Transcript
Speaker: That was my friend's one piece of advice to me before starting a podcast was don't forget to hit record.
Speaker: Wow, something's brewing.
Speaker: My first podcast episode.
Speaker: It's kind of crazy to think of starting a podcast, to be honest.
Speaker: It's something that has been on my mind for a long time.
Speaker: It is something that has come up.
Speaker: Other people have suggested it to me as well.
Speaker: Once I get talking to people about things that I've been through in life, my story, which I'm kind of an open book about at this point, and just learnings that I've had along the way, how I reframe things for other people or get people to think about
Speaker: about their own struggles in a different way.
Speaker: I guess there's a way of framing things that really is supportive for people and I'm really grateful that I have that ability and why would I hold that ability back from anybody else who might be able to learn from my story, what I've learned, how I phrase things, how I start to think of things.
Speaker: So
Speaker: Here we are.
Speaker: Welcome everybody to Something's Brewing.
Speaker: My name is Laura Joseph.
Speaker: I am just another person out there living in this crazy life, having a journey of my own, which has not been without some struggle, as I'm sure many of you have.
Speaker: I am a Virgo for all of you astrology lovers out there, and I definitely am a Virgo at heart.
Speaker: I am
Speaker: I'm an overthinker.
Speaker: I love hard.
Speaker: I love to have deep conversations with people.
Speaker: I'm an earth sign.
Speaker: Love getting in nature.
Speaker: Being at the beach is my happy place.
Speaker: I'm Jamaican, American, mixed.
Speaker: Girl, living in Connecticut, hopefully soon to be somewhere else.
Speaker: Right now I'm actually in St.
Speaker: Pete, Florida, recording this podcast, which is actually the place that I'm thinking of moving.
Speaker: So it's kind of nice to be able to record my first podcast in the place that I might end up or cross my fingers end up.
Speaker: So...
Speaker: Here we are.
Speaker: I'm really excited to be doing this.
Speaker: I hope that this can excite other people and inspire other people as well.
Speaker: I came up with some things brewing based on conversations that I've had with people in the last couple of months, to be honest.
Speaker: I've always known that I wanted to do something where I pay it forward with my story.
Speaker: I've recorded some podcasts.
Speaker: I've done some blog posts.
Speaker: but never really put it out there for a larger audience in this way before so bear with me as i learn the ropes here and start to understand how best to resonate with you all but i will hope to bring on some guests on the podcast i will hope to expand from talking about my story in mental health health self-development talk about nutrition talk about fitness
Speaker: talk about workplace wellness because that's where I've spent the last three years of my career talking with HR and global benefits people and inspiring employees to take care of their own well-being and one thing that's come up is why the heck we delineate between employee wellness and human wellness it's the same thing in my mind so it kind of blows my mind but I digress so back to something's brewing but what
Speaker: Yeah, I just started to get really honest with myself about passions that I have based on my history and career and personal history.
Speaker: What are the things that truly speak to my soul?
Speaker: What are truly the things that make me feel alive, make me feel in like a flow state, if anybody knows what that feels like.
Speaker: Maybe writers out there, artists out there understand that.
Speaker: What are things where I just feel most myself and feel really fulfilled after partaking in?
Speaker: And so for the first time, I think in a long time, I really just had to get honest with myself as to what those things were.
Speaker: And it's pretty much honestly like the beach and outdoors.
Speaker: community, mental health advocacy or health advocacy in general, helping people live their best life and building great relationships with people.
Speaker: You know, I was talking to a coworker the other day and he was like, your superpower is building relationships with people.
Speaker: So you gotta be in an area that allows you to do that.
Speaker: No matter what area it is, I'm going to build relationships with people.
Speaker: I hope that people feel comfortable, you know, either reaching out to me in a way that I might be able to help or support or recommending that I talk about certain things on this podcast.
Speaker: I do hold a life coach certification and a master's in nutrition.
Speaker: So I started my career in nutrition counseling and I then went and lived in California for a while working for a company out there in nutrition and moved back to Connecticut to pursue working for a startup in the diabetes space.
Speaker: Then
Speaker: Three years ago, found a company called Taskhuman was an app where basically we have a global network of coaches in over a thousand different aspects of well-being that we sell into corporate companies for employees to take their own wellness into their own hands in whatever aspect that means for them.
