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Season 1 Recap 4 - New Episodes Drop May 6th!
19 Plays1 year ago
Season 1 Recap 4 of Vulnerability Muscle - New Episodes Drop May 6th!
Welcome to "Vulnerability Muscle with Reggie D. Ford," the empowering podcast that challenges societal norms and invites you to explore the transformative power of vulnerability. Hosted by bestselling author and motivational speaker Reggie D. Ford, this show is your guide to finding strength, connection, and personal growth through embracing vulnerability. In a world that often portrays vulnerability as a sign of weakness, Reggie D. Ford believes it is a source of tremendous strength and authenticity. Through insightful conversations and thought-provoking interviews, "Vulnerability Muscle" aims to redefine vulnerability and help listeners develop a new perspective on their own lives. Reggie D. Ford, renowned for his bestselling book "Perseverance Through Severe Dysfunction" and his captivating motivational speeches, brings his unique expertise and personal experiences to the forefront. With a deep understanding of the impacts of trauma, the importance of mental health, and the power of vulnerability, Reggie inspires and empowers his audience to embrace their own vulnerabilities as catalysts for growth and change. Each episode of "Vulnerability Muscle" delves into a variety of topics, such as mental health, social issues, and mindset shifts. Reggie and his guests explore the power of vulnerability in healing, building resilience, and fostering meaningful connections. They provide practical tools and strategies to navigate life's challenges, overcome adversity, and create more inclusive and just environments for all people. Whether you're seeking personal growth, struggling with your mental health, or looking to create a positive impact in the world, this podcast offers a safe space for deep exploration and transformation. Reggie's compassionate and engaging style invites you to step out of your comfort zone and embrace vulnerability as a path to personal empowerment. Join Reggie D. Ford and his inspiring guests on "Vulnerability Muscle" as they illuminate the path toward self-discovery, authenticity, and true strength. Prepare to be inspired, uplifted, and equipped with the tools to unlock your full potential through the power of vulnerability.
📲 Connect with Reggie IG - https://instagram.com/reggiedford FB - https://facebook.com/reggiedford LI - https://linkedin.com/in/reggiedford X - https://twitter.com/reggiedford YT - https://youtube.com/@reggiedfordWebsite - https://reggiedford.com Book - https://amzn.to/487OqJD Podcast - https://reggiedford.com/vulnerabilitymuscle Podcast’s IG - https://instagram.com/vulnerabilitymuscle Podcast’s FB - https://www.facebook.com/vulnerabilitymuscle
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Transcript
Season Two Announcement & Recap
00:00:00
Speaker
What's up Vulnerability Muscle fam? Just wanted you to know that new episodes of Vulnerability Muscle are gonna drop May 6th. That's Monday, May 6th. The next season of Vulnerability Muscle will drop, so mark your calendars. But in the meantime, I hope you enjoy some of these clips from season one. Please like, subscribe, share these episodes with everybody that you know so that they can get a taste of Vulnerability Muscle. In the meantime, keep flexing that Vulnerability
Vulnerability & Personal Growth
00:00:29
Speaker
Muscle.
00:00:29
Speaker
using that privilege as power to help other people. And that is something that this was all about. And then also helping people understand that if you got into a therapy session, it'll be a lot like this with somebody who's qualified to ask you questions to help you dig deeper. And so this first season, it was therapy sessions for my brothers, man. That's what it was.
00:00:56
Speaker
I can confirm that for you. I needed that conversation when we had it, you know. So what you build here is definitely, I hope that it's helping the listeners as much as it's helping the person be an interview, you know. And I think I'm at that place in my life now to where it's less energy to just be open than it is for me to not talk about things, not be cool, but yet I'm overthinking and that, you know, I'm having this depression. I'm having anxiety.
00:01:26
Speaker
All these other things are really happening to me. I just now got to the point now that I can actually listen to music and I can start understanding words again. And now I'm realizing the more that I'm shedding a lot of these burdens, the more I'm able to feel again, I'm able to see again, the colors are brighter for me again. The words are actually there and I can hear them now. But that took a lot of the fact of just being honest with myself and saying, you know what, it's time to let these burdens down.
Black Men's Struggle with Vulnerability
00:01:54
Speaker
But I think if the dig deeper for the black man, I believe that we don't have the platform or the openness to be vulnerable to our families and to our friends and people that know us because it's like, get the job done, suck it up. Nobody wants to hear your excuses, you know, and for so long they tell
00:02:19
Speaker
Black people, Black men, that we make excuses. We make excuses why we don't get ahead. We make excuses why we're not good fathers. Whatever the narrative is, they say we make excuses. So in tune, we have to eat it up and get the job done. I feel guilty for missing it because it was the next day, literally, phone on silent, took that test, walked into the next class.
