THAT Conversation with Tarek Ali
For the past 7 years, Tarek Ali has always prefaced his talks with, “I never come to be right, I come to start the conversation.” And on this podcast, he continues THAT conversation. The thought-provoking conversations w not only inspire self-reflection and challenge societal norms, but also provide you with the tools for self-improvement. Tune in every week to hear Tarek have THAT conversation, either alone or with an insightful guest, as we grow closer to our highest potential—together. We talk mental & physical health, society & culture, financial literacy, business, social injustice, relationships, and so much more. Listen anywhere you get your podcasts & please RATE and REVIEW the podcast so THAT conversation can reach and heal more people.
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THAT Conversation with Tarek Ali
🔧TOOL: Working *with* Challenge, Habit Transformation, & Overcoming Triggers
Unlock this episode 👉🏾 subscribe now
This TOOL will be valuable to those...
- Dealing with challenges in life — whether constructive or taxing
- Having trouble identifying and overcoming impulses (not reacting to them)
- Trying to stop or slow down a habit & curate new ones
- Practicing—interested in adding more challenges in their life to build resilience and the skills needed to overcome them.
- and more!
Every journal entry holds the potential to unlock a new way of seeing the world, and in my latest candid revelation, I unearth a transformative five-step exercise that turns life's challenges from overwhelming hurdles to opportunities for intentional living. Picture this: I'm one week in, the air is clearer, my lungs are grateful, and I'm on a journey to find a healthier relationship with smoking—discover the tools and mindset that helped me draw a line in the sand and how you can apply them to your own personal quests.
Venture with us beyond the smoke and into the realms of self-awareness and grace, where work stress and the quest for social connections no longer hold sway over our habits. In this heart-to-heart, I’ll take you through my own struggles with cannabis triggers, sharing how a shift from judgment to curiosity can redefine our impulses and carve out a path for growth. Embrace the warmth of granting ourselves grace in the face of failure, and join me in exploring how these setbacks can become your stepping stones for personal development. With these chapters, we're not just talking about change; we're embodying it, one grace-filled step at a time.
leap into healing. Subscriber edition. Hello beautiful people, this is Turik Ali, with a tool for you to use on your journey of healing. This tool is going to help you with any challenge you are facing in your life right now, whether life through it at you or a goal that you have for yourself. We're also going to talk about offering challenges and not just reacting to them. In this clip, I'm going to take you first through a journal entry. That journal entry is going to give you some context and background of how I got to this tool that you can use, and then, after that, I am going to give you a rundown or an outline of the exercise, the practice, the tool that I'm presenting to you, and then I am going to share an example of how I use this tool in my own life, so you can see how it works and how you can use it for yourself. Then, at the end, I'm going to give you some things to remember as you go to practice this in your own life and use this tool. Without further ado, let's get right to it. Hello, beautiful people, I am Turik Ali and I'm here to give you a tool, a tool that I actually just came to this morning spirit gave it to me, my insides gave it to me and I am here to share it with you all.
Speaker 1:I went to hot yoga this morning. It sounds like torture for most people, but I love hot yoga. Every time I go to hot yoga there's a different thing that comes to me spiritually. And today I told myself I haven't journaled in a while. So I went to journal and, like I told you guys, when I journal there's no prompt. I just let my spirit say whatever's inside of me, and so pretty much what I'm going to do is read my journal entry and you're going to see how that came into the tool that I'm going to give you guys. So usually I'll write the journal entry and then at the end I'll title it, and I titled this the healthy challenge a practice to welcome and overcome challenges.
Speaker 1:January 22nd 2024. I went to hot yoga today and felt really balanced. I felt really connected to my body and my body felt like it was having fun. It went into flows and postures with excitement and enthusiasm. It was even excited for the challenge. The session today showed me that my wellness is up for challenge.
