Episode 309 - Dr. Alison Cook, "Navigating Emotions and Faith"

Welcome to "Restoring the Soul with Michael John Cusick." In today's episode, Michael is joined by Dr. Alison Cook, author of the newly released book, "I Shouldn't Feel This Way." Together, they delve into the complexities of emotions and how we can navigate challenging situations through daily practices. Dr. Cook's book is part of a trilogy that includes "Boundaries for the Soul" and "The Best of You."

Throughout the episode, you'll hear Dr. Cook explain her practical teaching method of naming, framing, and taking action—essential steps for emotional and spiritual growth. She emphasizes the importance of honesty about our feelings, especially our faith, and tackles the pitfalls of spiritual bypassing. Through personal anecdotes and profound insights, Dr. Cook and Michael explore how small acts of hope and bravery can lead to profound inner transformation.

Whether you're struggling with feeling conflicted about God, dealing with inner criticism, or seeking to understand the societal implications of emotional reframing, this conversation is full of wisdom and actionable advice. We hope you will discover how you can cultivate clarity, set boundaries, and bravely confront your true emotions on your journey to inner healing.

Feeling stuck in your relationships? Discover insights into possible underlying reasons with our complimentary resource, "Five Ways Unresolved Trauma May Be Derailing Your Relationship." Download here -> https://restoringthesoul.com/our-resources/

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Transcript

0:57

Doctor Alison Cook. Welcome back to the restoring the soul podcast. I'm so glad to be here with you, Michael. Thanks for having me. Thanks. You were so gracious in the past to be here to talk about your book, boundaries for the soul. And you wrote following that book, the best of you, which was a big success. And then very recently, I think at the beginning of May, you released I shouldn't feel this way. Name what's hard, tame your guilt and transform self sabotage into brave action. And I'm really excited to talk with you, not just about the book, but about how you work with people. Let me just start by asking kind of a standard question. What led to this particular book after your previous two books, which were so successful? Yeah, I was thinking about it as this one came out. It feels a little bit like a capstone on a trilogy. Three topics that have been really near and dear to my own personal growth and healing journey. And in my work with clients, boundaries for your soul I think of as the inner healing. Right. We have to look back to heal those parts of our stories and the parts of ourselves. It's a much more specific therapeutic modality that's been really transformational in my own life. The best of you kind of is almost the healing the self. What does it mean to have a self? Especially as a Christian, we sometimes get these messages about the self, that the self is bad. And so that also came out of my own journey. And then this last one is about the emotions, and it's probably the most forward facing of my books. It's really for folks who've done a little bit of work in the sense of I'm not digging into trauma, I'm not so much, I'm not digging into the past. It's more how do I live a life where things fly at me all the time, that are hard, and I have lots of emotions that get stirred up, and how do I work through those emotions in a healthy way that honors the emotions but also honors the reality of the situations that I'm facing. And so this is really kind of the day to day practices that we all have to do to just live as a human in this world where things get complicated in our inner lives and in our outer lives. I was actually going to ask you if it was a trilogy, if it was somehow sequential, and it may not fit exactly in that way, but I love how you use the word capstone, and hopefully that doesn't mean that it's the last book that you wrote. I want to comment and just say that I read a lot of books that come across my desk. I'm not always a fan of christian books, but I love how you integrate faith that is actually substantial without having to be really religious, and how you integrate felt needs and connect the two of those in such a way that on top of that, the bonus is you're just a really, really clear writer and you have a statement in your book. And I'm a sucker for quotes. Clarity gives birth to action. And I just think your book is one of the clearest books that I've read in a long, long time. I really appreciate that. Thank you. That means a lot to me. I'm a teacher at heart. So for me, it's all about trying to break down complicated concepts and make them really, really clear. Because while I think this stuff is hard to implement, I think there is some clarity that can come through some simple practices. Yeah, I was reading some of your posts on instagram, and you were talking about being a teacher at heart. And so you're a psychotherapist with a PhD. You've had a counseling practice in the past. I'm not sure with your writing, to what degree you've kept that. And then you're a writer where you're obviously teaching people. But tell me about the kinds of context that if you could create the perfect environment to teach, would that be a small group? Would it be, you know, a group of 300 people? Would it be at a church on Sunday morning? Would it be a college or seminary class? Yeah, that's a great question. It's actually kind of what I'm doing. I look at my own podcast as a little bit like a teaching lab. I am an introvert. I'm fairly shy. I don't love being in a room with lots and lots of people are on a big