Episode 2: How Can You Be A Better Self-Advocate?

Welcome to Everything You Need is Within, a Spotify Greenroom live audio show and podcast produced by and for Gen-Z, with me, your host, Gigi Robinson.

All right, all right, I'm going live, in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the second episode of Everything You Need is Within. I'm so excited that you're all here, and I cannot wait to get into what we're talking about today. And to start it off, I just hope that everybody is having a great day and a great evening. And whenever you're listening to this either live on the replay, I really hope that it touches you in some way. So, without further ado, let's get into it. The title of this episode is: How Can You Be a Better Self Advocate?

And I guess I will just go right into it, and kind of explain how this topic came to be and why I decided to make this the second episode very early on in this show. I will say that the first reason has to do with the fact that as a patient, and a person I have had to advocate for myself, for years, years, I tell you, and it can get exhausting and sometimes I even become a little bit jaded to the fact that that's something I deal with. But on top of that, since it's now my field of work where I help coach other people how to advocate for themselves in their medical situations, and in any kind of situation where, you know, whether that's having to do with relationships or friendships or doctors or family, or professional relationships, you're going to have to be your number one fan, and by hosting this episode and sharing some of my stories I hope that they either resonate with you, and hopefully they also leave you with maybe some action steps or some new perspectives on the ways in which you can level up on your own self advocacy. I also wanted to start this off by honoring everything that's going on in the world right now.

There's a lot going on, and I don't think that any of it should be taken lightly, we have experienced so much, and we live in a society, at least within social media, where we're so focused on this idea of always showing off, and showing up as our best self. And I think that celebrating our wins are so important. I'm absolutely doing an episode on this later, but I also think celebrating our low points is a really important thing to do, and it's very humbling. And when you can humble yourself at any point I think there's lessons that you can learn from it, and there's also something inside of you that makes you vulnerable enough to admit that you're wrong, so you have to push your ego aside to ultimately say like yeah I messed up. Yeah, I can be better. Yeah, I'm not, I'm not in the best spot, why is that why, why am I feeling this way? What can I do to change that? How can I be better moving forward? And that is what I try to do and try to put at the forefront of my work.

Aside from that, again, back to this idea of working in the advocacy space, I feel like people always approach me with, how can I do advocacy the way that you do it? And my answer is simply, you can't do it the way that I do it because everybody else is going to have their own niche, they're going to have their own perspectives, their own stories. So, in the same way you can't write the same book as somebody, you can't take the same picture of somebody more than once, you're going to do it your own way, and I hope that this episode also leaves you with some tools on ways to be a better advocate. So when people ask me how I have become or gotten into this field of advocacy, if you tuned in live last week, or if you listen to this on the replay, definitely listen to the first episode where I kind of talk about this idea of surrendering, which I'm sure I will do an episode on later down the line ... I did like the beginning stages where I'm always thinking about my next move and earlier today,

I was talking with one of my friends, and she was just having a difficult time and I was like look, like, are you celebrating yourself? Are you celebrating your wins? Are you celebrating how far you've come from a year ago, two years ago, like, five years ago? And her answer was no. And I thought that it was a really cool moment because I got to humble her in her own moment. I was like, you're not the same person. Neither am I, in no way, and I think that we have this really cool ability to change so, on the note of when I started this advocacy work, it was honestly almost exactly a year ago when a lot of things were happening around the murder of George Floyd, and the way that I was interacting with social media, and the way that the world was interacting with social media. And I knew I had to change something which, again, you can go listen to that first episode, as soon as it is up which it probably will be by the time this episode is up as well. And I was like, Gigi you gotta, you have so much passion, you have so much drive, you have so much to share, why are you not sharing it? So I reevaluated my, my own self and I wanted to try to help others to be better advocates and also to communicate better and, recently, someone asked me — and I would implore you to do this exercise on your own — what does advocacy mean to you?

