Anchored in the Emotional Tide: A Journey of Self-Care and Collective Compassion

Navigating life's emotional ebbs and flows can feel like a solitary journey, but it doesn't have to be. Join me, Jenny, as I open up about my own struggles and share the daily practices that help me remain anchored amidst chaos. In a series of candid reflections, I invite you into my world, hoping to remind you that through the rough patches and the moments in need of a reset, you're not alone. This mini-sode of the Jenny VIP Thought series is an intimate encounter with the ups and downs we all face, and a testament to the power of self-care and the solace found in shared experiences.

In the heart of this episode, I examine the often-overlooked side of personal growth—emotional intelligence—and its role in acknowledging the needs of others. The story of my cousin, who has been a pillar of the podcast since its debut, exemplifies this beautifully. Balancing her roles as a full-time mom and teacher, she's had to realign her involvement with our shared project to better suit her life. Through her journey, we'll discover the importance of supporting and adapting to the changes in the lives of those around us, illustrating that every pivot deserves respect and understanding. Tune in for a session filled with empathy, insight, and the gentle reminder that we're all in this together.

Transcript

Jenny Benitez: 0:00

Hi everybody, welcome to the Jenny VIP Thought series. This is just like a little mini-sode series that I've been developing over the past few months. Essentially, I just want to be more in touch and be more transparent and, honestly, more alignment with all of you who've been listening to the podcast. These little episodes are really meant to give you all just real thoughts, snapshots in the moment, things that I think that I'm struggling with or emotions that I'm going through. I want to be able to share them with all of you because I want you to know that we're all going through this. If you're having a particularly rough week, maybe one of these little mini-sodes might resonate with you, because we all have them. Life has tons of ups and downs and I think it's just important to know that you're not in it alone. This is really what the point of all these are. You won't hear the same topic over and over again. Most likely it's going to be very different from episode to episode. I really hope that you find them helpful and I would love to hear from you on them. Let's take a listen. Hello everyone, welcome to another little mini-sode with Jenny. I hope you're all having a wonderful day. And if you're not having a wonderful day. I hope you are taking time to reset yourself and take a deep breath and all it takes is five minutes to try to meditate and try to get yourself back on track.

Jenny Benitez: 1:38

I find that I'm doing that more and more frequently. I wanted to talk to everybody about something, because I always seem to talk about, not seem to. I always talk about and focus on us and ourselves and what we need to do to stay on top of things, or things, that tools for us to pivot, and how to be paying attention to yourself and in your own alignment, which is all incredibly important stuff. The other side of it, the flip side of all those things, is also being mindful of, also being mindful of the people around you and their need to pivot or their need to make a change and do something differently. The reason why I'm bringing this up is because I think we're faced with this a lot and while it's important to be self-aware, it's also really important to be emotionally intelligent and to be aware of the people around you. Now, the more self-aware you become and the more you use tools like meditation, affirmations, visualization, the more you lean on these tools, the more you are going to start to pay a little bit more attention to those around you and the more you are going to pick up on some cues, some of it's going to happen, naturally, but I want to point this out because there will be times where people are going to need to pivot and you do have to be aware and be respectful of those pivots. It's not all about you know. Yeah, like I want something specific, but if it's not in alignment with what this other person wants, like, then you have to be okay to let go.

Jenny Benitez: 3:20

What I'm going to use as an example here is the podcast. Now, if you're new listener to this, when the podcast started in 2023, in 2023, when the podcast launched, it was in April of 2023 and it was myself and my cousin and she's still in the picture, still here, but she was all on all the episodes, basically in 2023. She was with me for the whole time, for the most part, majority of them, for the most part, yeah, she was with me for through the whole thing. Now, what started to happen is she also, she has she's full-time mom, her daughter is home with her, and then she also has a full-time job. You know, she does things, job. She's teaching. Amazing. She does a tremendous amount of work and the podcast was basically on top of all that. And as much as she loved the podcast, as much as she really wanted to be involved in the podcast and she would try so hard to really commit to being available for recordings, it just wasn't in her alignment, it wasn't there, it wasn't working. It's important to be mindful and pay attention and then create a safe space for that. So essentially, what ended up happening was, you know, my cousin just kept giving me, you know, leadway and saying, like you know what, just take the guest episodes, we'll do solo recordings together. And that gave me the availability to schedule per my calendar, you know. And then there was different instances where we would pivot together as a team and she would tell me you know what, I'm not available for this, but I can do this. And so that was the grace of the moment.

Jenny Benitez: 5:11

And I wanted to highlight this because there's a lot of times where people get upset or offended or feel like someone has bailed out on them, like in this moment. If I wasn't so aware, I could have definitely gotten mad and said we launched this together, how could you pull out? And I could have thrown guilt on her and I could have made her feel horrible, but then what would that have done? It would have made the whole setting resentful. And why would you want to even do that to somebody that you're, you know, close with, or why would you do that period to anybody, even if you're not close with them?

Jenny Benitez: 5:46

Treating people with respect is, like, incredibly important, like to everybody. So it's a moment of like giving grace to yourself and giving grace to others, and that's really what I want to highlight here is that like if everyone could just have a certain amount of grace for each other and just give each other that lead way to make these decisions for themselves. Like I mean, the impact that it has and how much stronger it makes your bonds with people is tremendous. I'll use an example for my professional life as well. I work with a lot of vendors and over time and develop relationships with people, and one of them reached out to me and told me like it's such a pleasure working with you, you're so kind and you're so wonderful with the clients and everybody just loves to be with you and a part of whatever you're working on, the heat. And he really just sent me the, without prompting, sent me this lovely note and I almost cried because it was acknowledgement of how hard I worked to make sure people feel respected and valued, and when you let people feel that way, it makes you feel good, but then it also it does so much to the relationship. It's mind blowing that people don't get this, so I just wanted to put that out there. If you are giving yourself grace, it's important to also give your people around you grace and give them room to live their lives how they need to live their lives. There is no one right way to do anything. We all have to just do what we can to do the best for ourselves and our families and whomever else is important to us.

Jenny Benitez: 7:36

I hope this helped someone out there today. Greatly appreciate you. If you can just take a couple minutes, please, and leave a review. It's incredibly helpful to us for the podcast to help us reach other listeners and expand our reach, so leaving our review would be tremendously helpful. Greatly appreciate it. Until next time. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for listening to Jenny's little VIP thought episode. I hope you did find it helpful and again, these are little mini, quick hits so it won't take too much of your day and I hope that it just brings you some clarity, some peace, maybe some joy and some instances knowing that we're sort of all in this together. Check out some of our full episodes, which have guests and my co-host and lots of great things in them. But I hope that these mini soaps are helpful to you. Thank you and take care.