stage. That's always a little nerve wracking and anxiety inducing for me. So to be in my own sort of environment, but interact but connecting with lots of folks through podcasting has been really lovely for me. I like small groups. I taught in graduate school and I taught psychology in high school, seminary and college, and I do like that. But I really love the ability we have through podcasting like you're doing to connect with folks. Bring psycho education, bring tools, bring concepts in a way that's personal but doesn't take quite so much out of us. For me, who gets a little shy with a big spotlight and a big. Stage, plus you don't have to grade papers, which totally, yes, I agree. I loved my life as a professor but I did not like the academic side of things and all of that, but I miss it from time to time. And you're right, the podcast medium is like having, I know sometimes people call it a tribe, but a classroom and people that are drawn to your books and your teaching that have been helped, and then they spread the word to others. And it's really, it's, who would have thought 20 years ago or 25 years ago when we got our training that this would be an opportunity that we would have to spread the good news of transformation? Exactly. Yeah. Well, and again, I just think you've done a great job with it, with the book. The thing I love about, and I'll say it again, I kind of specialize in big ideas, and I'm often criticized or nudged with the elbow to kind of bring it down to the practical. And you have some big ideas, but you immediately concretize it. And you start out the book talking about your method, and the method is to name frame and break. And I had a mentor who once said, it's not worth teaching if you can't put it on the back of a t shirt. And I thought about that would go on a t shirt, really nice, but there's actually substance there. So will you unpack that idea of the method before we get into some of the things that we shouldn't feel or that we tell ourselves we shouldn't feel? Yeah, it really came out of this kind of frustration I have with oversimplification, where there's a lot of talk about naming your feelings, feeling your feelings. And I think to myself, well, okay, but then what, you know, or even as a clinician, you know, I have a lot of my clients like, well, then what do I go do? And so as I thought about this, I thought there's really three essential practices. They're really not steps. I think they're practices. One is the work of naming. It's so important. We know how important it is. Dan Siegel talks about naming is taming. You know, we know the importance of naming not only our emotions, not only our internal states, but also naming the things that we see around us. I always say, start with yourself. But we do need to also be naming facts that we see around us. We need to be good at that. It requires us to pause. And then oftentimes what I notice with people is the fear of naming something hard, saying, this is hard. I'm struggling in my marriage, or things aren't working in this friendship or at this job. The reason we're afraid of that is, we don't know what to do. I thought, well, okay, we got to get there. I promise. We got to get to the action. That's the braving. But there's this whole huge second practice, second step that I think is probably one of the most important. That's the framing. We have to pause and make sense of what it is that we're naming. And I use lots of examples in the book, but I. And I've seen it in my own life. I've seen it with clients where I'll name. I'll be having a strong emotional reaction to something that maybe I'll name as anger. I'm frustrated. I'm angry. And until I do the work of framing, I may not know, did somebody actually harm me and something really toxic is happening, or am I having a reaction that's out of my own sadness, my own wounds, something from my own past. That's my stuff, and they actually haven't done something wrong. It's incredibly important how I frame that. So that chapter, that second practice, while probably the least glamorous people like the naming, they like the braving, is, for me, the thing over the years, I've just millions of times, maybe not millions, countless times, said to people, we've got to figure out. We've got to pause and figure out how to frame this. We have to think about how to frame this, because if we jump too quickly to action, we're going to solve the wrong problem. And so that really came out of just years of learning that myself, learning the art. And I say it. It's more of an art than a science, although there is some science, too, of taking the time we need to get to the root of the problem and figure out how we're framing it, because that's going to make all the difference in the world, how we brave our way through it. Give me an example of when somebody names the feeling and they go, it feels like someone has been toxic to me. And that's a popular word lately, so I choose that intentionally. And it feels like you could frame it in a lot of different ways, and you gave some examples of that. But what would that concretely look like to say, here's what is happening. Yeah. And I will be honest, I made mistakes early on as a therapist in training. I remember some of those early years where a client would, you know, these people are being mean to me, and I would just jump to, right. We got to set some boundaries and then come to find out through various scenarios, through, you know, oh, my gosh I think my client was the one being the bully, you know? Right. Because that narrative isn't always the story that we tell isn't always the truest story and takes a minute to get to what's the truest of the true things