And it was a moment where I realized I'd been using this term about advocacy and thinking, okay, yeah, like I'm doing something to help others, right, take it a step further, like what does that really mean to me? Why do I want to help others? Why do I want to serve others? Why is it important to me that I make work that is putting myself in a place of service? And, I'm still figuring that out. But the main reason of doing it is to help the person that I think I wish I had when I was just diagnosed and dealing with my chronic illness at a young age. I felt very alone. I also this was around 2011 - 2012. So, social media, I think was in a way just taking off in the sense that there's basically Facebook and AOL Instant Messenger, and Instagram had just started, so soon after came Snapchat, and it was all about communication, right? That's what social media was created for: to communicate with people we love, and also connect with, with other people out there in this matrix of a world that we live in, I guess. I'm also gonna drink some water so if you're listening, drink some water, I like to remind people to do that. So, within this matrix and this idea, living in a place where we communicate with people all the time, I went back to the basics and I said you're making content, you're sharing it to communicate. Why are you communicating with the audience you're communicating with? Well, again, it's for the people. At first, actually, I take that back. At first, I started on my social media channel to learn how to take photos and fearlessly represent my own brand and work with brands that supported causes that I liked. That was my initial goal, but there was no purpose behind it, in my opinion other than more of a, an egocentric perspective of just wanting to get my work out there and wanting to become a photographer, and just wanting to boost people's confidence. And, oh okay, I guess, I guess there it is there it is, boosting people's confidence right, and that's another service based thing that I thought that I would be able to pioneer through, and instead, I fell down this rabbit hole of also getting really sick, and my chronic illness, not feeling too good, and basically just putting myself in this position where I felt like crap all the time, and I couldn't even do my homework, and I couldn't take care of myself. I would, I was one of those people at the time where I let my dishes pile up in my sink, and it was not pretty, and I feel like at some point,

I mean maybe if you're listening to this, this has happened to you and I don't wish this upon anybody but hopefully... that, that was one of the lower points for me where I physically was not able to, you know, take care of myself. And I was also alone. I was away from my family halfway across, actually not even halfway, the entire way across the country. We're based in New York and I was out in LA, so I was alone, and I had to face this fear of not being able to take care of myself. How could I be my own support system, which is really hard to do, you're not supposed to do things alone in this world. And that's just something that I've also been toying around with the idea of in terms of how can I allow myself to have the space to really develop my own perspectives and develop my knowledge and develop my personality to a point where I can set up these boundaries with other people when I'm struggling. Which leads me to... spending time on yourself is not selfish. And we're gonna say it again, spending time on yourself is not selfish. A lot of times when we deal with difficult things, whether that's generational trauma, whether that is a physical trauma, whether that is a heart break, an emotional or mental trauma, or maybe it's just a chronic condition or a mental health problem that you have, or maybe it's just that it was raining, and something sent you on a trickle down of you don't like the rain and it got you in your feels, and you just really started having a hard time in that given day. What can you do for yourself to really shift the narrative of how your physical, like how you can physically, respond to an emotional circumstance or a physical, physical ... how you can physically alter the things around you. You can't change what's happened to you. You can't change the people around you. But, you can. You can change your relationship to them, you can change your boundaries with them, you can change the communication that you have with them. There's this saying that I've heard before that I think is really funny. That is a piggyback on what I just said but you can't change the people around you, but you can change the people around you. In the same way that you can't change something that's happened to you, but you can change your outlook on it, or you can change your perspective on it, you can change the narrative around it. And it can be extremely triggering to do because you have to confront yourself with, which is probably the hardest part of recognizing what happened, and then being able to articulate it. And I have found that part to be so challenging because again it goes back to