We've all experienced those days when the technology doesn't cooperate, or the communication goes awry, or something carefully planned falls to pieces. Frustration is a slippery slope that snowballs with little effort.
We all understand that malfunctions happen, and it's so helpful to use those experiences to unlock hidden treasures; Life is full of lessons that enrich us!
In this episode of Picture Love podcast, Kris LeDonne shares a peek behind the scenes when that's exactly what happened, and offers some encouragement from applying some sage advice from wise mentors.
We're all on a journey, each to learn our own lessons and some of the tools we have been given in this life are our emotions. We take a look at how to personify our emotions- one at a time- to find hidden messages that unlock support available to us every day.
It's short and sweet, but this episode is packed with inspiration and wisdom to walk you out of frustration spirals and into a state of ease and resiliency.
You'll want to share it with a friend!
"Welcome to the Picture Love podcast! I’m your host Kris LeDonne and it’s my purpose to see the good in others and mirror the love back to them, and photos are one of the ways I love to do this. You’ll hear a mix of solo episodes with lessons I love to share and heartfelt interviews and valuable resources to support you with the parts that resonate. As an encourager, it’s my joy to help you picture love better in your life and if you need help curating photo evidence of lives well lived… I
You can help other optimists and storytellers find this podcast by sharing and leaving us a rating/review.
Find me on Social @KrisReminisce or visit my website krisledonne.com
We've all experienced those days when the technology doesn't cooperate, or the communication goes awry, or something carefully planned falls to pieces. Frustration is a slippery slope that snowballs with little effort.
We all understand that malfunctions happen, and it's so helpful to use those experiences to unlock hidden treasures; Life is full of lessons that enrich us!
In this episode of Picture Love podcast, Kris LeDonne shares a peek behind the scenes when that's exactly what happened, and offers some encouragement from applying some sage advice from wise mentors.
We're all on a journey, each to learn our own lessons and some of the tools we have been given in this life are our emotions. We take a look at how to personify our emotions- one at a time- to find hidden messages that unlock support available to us every day.
It's short and sweet, but this episode is packed with inspiration and wisdom to walk you out of frustration spirals and into a state of ease and resiliency.
You'll want to share it with a friend!
"Welcome to the Picture Love podcast! I’m your host Kris LeDonne and it’s my purpose to see the good in others and mirror the love back to them, and photos are one of the ways I love to do this. You’ll hear a mix of solo episodes with lessons I love to share and heartfelt interviews and valuable resources to support you with the parts that resonate. As an encourager, it’s my joy to help you picture love better in your life and if you need help curating photo evidence of lives well lived… I
You can help other optimists and storytellers find this podcast by sharing and leaving us a rating/review.
Find me on Social @KrisReminisce or visit my website krisledonne.com
Hi friends. I hope that this episode of picture love brings you some extra empowerment and support and maybe you can relate to some of the topics that I'm going to touch on today. My motivation behind this is purely to help myself and those who are coming alongside of me do picture love better in our lives. And some of that means dealing with things that get a little bit sticky. The sticky wikis for me this week, the theme was about technology and when things malfunction and the mishaps and the misunderstandings and the things that I rely on and even take for granted from day to day. When they're not behaving, it is so easy to slip into old patterns that just don't serve me. Can you relate? And yes, a lot of it comes back to the work I do with people and their photos and helping them not just fully enjoy them, but celebrate life through those photos. But there are so many threads of this thought process that can relate to pretty much any subject in your life that all of a sudden you stumble. Whether it's a conversation with somebody, whether it's a work project, whether it's, you know, troubles with your car or a health concern I think that there are common denominators that connect so many things that we might put under the umbrella of mishaps and malfunctioning. And before we dive in, I've got a brief message for you from our sponsor; Me. If you're looking for a trusted service that can transform tons of printed and digital photos into something that is space conscious, beautiful and displayed on your walls or in a legacy album on your lap, then look no further, my friend. Reminiscence by Kris LeDonne is here to serve you and your loved ones. Now you can continue to make and capture beautiful photo memories, enjoy sharing them with ease