00:02:47
Speaker
And I get in the class and I look at the phone, it's just missed calls and texts and voice messages. And even deeper, man, I know people don't like really, I don't know what people believe, but I actually like the moment that my uncle told me that my dad passed away, I saw that in a dream, maybe a year or two before. You know what I mean? Like that exact moment. So I didn't even react first to that feeling. It was kind of like a shock. Like, wait, you know, like this is like the exact,
00:03:17
Speaker
I'm looking, you know, the exact view of when I'm in the end,
Art, Relationships & Healing
00:03:20
Speaker
it kind of hit me. I'm like, what? You know, he broke down. And after that, man, it was just a blur. You know, it was just a blur for like the next.
00:03:29
Speaker
few years honestly. My senior night game that we talked about before, you know, I stayed like we almost couldn't go to dinner that night because I stayed and signed every single person autograph who wanted me to took pictures with them and their kids and like we shutting down the gym like folks like cleaning up like yo, y'all gotta get out of here. You know what I'm saying? But like that's just who I am in my heart because that's how I was raised. You never take people for granted man because
00:03:58
Speaker
They're not trying to get everybody on the team. Right? Exactly. They're not trying to take a picture with everybody. They weren't even trying to take pictures with everybody on the team. Right? And so you just never, never take that for granted. I specifically decided not to go to the varsity locker rooms, obviously, because then I knew that people were going to see me cry.
00:04:17
Speaker
So I went into the junior school locker rooms, and that's where I cried. And when I started to see that people were coming in, I went into the athletic room. Because at the time, I remember, what's the name? Chad Breedlove. And I said, hey, Chad, can I stay in here for a little bit? Just close the door. He said, yeah. And so again, it was the constant, OK. Like, I cannot let them see me. I cannot let them see that they won. Because I knew that somebody always wanted a reaction.
00:04:48
Speaker
And what happened is nobody got a reaction out of me then. But unfortunately, because I let that vest roll through all those years, all these reactions came to what I'm about to tell you now. You know, there were all these other times that things looked better and finding it in that moment allowed me to have this moment, you know.
Interpersonal Relationships & Trauma Healing
00:05:06
Speaker
And so, so yeah, I mean, I think that finding a way to
00:05:12
Speaker
get to the core of what's going on with you is going to be vulnerable. There's kind of no way to get to the truth of who you are without exposing yourself. And I think even people that have a hard time doing it in life, which I often do, art is a place that I almost feel, I feel responsible to the work.
00:05:40
Speaker
I can't lie about this. And so in telling the truth about that, everything else comes to fruition. We talked about about Terra and our relationship which has had so many different iterations, but partly in making this body work.
00:06:03
Speaker
was getting into some of those spaces and really kind of opening that side of the things that have been really, really dear to me and really, really important.
00:06:21
Speaker
and really hard to admit, like needing somebody. Saying like, man, this person really pulled me through this thing. She's one of the most brilliant people I know. And she talked about how we get broken in a relationship, but also we heal in a relationship. Yes. So understanding that just because we get broken in a certain relationship doesn't necessarily mean that we need to shut the door in relationships. Because like you said, building interpersonal connections when you've been through trauma and been through
00:06:48
Speaker
been through fractures in relationships. A lot of times there's a, there's a hesitance there because you're like, man, I want to protect myself. I don't want to get hurt, but that's just the nature of life, right? Like we're all going to get into other relationships that are going to hurt us,
Athletes' Trust Issues & Support Systems
00:07:01
Speaker
right? Like we're going to trust people that we shouldn't trust.
00:07:03
Speaker
and different things. But I think at the end of the day, love is way too powerful and way too healing to not fully engulf yourself in it when there's a possibility of it. So yeah, that's what these stories are just telling me, man. A lot of the challenges that we hear when we work with athletes, they say they don't trust the staff because they think it's going to get back to the coach. And if it gets back to my coach, like we just discussed. And so that was my experience working at Tennessee State.
00:07:33
Speaker
I had to earn the trust of the athletes to know that what they discussed with me is not going to get back to the coach because just to be frank, some of the stuff could get you suspended. It can get you kicked off the team. And what happens if you get kicked off a team and you're an athlete, you lose hardship, you lose your whole opportunity to be in college. So some of this I need to keep.
