From My Heart To Yours

Carol Banens: “Being kind can mean so many different things. When it comes to grief, it doesn't mean trying to fix grief. Let's get that out there. Because you don't fix grief, you live through it. You get to work through it. In grief, being kind to yourself can be calling on a friend for a chat, monitoring the intensity of your grief, or journaling about your grief (what you’ve lost and what you still have). Being kind to others in grief is about remembering that they are on decision overload. They might not even know what they want or what they need.

When my husband died, and before I could even think about mowing the lawn, my realtor sent over a lawn crew. This continued all summer. What a gift and a blessing. Talk about instilling gratitude! It took away a burden I didn’t even know I had. It was one less thing for me to think about.

So when I think about being kind, sometimes it's the practical things that make all the difference in the world.”

Have a listen as I interview my special guest, Carol Banens.

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Carol Banens: “It doesn't matter how someone dies, grief is immense. We get to remember that fact. When my husband died, I pushed everything down so I could go back to work, so I could manage things, and it came back to bite me for not dealing with it. It's exhausting to put on a facade of 'I'm fine', if you're not. As soon as we start to have these conversations, as soon as we're with compassionate people who will sit with us and listen, let us put our head on their shoulder or go for a walk with us, it softens our grief. Community coming together is such a beautiful way of dealing with any sort of trouble because it allows us to see the connection between people.

It's so important to talk when you are ready to talk. Grief has to be witnessed, it has to be heard. And the more we talk about it, the more we stop resisting it and pushing it down.”

Have a listen as I interview my special guest, Carol Banens.

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Iana J. Daniels: “Every day is an opportunity for plenty of things, especially change. We are not perfect beings, we are not infallible, we are human. The world is not perfect. The game is rigged. You are going to make mistakes. Anyone who has decided they know how you should live your life, has no idea how to live their own. I was guilty of that as well.

One of my coaches called me out. She said, ‘You need to get rid of your instruction manual, the one for other people's lives’. I'm the eldest. In my mind, I had an instruction manual for how my youngest sister should live her life, because she was my responsibility. A day later, I was having a conversation with my mom and she said, ‘I know you feel like your babysitter is like your kid, but as your mother, I say, Let that go. She is an adult’.

That was the day I realized that I had to allow my younger sisters to live their own lives.”

Have a listen as I interview my special guest, Iana J. Daniels.

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Iana J. Daniels: “When we realize that everything is temporary we begin to develop the fear of missing out (FOMO). Growing up in Guyana, there are two phrases that older people say all the time. As a young girl, I didn't quite understand it. I understood it more as I grew older. The first one is, ‘You know that you're getting older, when you have fewer friends’. And the other one I recall hearing was, ‘I’m tired. I’m ready’. My maternal grandmother lived until she was 104 so you can imagine how many times she used that phrase.

As I got older, I realized what they meant. ‘I've lived a life. I feel complete, and I am fine. I am at peace with the world no matter what happens.’

In every situation and every experience, you learn something about you and you learn something about the world. So you still come out of a difficult time in your life with a lesson and a blessing.

We get to create and recreate our stories from our lessons and our blessings. We do that from our intuition. Like, something’s just not feeling right and that's okay, I can make a different decision.”

Have a listen as I interview my special guest, Iana J. Daniels.

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Iana J. Daniels: “One of my supervisors said, ‘Iana, you take yourself so seriously, you don't have to. Smile a little bit. Everything does not have to be a problem to solve. With some things, you can just let them go’. I've always had laughter in my life. For a while, it was a coping mechanism, instead of crying. When I learned about belly laughing, I realized that's the type of laugh I do when I am truly happy or find something really, really funny. It's not the laugh I do when I'm trying to make myself enjoy something.

When it comes to suicide, we see things on social media how the person who had just ended their life by suicide was seen just the night before laughing at a party, seeming to be having a wonderful time.

There was a time in my life where if I wasn't doing something, I didn't feel productive or I felt something was wrong. Nowadays, some days are what I call a pajama day. I do nothing and I even stay in my PJs all day.

I now watch the sunrise and the sunset. I often wonder how many more sunrises and sunsets I have left in my lifetime and how many of them will I miss? How many of those have I missed because I was too busy doing other things? So, sunrises and sunsets happen whether or not we pay attention to them. Watching them is a great way to slow down literally and metaphorically.

I also remember to dance in the rain.”

Have a listen as I interview my special guest, Iana J. Daniels.

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Iana J. Daniels: “If you told me as a teenager sitting in Guyana, South America that I would be here talking to you on this platform, sharing parts of my journey, I would have said you're on some very good stuff.

There's a quote, I read one time, it said, 'Life is like a roller coaster, just hold on tight and enjoy the ride'. It was and I did hold on tight.

I also feel sure about the enjoyment part, even though there was a lot of trauma and shame early on in my life.

And like a roller coaster, it's been intense.

I even ended up in military service, in the US Army. That was one of those things that I did not have planned for me. I wanted nothing to do with military service. I was presented with an opportunity to have my student loans paid off, in addition to being able to have my graduate degree, as many of them as I wanted, subsidized, while at the same time making a living. Those three things for me came down to one word: independence.

I gave them 21 years of my life when I only intended to give them the three that they needed.

I wouldn't recommend anyone going to college to pay for college the way I did, because you introduce unnecessary suffering into your life.

I got through with a combination of student loans, credit cards, and a partial track scholarship.