and make new memories in the process of reminiscing. You can find inspiration and a contact form at krisledonne.com or just check the show notes for a link. And now back to the show, I'm going to start with a happy thought. Think of a recent time or just a standout time, if it wasn't very recent, when you started sharing a story with somebody and it triggered an emotional response from them and they jumped in either on your story or to piggyback with a story of their own with some connected thread and you shared the emotion. Hopefully it was a positive one, but we do know that it's a slippery slope when somebody starts complaining. Those emotions can be negative too, but hopefully you can think of a happy memory, a time when you were reminiscing and it just made you feel so good. And you could feel the smile chemicals in your body, the happy chemical release. And the person you're sharing with was either there to share the memory or they're expanding on it, or they're jumping in with another story. And there might be laughter involved and it might be over food and drinks. There might be music, there might be noisy background, or it might be just the two of you on a walk or on your sofa or out at, at lunch. That time together, when it's finished, and you look back on the conversation, you can't help but physically smile. And whether you're a smiley person or of a more stoic appearance, you know what I'm talking about? You just felt energized by that exchange. Well, that's what I want you to hold on to as not just a memory treasure, but think of it as a tool to help you return when life doesn't feel quite that good. I'll explain. It was a typical April, Monday morning, and I woke up happy to dive into the projects that I had ahead of me for the day. One was a really beautiful, beautiful, album project that I'm making for a family to preserve their parents photos. You know, the bags and the boxes, the bin, the posters, the things that they inherited that you just really couldn't enjoy. I was really looking forward to this project because I'd gotten all the tangibles scanned into files so that I could design this beautiful book, on my computer. Well, the hours that I had designated for that project got bulldozed by some technology that went awry. And my inbox was just flooded by Well, notifications. I'm not going to rehash the whole thing for you, but let's just say the cortisol started to kick in and the stress level started to rise and the distraction. You know, the emotional distractions that happen when you know, you're looking forward to doing something special, something meaningful, something you're passionate about, and life just gets in the way, right? We could all name a hundred different ways life goes wrong, but that's not what I'm trying to bring you through right now. Where I'm going with this is, after a day of troubleshooting, I, I just literally blessed and released it and was fortunate to be able to go to sleep. And one of the things that helped me go to sleep was a reminiscing rampage, like what I had just described to you. And it soothed me, it made me feel better. It reminded me of times when things do work easily and that this challenge right now is a momentary thing and it's not a forever thing. Just because my inbox is flooded with notifications of something that's going wrong and something that I am not experienced enough with my tech to fix. I have people I can trust. I trusted it was all going to work out. Everything was gonna be okay. So I woke up the next day to more of that. And this time I decided to take a new approach because all of the time I was wasting and not getting this beautiful, beautiful album project underway it was not only frustrating, it wasn't helping anybody because I was not equipped. So eventually I got into a workflow and got some stuff done and silenced the notifications. I don't know if you're one of those people who always feels like you have your cell phone attached to your hip, but that do not disturb setting is a lifesaver. I digress. Anyway. If you didn't know this about me, I am a big journaler. I like to put things down on paper, you know, pen and paper. If you're a digital journaler, no offense to that at all. I think that's great. I love having things digital and accessible from my desk or from my phone. Whatever. But in this case, I just I I love a morning ritual that's not on tech that lets me just brain dump the things that are concerns. Well, I started journaling about this mishap, this technology mishap, the thing that was going on. And I started just writing about how it made me feel. And I really got into the feelsies. I said, I felt attacked and I felt overwhelmed and I felt stressed. And, and then I remembered what more than one mentor of mine said to look at your emotions like children. Give them some attention so that they can feel heard and then they can calm down and to personify an emotion like that is a different way. To me, that was not an instinct. That was something I had to receive as a, as really great advice. So if you've never done that, I highly recommend it, whether you're a journaler or not, just