to let it bubble up. So an example might be, you know, someone asked me, someone was really mean to me. You know, maybe I'm angry because someone told me that they. They don't want to spend time with me this weekend, and they've said no to me. They've said, I can't come to that event. I'm. I'm not going to do it. And so I'm really angry about that and feeling hurt. Well, number one, I don't know the backstory of why that person said no. Number two, is it possible that that boundary is being set with me because of something I'm doing that maybe wasn't thoughtful of that other person? There's lots of different ways to understand that, and this takes a lot of core strength. I like to say to people, this work of being really honest with ourselves first, it's more about core strength than big biceps. Initially, it's like, do I have the core strength in this potentially inflammatory situation? Maybe my spouse is upset with me. I don't like it. It doesn't feel good. Maybe my spouse is being a jerk. It's possible. But do I have the core strength? Especially if it's not a chronic pattern of behaviors to go, is there anything that I've contributed to this? Is there anything that I've done where I can see, and it, again, in this world where we're quick to jump to the binary, you know, they're bad, I'm good. It takes. Because, again, I always feel like I have to say this. If you are in a toxic relationship, it can be very disorienting and confusing to know what the truth is, and I just want to name that. Right. But it's also so important that we do learn how to go, whatever piece of this, whatever part of this is mind to own, I do need to look at that, to just try to get to the truthiest truths of all, the truths that can surface, that can bubble up over the surface, because that'll help the relationship in the long run, even if I end up realizing, oh, this is a relationship I've got to leave. Right. So for people who have been in a lot of counseling, they'll probably resonate with this. And I suspect that you would say this is true, but it feels like a lot of the counseling that we do with clients is that we help to frame it. Some people do have a difficult time naming their emotions, but the hard work is coming up with that frame. I love, love, love the contrast between the images of core strength and big biceps. Because as a guy, I've lost weight and gained weight and lost weight and gained weight, and I've probably paid tens of thousands of dollars in health club memberships that I never use. But when I go, I want to pick up the curling bar and I want to get those muscles in my arms looking great. But nobody wants to do core strength and lay on their back and do sit ups and bridge lifts and things like that. It doesn't really pay off that much until that day when you go to tie your shoes and you sneeze and you go, why did I throw my back out? So that's the hard work. The hard, hard work is the core strength. And that comes from that reframing. Exactly. And being really just honest with the truth pieces in our own lives. Yeah, we could not only do well to take the time to reframe things in therapy and in relationships, but it seems like at a societal level as well, that people are really good at naming, hey, this is unjust, and I've been mistreated. But then they react. All change happens when one person changes, one heart changes, then that can change society. Exactly. And this is the thing about this work, that slowing it down. Even if there is something toxic going on, you are going to enter into that with so much more power, with so much more strength, with so much more conviction, if you do the work to get really centered in what's true on your strategy, on how you're going to work your way through it. Then again, if you try to go in there with that one two punch of the big biceps, and then later you're like, oh, my gosh, I don't know what I just did. And you second guess yourself and you know all the things. And then, so you talk about the third aspect of the method as braving, and that might sound self evident, but unpack that a little bit. Braving is the action. And braving could mean a lot of different things. I use the acronym, you know, a lot of times, braving, again, people love boundaries. Sometimes braving is setting a boundary, whether with someone else or with a part of ourselves or a thought pattern. Sometimes braving is. This is a situation I give three. Oftentimes, I see three categories for change. When we've had a big, emotional, tangled up knot in our lives, and we're trying to work our way through it. We do the naming. We do the framing. It's time to take action. Sometimes it means I have to leave something. Sometimes it means I have to fight for change. And so the braving is going to be to have conversations, maybe not just one conversation, maybe to initiate a series of conversations. Sometimes it means I have to suffer something wisely, which means I recognize this is really hard. I can't fix it. I can't change it at this time for whatever reason. And so I have to resource myself. I have to add some things into my life to support myself so that I can suffer this situation wisely. And so braving is not unilateral, it's not one dimension, but it flows from that clarity of, you know, I got to leave. Okay? So here's what I need to do. I've got to fight for change. Here's what I need to do, or I've got to suffer something wisely. So here's how I need to resource myself. And then we start down that path. Yeah. So the braving leads to empowerment. The reframing has given me clarity, and now I have a way forward. I may need to develop resources, grow in some areas. I may need to grow that core strength for a very, very