Be prudent about any type of student loan.

Credit cards, definitely not as a student. During the first month of a new semester there's nothing but credit card companies at the student union.

It’s easy to get into credit card debt, especially when you don’t have a job.”

Have a listen as I interview my special guest, Iana J. Daniels.

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Mike Stevenson: “I believe that young people should have special sittings with local and national governments. It might add more voices to the cacophony of politicians and yet we need to hear those voices. We need to give young people a sense that they are part of the solution, and we need to listen to them now.

Reforming democracy sounds complicated. It's not. They've done it in places like Norway, where the young people were leaving because all the industry was gone. They brought young people in as part of the political solution. That's the thing to do. It's also about asking the right questions. For example, "What's going to encourage you to stay in this town?"

Every human being has enormous capacity. When you see it in children, you realize just how great that capacity is.

We tend to keep young people compliant. Listen to us, we know best, rather than hearing their ideas.

When we start exploring the creativity and the imagination of all parts of the community, we find richness. I have been able to do this. I have worked with people and communities. I have held big idea sessions and shown groups of people how extraordinary ideas have taken root around the world.”

Have a listen as I interview my special guest Mike Stevenson.

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Mike Stevenson: “A child will say, "I want a city that is designed for all of us". And in response, an adult will say, "Where is the budget coming from? Can we do it? There's too much opposition.” They will take a position that's going to be immediately adversarial.

Changemakers in the world draw people in because they don't complicate things with policies and facts. They just say, "We want a city designed for people and all those plants and creatures that inhabit the world".

I do believe in young people and I'm at the age where so many of my contemporaries are dissing them and referring to them as snowflakes.

This is a political weapon to attack young people and people who are more liberal minded. This really is an attack tactic.

We have problems in the world that must be addressed now. There must be some leverage of the money that has been amassed in tax havens. We get to stop that and the world needs to agree on that now. It's part of the process for repairing the world. We get to start considering and noticing the planet.

There's actually a great deal of enthusiasm to do that. The only stoppers are those who have a vested interest in retaining the status quo. That's why I believe in giving leadership to young people, because they get it. Their future is at stake.”

Have a listen as I interview my special guest Mike Stevenson.

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Mike Stevenson: “It's time to rebalance our understanding of what money is about. When it comes to greed, we can pin it down to three things these days: business, money, and politics. We've allowed business to kind of morph into unfettered greed and we’ve allowed greed to grow. Business is a force for good and business should be a force for good. The market can solve problems and yet we've allowed it to get out of control.

We now have a situation where the sixty-four richest people in the world, multi-billionaires, own more than the entire bottom half of the global population.

They see themselves as successful. Yes. Okay. They've had great business ideas and implemented them. At this point they are people who are making money simply by having money and investing it. I don't think they're earning it. I think it's spurious to claim that people are earning it and it’s so much money, they can't even spend it within their lifetime. The worst part is that they keep charging the rest of us higher and higher prices. That's what I mean by greed.

Politicians are elected with money and are mainly made by money. That means that power and control are held by the people who have exercised the greatest greed.

We get to separate money from politics.

We are living in really difficult times. The voices that will be heard come from people asking audacious questions and we need answers to those questions.

The best leaders are people who live in some of our most impoverished communities, because leadership becomes a necessity to survive. People seem to think there is some kind of leadership gene. There isn’t. We've allowed bad leadership in politics. Now we get to reroute politics to communities where we live. That's where the power should be, because the people are sovereign. It's the whole foundation of democracy. We've gone beyond that.”

Have a listen as I interview my special guest Mike Stevenson.

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Mike Stevenson: “I was born to a Scottish-Irish father, and a Lebanese mother who had grown up in Egypt. So it was quite a mix to be born into as a cultural being. I spent three years in Pakistan between the ages of three and six-and-a-half. On the way back to Scotland, we got caught in Egypt. It was at the time of the Suez Crisis with the British government. I remember the troops on the shore of Port Said; we got out just before the Suez Canal was closed.

I came back to Scotland, which I barely knew because I had traveled to Pakistan at age three. I found it cold and gray.

Settling into school was extraordinarily difficult for me because I had started kindergarten in Lahore, Pakistan. Evidently I spoke pretty decent Urdu. I can only remember a few words of it now. It's so incredible how children just absorb information in extraordinary ways because they are so adaptable.

I ended up attending a total of three different primary schools and I hated it. I hated the whole school experience.

When I went to high school, it wasn't any better. I just could not settle myself. I was fidgety, distracted, disinterested, and bored. I was constantly thinking of the Beatles and The Rolling Stones, and being a rock star. I wanted to stand on stage, and at the age of thirteen that's exactly what I did. I started a band. At school, none of that counted for anything, because you are judged entirely on academic grounds. So it was no surprise that by the age of fifteen, I was asked to leave school on no uncertain terms.

My parents were going through a divorce and it was horrible. It was nasty. I escaped to London to get away from it all. I got a job in a shop selling furniture and it was all going well until it wasn't. Apparently, none of the customers could understand a word I said because of my Scottish accent.

So I was sacked three days into my first job.

I ended up sleeping out for about a year, which was quite formative in negative as well as positive ways. It was a challenging and threatening experience where I learned that I could survive and found out who I was as an individual. After that, I went through an extraordinary journey.”

Have a listen as I interview my special guest Mike Stevenson.

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