Speaker 1:Challenge doesn't have to always be an attack or something I'm trying to manage or overcome in life. Challenges can be fun and a way to build relationship with your mind, body and spirit. Challenge having fun with my body and the challenge this morning reminded me of the fun of challenge. Challenge I wasn't in a space for challenge to be fun before because I was going through a lot of challenges that life presented to me. But as I slowly get successful, managing and healing through those challenges, I am excited to offer others into my life.
Speaker 1:I think overcoming those challenges that life threw at me and seeing how intention, consistency, grace, patience and faith got me to an even greater place than before, I am able to welcome more challenge in my life and not pushing myself for the sake of winning, completing or reaching the goal, but motivating myself, encouraging myself that I can do it, no matter what my circumstances, my mind or the outside world says. It's operating on faith while working with myself and making note, being aware of the obstacles without letting them discourage me or dictate my actions. Being aware of them helps me determine what I need, how to take care of myself and helps me give myself space. So that was the journal entry and from that I just came up with a practice. It just really flowed. So under it I wrote exercise slash practice. It reminded me of screenwriting.
Speaker 1:I'm a screenwriter, so in screenwriting, with scenes, what we do is we say what the goal is, what is the character's goal, and there should be obstacles in that scene that keep the character from getting to that goal. And it reminded me of this. So, first, what you're gonna do is write your goal or the challenge that you're setting up against yourself. This could be a fun challenge. It's supposed to be fun. It's not gonna be fun. But you know, in a way of like your offering challenge into your life instead of always reacting to things happening to you and screenwriting as well we always say you know, if things are always just happening to your character, that leads to a bad protagonist. You want the protagonist to always be making choices and doing things out of their free will, and so here we need to be doing the same and offering challenge to ourselves when we are in a space of receiving them and cooperating with ourselves to get to it. So, one, write your goal or challenge. Two, write the obstacles or things keeping you from it. Three, express the grace. This will become the mantra you'll say when it comes up. Four, identify your reactions, things you do when triggered that don't support your goal. And five, declare how you'd like to respond to support the goal. So after that, I wanted to give myself a go at this practice. I always try to like to do my own practices to see if they actually work before I just give them to people. So this is what I did for myself. So I thought about what was some challenge that I wanted to offer to myself.
Speaker 1:And this season and this time and this week, particularly in this week, I've been. I don't smoke a lot but I have been smoking like maybe once a day and usually at the end of the day, but I've been smoking pretty consistently. And just in this week in the season, something I felt in my spirit was that you know, I wanna go this whole week without smoking. You know that was just something that was in my heart. And it's Monday and I was like I wanna try to like not smoke until Friday. So, one, my goal not to smoke or drink this week until I log off for the weekend.
Speaker 1:Two, the fulfillment it will bring me, cause you wanna also think about. You know, I don't wanna just challenge myself for the sake of challenging myself. I wanna know what this is doing for me. How is this pouring into me? How is this an intention to my wellness and my being? When you make the intention, then it pours into you. When you succeed it. If you just make a challenge or a goal and then you get to it but you don't really know how it's feeding you or pouring into you, you just you know, you just reach the goal, but when I set the intention, the fulfillment it will bring me.
Speaker 1:Is that I wanted to do this out of health. I really just wanna see what my body and mind and spirit feels like. You know, completely sober. I also believe that you know, in my spirituality, the closer and more connected I am to myself, the more connected I am to spirit and the more connected I am into what I'm supposed to be doing in this world and my purpose and my healing and my creativity. So in order to be the most connected to myself, I have to be myself and full, without any alterations. And you know, smoking puts you in a different state, drinking puts you in a different state. I really just want it to be with me and everything that my body and myself offers to me in this week, even if that is anxiety, sadness, whatever all of the emotions. I kinda just wanna sit with myself this week and level myself. So that's the fulfillment it will bring if I reach this goal and if I succeed this challenge.
