Rising from the Depths: Transformative Strategies to Conquer Grief

0:28So, hey, guys, are you frustrated with where you're at right now?

0:33this is the Ed Myron Show all right welcome back to the show everybody so I have to tell you I've been watching this lady's work for years like watching her dance and on tv and I always thought how talented she was but lately I've watched her shift into a space she's actually probably been thrown into a space that most people are never prepared for but I've watched her rise with such grace and i really believe she was called for this moment um you've seen her on so you think you can dance she's a host a judge this year on the show you also probably know that you know she's had some tragic things happen in the last few years with dj twitch who she's married to steven and um we're just going to talk today about her journey her experiences what she's learned and um i don't know there's anybody on the planet more qualified to have this discussion today than you so alison holker welcome to the show thank you so much for having me you've already been someone that is like so inspiring to talk with so it's already an enjoyable moment thank you you um i just told you this off camera every once in a while a human being meets a moment in their life that they thought they were ill prepared for and then you watch them step into it they they may still have imposter syndrome like am i qualified for this or not but the conversation about grief i want to talk about today but also just like part of life someone may not be going through grief listening today but like they had a plan for their life and they were pretty sure it was going to go one way.

1:54And then in a moment, it's not. And that happened with you. I'm just wondering, first off, where are you in your grief journey? Do you think you have a handle on where you're at? Are you still every day sort of, I thought I had it and now I don't? I think you're kind of in a state with grief where you always are hoping you're on the other side, but then you have moments that are reminders and triggers. What I can say is I'm better at handling those triggers now. You know, it's never that it's fully gone. I always have memories that pop up that make me want to cry or or make me want to laugh but I've just learned how to control myself in it better you know I I'm a very disciplined person and I think the discipline of learning how to carry myself in my daily actions have really prepared me to be a strong mentally spiritual person to be able to handle whenever those kinds of things pop up in my life so it's not that I'm not still dealing with it it's just that I'm in more control of who I am in it do you think you do you think you have to know why something happened to process it completely meaning first off do you think you understand what happened number one we won't go much further than that today but like do you understand what happened and then because i think sometimes maybe someone goes through a divorce they don't i don't even understand what happened or their business field do you have to because i think our brain goes i have to understand this before i can move past it but do you think that that do you think you understand what happened and do you think that's even required to move past or through something?

3:19I think before all this happened to me, this is my first grief and my first trauma. So I never gone through anything like this, even into a small degree. And before this, I would have thought like, oh, we have to have answers because I'm a very like solution based person. So what happened? What's the solution to this? How can we make it better? What happened? What was the backstory? But now experiencing it, I've had to learn and understand that we are not going to know. and that is really really hard to get over what happened the why the could something have helped what you know is there something i didn't know is there something i knew and just didn't see you know it's all these things you kind of have to work past for yourself because at the end of the day that person is not here to tell me yeah and that is probably the hardest thing because i love someone so much and i did think that we were just going to grow old together and watch our kids grow old together and at the end of the day I feel so side blind you know and for me I never got to have closure with him and that is still something that's really really sad to me that I never got to have that and my kids didn't get to have that because we didn't see this coming but at the end of the day it's not my job to understand the why it's just my understanding that this was his choice doesn't mean it has to define my life or my kid's life moving forward so I'm trying to encourage myself to be like, you know what?