Speaker: So in that, I got to be able to work with all different people and inspiring them to define what wellness means for them, define what makes them feel their best self and find coaches and support systems and accountability partners to help them do that.
Speaker: So that's kind of my trajectory here.
Speaker: Then I started to really, like I said, get honest with myself as to what my passions are based on things that I've learned along the way and little snippets of like, oh, I enjoyed this, but I didn't really enjoy this.
Speaker: And I started to have conversations with people about where that could lead me when I had some sort of idea as to what direction I might want to take my career.
Speaker: And as we know, like one conversation leads to another leads to another.
Speaker: And I was talking to a friend at a coworking space about all the conversations I was having.
Speaker: And he looked at me and he's like, it sounds like something's happening for you.
Speaker: And I turned around naturally and I was like, I don't know, but something's brewing.
Speaker: And he looked at me and smiled and he goes, dude, that is the name of your podcast.
Speaker: Like whenever you decide to start it, that's what it is.
Speaker: So I am just here to hopefully pay it forward.
Speaker: A little bit about my background, since you already know, kind of like career wise, but
Speaker: I am a child of divorced parents who grew up, now that I know, not feeling super worthy of love and strong within myself, safe within myself, didn't really form a strong sense of self-love.
Speaker: I had some separation anxiety.
Speaker: with my mom in elementary school.
Speaker: And then in high school, I experienced some bullying with other girls that were in the class itself.
Speaker: I struggled with eating in high school as well, not knowing that that was a control for other things that were underlying with everything else that had gone on, but struggled with eating throughout high school and mostly into college when I started to question my sexuality as well.
Speaker: really really grabbed onto, feeling that I needed to know who I was and what my sexuality was.
Speaker: Deep down I think I already knew, but there's something about that that terrified me.
Speaker: If you, you know, are catching my drift here, there's the idea that if I didn't really love myself, if I was gay, that was another piece of shame that kind of came into my life and I wasn't really aware of it at that time.
Speaker: But the amount of obsession that I had about this led to a diagnosis of OCD.
Speaker: So I started to dive into what OCD was.
Speaker: I started to really try to understand why it was happening, what the treatment was, started to learn a little bit about it myself.
Speaker: My therapist told me I was one of her best students, which I took.
Speaker: You know, I was very grateful for that compliment because it's not an easy disorder to have, let alone try to treat for anybody out there.
Speaker: If I can help you, let me know.
Speaker: There are gold standard treatments out there, but just as a side note, please find an OCD specialist to work with for they're going to be your best bet.
Speaker: So with that, I, to be honest, I was just super grateful to have a diagnosis, to have something that I could really pinpoint and feel that I could take steps to then get better.
Speaker: So I was living in California at the time.
Speaker: I ended up moving back to Connecticut, found a therapist that was honestly a lifesaver.
Speaker: I always said I love therapy.
Speaker: I just recommend therapy for everybody, honestly.
Speaker: I think it's one of the best things we can do for ourselves.
Speaker: We all have things that we could talk about, and that's kind of why I'm starting this podcast is to just pay it forward in any way that I can.
Speaker: But I got to be a student, a historian, an investigator, and a writer of the rest of my story all in one just by being a client of this therapist.
Speaker: So...
Speaker: I really took it as an opportunity to get curious.
Speaker: And that's one of the biggest themes that you'll probably hear in this podcast is just being curious about the things that you struggle with, the things that you do in life, the things that make you happy, the things that make you sad, whatever it is, have the self-awareness to ask the questions as to why so that you can learn deeper about yourself.
Speaker: You know, we all kind of go through life
Speaker: Sometimes, I mean, it's really hard to change, right?
Speaker: No one likes to change.
Speaker: I'm in like a deeper stage of healing now that is requiring change on a very different level than I've ever done before.
Speaker: So that's a side note, but back to the diagnosis.
Speaker: And so I dove into that for the last six years.
Speaker: I was pretty good smooth sailing.
Speaker: I mean, I wouldn't say smooth sailing, but just like
Speaker: living life.
Speaker: I got another job three years ago and I think the stress in a different way of that job, I started managing people.
Speaker: I still had emotional stress that I was dealing with.
Speaker: I wasn't really happy with where I was living.
Speaker: had a lot of like both relationship and friendship things come to an end or confuse me or cause some struggle in my life that I really held on to in a different way that I felt other people did.
