Shaka Senghor

And I was able to have empathy while still being accountable.

And so all these things that I've used to unpack these larger life lessons, because I've seen colleagues who are doing amazing,

but they don't get a thing right and they beat up on themselves.

I've seen parents, I've seen people in relationships and it all comes back to oftentimes something that happened early in our childhood that imprinted in our minds that we have to be perfect, but we can't make mistakes.

And if we do make a mistake that we must therefore beat up on ourselves over and over and over again.

Re-plan that moment of the failure over and over.

And what journaling did for me is it disrupted that cycle.

What writing that letter did is it broke that cycle and allowed me to be present with myself and feel the grief of losing my brother without attaching it to my own guilt.

And that's the power of really awakening to one's mind and realizing if you just keep these small steps, writing it down.

So it seems like a small thing to do.

It's one of the biggest unlocks that we can ever have access to.

That's a powerful question.

I think in my journey, what I know with certainty is that it's been a sliding scale.

Of course.

And I didn't realize this until I actually began to write about shame, that environmental factors oftentimes dictate how we feel about ourselves.

Mm-hmm.

Growing up in a city like Detroit, where the impact of the war on drugs was very present, a lot of people were incarcerated, a lot of people were shot and killed.

The understanding of that environment in my community saying, hey, we understand that you went through this thing, but it's not who you are today, kind of lessened that feeling.

But it's also been weaponized in intimate relationships, you know, where I've had, you know, partners at times basically use my past to try to demean me.

That's not good.