4:41I don't know why. And a lot of people want to know why they want to ask me all these questions, but I'm just like them. I'm just as confused, but for my kids, I want them to accept that and that it's okay. We just got to charge forward and make our own decisions in life. So beautifully said in many ways, externally, you're flourishing right now. Like I, I see you, you know, succeeding in your career. And then to be honest with you, no matter what you ever do on television and the different great things you have going on, the work you do right here is is it saves lives like i've had i don't know i've done like 600 shows and so when i travel people always ask me what's your favorite show which is like totally disrespectful to all these amazing guests i've had on right but i can tell you what my favorite show was and it's the person that had the smallest social media following i had a woman on my show named kayla stockline many years ago and um i think when she came on the show she had 2 000 followers on social media and she was a pastor's wife and he ended up passing by taking his own life and the reason that i had her on the show was i wanted people to understand that you don't have to process all of the grief to move forward in life and also i want anybody contemplating it quite frankly to understand the impact that it had on her children and whatnot yes so and so that was my favorite show and the most impactful show and so i'm just wondering what you would say to somebody there's someone right now listening to this or knows someone that is it's they're considering something not real smart in their life you know they're considering i think most people there's some stat out right now like 46 of all young girls under 18 have considered suicide in the last year right what would you say to somebody who's just having those types of thoughts because you've lived with the consequence of a loss in your life with your children what would you say to someone that's thinking those thoughts being brutally honest you're affecting every single human you've ever touched in your life because truly you can love someone so much and be so loved and if you don't see that all those people you've affected are now going to live with some sort of trauma and every single one of those people go through a moment everyone even even minuscule when something like this happens every single person that you've been involved with or just friends with or family with or or just an associate at work everyone's going to think back of what if i did something different what if it was me what if it's something i said what if i caught something and then you're so you're now having everyone internalizing and judge themselves thinking maybe it's their fault and that is a really hard place to put someone in because i've had to have these kind of tough conversations with my kids even my seven-year-old boy has been like mommy if I was just nicer and it's it's a tough conversation I have to have with someone because you have to allow them to feel it because it's a very real feeling but it's not their fault you know but it's really hard for someone to not believe that with someone that they're so close with and they're trying to comprehend how could someone do this why did this happen it must have been something I did and it's it's I've done that on all my kids have done it everyone around me I had an assistant who was like what if I would have just said something better that morning I was like no no no we can't do that to ourselves because at the end of the day this was someone else's choice has nothing to do with us but even having someone have to go through that and all that trauma for themselves it's asking a lot of people you know and well it's It's a tough thing to have people really start questioning who they are in it because it's not them.

8:23Oh, my gosh. We could stop right now. I'm emotional. There's two things about you that make me emotional. One is what you just said. And then I prep really hard for interviews. So I've watched a lot of things you've said and talked about. And something like really stood out to me that you said about Stephen. And I want to talk about it for a minute if you don't mind. And here's what you said because I suffer from this. And so now I'm going to flip it for those of you that don't see if you all relate to what I'm about to say. What I heard you say was that he was this loving and giving and amazing man.

8:58However, he had a hard time receiving love from other people. I just got chills all over my legs. And I have been open on my show about this fact. I almost think I give an abundance of love and attention to other people almost to compensate for the fact that I just very rarely allow myself to feel loved by people. And I have so many that do love me. And it's not like I feel like they don't love me. I just don't feel loved. And when I said it, I wonder how many people live like that. Could you just talk about that for a minute? Because it's something that deeply impacts me. I have this amazing life and these amazing people.

9:37but I don't just allow myself the gift of feeling loved sometimes by the people who love me the most.

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10:13Steven had a really hard time accepting compliments or accepting how talented he was or accepting how many people he was impacting he was always like no no no I can do better I need to be a better human I need to give back more or not I'm like not good enough right now even when it came to dance he'd be like no I need to be training again like I've really fallen off like he was so hard on himself so when he would receive compliments he would almost throw it back off of him yeah and not just by like not accepting it like oh he'd be like i need to give that love to someone else yeah and he constantly pushed himself to make everyone else happy around him and i think he just kept throwing out throwing out without filling his cup and it's not because he wasn't receiving that love he was receiving an abundance of it from everywhere everyone adored him is because he was but he was constantly being like i don't deserve this i don't deserve this so i just feel like he kept depleting himself of it you know a lot of people great word great word a lot of people think that he had this really extroverted personality because he was twitch but if you knew him if you knew steven he was an introvert if he would go to a party he'd be the one in like a corner reading a book i relate to all of this he did yeah you know and so there was times i look back and i'm like oh i wish i wish he would have been like i need more help through this instead of trying to do on his own but he'd come home from giving all this energy and giving so much lover he'd be like i need a second and he'd go sit in the corner in the dark and my kids and i you know he would always tell us like his safe place was our home because we would let him have those moments and now we look back i'm like oh like if we would have just pushed him to get therapy through that but he always was like no no no i just need to like recharge myself you would always say like no no I just need a moment to like you know so I thought he was like in meditation reading his book kind of building himself back up just because he is an introvert so every time he was giving all this love and giving all this energy it really wasn't him it was taking a lot for him to do it and then I think also on top of that that's the thing that everyone compliment him on is oh you're the most loving you're the most joyous you give so much to everyone that I feel like he would never let him take a day to not do that because well that's not twitch twitch is a giver twitch gives love twitch gives energy he gives joy and so he'd push himself every single day to the umps degree even at the grocery store like he would give everything to everyone and and i even would tell that that's your gift and sometimes i'm like oh like i would have just encouraged him to be like you are this way but you hold on to some for yourself oh my gosh you know because i i just think he had this spirit but it was he was building himself up by thinking if i give it i'm a better person yeah you know and and and if i'm honest i thought that was a beautiful thing and i still do but now i've just learned the other side that like you have to be able to hold on to love and know that you deserve it when someone's giving you a compliment just say thank you right when someone's hugging you just receive it instead of pushing the energy back onto them you know and and allow yourself to feel that I think also he didn't love himself, which is maybe why he didn't accept it.