long time, if you will. But then I can take action. And doing that is I'm empowered. And in the very first chapter, I loved your introduction with all the different scenarios of people and their various struggles that you kind of put in first person of even the one for me, because I've had food issues over the last couple of years. I've really done a lot of work around that. I've talked about on my podcast. You talked about reaching for the bag of chips in the midst of the pain. We do that, but when we have that clarity, we're actually able to move forward. And it feels so freeing to be empowered. That in and of itself can be healing sometimes because people feel so powerless when they come to us in these situations. And this gets at the beating ourselves up. Right. Which is so counterproductive. I've worked with so many people who are beating themselves up that they're staying in a job that they find demeaning or they find unfulfilling or staying in a relationship. And when you do the work of naming and framing, sometimes they realize, I can't leave it right now. There's reason. There are reasons that this is happening, and so then we can work on. And then there's that clarity. So at least then we've removed the shame, and we've removed the guilt tripping, and we removed the beating ourselves up. And I think for so many of us, when we get confused, when we get tangled up, the easiest low hanging fruit is to just. I shouldn't feel this way. I'm the problem, you know, I should know better. I should be able to do it differently when usually that's a cue. And I tried to spin off of that in my own life when I noticed that inner guilt tripper. Oh, it's a cue that something hard is going on, something that's complicated, that needs my time and attention. And I often think about, you know, like, you have a necklace. I just had this knot in this necklace this morning. And to untangle a knot, you have to slow things down. You have to pay attention. You have to pull out the threads, you know, and just giving yourself permission to run that process, you're going to set yourself up so much better in the long run. I love that analogy with the necklace. And I wrote down, just throughout the book, I wrote down wonderful quotes, and you're such an elegant writer, where there's phrases and images that are just really, really beautiful. But you said the jumbled up knot is a cry for gentle care. But we've not been given tools to unravel it. And that's really what this book is about. In the same way of naming, framing, and then braving, your book really helps people to name what the jumbled up knot is and to tell them you're not bad for the fact that this is there and you shouldn't beat yourself up. I thought, and I just went through a long process with my publishers of coming up with a name for my book. And it wasn't exactly what I. Where we ended up was not exactly where I wanted to start. And I'm very, very happy with it. But as you know, it's a process of how you go about that. And I love the title because I knew exactly what the book was about. And then I started reading it, and I thought, oh, this could also be called how not to beat yourself up or how, you know, how not to be a jerk to yourself. Because there's something about that for me, and you just shared this as well, that it feels so right, it feels so helpful. Like, if I am hard on myself and if I do have, whether it's contempt or even self hatred on one end, to just being with that self critic, that will help me to do better, and that's going to guarantee that I don't feel this shame or this frustration again. But it's so counterproductive. It gets in the way. It's actually the opposite. So counterproductive. And it's so freeing. One of the, like I say, for me, just to be able to name that, that feeling up, I really just want to beat myself up right now is sometimes the first step is just to name that without shaming myself. Right. Because that can be such a. It just adds pressure to an already pressurized situation. It's so freeing. It really is liberating when you just begin. And there's a mindfulness component to the book. It's sort of my spin on sort of mindfulness and active mindfulness. I've always had a busy mind, and so mindfulness activities that require me just to empty my mind don't work. But to attune to my thoughts and attune to my feelings has been life changing for me. I can do that. I can just notice, okay, I want to beat myself up right now. Okay, I'm feeling this right now. And it's a way of life that really is life changing and transformational. So why do you think it's so easy for us to just go to that default of beating ourself up? Why is that. Why is that such a universal experience with people? Yeah, it's a great question. I think everybody has some form of an inner critic. Whether it's an inner critic, whether it's an inner guilt tripper. It has maybe different extremes, takes different forms, and I think shame, to some degree, has something to do with it. I think shame is something we're all in the business of learning how to untangle from and false guilt. I talk a lot about the difference between true guilt and false guilt, especially for some of us who grew up in faith based context or christian contexts. We can have inherited an overactive moral compass that isn't really even a moral compass. I like to say in the book that guilt, for example, is an emotion. Guilt, the feeling of guilt, is not necessarily an indication that you've done something wrong. We have lots of forms of false guilt that show up, and so it is learning how to, again, attune. I sometimes think of the human psyche as an instrument. It's like a violin, that we have to learn to attune to all