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Hello my friends and welcome to another episode. I'm so excited you are here. I'm especially excited to have you here for an important topic that I talked about exactly four years ago on election day in 2020. And today, if you're listening to this, the day that it comes out, it is election day in the US uh, November of 2024. And I figured that it is time to revisit this topic of how to feel okay, how to focus on getting through what might seem like a lot of things outside of your control.
A lot of scary things, a lot of things that can seem very doomsday for a lot of us. I see a lot of that on social media in the news and I know that it hurts a lot of our wellbeing and our mental health. And because I focus a lot on mindset work and yes, I typically focus on mindset work with respect to your careers. But a lot of the work that I do can be applied to anything. And I often get asked like how do we get our thoughts in order? How do we take care of our mental health when it seems like the world is a dumpster fire? And so today when there's likely a lot of emotion that's gonna come up for a lot of people. And in the coming, you know, weeks and months, I wanted to talk about this, about how to regulate yourself, how to feel okay when the world doesn't feel okay.
And if you're not in the US if you're listening to this after the election, this applies because as you'll see, the world always feels like it's not okay. And so you can apply this whether it's in politics or other things outside of your control. This is how I have learned to react to the world around me. Okay? So the thing that that I'm gonna start with, if you are new to me, if you aren't used to the thought work that I do, a lot of the work that I do is helping you understand how your own thoughts create a lot of your reality. So it's not to say that there aren't circumstances in the world that are hard, that are terrible, there are, but oftentimes our own thoughts and feelings exacerbate our experience of it. And truly the only thing we control, we don't control the wars or what politicians do or who's gonna be president, but we do control how we react to it.
That is the only thing we control. And any change that is going to happen in any country happens because of the way people react, because of the way people act. And so a guiding principle for me, something that I constantly look for is what do I wanna think in order to act the way I wanna act right? What thoughts are gonna serve me in this instance? It's not to say that I need to be happy about it or that I need to be like everything is fine. Everything is okay. That is not what I want you to do. That is not what I think is the best thing to do. Part of it, this is not about toxic positivity and always looking for the silver lining. It is simply looking at what is going to serve me in the end? What is going to get me to show up the way I want to show up?
Because I think ultimately a lot of us aren't showing up the way we want to. A lot of us are feeling really bogged down and sad and disheartened and that leads to a lot of hopelessness, which leads to a lot of doom scrolling and not much else. And nothing changes. And so I tell you this, having gone through the experience of being that person where I had sort of had given up hope on making any change, on doing anything that was productive because of the beliefs I had around the world and around the subjects that I was dealing with. So I'll give you a quick example of how I sort of learned to reframe a lot of these thoughts. If you don't know me or if you're new to this, like you may not know that I used to be a federal public defender. I went to law school in order to help people, especially within the criminal justice system.
I felt very passionate about helping a lot of people who are voiceless, who don't have the means to get the help that they need. And I felt very passionate about that cause and I became a public defender for about four years. And I was so angry about the injustice that happens within the criminal justice system. And that anger really just ate at me. It completely destroyed me emotionally. I felt extremely emotionally invested in the job that I was doing to the point where I burned myself out. I could not disconnect from work. I did not know how to compartmentalize and not bring my work home. I cried a lot, I felt a lot of rage. And it got to the point where I realized I can't do this. Like I'm gonna die if I continue in this way. I had a lot of anxiety, I had a lot of like panic attacks.
I had started becoming depressed and I really realized like for my own wellbeing. And at the time, uh, when I had my first son, I realized if I'm going to be able to show up as a mother to him, I can't keep doing this work. And so I ended up quitting. Now there was other reasons that I quit and I talk a lot about that on the podcast. So it's not to say that it was just this reason, but I realized that my unchecked rage really led me to having to leave for my own sanity and for my own physical and mental health. And I think back on that time now, I didn't have these tools. I didn't learn anything about mindset work at the time. And I really questioned like who did that rage help? How did it do anything other than take me outta the game?
That's all it did. It didn't change the criminal justice system. It sure as hell didn't help my clients because I left them. It didn't do anything. It caused a lot of grief for me. It ruined a lot of years for me. And it ultimately just took someone who was very passionate about this topic and who had the means to help and who had the education and who could help out of the game. So what was the benefit of it, right? I felt self-righteous. Like I definitely felt good about myself. 'cause I thought like, look at me paying attention, look at me being angry about this very real injustice. It's not to say that the injustices weren't real. The criminal justice system is horrific in so many ways. And so it's not to say that it was misplaced anger, it was, I think most people when you are paying attention should be angry.