13:24Because he was constantly on this journey of being the better human, the better this, the better that. Instead of just being like, you know, it's interesting. I'm kind of jumping now. One of my really good friends the other day was like, Allison, do you ever just tell yourself you love yourself? I was like, I don't think I've ever done that. And it's not that I don't think I, you know, I think I love myself, but I've never just said it to myself. And now I'm making a conscious effort to do it because, like, sometimes I look at Stephen's position. I'm like, did you ever love yourself? Because why didn't you feel like you could receive this love?

13:57You know? Allison, maybe that's the most impactful five minutes for me ever on my show. I relate to every single word you just said, every single word that you just said, from the introvert part to the putting it out to depleting yourself. And I have to think if you're driving in your car right now or you're listening to this, If you relate to any pieces of what she just described, you need to evaluate that. You need to love yourself. You need to be willing to give yourself the gift. I'm telling you, you're stepping into your power right now. The fact that you can articulate that in a way that hits me so deeply, I relate to every, excuse me, sorry, it gives me emotional, every single word of it.

14:35And I think so many people deplete themselves. And I don't know what happens in the worst moments when someone makes these decisions. I don't know. I know you don't know. And we're not here to figure that out today. but I wonder in some cases if they've just literally depleted themselves completely. She's nodding in an affirmation with it. They just become that empty tank almost. I wonder if that's what happens. Because they're such a lover. A lot of people look at it as a pain and ugly thing, but he was such a lover of life and people. He was someone that made you feel seen. I think that was his gift.

15:13you can really see into you and you know there's very rare people that like you meet that make you become a better person from just being around them i wonder if that part the other part you said of being the better you being the better you obviously i'm one of the champions of that in the world i've got a good friend who's going to therapy right now and he's like i gotta fix this i'm all screwed up i said what if it's that you aren't all screwed up but you just want to be better in other words this sometimes by the way i'm a huge advocate for therapy heck one of the sponsors here as a therapy sponsor, right?

15:44But I also think sometimes we go there, I'm a mess, fix me. What if it's like, I'm great as I am, I just want to be better. And every once in a while, I think everybody in life, and I'll let you speak to it. Yes, we want to grow and expand and be better. But an acceptance and a love for who we are right now gives us the strength to be a catalyst to grow. If it's always that you're moving away because you're not good enough, at one point, you can't keep running away from yourself you should be running towards who you want to become but not away from who you are all the time does that make any sense yeah no it's interesting because i truly honestly for years i was like oh i can be a better person like really into self-help books and like motivational speakers i love to like always be pushing myself you know with life with being a parent with education with career i'm always pushing myself to like one-up myself all the time which is in a lot of ways why people succeed it's why you're so it's one of the reasons why you're so successful but at the end of the day something I've learned that is probably the most powerful thing that I've learned for myself and I'm trying so hard to teach my kids is existence is enough just existing because life is the gift so for me what I have learned is me just choosing to wake up and being present in the moment I'm doing my job that's all we're here to do is to experience and so I'm trying to remember that like as much as I want to push myself me just being right here in this moment that's everything and I get to do that every single day and make that choice just to be here and show up and just you know experience whatever in this moment is supposed to happen from the universe and I never felt that way before I was always like trying to prepare for everything and like be the most educated in the room or the most blah blah and it's like no just walk in yeah just walk in and I never I never understood that and I I just think that's a really powerful thing that people can find balance in because I think you should push yourself.