Speaker 1:So, three the obstacles One I've been smoking consistently, like I just said, like every day, and the grace to that. So you wanna write the grace to the obstacle. The grace is it's hard for any human to break a daily routine or habit, like it doesn't matter how hard it's gonna be, it's gonna be difficult because it's hard to break a habit. So that's the grace. Two it helps me relax after a long day of work. The grace is, you know I work really hard and my work, even though I'm not, like you know, physically on my feet, doing hard labor all day, my work requires a lot of mental, spiritual, emotional and talking, and so it's just, it can be draining. So you know, knowing that I have been using weed to relax, at the end of the day I can give myself grace because, tariq, you work a lot and at the other end of that you just wanna relax and you know weed has been your vehicle for that. So that's me giving myself grace Three is usually around me at home or my friend's smoke, so so it's a social thing. You know, especially living in LA, there's a dispensary on every corner next to a Starbucks, like it's everywhere. So the grace I can give myself is it takes extra strength to resist something saturated around you, like if everywhere you go, something that you're trying to avoid is there, it's going to be more tempting. So that's the grace Four.
Speaker 1:I think it's fun. I love laughing, the spaciness and the goofy-ness I get, being high, like it just is a different, like I said, a different state, and it's a version of me that could be pretty fun and creative and goofy and I enjoy that. So the grace of that is because you do work a lot. Fun is something you're trying to pour into as well. You know so it's going to be difficult. You know taking a chance on new things for fun when you know something else works Kind of reminded me of, like going to the, a restaurant. Right, if you always get the same thing when you go to this restaurant and you know what you're going to get, you know what's going to be enjoyable, you know you're going to like it, you know it's going to fill you up. It can sometimes be daunting to try something new because, like one, I'm spending all this money, like what you're putting into it, and then you may not like it, so you may not get a return, but that is. You know the vulnerability of trying something new and going after something that you. That is a challenge. You have to take a risk, and so that's the grace is that you know you may have to go to new things for fun, and they may not fulfill you in the beginning or instantly, but it's the intention of you trying.
Speaker 1:So then I wrote down my triggers. One is exhaustion from work. So that is also stress, anxiety. When these things come up, depression. My body has the reaction, because this is something I've been doing. It knows that when these things come up stress and anxiety, depression, all those things that come from work my body is going to want to smoke, because that's how I've been, you know, reacting to it in the before. So those are, that's a trigger. My second trigger is habit. So I'll randomly have the impulse, and so when that does come up, I'll know that, oh, that's a trigger, it's just a habit. So it's just about not giving into the habit.
Speaker 1:Three boardness I put wanting to have fun or just a different experience. So whenever I'm bored or I just want to do something or be in a different state than I am, I know that I will have the impulse to smoke because this is a trigger, this is something that would cause me to smoke before. And four proximity and social wanting to smoke to feel connected. The reason I specified social here was because there's been times that I'm around people that's drinking and smoking and I'm literally okay and I'm like, I don't want to, like. I'm not really a peer pressure type of person, it's more of like a. I don't want to be left out and not left out in a like oh, they're doing it and I want to come too, but more so, like you know, when everyone's drunk and when everyone's high, we're on the same wavelength, we're all spacey, so it's funny. It's like more of like a. I don't want to lose that connection and I don't want to miss out on the social aspect of everybody being in it and I'm the only one out. And so, because I am aware of that, I know that I had to specify here that it's not just being around weed, but it's wanting to smoke to feel connected to the people around me. So that's also a trigger, and knowing these triggers is.
Speaker 1:So when you do have the impulse, you can be like, oh, I have the impulse, which one of the triggers is it? And usually, when you know it's a trigger, you know not to respond to the trigger. There's two things that can happen from triggers you either react out of impulse or you respond to them. So the reaction would be I go to smoke and the response would be something that you would do in support of your goal or the challenge that you're putting upon yourself. In order to support your goal or your challenge, you want to one identify which one of the triggers came up, tell yourself some grace the one you identified with your obstacles, remind yourself of your goal and the challenge, ask yourself if you think you can keep going towards your goal and remind yourself of the fulfillment it will bring. So that's how you will respond to it every time you want to smoke.