listen to that emotion one at a time, like children lining up for attention. I'm a former elementary school music teacher and those kids just wanted to be heard. So thinking of each one of these emotions as one of those children. Each valuable deserving to be heard, but not all at once. I can't hear anybody when they're all talking or excited or storytelling or complaining all at once. I couldn't focus on them all at once. So treating my emotions like those precious children, all of a sudden they discovered they calmed down and I got to the root of it. The root of the problem was Not just the actual thing, but that I was feeling unreasonable expectations on myself as if I was letting my clients down by dealing with my Technology and then I realized that is a trait of the people pleaser that I had recently done a lot of work to uncover and to heal and So perfectionism by the way is one of those traits as well. But Realizing as a human, I can hire people to do things, I can trust them to take care of them. And then I can show up fully and really where my expertise lie. It was so relieving to look at those feelings, get the ideas down. And then all of a sudden my head was clear and things started working. And then I had beautiful, beautiful gift of this realization. This challenge. This malfunction was kind of like a sign in the road saying, look at how protected you are. Nothing was broken and irreversible. Look how supported you are. You have people who can fix this. Look, you have time. If this project is not done already, it will get done. You trust yourself. So, it was a chance for me to dive deep into appreciation for this pattern interrupt that let me discover all the things that really I have going in my favor. And it's my hope that my clients who come to me with these feelings of I just don't understand this technology.""I just don't understand why are all my photos in paper and in bins and in files and in devices and why can't it be easy again?" And so that's why I created the freebie that if you haven't already grabbed from my show notes,"Obliterate the Overwhelm". It comes back to this. Sometimes we just need to get things out of our head and down on paper so that we can realize exactly what are they and look at each item. When it's not all up in your face and blocking your sight from seeing all of the other beautiful things in front of you, then all of a sudden you can process that information. I mean, we're humans. We're not machines. We're not computers. Computers are wonderful tools and technology that we have, and we have trusted humans who can help us decipher it, do parts of it for us, and then come alongside of us when there's something we need to learn how to do for ourselves. And that is the beautiful thing about empowerment. So I'm actually grateful for this malfunction. It was involving my website and I was able to disable the part that wasn't working and it drew my attention to something that really needed some updating. I was told by a colleague recently that your website is always an old version of you. Well, I think it's a little severe, but it's at least a representation of us, right? So when we go get our haircut, we're becoming a more polished version of ourselves. With every website update, I'm putting out a more polished version of what I'm serving. When I put out a new podcast, I'm putting out a new polished version of what I'm serving, um, to my audience. And I think all of us have different ways we show up in the world, fresh and new every day, every week, every month. And we get to picture love from a new perspective. So I want to just take a minute to review the next time I feel overwhelmed and I'm encouraging you to do the same thing where it just feels like everything hit the fan and it's splattering everywhere and you feel like there's an emotional hot mess going on, name it, write it down, look at it. Examine it like a scientist would under a microscope. And I'm just speaking metaphorically, of course, but whether you're a journaler and you using paper, whether you can use some voice notes on your phone, get it out of your head, record it, and then love on it. Don't hate on it. Treat it like that child that just needs a little bit of your attention and they'll feel so much better. And once they're calm, then you can carry on with what you were doing. And then you can also see what needs some of my attention. What did this life interruption offer me as an opportunity to revisit, to appreciate, to remember, to share, To remember to ask for help, to remember to allow help in, and also maybe even a chance to see something that's worth letting go because it's no longer serving you anymore. So that is the goal of this conversation. How can we return to the things that matter the most, by putting other things in perspective? I would love to hear your stories of turning malfunctioning and overwhelm into a learning moment where you have received a gift. Because my gift today is the reminder that I am fully supported. Things always work out for me, and they do for you too. I hope you can see it and feel it and picture love more beautifully in your day.