But if I had learned to manage that anger and I had learned to channel that anger, I could have done a lot more than allowing it to simply consume me to the point where I quit. And I see that in so many aspects of social justice and so many aspects for change makers, people that want to make a difference so desperately that want to see change in their lifetime, that want to help make this world a better place. And instead of taking action and figuring out how to get themselves to be mobilized and engaged and figure out how they wanna make a difference, all it does is get us to lay in our rooms, scroll on our phone, get angry, maybe leave some comments somewhere, sign a couple petitions and that's it. And I know for most of us, that's not what we want to do.
And so I'm telling you from my own experience, I used to be the angriest all the time. I used to be the angriest in any kind of political argument, in any kind of dispute about international relations and war because I had so many opinions and I thought my opinions were obviously I thought they were right, but I also felt so righteous in them. And I felt like people had to understand what I was saying. And again, I realized I never changed anybody's mind. I never made any progress. I didn't do anything other than make myself miserable. And so I have since learned how to navigate the world in a much healthier way that allows me to show up in the way that I wanna show up. And so I come to you from that place. And so here's how I deal with it. Now, you don't have to deal with it this way.
You can decide that you don't wanna change your thoughts, that you want to have that level of rage and that is totally okay. You are perfectly allowed to feel whatever you wanna feel. I'm just going to kind of let you know how I have worked through or continue to work through when the world feels really heavy. Okay? Number one is I stopped waiting for everything to be great in order to feel okay. And what I mean by that is I understood that two things can be a true at the same time that the world can be a dumpster fire. That the world can have a lot of really horrible things and that I could still feel okay, that I could still feel joy, that I could still feel happiness, that I could still prioritize my joy, that I could do things for fun, that I could laugh.
That that did not mean that I was forsaking people. That did not mean that I was giving up on people. That did not mean that I was not helping. And in fact, it was that joy, it was that happiness. It was that rest. It was that it turning things off that allowed me to continue to do whatever the work is I wanna do in this world, right? I realize that those two things had to coexist. 'cause I realized that there will never be a time where everything is okay in the world. There just won't. And that is a truth that we have to come to grips with, right? I know it feels bad. I know we all want to believe in some utopia where we're gonna get to and everything is gonna be rainbows and butterflies. But that will not exist 'cause that is not the human experience because there is good and bad because there are a lot of traumatized people because there is greed, because there is power, because there are systems of oppression.
And so there will always be horrible things. Now I know that that might sound morbid and it's like maybe, maybe I'm not starting off on a strong point. But I will tell you that for me, when I started really accepting like I have this premise that I'm not allowed to be happy or I'm not allowed to take a day off, or I'm not allowed to turn off social media or I'm not allowed to do until everything is okay. And if that's the case, then I will never be able to do that. I will never be able to enjoy my life because there will always be some part of the world or something that is happening or lots of horrible things happening all the time. But that has always been the case. When people tell me like the world feels like it's a dumpster fire, I'm always like, when was the world not a dumpster fire?
When was there not war? When was there not famine? Where was there not people doing horrific things to each other? That's not to say that we just accept it, that we don't try to change it. But if that is my underlying premise of like I cannot allow myself to feel happy or I know a lot of people that feel guilty, I did too. I feel guilty going on vacation, enjoying my life, you know, enjoying whatever it is. When I see that there is a genocide happening, when I see that there's a war happening, I understand that. I'm not saying that, that it isn't. You know, that shows our empathy, that shows our level of connectedness as humans, that shows that like for most of us, most people are good people and do not wanna see the suffering of other people. But I realized like my suffering doesn't free those people.
My suffering doesn't change anything in the world. It just adds more suffering. And for myself, I started realizing that the more I did take care of myself, the more I did allow myself joy and happiness and guilt-free rest, the more I was able to show up in the way I wanted, the more, and I'll talk about that, the more I figured out how I wanted to show up. And I allowed that to be okay the more I actually did something other than just doom scroll. And so I think that while it might sound morbid when I say it in the beginning, I think it's one of the most important points is understanding that whatever happens in this election, whatever happens this month, this year, it's not to say that horrible things can't come from it. Of course they can. It's not to ignore that, but it's also to understand that that is simply the way of that the world is.
And we should work to change it. And I think that my second point, we'll get to this, but I think that when you sort of just accept, 'cause I think for a lot of us, the doomsday is like, oh god, this is some cliff we're gonna go off that we'll never be able to come back from. And that is simply not true. These things have happened throughout human history and they will continue to happen unfortunately. And we simply get to decide how we wanna show up to them. This is the next thing we are going to deal with. I really looked back at my own life and I was like, huh, look at everything that I've watched in just my lifetime in history. In every decade there has never been a time where there was just peace on earth for everybody and everybody was fed and there was no problems.