17:38But also if there's a day you just want to be here, great. You're so right. I think there's seasons, right? Yeah. I think there's seasons where you're like, I am ready to go and go to the next. But when you never have an off season, which is something I've struggled with. I just have never had. I'll get around to that off season where I'm just going to be like, I'm pretty good right now for a while. I've just never gotten around to it. It's almost like running an engine full speed all the time. At some point, you have to let it sit in neutral for a little while and just heal up a little bit. I wonder one thing about you.

18:12By the way, one of my favorite things to do when I'm feeling bad, this just started lately. I'll just go to your Instagram and I'll just watch you dance. By the way, she's like this unbelievable dancer. But like it's just like a break. I'm like, oh, it's a beautiful thing. And it's like you're having a good time on Instagram. And I watch that and you're really giving me a gift when you do it. However, I wonder if there's, when you go through grief, is there a part of you that then feels guilty in the moments when you are happy? When you are enjoying yourself? Like, oh, I shouldn't be doing this.

18:42Do you have some of that? A thousand percent. I'll never forget the first time I laughed. And it was actually with my daughter. Luckily, it was with my daughter who's 15, Wesley. She's such an amazing spirit and so well beyond her years and knowledge and experience. but it was about two months after our situation happened with Steven we were in our kitchen and we were actually discussing him we were going over memories and we just busted out into laughter like cackle laughing and then we immediately stopped at the same time and we're like we didn't know if it was okay and then we had to process these emotions of telling each other and convincing each other like no this is good I think it's okay that we're laughing I think you want us to but i'll never forget that moment in my kitchen just us literally laughing and then stopping and immediately feeling so bad and remorseful thinking it was such a terrible thing for us to do because it wasn't that we were mocking him or anything it was just we were talking about such a beautiful time with him but then it still made us feel icky because is it okay yeah and then we discussed it we're no we should we should we should be having laughter again and smiling again but there are definitely moments that not even just for myself but i'll say for myself i sometimes feel remorseful that i'm moving forward and continuing to champion my kids to move forward but i think the biggest thing is i get it from other people i was going to ask you that you get some flack for that oh i absolutely so you get flack if you're having an enjoyable moment in your life because you had a tragedy in your life you're no longer allowed to have an enjoyable moment am i understanding Really?

20:15Yes. It's been a really interesting journey as I've been trying to pivot myself into a forward motion and help my children forward. There's been a lot of feedback from people we know, close ones, friends, family, people we don't know, associates, social media of people being like, she's too happy. She seems okay. And it's not that I'm totally fine. It's like I have pockets of all the different emotions of crying in a corner, being really sad, laughing with my kids, but then also just being completely angry. I feel like I'm experiencing all of it. But because I share more and more joyous times, people are very upset about it sometimes.

20:55And it's something that I've come to learn that because people are experiencing their own kinds of grief, they want me to be where they are. and I and or wherever you know any different experience that they're having so it's usually people's own insecurities or where they are but at the same time it hurts and it crushes me sometimes and I've also come to realize that we really honor the dead more than we honor the living and it's I I live a lot of my life wanting to honor Stephen and a lot of people say to me like oh honor him every day like you get up every day for him and yes I do but really I'm honoring my children and myself you know and i i've just come to know that a lot of people want to see me honor him for the rest of my life and i i will but we could also honor the people that are here and making conscious choices of living a better life wow wow wow wow yeah that's uh amazing that you know first off what you just said is amazing but the notion that really all you should do on Instagram every day is bring us a bunch of pain and sadness and grief and as if that's the way that you honor somebody in your life.

22:10Or I love this notion that it's too soon. Yeah. As if there's some time frame in which it's appropriate for you to have an enjoyable moment of your life or have some normalcy in life that outside your home someone's got some time clock and okay now you're allowed to. Yeah and it's interesting because at the end of the day I think sometimes because Stephen was such a prominent figure and so idolized for beautiful reasons. I think sometimes people forget that I am still a mother. Sure. You know, even if I wasn't a mother, we should want people to move forward. But I am a mother. Right. So I need to encourage these three children and be an example to them, but also help them to become better versions of themselves and know how strong they can be through this and that this does not define them.

22:53Beautifully said. You know, and so it's I think sometimes people forget that for me. They do. And by the way, that's huge. There's someone very close to my family who's lost his father in a similar way. And I love him. He's like a second son to me. And one of the things that I'm very careful about with him, by the way, this could be you come from a family where there was a divorce or someone went to prison. It doesn't have to be the situation you went through. Yeah. But what happens with kids especially is, or even the spouse that's left behind, is that becomes their identity the rest of their life.