Speaker 1:And so when you're doing this practice, you want to remember that doing the work is in the practice, not the efficiency of completeness, and what I mean by that is by trying, you are healing and you are growing. The more you practice, the better you become. So pretty much, this is also helping you have grace with yourself. Say, you do Try to go through the responses and you smoke anyway, that's okay, you're just gonna start again. But it's the fact that you even tried, that you know that you are healing. But healing is in the pursuit. Okay, it's not in the completeness. No one's ever completely healed. It's it's the practice, it's the journey, it's the pursuit. And even when you fail, you win, because there's so many great things that come from failure if you use it, because everything can be used. Remember that.
Speaker 1:So when you do fail, you want to become aware and not judgmental. What does that mean? It means Think about the failure and what it's offering to you and what you can learn from it, and just become curious. And being judgmental would be labeling it, establishing it a or b, or Saying it was good or bad, right or wrong, right. So how do you become aware? What is that curiosity look like when you fail? It probably can show you new triggers.
Speaker 1:So say, you know you have the impulse and you go through your triggers and this is something that's not in your triggers. So you're like okay, so this is just something I want to do. I'm not being triggered, this is just something that I want to give to myself, and there and when you want something sometimes is good to give it to yourself, right. That can be healing as well is giving yourself to space to take care of yourself or give yourself what you want. Or this could be a moment where you're showing yourself a new trigger, one you probably didn't think about before, like wow, I want to spoke because of this and I think, through each Failure and I'm like air quoting if you keep doing it because of that reason, I think by the third or fourth time or whatever time for you, you'll realize wow, okay, so I think this is also a trigger. And then you become curious why, what is it about it? You see how I did with being around it out, you know, I asked myself is it because it's around me? And I was like no, it's not because it's around me. What is it? Well, when other people smoke, like they're like that and I realized it was more about the connections. So become curious about it.
Speaker 1:Also, when you fail, it shows you which triggers are harder to ignore than others. You know. You will know like this one is a big one, so I should not be around people or this one, or maybe I shouldn't work myself as hard, because when I work myself as hard, I want to smoke. You just get a better idea of of your triggers. Also, when you fail, it desensitizes you to the time it takes to heal, grow or reach any goal or Overcome any challenge. When you give yourself this goal because it's intentional, each time you fail, like it'll show you like, wow, this is gonna take some time. It's kind of like riding a bike like no one learns how to ride a bike without falling, like no baby learns how to walk without falling. So I think it'll desensitize you to the idea of making a goal and the amounts of times that you have to fail and the time that it'll take for you to overcome that challenge or to reach your goal, and this will help you in all spaces of your life.
Speaker 1:I also believe that failing, you know, helps and trains you in being more aware, versed, judgmental of self, for example, and the one earlier where I told you identifying new triggers Instead of being judgmental and being like you keep doing it. You blah, blah, blah if you become carries and say, hey, so why is it. Why is it that you want to smoke in this moment? What is it about this? You, you become more or aware of yourself, and by doing that, you become more accepting and you also become more loving of yourself, rather judgmental.
Speaker 1:And lastly, I also believe that failing helps you practice of being graceful with yourself, because every time you fail or every time the obstacles come up, you're telling yourself that grace, that thing you wrote down, you're giving yourself grace.
Speaker 1:It grows yourself grace and, in turn, you're able to give grace to others, because you are aware of how many times You've had an impulse or trigger or something come up and you give, gave yourself grace, and you see how that kept you In pursuit of your goal and kept you where you wanted to be. And it'll show you and Give you a response to be graceful to others and how to see how it takes other people time as well. And so, yeah, that's the tool, that's one that I'm gonna be using this week and I'm so excited because that little tool I came up with. It truly, truly, feels helpful already and I hope it helps you. So let me know what you thought about this, guys, and let me know if you try it and if you do try it, dm me on Instagram, tiktok wherever, and I would love to hear how it worked for you. Okay, Love you guys, have a great day.