humbling yourself, and realizing like, oh, damn like I have this baggage, I have this issue that has been weighing on me for all of these years or days or months, whatever, whatever time span it is. How can I understand how it, like why it's affecting me? From there, with, like, how can I react and respond a certain way to it, and this happens across the workspace, the personal relationship space, it can happen with like intimacy and romantic relationships, it can happen in academic relationships and institutions. It can also happen casually with friendships, or even when you're out sometimes I go out with people to a bar to happy hour and they're like, oh, like, why aren't you drinking like... are you... what's going on, like what's wrong with you, like, do you go to AA? And I'm like, no, like it's more of a personal choice actually but the fact that we were brought up in a society, at least here in the United States ,where the drinking age is 21 (it used to be 18), so by the time you're 18 you've probably maybe have a drink or two before, and you get to this point of like, okay, it used to be 18, so technically it's fine. By the time you're 21, you just assume that everyone's been waiting and waiting and waiting, because of the structure that exists in society that's telling us, like, hey, you need to be doing this because you haven't been able to do this until you're a certain age, the same thing with driving, but well driving is a little different, you need to get a test car now to operate a car, but in the same way I think we need to debunk myths around alcohol and also teach about it and not just go to school... oh, be aware of your drink and this is how long it takes for your body to process alcohol but how can alcohol actually cognitively affect us in the way that we handle situations? And how can we also drink responsibly? I know that also sounds very ... probably ... entry level and basic, but I do think that if you're listening and you consume alcohol, just evaluate your relationship with it and check in on yourself with it, because sometimes I feel like it may not be something that people use and abuse. Anyway, that's not the topic of this conversation, I could go down a rabbit hole there. But I have always felt such difficult times... I felt, I felt myself, having a very difficult time when it comes down to setting up your boundaries. Part of it has to do with the fact again that you're confronting your own trauma, you're confronting your own limiting beliefs, you're confronting your own internal bias and everything that's happening to you, but you're also, like, about to confront somebody else's limiting beliefs, and you're going to confront the way that somebody else is having a perspective on you, and that is scary sometimes actually most of the time, because you're putting yourself out there, to be in a position to be challenged and not believed, and within at least the chronically ill and, you know, mental health space that can be really, really challenging if somebody doesn't, if somebody grew up in an ableist perspective and they can't really see past the fact that you might need to have a physical ailment for them to believe that you're sick. And that can be really triggering, and even just something like a simple banter back and forth can be really difficult. So, I decided this year, this past year of 2020 to 2021, that I would sit down with myself and figure out what it was that really was bothering me when I had to confront a lot of the issues that I was dealing with. So like before sharing about my chronic condition openly on social media, how could I change and confront my own personal narrative of why I was scared to do that? What was I scared of? Obviously judgments, the first thing like, oh, okay, what are people gonna judge me about like this is just who I am, right? No, it's more than that. Being chronically ill has, in a way, shaped a lot of my personality because I've had to, you know, be the strong person and, oh, like, like, also the fact that like every single time I talk about my chronic condition to somebody new, whether they've researched me or not when I talk about it, their response is always, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry you have you deal with that. And I'm like, okay, I'm sorry too, but in telling me that you're sorry, it's like degrading. You're telling me you feel sorry that a part of me and the way that my body functions like is, is genetically not changeable? You wouldn't even tell someone you're sorry that they have blue eyes like why, why are you telling somebody you're sorry that they have another condition? So, and I also think there's a way to have compassion and empathy for somebody around a health condition. Aside from acknowledging that their condition is like even there, and that they're allowed to, you know, have any feelings and emotions around a condition, if possible. Because, and that's what I will get to later in this episode, I can't believe 20 minutes have gone by, I'm going to drink some more water, for anyone listening, I encourage you to drink some water.