23:25Oh, she's that. Or the kids, they're fine. At some point, someone's allowed to establish their own identity in their life. So always tell this young man that you're not just the son of someone who had this situation happen. You're your own man. You've got your own memories, your own dreams, your own life to live. The best thing you could do by honoring him is not to be identified as your primary identity. And whatever the loss is in your life, everybody, if you start to attach that previous time of your life as your identity. I was a high school football player. I was a quarterback. I used to have a business.

23:57I had a great relationship. So-and-so and my family's passed away. That identity keeps you locked into the past. There's two frames of reference in life, everybody. There's people that live their life out of vision and dreams, and there's people that live their life out of memories and the past. And you are either one of those two types of people. And even if they're good memories, they're memories. They're the past. The way you create new ones is not by always looking at the old ones. We all have those friends that are around us that go, you remember when? You remember when? And they're cool for a little while.

24:28But my favorite friends are like, hey, what do you got going on right now? What are you excited about? Being present in the moment and thinking about the future. So I celebrate the fact that you do that, and I hope that you do more of it. By the way, one thing you have done to honor Stephen is you have this book, Keep Dancing Through a Boss Family Groove. You wrote that together? Yes. See, this is what most people don't know. So talk about it. By the way, it's beautifully illustrated. By the way, those books aren't easy to do. They're expensive, by the way. Most people don't know this, but illustrative books, these things are pricey and very difficult to do.

25:00But I didn't know. It was a great book. I didn't know. You did it together. Yes. We wrote back in, I believe, 2021 into 2022. And it was a testament to our family. We wanted to share a day in a life with us because we do and always did believe together in teaching our kids about affirmations. Every single day with my kids, like even this morning, it's like I'm strong, I'm smart, I'm beautiful. I'm kind my son it's I'm handsome and then I always say to them we do that and they finish out with saying the hard things it's really cute I love that yeah and then our words become and they say our reality um so because I want to encourage them to always talk kindly to themselves um but we wrote that to encourage parents to do that with their kids to get their kids learning how to be kind and that the people that are talking to you in your head all the time is yourself um and so you have to encourage yourself and be your biggest champion so we wrote that this and it just follows each one of our kids going through very very light-hearted complications in their day but the fact that you can lean on each other with using encouraging words yeah um and not just coming from the parents we actually in the book wanted to also just show the siblings can do it with each other and support each other in it that's a rare thing in the world today right we all have kids like actually a brother saying something nice to their sister that's something we should actually encourage a lot more i love yeah and so we were so proud of this book it'd been a dream of mine to write a children's book since like i mean since i had my daughter wesley i'd always wanted to do it and share that and just for us because you know books is a big thing in our family so i just thought it'd be a really nice thing to do um and i'm really proud of it because it was scary to put this out there i'm truly it was really scary um you know there's always like backlash anywhere and with any choices you make but i was like again you know we keep talking about purpose in God and the life I'm now in.

26:49And it just felt like a message that was too strong to not be received. I mean, it, the title of the book, Keep Dancing Through, when I read it, I was like, yeah, I am. I'm going to keep dancing through and I hope to help others. And you know, it's not even, I would like to say selfishly it's for me and my kids, but really it's also for everyone that's followed our family. I was on TV the first time when I was 18 years old. Stephen, I think we're around the same age, his first time being on TV. And we've had people following us this whole time and championing us and cheering us on. And they've had a hard time from this as well.

27:25I don't look at anyone's grief as being more or less or more important than the others. And I was like, even for other people that have followed and my family from when it was just me being a single mom to then marrying Steven, then having more kids, all those people that have been rooting for us that are affected by this as well, this is kind of a chance for me to say like hey yeah you can also keep dancing through this i love the title of the book there's a great quote i'll mess it up but by gandhi where he says i will not allow you to walk through my mind with your dirty feet and it's such a great quote right which i probably just messed up but i know i need to write that one down that's really good and people do this to us all the time criticism but oftentimes we do it to ourselves as i've looked back through my own life the reason i do this work is too many times that person walking through my mind with their dirty feet has been me in my life.