Speaker: Relationships are one of my biggest values in life and
Speaker: I also was starting to understand that I held on to certain relationships because I didn't have other ones in my life.
Speaker: I looked externally so much for validation and I looked externally for fulfillment of self instead of internally.
Speaker: And literally last September, I got physically sick with a GI infection.
Speaker: And in March, I got a second GI infection.
Speaker: And so these instances that happened to me
Speaker: were just such an eye-opening experience.
Speaker: I had thought I was doing really well.
Speaker: I think therapy for me,
Speaker: At that time was what I needed, you know, like we go with what we need at the time and sometimes we need to adjust or readjust or things happen that cause us to really need to readjust and When I got sick, there was no catalyst So I really had to figure out what the heck just happened where you know, I was losing weight unintentionally I could not eat anything I
Speaker: had to go to multiple doctors, I had to be on medication, antibiotics that made my mental health worse than I could ever even describe to you.
Speaker: It was a dark time, very, very, very dark time, and that lasted for a while.
Speaker: And so it forced me to redefine what stress meant for the body.
Speaker: I ended up seeing a naturopath, and we did some cortisol testing, we did some hormone testing, both of which were completely out of whack.
Speaker: It's funny because I thought that they were fine based on the results.
Speaker: And he looked at me and he's like, are you kidding me?
Speaker: Like your system is completely out of whack.
Speaker: And I had had hormone issues previously.
Speaker: So just interesting that I don't think that they were ever really rectified.
Speaker: But it was an eye opening experience because it was the first time somebody had mentioned stress to me as a culprit.
Speaker: And stress for me was
Speaker: I felt stress was like, oh, I can't sleep and I'm thinking about this and I'm so stressed out because, you know, work, right?
Speaker: Like work is always kind of what we feel stressed out about or family stressing me out or whatever it is.
Speaker: But my definition when I tell you of stress redefined itself like complete 180.
Speaker: because I didn't even realize how much emotional stress, spiritual stress, psychological stress that I had been under suppressing my emotions for years, um, could have this effect on the body.
Speaker: So I was basically at almost like adrenal fatigue for anybody out there who understands what that is.
Speaker: Um, very, very, very low cortisol levels throughout the entire day.
Speaker: almost zero progesterone in my system as a hormone that's really required for cortisol and just regular hormone balance.
Speaker: So the naturopath was like, no wonder you are feeling, you know, apathetic and depressed and anxious.
Speaker: And he's like, you can take antidepressants, but those are also not getting to the core issue that is occurring right here.
Speaker: I was like, why doesn't everybody go to a naturopath, man?
Speaker: This is crazy.
Speaker: So that set me on such a deeper healing journey that I've ever been on in my life where I knew I had to change something.
Speaker: I knew that there was a next chapter in this healing for me and in this therapy and this self-development, self-care chapter and journey that I
Speaker: I looked up healing retreats.
Speaker: I looked up like a lot of different strategies.
Speaker: I started to do Reiki.
Speaker: I started to meditate every single day.
Speaker: I just started to put things in motion because I, it was one of the darkest times and I was battling myself at that point.
Speaker: And so I was supposed to move to Florida.
Speaker: I ended up moving in with my mom.
Speaker: um temporarily and I was inspired by this next level of healing because it was something so different than I had ever done before and I was meeting people who had experienced similar things obviously with different stories and backgrounds but the theme was the same and I just started to dive in and kind of
Speaker: soak it up in a way that obviously was hard.
Speaker: And for me being a Virgo, I really try to understand, okay, so how do I heal?
Speaker: Tell me to do this and I will do X, Y, Z, and then I should feel ABC.
Speaker: And it's like, that ain't how this works.
Speaker: So this is a journey, you know, it took you 32 years to have these subconscious beliefs about yourself.
Speaker: It ain't going to be overnight that you're going to just kind of get rid of them or pop out of that, you know, thought process.
Speaker: So yeah,
Speaker: It was a real wake-up call.
Speaker: And it was a wake-up call in many areas.
Speaker: And I think rock bottoms like this can really inspire us to reassess.
Speaker: I think for me, it was knowing how much I had ignored my own intuitive voice for so long.
Speaker: And that was another thing that came up as a theme is just I was living my life for...