So, on that note, this idea of scared relationships, and you're, you're scared to share and be vulnerable with people again because of judgment, but also, why are you scared of judgment? You're scared of people leaving your life. You're scared of being lonely, right?That's what it was for me for a while. I was so scared of sharing about my chronic illness in college because I was scared that I wouldn't have friends. And, unfortunately, I will say this does happen a lot within the chronically ill community, and I'm, again, only speaking to my experience, but it became so difficult for me to acknowledge and address my own position as a chronically ill woman and how much I was struggling with, that I couldn't communicate in a way, with my friends. So, the friendship basically collapsed because I was in a way expecting things of people in my life that were very close to me, for lack of a better word, my closest friends, and I did not feel supported at all. And that was really triggering because, for me, that was unforgivable. I was like, I am dealing with this, and like you don't even understand what I'm going through, and part of it was because I couldn't articulate. So, what was the lesson there? How can you articulate what's going on better? Okay, I'm having a hard time with my chronic condition today, and I really can't go out and I'm so sorry, right? If somebody's response to you is like, oh well your lame like don't be lame, like, which I have literally gotten before, your response should be, you know what's lame? The fact that I have a medical condition, and you as my friend are telling me that, because I'm setting up a boundary that it's lame. No, honey, no, no, no, no. We are strong when we set our boundaries up. And, again, spending time on yourself is not selfish if you spend the time, even if it's in this room on this on this show and you're listening, and as you're listening this is bringing up some issues that you may have on your own. I would seriously implore you to just take it a step further and think about why you're scared of sharing your boundaries with people that you care about. And even further, why does it have to be something scary? What if it's the best thing to happen to your relationship? With one of my closest friends, when I was really really struggling — and this was also a friend of mine who was on the east coast while I was at school on the west coast — and that was extremely difficult because not only did I not have the support that I needed from one of my closest friends, but some, some, some things were happening in the moment with my friends that were around me. Again, back to what I said before, you can't change the people around you, but you can change the people around you. So I changed my direct people around me, the close friends from school. And I sought my, my friends who were back home, and I tried to talk to them as much as I could just saying like, I'm really not feeling well, like, even if we just sit together on FaceTime or, you know, we don't even talk we could just listen to music or we could just sit on mute, like even just having somebody there was so important for me. And the biggest thing that I learned there was that the people that want to be there for you and that want to be open to hearing your perspective and also to changing for you because they care about you and they value in your life, they will, they absolutely will. And, it's not to say that it's not lonely sometimes because it sure as hell is lonely, especially when people don't understand why you have to set up a boundary. People are inherently egocentric. We're in a society where, especially in the United States, people are creating brands left and right about themselves, heck, like I'm doing it myself. I'll call myself out on that. But I think this relationship, and again, I keep saying boundary, that's like my word of the night. My personal boundary with social media comes at the cost of, how can I still be myself and also share as much as I can with the people listening and with the people watching and make an impact on their life so that they can also set these boundaries up with themselves. Because there's people that will be on here for hours and hours and hours and not realize how difficult staring at the screen is for all these hours and not giving themselves the time to relax and give themselves a break, you don't always have to be in growth mode, you don't always have to be in burnout mode to succeed, or to get the growth that you need. Sometimes it's gradual. Look like we only have a couple people down here but I'm hoping that you have questions, eventually, and I'll bring you up later in this, in this episode.