28:14And so that's why these affirmations, these things that we say to ourselves matter. Overall, how has this changed you? Like overall, having this experience, has it changed you from your faith? Has it changed your perspective on life? What matters? How has it altered you, do you think? Or do you not know yet? I think I'm trying to figure that out, actually. I love that kind of a question because I love when I have a question, I'm like, I don't know exactly how to answer that. But what I have learned is that life is so beautiful. And there's this thing I love to say. I used to say it, and now I'm saying it again.

28:48Romanticize your life. Romanticize it. Your whole face just changed. Like, everyone, to some degree, is going through something. You're going through a pain, grief, a breakup, a trauma, unfortunate experiences. Everyone's experienced something. and no one's is more important or less important who are you going to be after what are you going to choose to be what are you going to choose to do with it what do you choose to encourage your life further and move into a different path for yourself um and even going back a little bit to what you said is something I've been working on the last couple months is who am I now and I think I'm a better human.

29:32I think I am a lot more conscious in just what existing is. And I am more grateful every single day. I didn't go the opposite way. I went more, I've always had a lot of gratitude for life, but now it's different. I'm so grateful for the chance to wake up every single morning and make choices. And I'm also grateful to experience really awful terrible things. Yeah. Because how am I going to get through this? I can get through this. I can choose a different life i can make a lesson of it and i can encourage other people to not do this i can encourage people to live this way and and i just choose to i don't know i it's such a complex question for me it's a lot of things but i also don't have the exact answer i'm gonna give you a weird one this is one like people are gonna go this is a bizarre thing to say but if you actually think about it i might be right some of the most difficult things i've gone through in my life and i've not had to gone through what you've gone through so i don't want to equate those at all in some weird way one of the ancillary gifts god's given me through them is some of the pressure's off me now and what i mean by that is like like you're so successful in your career but i'll bet before this that the success in that career probably meant a little more to you than it does now it almost like takes the pressure off like you kind of start to understand there's an end to this for all of us it's going to be okay either way and to some weird way even when my dad passed away he lived a full life but it's straight one of the tiny gifts was some of the pressure was off me like i watched this man i love like his career mattered but at the end like how much did it matter do you know what i'm saying and so in some odd way it's almost like i'm just running up the score yeah i get to run up the score either way i win i'm alive does that make any sense at all it does take some pressure off in odd ways i actually do i maybe even an answer kind of like what I've been feeling without being able to articulate it but it is it's more of like whatever I'm doing daily whatever I'm doing with my kids whenever I'm doing with my career none of it really matters to me except what's the energy and vibration I bring to it yeah what what are people gonna walk away after they've meet like meet me you know it's like you might not remember my words you might not remember you know the cool dance I did or what I said on this cool TV show it's yeah what is the feeling I gave you did I help your life did I encourage you so it's more of like the vibration I'm sending to people that I worry about now.

31:52Yeah. I can tell you you're changing and saving lives today. That's no exaggeration. You're literally changing and saving lives. And it's abundantly obvious to me that in some way, one of the gifts of this is that you were chosen for this moment. It's impossible not to be true. The way you articulate the depth of what you say, what you feel when you say it, this is clearly a human being, a beautiful human being who has been chosen for this moment and this calling and it's odd because even whatever i've been chosen for me really why me i'm all screwed up in the last person but i'm telling you in your case it's really really obvious what about your faith has it changed you and i can i say who your pastor yeah of course your pastor is one of my great friends erwin mcmanus um has it changed your faith your you because for a lot of people they might go through this so like they doubt god i've been going to the mosaic church for years.

32:49You know, there was like during 2020, obviously that kind of like pivoted me off a little bit just because we couldn't go. So I got a little bit off of the habit of going like on a regular basis to the actual church. And I've been so grateful to really find myself back there again. He was one of the first people I called to talk to. I knew I needed him. He's just such an incredible spirit with such encouraging words and honesty too. And we'll go there with you into depths and ask the right questions and help you navigate this space from a really healthy healing manner and i go all the time now where i stay really good in touch with them because i do need them i don't think before i was willing to admit that like when i when i started going back to church it was just like oh i i enjoy being here it's a great energy you know yeah and like oh i'm going with my friends yeah now i'm willing to admit that no i need this energy in my life it's necessary for my health.