Speaker: other people.
Speaker: I did not trust myself and my own voice.
Speaker: I looked externally for love, as I mentioned, and I had not built safety within myself to feel that I could accomplish the things and live the life that I had actually dreamed of living or envisioned for myself, which was
Speaker: closer to the beach, which meant probably a little bit more away from my family.
Speaker: Um, and I was very intertwined with my family and had never really had time to individuate my, like by myself.
Speaker: And so a lot of that now is just kind of working through that, trying to break free of some of those ingrained subconscious beliefs, core beliefs, thought patterns that are so incredibly hard to break.
Speaker: So
Speaker: For anyone out there who is also resonating with this, I'm there right with you.
Speaker: We got this.
Speaker: Let's do it together.
Speaker: We can share tips and tricks as we go.
Speaker: That's kind of where I'm at right now.
Speaker: I will dive into more aspects of my story in other episodes because there's so much just to dive into, not as a way of just like talking about myself, but in a way to...
Speaker: really help you if you resonate with anything tips and tricks resources books that i've read things that i've done it's taken a lot of time by myself it's taken a lot of risks i would say but more so doing things that make me uncomfortable again change sucks we hate it the brain the body everything loves comfort but there's also misery and comfort
Speaker: I feel like with change comes growth, obviously.
Speaker: And so be gentle with yourself and have compassion for yourself during these times.
Speaker: But my main goal here is to really figure out how I can...
Speaker: build a community of people that uplift each other and where vulnerability becomes strength and we don't live our lives in shame or regret or staying small, right?
Speaker: We all have a purpose.
Speaker: We all have strengths.
Speaker: We all have things that are meant to be shared with this world.
Speaker: And I really just want to inspire everybody to sit with themselves and
Speaker: As hard as that can be, get honest with yourself and start to take small steps in the direction of taking care of yourself first.
Speaker: We live in a life where we put ourselves last because there's other people to take care of.
Speaker: but you are pouring from a half empty or almost sometimes empty cup with other people.
Speaker: So if you turn that cup around, fill it up for yourself first in many different ways and at many different speeds,
Speaker: It could be a drip at first, but getting that pattern first so that you have more to give to other people and you show up in life as a parent, as a sibling, as a worker, as whatever hat you wear, and we all wear multiple hats, you will show up better for those people.
Speaker: You will show up better for yourself.
Speaker: And that is all that I can ask of people is to take time, pause,
Speaker: Ask yourself some of the hard questions, whether you acknowledge the answers or hear the answers, write them down, but don't do anything.
Speaker: That is a first step.
Speaker: If you're, you know, if you find that very, very challenging, give yourself some grace.
Speaker: It takes time to get there to understand that like something hard is going to come up, but through that hard getting through it is how we get to the other side.
Speaker: So,
Speaker: If I can help rewrite some areas, reframe other areas, get a little curious, you know, reach out for support, make small changes.
Speaker: They add up to the bigger ones.
Speaker: I'd love to hear from you as to what has inspired you to change what changes you have made or plan to make, um, how I can support you in that journey.
Speaker: I am here and I want to thank you all for the time that you took to listen to this, to be there on this path with me and to join other people who I talked to about their journey and hopefully resonate with some of them.
Speaker: Take that and make changes in your life that you can share with us.
Speaker: So the one thing I will ask you to do before I sign off, it wouldn't be me if I didn't, is to encourage you to take a few minutes, five minutes, one minute,
Speaker: half hour, whatever, to do something that fills your cup right now or today.
Speaker: Make sure you make a promise to yourself to do that.
Speaker: You deserve it.
Speaker: We all deserve it.
Speaker: Life is a journey, but we're here as a community to build each other up.
Speaker: So I will probably try to encourage you to do different things.
Speaker: Each time I make a podcast just to make it a little bit interactive and different, but take a moment, pause.
Speaker: What inspires you?
Speaker: What fills your cup?
Speaker: Do that today and feel better.
Speaker: If it becomes a habit, even better.
Speaker: But I want to thank you for being at Something's Brewing.
Speaker: I want to thank you for understanding who I am and what my goals are with this podcast.
Speaker: My goal is to help you, not to be self-serving at all.
Speaker: I am just happy that you're here and I'm excited to ride this journey together.
Speaker: So go be great and we'll chat soon.
