Dr. Nicole LePera

I can't tell anyone that this is what I'm struggling with.

So I want to say that that is so not true.

And the reason why I so readily share my own self is in hopes that you can kind of break down that wall of feeling alone, because we are all so much more similar than we are dissimilar.

And again, we are all

So worthy for just being who we are in all of our messiness, the things we're good at, the things we're not good at, our joy, our sorrow, and everything in between.

To live a life that's yours is what comes up, right?

Because we all even have different ideas of what good is.

I think our journey here is to find ourselves, find our way back home, get curious, explore that beautiful creature of worthiness and to create space in our environments and our relationships to live that expression.

So I think that that is the ultimate goodness in life is to live a life that's yours.

Can you take me back to that time and what you've learned from that?

Absolutely.

And so as we all are in childhood, we're very connected, observant, and absorbative of the world around us.

And I saw very clearly very early on that in a very traditional way, my family, you know, was of the mindset that success in life meant having financial security.

And of course, the way to that was to excel academically and or athletically, because oftentimes

Those things lead to the good college, to the good career, et cetera.

So seeing that very clearly and experiencing an absence of connection, quite largely in my home, of no fault or ill intention of my parents.

I had two parents.

My mother was in care of the home, always present, yet because of her own childhood trauma and stress that was happening both outside of the home in the city that we lived and inside the home with health-related issues,

She wasn't really able to be present to me except in those moments, right, where she was fostering the things that I was good at, which it was very clear that I was successful academically and athletically from a very early age, and seemingly both came easy to me.

It's not to say that I didn't spend, as I'm sure you did as well, a lot of time honing my skill, practicing all of my outside hours.