For anyone joining the way that this, this show works is that I am going to just talk for the first, you know 30 - 40 minutes here, about my perspective on how can you be a better self advocate, and then you guys can come up and ask questions and I'll give you some live advice.

If there's anything on your mind so I just wanted to reshare that now that we have a few more of you in here. But don't be scared of sharing what is on your mind with the people that you care about. Because if they truly do care and respect your boundaries and will be open to hearing your perspective, they're not going to run away from you. In fact, I'm sure it would maybe make you closer. Anytime I share something really vulnerable with somebody that I'm close with it, either pushes them away or brings them closer, and instead of running the narrative of well what if it pushes them away? I'd like to say to myself, well what if we become closer than ever? And that always helps me. Whenever I'm thinking of sharing something with someone, and an example of this recently was when I was talking with somebody more about I think like a potential of getting into, into a relationship, or seeing/testing the waters, dating, is the word. And as a chronically ill woman with also some other roadblocks in the way with my health condition, I found it incredibly difficult to want to express these boundaries, I'm like, I literally share my story on social media, why is it so scary to talk about something so close to me with somebody that I love, or with somebody that I potentially could see a future with? And the answer was, again, I was, I was going in that path of like what if it doesn't work? So I said you know what I'm just going to shoot my shot I'm going to say, well, hey, like, I actually have a chronic illness. I know that that's not everyone's cup of tea. Not every single person that comes into your life is going to want to deal with your chronic condition or be there for you. And this also when I say chronic condition, this can be any invisible condition or visible for that matter, it can be, you know, an eating disorder, a mental health condition can be like, just that you're feeling sad one day. And I said you know what, look, I have this condition. And I'm so used to this answer of "I'm so sorry. Best of luck. You know, that's really inspiring but not my cup of tea" that I, I set myself up to be disappointed. But instead, the person I was talking to you said, "oh, why would that bother me?" And I was like, that's a good point. Why would it bother you? I don't really know, and it has to do with the way that we were brought up in a system that's also just very ableist from the get go. We're working towards reform, I know a lot has been happening with the Free Britney movement and hopefully this is just a small, like, because there are names attached to it, I think that there's more, hopefully momentum around this and we can use this as some real drivers of change for disabled people in the American healthcare system and in health care systems around the world. But that said, it's just very, it's very important, even when you don't know something's wrong with someone to just be kind also. I'm just going to throw that out there. So, when you decide that it's time to shift your narrative, I think, again, back to this humbling moment. How can you shift your narrative? Sometimes when I acknowledge that I've made a mistake, I'm like oh shit I made a mistake. My business is like going to take a hit because of it. I'm like okay, you made a mistake. What if sharing your story and apologizing and also actually actively working towards progress off screen, like that's the work that we need to be doing, that's why people say like progress not perfection. We're not even striving for perfection here, we're trying as much as we can to combat all of the problems, all the systems that we are raised in, all of our own limiting beliefs, to address what happened internally and exude something better externally, so that we can communicate better. There's this quote which ... I'm honestly so forgetful. I've been talking now for 31 minutes. I don't know if I said this in the beginning, but we can't help others until we help ourselves. This is true across the board. Especially for chronically ill people but for people dealing with mental health, you can't, you can't do a good job in the workspace, or you can't do your job properly until you take care of yourself. And for students, that's doing school. I couldn't do school until I took the time to address and acknowledge my chronic conditions properly and get the help that I needed, and the tools that I needed to talk about the problems. So on that note, I kind of, I'm going to do a little segue and a little story here about when I was sick and when I realized I started having more problems and it wasn't just a physical thing it was a mental and emotional problem too, I decided to go get therapy. And if you listen to these episodes, you'll know that I am a very big therapy advocate. I love physical therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, therapy, oh my gosh, cognitive behavioral therapy. I love psychotherapy, I love all the therapies. And I think that they're so helpful in uncovering the ways that you feel. So when I was having these problems in 2019, this was a time where I tried to be articulate about what was going on, but I physically could not. I mentally could not, emotionally could not. So I hid from my own feelings, and it led me to burn out because I put a smile on my face and I just kept powering through, and it led me to a point where I did not feel like my feelings were even valid. Sometimes when you're chronically ill and dealing with an invisible condition, and everyone's telling you "Oh, there's no problems it's just the way that it is for you." It's like, do I actually have a problem, or am I like psyching myself out now? So, not only dealing with this like internal dialogue but dealing with how other people are reacting to you, it really does affect you so, again, be frickin kind. But I went to this teacher, after having all of these problems and I said, look, I do not know what to do. I cannot complete the assignment. I physically cannot, I emotionally cannot, I do not have the time to do this, like, I go to the physical therapy from 6:30 to 7:30, and then I'm in my 8 am class, and then I'm in class until 9 pm and I only have a one hour break. How am I supposed to manage my health when I'm doing that? And now that I say this two years later, I look back and I'm like, why would I have ever scheduled my classes like that? That is absolutely insane. And I think that it just, it struck a chord with me because this teacher said, look, if all you can do is go to your appointments, and like, reflect about it or take notes or observe, spend the time in your, your weekly homework time, your weekly assignment, I want you to focus on getting your thoughts and your feelings out in whatever medium that is. So, I spent the rest of that semester from there on out photographing things based on colors. So, I was in these doctor's appointments and anybody who I feel like has been around a medical environment, maybe knows that slight buzzing noise of a fluorescent light bulb, or they know the sound of the doors that close on their own, where they, they have a little bit of, I think, pressure so they automatically shut. You may know that fluorescent glow from the lights, you may know those white tiles or the, the texture or the feeling or the way that the paper crinkles under the bed when you sit down in a chair, on a hospital bed. And those were all things as an art student that I said you know what, I'm going to take photos of these, and I'm going to make art about it, and I'm going to do a color study. So I spent the entire rest of the semester, just picking out colors. I took pictures on my iPhone, and I analyzed the colors and I made an artwork, about color and I shaped them in the shape of a hospital bed and it was very metaphorical and yes, it was very conceptual, but I was in a fine arts program so I feel like that's expected and two years later, now that I'm graduated, I have this knowledge where I can critique everything, and I think it makes me a better advocate, and it makes me a better storyteller, because I'm able to not only take a picture that's worth 1000 words, but I can also articulate how the photo made you feel. And a good storyteller makes somebody feel something. So, in advocating for yourself, you can tell stories that make people feel compassion and empathy. So if you are somebody dealing with a problem or a story where you, you need a little bit of that, now's the time where I would love to invite anyone to come on and share what they need to share. Let's work through this. Let's talk about it. Let's see if we can shift a perspective tonight. So if you want to raise your hand or if you want me to bring you up just, just let me know. You can also ask questions here in the waiting room that I can answer for you. So I'm just going to leave some space for that and also drink some more water.