And so it's imperative to simply accept what is so that we're not arguing it. 'cause so many of us are spending our life arguing with reality. It shouldn't be like this, it shouldn't, but it is. Of course it shouldn't, but it is. This is what it is. And so how do I wanna show up to that? How do I wanna show up to that in my own life? Right? And that leads me to the second thing is to look at history. One of the things that calms me from the first point that I made is to simply look at how much we have improved in history. I understand that it doesn't fix everything, but I really do live by Martin Luther King's quote, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. And when you take a macro look, when you zoom out, and we're not looking at the, you know, very immediate future of the last 50 years, a hundred years really pulling out, you see how much has changed and how much has changed towards a more just and equitable world, right?
When you look at wars, it's funny like studying history. And when you look at wars and the brutality with which wars used to be fought, not to say that they're not brutal, they are brutal. But the fact that we even have rules of war now, it was never a thing. There was never rules, there was never, you know, governing bodies that were meant to overlook whether countries were overstepping. There was never even rules of whether you were allowed to invade other countries. Countries were just allowed to. And again, it's not to say that countries aren't doing horrific things. They are, there are colonialism, imperialism is very much alive, very horrible things happen every day. But simply looking at the way that we used to engage in wars the way that we used to, you look at racism, sexism, we have made progress. It is not as fast as we want it to be.
It was not nearly enough for what I think for most of us believe we need in an equitable society. But it has moved towards a more equitable place. And that just comforts me to look at like, yes, in my lifetime things are not gonna become rainbows and butterflies. We are not going to solve racism. We are not gonna solve sexism. We are not going to eradicate all the isms. We are not going to stop war. And that is sad. It is a sad fact. But we can work towards progress. We can look at incremental progress, we can look at what is changing. I take again, solace in, I didn't see this at the time, but when I was working in the criminal justice system, everything moves so slowly that it was easy to think that things weren't changing. It was easy to think that there was no progress being made.
And now looking back and looking again from like a macro perspective, things have changed. Things do get better. They just get better at a very slow rate. And that's really hard for a lot of us to deal with. And I'm not saying that we should have just merely accept it, but it's simply seeing that like just because it's not overhauled all at once doesn't mean that change isn't happening. And so when I look at it and when I know that like of course we need more strides, but when I look at history and I do see that progress is being made and I know that I wanna be a part of that progress and I know that that progress is not gonna be perfection and it's not gonna get to a place where I'm gonna leave this world being like, you know what? Everything is fine now, but I can leave this world knowing like I worked towards change and I didn't just give up because things weren't exactly the way that I wanted them to be.
And so that is the second thing that I constantly think about when I think about when my brain goes to this is the worst thing that has ever happened. It's not, it really isn't this election, all of it. Not to say that it can't lead to more terrible things. And it's again, not to minimize the suffering that a lot of people deal with, but I, I simply look back at the resiliency of human beings and how human beings have throughout history, always learn to fight against, you know, abuses of power and horrific circumstances in order to fight for change. And how that slow incremental change is still worth it. The third thing that I like to remind myself is that our brains are not equipped to take this much information. They just aren't. We were never evolved to know about every single atrocity that's happening in every part of the world.
That has never happened in the history of humankind, right? You usually only had knowledge of like the neighboring tribes around you. Um, when you look back in the last like hundred years, like with newspapers and radio and then tv, we did have more access to things outside, you know, our specific sphere. And yet even that was limited. When you, I look at like how I grew up and the news was an hour a day or something at night and that was it. And then you shut that off and you got to have some time to decompress and think about your own life again, that's not to say that we should ignore what is happening in other places of the world. Part of the beauty of technology is that we do get more information and more access and we have to figure out, you know, in real time very quickly how we want to process that information, what we wanna do with it.
But I think that what happens is that for a lot of us, we think that when we are taking in for information, we are doing something, it feels productive, but it's not. It's simply unhealthy. We are simply looking at, 'cause also with obviously the news, it benefits from showing doom and gloo. It definitely benefits from keeping you afraid, from keeping you sad. We're not doing a ton of news articles on all the beautiful things that people are doing around the world. We're not doing a ton of articles on people that are saving people that are helping, that are in communities that are mobilizing. Imagine if your newsfeed was filled with that all day every day and how you would feel, but it's not. We're showing every horrible thing that happens all the time. And it's okay to walk away from that for a little bit, right?