the different components of it, to learn how to play it well in partnership with God. But to attune to some of those different sensations and feelings, we just get bombarded, whether from our family of origin, whether from the culture around us, we just kind of get. We tap into burdens and weighty, guilt shaming messages, and we internalize them, every single one of us. And so there's just the work constantly. I think it's the most important part of this work, is attuning to those false guild and shaming messages and learning how to tune ourselves to the voice of truth. To use Henry Nouwens, the inner voice of love. Right? Yeah. The inner voice of love versus the inner critic or voices that we just assume are loving. Yeah. You talked about this being the Capstone book of three. But I read, and I'm hearing even in this conversation, there's not really a fine line between the inner world, the mind, and the emotions, because even Dan Siegel's idea of the mind is this interrelated relationship, which it's not my brain, it's every cell in my body, plus the neurons of the people around me. But you're talking about attunement, and you're talking about mindfulness, and it's all of that attentiveness to what's happening in me in the moment. And so a lot of the language, not necessarily the sentences, but the imagery and the concepts, are ifs oriented as well as mindfulness. And so this is a wonderful book, not just for people that are beating themselves up or saying, I shouldn't feel this way, but people who want to develop more self awareness and more connection to the inside of them. When you talked about the faith based messages with false guilt, one of the I shouldn't or I shouldn't feel this way? You have seven of them, if I counted correctly. I shouldn't feel stuck in my head. I shouldn't feel, like, numbing my emotions. I shouldn't feel ashamed of my body. I shouldn't feel less than other people. These are all chapters, and then the final two. I shouldn't feel trapped in toxicity, and I shouldn't feel. I'm sorry. I shouldn't feel mad at my loved one, and I shouldn't feel conflicted about God and the one about God. I think that's so intriguing because there's also this inherent sense of, well, I can't say I'm angry at God or hate God or doubt God or something like that, but frankly, a lot of the false guilt messages lead to that. So tell me why you included or felt it was important to have the I shouldn't feel conflicted about God in there. One of the things I talk about throughout this book, and the best of you, is this concept called spiritual bypassing, which is this concept. It developed actually not in christian settings. A psychotherapist, who I believe was Buddhist by background, noticed that some of his clients would spiritualize their problems or their painful feelings, and it actually got in their way. Then they couldn't work through them. And I said, oh, my gosh, we do that as christians. And I started writing about it. We say, oh, I just have faith. I'll just trust God or I'll just forgive, or I'll just let go and let God. And there's maybe a well intended part of us, but underneath that is, I'm kind of mad this isn't working out, or I don't really feel close to you, God. That's also true. That's also true. And I say in the book, God doesn't ask us to gaslight ourselves. God doesn't gaslight us. Right. It's like I'm, and I, this is, again, another practice where I'll notice even in my spiritual life, like, I know I should pray, and I'm kind of mad at you right now, God. Which is a form of a prayer, right. Because I'm actually naming what's true with God. And so it really just came out of recognizing our relationship with God is like any relationship. It requires that two things can be true. You know, you think about your spouse and it's like, man, I love you and I am so annoyed with you and I feel so let down by you. And how do I hold space for two things in my psyche without harming you, without harming the relationship? But if ignore, bypass, then negative, that's not going to be healthy either. It really is an art. I use the metaphor in the last chapter of riding a bike. If you think about learning to ride a bike, right. There's a lot going on that you have to attune to, and it applies to our relationship with God. It just never worked for me personally to kind of be like, well, that's dumb. You know, that cliche I just heard doesn't make any sense. I'm going to go ahead and be honest with you, God. And that just, for me, that was always kind of what worked for me in my relationship with God, which I'm so grateful for. But I learned that a lot of folks have been taught almost systematically to be fearful of those emotions because they might almost sort of like a, I almost see it as sort of a magical thinking. Like, oh, if I, if I say that I'll bring it in, I'll will it into being. And I'm thinking, well, it's there. You know, God knows it's there. You know, it's there. Let's just name it and bring it to the surface in the context of healthy relationships. So that's just always been a really important part of my own spiritual life and part of my work with people. It's just that honesty, I think the truth really is what sets us free. Right. And probably everybody who you and I and all of our therapist friends have ever talked to would say that that's true from John, chapter eight. And yet, no, I can't talk about that, or no, I can't face this, because that's not okay. And it's often the truth within ourselves that we bypass, as opposed. We just want more of God's truth in us, and then we don't actually have to be dependent or trust or to be vulnerable. Those issues beneath it. Can you pick maybe two or three of your