No, no one, no one wants to share their story. Oh okay, Jesse wants to share a story. Hello, Jesse. Welcome to my show, you are my very first guest, so welcome. I would love if you could just share your piece about how you have either become a better self advocate for yourself, or how you hope to improve.

Guest: Well I've been listening to you, I'd say for the last maybe 10 or 15 minutes and first of all I want to commend you. You're very brave and transparent and strong. So, I mean that's, that's an amazing thing, I think you're going to bless many people. Because, transparency is something not everybody has, and people know right away. People can can identify. So I tell, I tell, I have lots of stories because I've been very blessed to be a professional musician for a long time. And, you know, play lots of big Christian events and stuff like that and, and I have a daughter named Jay Makina who's and this is just a quick story I'm going to share. Born with very little folate, and as a result she was very sick and today — she's 13 — takes two shots today of something called leucovorin, has lost 80% of her hearing, but still sings, plays ukulele. And I was so proud of her, got great grades this year in the seventh grade, she's going to eighth grade coming up, and I'm just so proud of her. She's a fighter, she's a champion. And when she was sick in the hospital at Boston Children's Hospital for three months, when she was six months old, those are some of the hardest days of my life because I wondered if, if she was gonna make it through. And I and I struggled with, with my own faith and my own belief because I'm a singer/preacher kind of a thing, and then it's easy to talk about it. But when you have to live that moment and you have to believe yourself through it, it was pretty tough. So it's one of the things I'll share tonight, is just the you've got to really believe, or you've got to be able to be free to say, listen, you know, it doesn't always work but I'll tell you, I didn't have enough faith but thank goodness my wife did. We made it through that time, my daughter is amazing. You can listen to her song on Spotify. The song is called "When You Can't Breathe." I'm sure it'll bless you. It'll touch you. She wrote it when I had COVID and I was in the hospital for 21 days this past November in Beaumont Hospital in Troy, Michigan. That's where I live so I just wanted to share with you. Yeah, thank you.

Gigi:

Of course, yeah, I, I also just want to, you know, thank you for sharing your story here. That's incredible. And I'm glad to hear that everybody is in good health. And I think something that really just struck a chord with me here is the fact that you said you had, you know, you said, "I lost my faith, but my wife didn't, thank God she didn't." And I think that everybody deserves a person like that in their life. And when it comes down to your limiting beliefs, whatever they are, for me I have limiting beliefs around love a lot of the times because, I'll talk about this in a future episode, it's far too detailed to cover, but in having a chronic condition, how can how can I become vulnerable to let somebody like be a caretaker, because I, again, for me this is about ego, I think it's about letting go of that and just knowing that, okay, if someone loves me enough to make my bed or do my laundry because I just can't that day, then, thank you. Like, that's, that's such a blessing. And this can be a friend. This can be your family, this can be a caretaker that, you know, lives with you, this can be your spouse, and I think that if we get less shameful around asking for help and also just confronting our problems with another person, that, you know, that's, that's the way forward, that's, that's what we have to do. We got to get comfortable being uncomfortable. Would anyone else like to come up and share their story real quick? No?