It's okay to understand that your brain wasn't evolved to be able to process that much information and then be able to function. And I think for a lot of us, we feel guilty, like as if we are turning it away, we're, you know, turning a blind eye. But it is simply about knowing like what is my capacity? What is the capacity that if I don't pay attention to, I'm going to shut it all out. I'm gonna completely either bury my head in the sand or become so hopeless and despondent that I can't do anything. And how does that help anybody? One of the things I had to learn about really quickly was you can't be knowledgeable on every issue as much as you wanna be. You can't, none of us are, right? I used to remember, like I used to feel so indignant and upset when people didn't know what was happening in Iran or when things were going on between Iran and the US relations and foreign policy.
And obviously it was absurd. I was young and dumb because I don't know what's going on with most countries around the world, right? Because I can't, how can I, the only reason I knew about Iran is because my family lives there, because I have a tie there because I'm more interested in that. And that is how everybody is with any type of connection that you have to something that means something to you. And that's okay. I felt like that the same thing when I started the work that I was doing in the criminal justice system. I know a lot about the criminal justice system and that is an advantage to me. That is so means that like I can do more work in maybe spreading more information or helping change things, but I don't know a ton about environmental law or maybe immigration and what's happening in that or family law and how it is hurting, you know, domestic violence survivors or whatever.
There's so many issues facing so many of us and you can't know everything. And I think you do yourself a disservice by trying to, it's not to say that again, that you have to bury your head in the sand and not know anything about it, any of it. But for me, when I started really figuring out like what can I focus on? What are a couple of issues that are really important to me that I really wanna make a mark on? How can I focus that and forgive myself for not knowing everything about everything else? How can I know that I'm a human being that has limited brain capacity to be able to take this much information in And while I would love to, it's not gonna happen. So I would rather focus on the things that I can and that's what I do. I decide on what I wanna focus on and I learn more about it and I read more about it and I decide how I wanna act and I decide when I wanna think about it so I can feel a certain way so I can make some incremental change in that area in a couple of areas.
And I don't allow myself to guilt and shame myself or allow anybody on the internet to guilt and shame me about the fact that I don't know everything about everything. Of course I don't how human of me, how perfectly flat of me, right? I also, you know, I know everybody's giving this advice, but it is worth noting like to set limits for yourself, especially on days, weeks like this, especially in like election cycles or in times where you're just inundated with information. You have to learn how to limit it without any shame or guilt knowing that it is not in anyone's best interest for you to take all of that information in. It does nothing for anybody. And that leads me to the last thing that I really focus on and that is what I control. It's the biggest lesson I've learned through my own, you know, social justice days through a lot of the thought work that I've done through the work that I do every day in the club is most things.
I don't control most things out in the world. I can wish it away. I can sit and about it, I can talk to everybody about it, I can cry about it and I won't change it. But what I do control is myself, my thoughts and my feelings and my actions. I control what I spend my time on. I control how I treat myself. I control how much self-compassion I have and how much I beat myself up, right? And so I start looking for me, I do a lot of what I call thought work, which is figuring out what are the thoughts I want to think here in order to feel a certain way in order to take certain actions, right? I think about like, I am not going to save the world. I'm not gonna happen and I don't need to. That's such a like individualistic westernized concept where it's like you have to be this underdog that saves the world.
It's like these Armageddon movies where it's like I'm one person that goes and saves the world from an asteroid. That's not how it works in real life. And how much pressure is that on one person to have to do that? That's never what you have to do. Part of this is thinking about coalitions and collaboration and community. How can I show up within my community and be a member that works towards change? And for so many of us, when we do this doom scrolling, when it is doom and gloom, it gets us to withdraw, right? We feel so helpless that we withdraw, that we don't figure out how we can have small ripple effects around us. We don't figure out how we can make little bits of change. We don't think about like how we create that community within ourselves and how that will ripple into the, the children that we are raising, the people that are around us, how they treat other people and how that changes the world.
And so you really have to accept this idea that like you are not meant to save the world by yourself. You do not have to do one thing that's gonna save the world. There is no saving the world. Going back to the number one, there will never be a time where the world is not hurting. And that's okay. We can still make progress, we can still work together, we can still create communities, we can still create bigger bonds. We can still control how we think and feel. We can still have joy and happiness. We can be in this for the long haul. We can understand that this election is not going to be the end all, be all of anything if there's a ton of work to do. And that we wanna show up to that work regardless of what it is. And so we have to really figure out how we want to think and feel in order to show up the way we want to.