00:07:56
Speaker
Yeah. Personal, right? And so we want to be one of the leading agencies that is not affiliated with the school, that we can come in and help provide our services to student athletes, psychoeducation services. And I think looking back now, it's just like, why didn't you do more to stop or at least
00:08:18
Speaker
reduce her effect on us
Healing Through Love & Therapy
00:08:22
Speaker
kids. Does that make sense? So it was hurt there. But like I said, I think what will help me heal was therapy. But the main thing, honestly, was my wife, bro. Like,
00:08:35
Speaker
it was just her being her and just showing me her unconditional love and showing me what unconditional love looked like. It just, it showed me that there was another way to be and there was another way to live life that I didn't have to be constantly on guard and always trying to fight a motherfucker, you know what I mean? Or trying to like react to something or always trying to like
00:09:02
Speaker
watch my back, because I don't know if something I said to you ticked you off enough to where like, does that make sense? Like, you want to fight me, or you want to start an argument, and shit like that. But with her, it was just complete opposite, right? And so that's really where a lot of my healing came from, was my relationship with my wife, and just her being her, and just her showing me unconditional love, and just showing me what it looks like to have somebody constantly in your corner, and somebody who
00:09:30
Speaker
really, really loves you as somebody who is on your team, like literally. And so it took me a while. It took me a while to recognize that and to accept that. Thankfully, through therapy, I was able to go to therapy and talk a lot about that stuff. But yeah, bro, that relationship healed me a
Barriers to Therapy Access
00:09:51
Speaker
lot. What are your thoughts on that? So currently going to therapy, I have my appointment tomorrow at 5.
00:09:59
Speaker
But I had just gone back to therapy recently. I've been uninsured for a while, so that has been like a barrier. And the other things, when I was, when I've gotten in trouble with school and things like that, ironically, so I was seeing therapy there, but then ironically, when I needed therapy the most, like, you know, oh, you're no longer have access to the health insurance or this or that.
00:10:28
Speaker
That was the other big piece for me is understanding that the way systems are built, when you need help the most, you lose it, especially for somebody who coming from a low socioeconomic background. If you don't have access, if you're not in these schools, you don't have steady access to health insurance. If you're not always employed 40 hours,
00:10:51
Speaker
you don't have steady access to health insurance. These are the barriers to people who are feeling, you know, distress or, you know, feeling difficulties during their time. So I wish I've always had access to insurance when I needed it the most.
00:11:06
Speaker
but it's not always been that way currently seeing it. And we haven't really focused on my family. Cause I feel like- I really think like there should be more opportunities for free for youth. What is middle or high school age youth to be able to be able to travel and explore and just think about, you know how, I don't even know if they do this anymore Reggie, but remember like in our younger days, we would take like field trips. It would be like a thing. I don't know if kids take field trips,
00:11:34
Speaker
Like we used to take good people and grade school and stuff, but that was part of exploring and getting outside of your community. And I wish, like, that would just be a burning desire for me, man. It's like, whatever I can do to help people kind of get beyond their, you know, that silo or their, you know, existing community to really kind of get outside it and see how other people are living, thinking, eating,
00:12:00
Speaker
speaking or whatever that may be, man. That's just like, if I can encourage people to do that, to really explore, and that's why I care about a lot of issues like many other people, right? It showed me something about myself because a lot of times I wonder why I struggle with some of the things I struggle with. It's because I've allowed the enemy to have a seat on my table. I'm talking about
Positive Mindset & Season One Recap
00:12:21
Speaker
the enemy as far as like negative stuff, like negative overtones, negative stuff that comes into our lives.
00:12:27
Speaker
We're allowed to just sit at our table, and we just cool with it. Now don't be cool with it, man. Push that stuff out the table. Get them off your... No, you can't sit right here, dude. Depression. No, you can't sit right here. Anxiety. No, you can't sit here. You know what I'm saying? All that negative, you cannot sit here. But when I allow that stuff to sit at my table, then that's when I become influenced by who's at my table.
00:12:51
Speaker
What's up vulnerability muscle fam? I hope you enjoyed season one of vulnerability muscle. If you haven't already done so, check out all 12 episodes of vulnerability muscle season one and tell me who is your favorite guest? What is your favorite quote? Let me know, send a message, send a DM, send something so that I know what you resonate with.
00:13:11
Speaker
Be looking forward to season two of Vulnerability Muscle that is set to drop on May 6th. That's Monday, May 6th. Episodes start at 2 a.m. Central time. That's U.S. Central. Monday, May 6th mark your calendars. But in the meantime, every Monday this month of April, we will be having clips from our favorite episodes of Vulnerability Muscle season one. So if you haven't already checked out the full episodes, go check those out. But you're all caught up for season two.
00:13:41
Speaker
Thank you for joining another episode of Vulnerability Muscle. I hope that the stories and the insights shared really resonated with you. And if you want to help podcast, you can do a few things. First, hit the subscribe button. If you've been moved by the conversations of redefining vulnerability, please consider leaving a review.
00:14:00
Speaker
Share your thoughts on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're tuning in from. And don't forget to spread the word. Follow us at Vulnerability Muscle, where you can keep up with me personally at Reggie D. Ford for additional resources. And remember, embracing vulnerability is a strength. Thank you for being a part of the journey. And until next time, stay empowered, stay vulnerable, and keep flexing that vulnerability muscle. I'll see y'all May 6th.