33:43And I think just being a person that's always so independent and always doing all the right things and doing my cold plunge and doing my song of time, like, oh, I've got my life together. I think being willing to say, no, I need this. Yeah. This helps my soul. This puts me in the right place was a hard thing for me to admit. So that's the difference with my faith now is I need it. Oh my gosh, you're so awesome. So awesome. All right, a couple more things. this flew by maybe faster than anyone that I've done we've talked I want to unpack forget let's step out of the grief world for a second yeah we've talked a lot you brought energy up a few times one of my favorite topics because I am a Christian I'm a person of faith but I also cannot deny the frequency thing that you've and I discussed like truth vibrates at the highest frequency hope dreams vision encouragement vibrates high discouragement hate lack of tolerance vibrates real low and you can feel it someone who dances, you bring in energy.

34:37You feel something when someone dances, right? And I'm conscious of that too. What am I making somebody feel? It's amazing to me how many human beings go through life and they don't understand. You're always making people feel something. And being intentional about that matters. So just discuss, like, it could be from a dance perspective, how much you think energy, I think us not being conscious of our own energy reserves, the energy we put out, the energy we feel, the energy our environment brings to us, Just energy in general is like life fuel. Yes. Right? What would you say about that? I believe in high vibration.

35:10I believe that people that are disciplined in their life create a lot of self-care, self-love, self-compassion. And those people that are disciplined in their spiritual health, their mental health, their physical health, I just feel like they vibrate differently because they're confident. and they know themselves so well and they know what they can bring to the table that they're able to now give to other people. It's a different kind of thing because if you're someone that doesn't know yourself and you don't have discipline and you're not making the right choices, you're not going to be able to help someone else in that journey to become a better version of themselves.

35:44You have to be the better version of who you are and really help everyone around you after that by not even having to do anything, but just vibrating higher, knowing who you are, knowing what you love, disciplining yourself every day, making the right choices whatever your choices are because everyone's choices are different yeah you walk into a room with a different kind of energy that just affects everyone and not from like an ego place of like oh i want to be like them they're so cool like oh yeah i want i want to feel that way yeah what are they doing yeah and then if you're someone that they actually you know are willing to ask you can say oh well you know i do this that or the other and for me it's like Like, I've always been a very disciplined person, a very organized, task-oriented person.

36:26And I think that that, in my past, in that discipline, is what has really made me get to where I'm at today. Because even through this grief, I've never lost out on my disciplines. Do you know what I'm saying? Like, I work out every day. I get in my sauna. I do the cold plunge. I am active in, like, my organization. My home is clean. I clean up after. Those things, and maybe those aren't the same things that make other people feel like they have self-love. but for me not losing out on those things yeah keeps me going every day yeah and it's and it shows me like okay i did the hard thing today i did things that most people will never do and i made that choice and i think when i walk into a room i already know for myself it's not about me being cool for people for myself i know i can show up yeah because i know i deserve to be where i'm at because i've worked really hard to be where i'm at but not necessarily just the cool career i've been working on myself yes yeah and i think those people just have a different vibration about it because it's a different kind of confidence because you know you know you're doing the work and you can believe in yourself and I can rely on myself I don't rely on other people and I think you feel that from people I don't rely I'm not a you know what it is is um almost like oh this sounds terrible a little bit like mostly energy vultures people that need to take from your energy but then there's the other people like no I can give you energy because I've worked on it you know I want to be one of those people I want to be one of those people that walks in the room and I've done so much work for myself but also can keep stuff for myself but I can give back to everyone.

37:52I think you are. I think you are that person. You know, one thing to check, everyone that was listening, I was thinking about what you were saying. For you parents, it's easy to slough that off. Hey, I'm an energy giver. I'm not an energy taker. But then evaluate every area of your life. You said something earlier in the interview where Twitch would come home and go, hey, just give me a moment. I'm going to be alone. One of the things I evaluated later, and it really bothers me to this day, is I didn't always bring that energy to my home. meaning I gave so much out into the world, right? Do you relate to this?

38:23Like so much out into the world that when I got there, I was almost like, okay, I'm here to rest and recalibrate. Forgetting my daughter and my son needed that. My wife needed it. My mom, my sisters, they needed that energy from me. And that was the place. I showed up as loving and caring and joyous, but I didn't show up with the energy at home because I was so depleted. That's why what you said earlier meant so much to me. I was so depleted. And it wasn't until, I don't know, my daughter said something one time. Like, Daddy, you're so, with everybody else, you're tired. I'm like, wow, like I don't bring it here like I should.