favorite chapters or ones that maybe today you're feeling jazzed about? About the I shouldn't. Whether it's my head, numbing my emotions, ashamed of my body, feeling less than people, I think every one of these all feel like the people that I talk to and our podcast listeners, these are very, very human issues and very close to the surface for them. The I shouldn't feel ashamed of my body was probably the most personal for me and the one I think is so deeply resonant. I know we have a mutual friend in Andy Kolber, and I've really appreciated her work around the nervous system. And so I really approached that chapter as this idea of what would it be like to attune to our bodies. So that one was really. And then I shouldn't feel conflicted about God is really personal to me because that's where I live. My doctoral work is in both psychology and religious studies. And so I've always. For me, that relationship between psychology and faith has just always been so deeply important to me. And so I always enjoy writing about that and just giving people the confidence to not be afraid of their feelings, especially their feelings with God. So those are probably the two that have the most personal resonance. I talk a little bit in that chapter about some of my own experiences wrestling with some hard things with God, especially in faith communities, and how I figured out how to sustain being in a faith community, what that looks like for me. And, yeah, I'm just really grateful, I guess, for the opportunity to get. To share some of that. And then you have a conclusion, Alison, about the paradox of hope. And I have to confess, I did not get that far in the book, I have a PDF version. I'm going to get a hard copy that I'm waiting on. But that's a subject that is near and dear to my heart, and it comes right back to the both. And that with everything that we're talking about, I shouldn't feel this way. I shouldn't have to numb my emotions, but I do. I shouldn't feel this way toward God, but I do. And hope is also a paradox. So talk about what you were up to in that chapter there as we wrap up. Yeah, exactly. And it's kind of based on that. Romans five. But the idea being every brave act, it's iterative, right? So the hope doesn't come at the end of the solution. The hope is, oh, my gosh, I just caught myself beating myself up. I just did it. And that's. There's hope in that. There's a glimmer, right? The opposite of a trigger. Oh, my gosh, I just told myself, wanting to shame myself or, oh, I just caught myself kind of shaming my body. I haven't even fixed it yet. I've caught myself. There's hope. Every. Every little step that we take becomes, in and of itself a step of hope. And that's just really hopeful to me. Right. Because and then over time, you know, all those glimmers, we are again, to use that metaphor, of riding the bike. Suddenly we are riding the bike and we are realizing, oh, my gosh, suddenly I'm kind of on this topic. I'm kind of flowing down the sidewalk, and I know where the obstacles are, and I kind of know how to avoid them. And I am avoiding them. But even just those first wobbly efforts of just getting up and then falling down and then getting back up and falling back down, there's hope in each one of those. And that's what I really want readers to get from this. We are so hard on ourselves, and yet each act that we take, each brave act that we take to just get back up even after we fall, or maybe we trusted somebody and they let us down and we. Okay, I'm going to try it somewhere else. Is an act of hope. I love how you shared about every little thing is an act of hope. And it reminds me of how those catching ourself moments, they are so often spontaneous and that spontaneity or something kind of rising up within us and it happening is because of the naming and, I think the framing. And then when we step with braveness into it, there is a organic and very spiritual some might say supernatural reality, where it's not us, it's us, but there's something divine and outside of us that's happening to bring about that change, the way that a muscle grows, where we can flex and exercise the muscle, but we don't actually make it grow. And over the last several months, about six months, I've been engaged in a yoga practice for the first time in my life. And I felt so incompetent at the beginning, and they talked about having a beginner's mindset, and I'm not there yet. But what I've realized is that there is no endpoint for yoga and there's no endpoint in the spiritual growth. It's just about showing up. And then every now and then, I'll notice, oh, I bent down to tie my shoes and it didn't hurt. And something like that. It's like, wow, six months after I started, I'm starting to notice things like that. Isn't that how inner transformation happens? Where you just. You show up with courage, you put yourself in a position that might feel very uncomfortable or, for me, uncharacteristic, but then really cool things are happening as a result of that. I love that. I love that metaphor of the beginner's mindset in the yoga. It's so true. It's just so true. Well, your new book, your third book, is I shouldn't feel this way. Name what's hard, tame your guilt and transform self sabotage into brave action. And I'm so, so thankful to talk with you today and just wish you all the continued success with your writing and your podcasts and all the ways that God has blessed you to influence other people. Lives are changing because of your work. Thank you so much, Michael. And I feel the same about you. I'm so grateful for the work that you do in changing lives and really just appreciate this conversation. Well, bless you. We'll talk again sometime. Yes.