I'm gonna go back to what I said in the beginning. I often ask myself this, the question of does this thought serve me? Not, is this thought true? There's a lot of true thoughts, right? I can think the thought that the world is a dumpster fire. That's a true thought, right? I mean, well is it? It's just the thought. It's not like a fact. But like there's a lot of evidence to show that, that the world is a terrible place. There's a lot of evidence to show that the world's a beautiful place. Like look how many people are trying to change it. Look how many people do desperately feel so much empathy for people suffering around the world. Look how many people are doing really amazing things for their communities, for the people around them. Both of those thoughts are true. Which one serves me right?
What do I want to think here? And so I constantly redirect my own brain. When my brain goes to thoughts that make me feel helpless when it goes to this is the end, it's gonna become terrible. There's nothing we can do, it'll never change. People are so dumb. People will, you know, whatever those thoughts are, those will never get me to act the way I wanna act. And so I really sit and think intentionally about what do I wanna think. I'm gonna give you some examples, some thoughts that I think that you can adopt if you want some thoughts that can help you instead of, you know, the the thoughts that we typically have a lot of us think things will never change. A thought I like to think is while it takes time, we're always moving towards a more just world. Like I have to just keep reminding myself of that.
It's not gonna happen overnight, but we are making progress. That thought is true. Just as much as the thought things will never change, of course they will change. Why would I think that? Or there's the thought, there's nothing I can do. A lot of us have that thought. Like there's nothing. I'm just one person. There's nothing I can do. The thought I like to think is I'm committed to doing my part. That's all I can do. That's all I need to do. And I'm gonna give a caveat there too. That depends on your capacity. Your capacity. You are not a robot. Doing your part is not doing the same part all the time throughout your whole life. At some point you have a lot more capacity. And at other points, maybe you're taking care of young kids. Maybe you're taking care of ailing parents. Maybe you're sick yourself.
Maybe you're working tons of hours, maybe you don't have time to be doing a lot of social justice work. That's okay too. Taking care of yourself is what will help the world. Showing up in a way where you are not completely depleted and a shell of a human being is what helps the world. And so I constantly bring myself back to like, what is my part in this? Can I be committed to that part? And can that part change? Sometimes I have more capacity and I can do more. Sometimes I have to do less. And that's okay too. I can forgive myself for that. Another thought I like is people think the world is such a horrible place. The world is a dumpster fire. I like to think, look at how many people around the world are working to make it better. It's amazing. It's incredible.
There's so much hope for the future. Look how many people care. Both of those thoughts are true. My friends, one will radically change your life. One that you might be feeling today is it all feels like too much. And the thought I like to go back to is I don't have to save the world in one day. I don't even have to save the world all by myself. I'm just gonna keep showing up and focusing on what I control. I want you to think about how these thoughts can ground you. You, you decide which thought you believe, you decide which thought feels good to you. But pick one. If none of those feel good, find one that does that you can believe that gets you to move away from this is terrible, this is horrible. Nothing good comes of this. Everything's gonna change. People are gonna die.
It's gonna be horrible. 'cause all that's going to do is to get you to be a hermit in your room that doom scrolls all day and doesn't do anything else. And that's what we don't want. We want you out in society as a full fledged human with happiness and joy that is giving back to their community, that is making change. And the way you do that is by controlling how you react to everything that is happening in the world. And so I will leave you with this, my friends, regardless of what happens today, it is not the end of the world. It is not a finality. There will always be more to work on. There's always more change and we don't have to do it by ourselves and we don't have to all do it at once. We will get up and we will continue fighting and we will continue making change and we'll continue working towards a better world and we will do it together.
And that requires you to take care of yourself and control what you control. So start there. Take care of yourself today. Get offline. If you need to turn off that phone, go for a walk, read a book, watch Netflix, do something else. I promise you there's more work to be done tomorrow and we all need you to be in it. All right, my friends, I hope this was helpful to you. Um, this isn't the normal type of content that I do, but I do think that it's really important in times where a lot of us feel a lot of emotions. So I hope that this helped and I will be back next week with another episode.

Hey, if you are looking for more in-depth help with your career, whether that's dealing with all of the stress, worry, and anxiety that's leading to burnout in your current career or figuring out what your dream career is and actually going after it, I want you to join me in the Quitter Club. It is where we quit what is no longer working like perfectionism, people pleasing imposter syndrome. And we start working on what does, and we start taking action towards the career and the life that you actually want. We will take the concepts that we talk about on the podcast and apply them to your life and you will get the coaching tools and support that you need to actually make some real change. So go to lessonsfromaquitter.com/quitterclub and get on the wait list. Doors are closed right now, but they will be open soon.