Ep. 104 – How helping others can help us become happy when we are struggling

TRANSCRIPT

Gissele : [00:00:00] welcome to the Love and Compassion Podcast with Gissele. We believe that love and compassion have the power to heal our lives and our world. Don’t forget to like and subscribe for more amazing content, and if you’d like to support the podcast, you can buymeacoffee.com/loveandcompassion. Today, we’re gonna be talking about finding happiness even in the most difficult moments.

Gissele : Our guest today is Karen Olson, who is the founder of Family Promise, a national non-profit organization that helps homeless and low-income families. Today, the organization boasts more than 200 affiliates across the US, with more than 180,000 men, women, and children served each year. In her book Meant for More, Karen tells her story from tragedy in childhood to an adulthood full of compassion and service, which has made her stronger, healthier, and more fulfilled than ever before.

Gissele : Many people seek happiness through acquiring material goods or achieving status, only to find a lack of fulfillment. With first-hand [00:01:00] testimonials from Karen and other volunteers, Meant for More is a call to action. When you reach out beyond yourself and seek to make a difference in the lives of others , happiness will catch up with you.

Gissele : Please join me in welcoming Karen Olson. Hi, Karen.

Karen: Gissele, thank you s- so much. I’m happy to be here. I’ve got a little cough today, so I have to clear my throat.

Gissele : Thank you so much for being on the show. I was wondering if you could start by telling the audience a little bit about your childhood and how that led you to to choose a life of service.

Karen: My childhood before I was 12 was very happy. Playing outside, going to the beach in the summer, swimming in Long Island Sound, and in the winter, skating on the pond on our street. And I just was happy-go-lucky, giggling and laughing all the time, having so much fun. I didn’t recognize that it was so happy until one day it [00:02:00] wasn’t.

Karen: When I was 12, I experienced a very tragic and sudden loss. My mother committed suicide when I was just 12. She had been depressed, and she was seeing a doctor, and her marriage to my father wasn’t good, and but we had no idea she would commit suicide, but she did. And since I was so close to her and my dad was an alcoholic I just, it left a hole in my heart when she died.

Karen: But that hole drove me to help others, ’cause I knew what hurt was, and I didn’t want anyone else to hurt. So I did various things. I volunteered at the ho- local hospital as a candy striper. I delivered flowers to people. And I played tennis with a man, young man across the street whose girlfriend left him, and he had cancer, [00:03:00] and he didn’t have long to live.

Karen: But it just seemed natural to me to wanna reach out to others, something I was not aware of before I had lost my mother. But the loss of my mother encouraged me to reach out to others, and I think it’s that drive, that passion that drove me on to create Family Promise and help so many people

Gissele : Now how did you specifically choose to help that population, the homelessness population, instead of like maybe some other organization?

Gissele : Like why homelessness in particular?

Karen: I started out giving sandwiches to people in New York City at Port Authority Bus Terminal. And actually, what led me there was I was on my way to a meeting in New York City. I was a consumer promotions manager. And I was about to pass [00:04:00] this woman who I had seen before. She was elderly. She sat on a crate outside of Grand Central Station,