that is the most loving, kindest, most beautiful thing that you can do for another person is hold them in love without judgment. And the reason I see that is because what I want from those around me more than almost anything is exactly that To love and support me, to help me see perspectives when I may not see it and help me see my blind spots when I may not see them, but allow me to make the choice in the unraveling and allow me to find my way through things. Back when I was still with my ex-husband and struggling to talk to anybody who was feeling super-duper isolated. The biggest reason I felt so isolated was because of those judgments. It was because everybody had an opinion and a perspective of how they would behave, what they would do in that situation. Everybody wanted me to either tell them more information or almost gossip about it. They wanted the details and they wanted to judge my choice one way or another. They wanted to judge my choice when I stayed. And then there were those who judged my choice when I left and everything in between and those judgments, no matter how much they think they were quiet within themselves. Most people can feel when somebody else is judging them. I certainly can. I can feel. When somebody else has a negative opinion of me and I'm in the same room, I can feel that they go. I think I need to stay away from this girl. I can feel it. I grew up as a child being triggering. Just being in the room with certain people would bother them. I have a very strong presence and I have always known myself and not in itself, just existing in that human body form triggered even family members and still to this day triggered some family members. But I long stopped making me wrong for it. I stopped making this a problem because I recognized that the work that I have done is only going to continue to amplify that. But I also have now had the experience of being on the other side, being on the inside of that judgment sphere and feeling everybody else throwing their opinions at me, and that is not something I wish upon anybody and if you ever know somebody going through hard times, that is the last thing they need. And if you can't keep your judgments to yourself and I don't mean just out loud, I mean energetically if you can't hold them in loving space for their choice, the best thing you can do is stay away until you can. It's not easy to hold space for somebody who's making a choice that you wouldn't make, whether that's an illness, whether that's a relationship, whether that's career choices, whether that's any of it and all of the above, any of those things. When we watch people we love make those choices, the most loving thing we can do is allow that choice to be their own, allow that choice to be theirs and theirs alone, and hold them through each and every step of the way. So the other exciting thing that happened this week alongside all of this is I also had an interview for a TEDx event and I'm saying it out into the universe because I believe that I'm going to get this one the interview went fantastically well and, as I was reflecting on this before sitting down to record this episode, that such a challenging week emotionally, also being met at the exact same time with one of the most exciting things in recent times because that's been a goal of mine is to get on some bigger stages and to share my message in a bigger way, and TEDx is one of the biggest ones you can do, and so you know it's almost. It's just thinking through how you have to hold both pieces. You have to hold this excitement and enjoy and the challenge, and for me, being able to do that and hold both ends, that's how I want to show up in the world, because life isn't going to keep, it's not going to stop throwing curveballs I can pretty much guarantee it's not and so how do I want to show up in those? How transparent and vulnerable and authentic and all those things do I want to be. Whether it's a really big challenge or one of the most exciting things that's happened, I want to do the same thing in both energies, and in order to be able to show up really amazing in the interview, I had to unravel and realize where I needed to show up differently in my life in an emotionally challenging situation. I have to do both, and so do every single one of you. It's not just how we show up when things are good, it's not just how we show up when things are going our way or we get the job or the promotion or the event or the whatever. It's how we show up every single day, no matter what version of energy hits us. It's who we are to ourselves. It's how we show up from inside that really, really matters, and so the last thing I want to leave you guys with this week is an invitation. I've made a new decision that I'm going to be launching a new type of community. One of the biggest things I've worked on in the last three years has been safety and community. Finding my people and establishing safety in not just my physical reality, but understanding what emotional safety, mental safety, spiritual safety, what all of it means, and understanding safety and within community. I finally got the piece that I need to put this together and to try and invite, to bring people into this new space with me that want to go deeper. They want to go deeper into the same topics we're talking about here. They want to go deeper into their healing work. That want to and know that there's more. They know that there's more that we can uncover. There's deeper healing that can be done. This isn't just top level talk therapy, but there's real transformation here and those people that feel called to come. I'm doing a live event at 10 am on the 11th of November, which is just a couple of hours after this is going to be published, and if you miss the live event, you're welcome to join and find the replay. You can find it on my Facebook page and the group quantum impact community, which is where it will be live, and I will also link it in the show notes. The replay will be available and it will share all of the details, but I'm really, really excited to launch this into the world and I'm excited to bridge safety and community in a way that I believe is going to be supportive for everybody, and if you feel so called, I would love to have you, and otherwise I will see you guys all next week. Thanks a lot.