All right. Well, another thing that I wanted to kind of do a small little segment here on is around journaling and limiting beliefs because not only have I had limiting beliefs with some of the things that I do, whether that's in social media, or whether that's something as small as starting a podcast or big. I think starting a podcast is a big deal, actually, so I take that back. But I did have a limiting belief around it for a long time of saying oh no one's gonna listen, hey I've got three listeners right now live. I did say that, you know, at one point I was like why am I sharing on social media? There was this one moment where some people that I used to be friends with said, why are you sharing your life on social media like, good luck with that and I'm like, that's not the point again I'm doing it to help other people. I'm doing it so that we can talk about our stories and we can also find comfort knowing other people deal with similar things. So I have heard, for the longest time people have always told me, oh, you need to journal, you need to, you know, really connect with yourself, that's how you're going to uncover a lot. And I was too proud to to journal for the longest time, until about, I would say like two months ago, I decided, you know what, I'm just going to pick up this journal that got sent to me in October, November and I am just going to write in it. I'm going to use it for taking notes I'm going to take it, use it to write my manifestations down of what I want to happen and what I want to achieve this year of financially, emotionally, physically. And I am just going to write them down and put them out there. And I think that manifestation is a super interesting topic and I'm definitely going to bring a guest on in the near future about that. But how can you, like, do you believe in manifestation, or is it just the fact that you're writing something down and you're visualizing and you're confronting yourself and your own limiting beliefs in the same way that you confront yourself and acknowledge what has happened, emotionally, mentally and physically to you to change, change the narrative in the future? So, I wrote all these things down, and by February 27th, I crossed off almost every single thing on the list. And I was like, Gigi, what, like, what in the world is going on? Like, how is this happening? And I don't know if it's that, again, I wrote it down and I had something to reference where I could go back on it and I could say, okay, wow, like I actually I did write this down, I did want this to happen and I made it happen because I wasn't scared to and I was able to visualize that and put it out in the world and then on top of that, I crossed everything out and I wrote a new list on my birthday, May 10. And I literally crossed out like three of those things, it was a bigger list more ambitious, more specific. And I crossed out three of those things like three weeks later, and I was like, literally, how does this happen? So, I rewrote the list again, I kid you not, last week after my first episode, because a lot of the things that I talked about in the first episode were a little bit intense for me it was about my story and how I came to this point of self advocacy. And I was writing everything down again, and I swear, I literally have crossed some of those things off in the past week. And I do think it comes down to accepting and actually getting the thing that you are trying to either run away from or you're hiding from you just need to get it out there. You need to get it out there and believe that you're capable of making it happen and that you're worthy of making it happen. So that was, you know, another, another interesting thing if anyone else wants to come up and share your piece on manifestation or making something you'd like happen, please, please let me know, I would, I would love to hear. If not, no worries, but just, I'll give some space for that here.

All right. Well, one of those things for me that I wrote down was landing a major campaign with a big brand, and I, I told myself I wanted to not only make an impact within the chronically ill community but how could I also make an impact within the disability, and the body inclusive community, and including disabled bodies in fashion, and in body confidence and body acceptance is extremely important to acknowledge as well. And, I booked one of those campaigns. And I literally wrote this down last week. So I was freaked out. And you may be asking, how does this relate to becoming a better self advocate? Because that's what that's what this whole thing is about. For me, getting clear on my own goals and achieving those things for myself, helps me frame my narrative, so that I can help other people achieve similar things. If you are a chronically ill person listening to this, maybe you're, you're in high school, listening to this and you want to, you have a chronic condition and you want to become a podcaster, you have a chronic condition and you want to freelance for yourself, or maybe you just want to work a corporate job, I don't really know what that is for you. But if you can listen to this and see that, like, I believe in you and that you just have to sit down with yourself and really confront what your own limiting beliefs are, and write them down so that they're out there and spend time looking at them, if you say I, I don't think that I am good enough to run my own business because I'm chronically ill, there's help for a reason. That's why people grow companies, the whole point and structure of a company is so that people help the CEO or the co founder, get their business off the ground running, you can't do everything by yourself and being okay with that, is something I think, again, you got to get vulnerable, you got to humble yourself.

As much as you want to project to be your own completely, you need to share it with other people and that's also what this show is all about. It's about sharing the platform with people, letting people come speak their piece, letting people come talk about their issues, and having an authentic discourse and dialogue here about how to get through that and how they've gotten through it and how this can help. I guess part of 13-year-old or 11-year-old Gigi really heal from this because I did not have somebody to listen to something, or look up to them in the public eye, I would say, that was dealing with something similar to what I was dealing with.

So again, at the very least if this touches you, please reach out to me. I would, I would just love to talk with you and I think that it's going to be awesome, and I will be doing some special things down the line to feature all of you on my social pages, so stay tuned for that. On that note, I did create a new Instagram page for this show, it's called. @Itseverythingyouneediswithin, similar to my Instagram handle, @it'sGigiRobinson. So, you can either find it through that page or you can just go and check it out. I'll put it in the link in my bio on here as well. But with that said, I want to remind you that everything you need is within, you've got all of the tools, and again at the very least you've got me. So I know you can make it through this. You guys are all absolutely incredible.

Thank you to everyone listening and for participating in this show, I am so excited to do next week's episode, please come next week and every week to follow at 8 pm Eastern/5pm Pacific to listen to my show, Everything You Need is Within. And if you do have any suggestions or any feedback, please send me a message or stay for the after show after the recording is over and we can talk about it, but thank you so much everyone listening, you can find me @itsGigiRobinson and @itseverythingyouneediswithin on Instagram, @gigi here on Greenroom, and you can just find me by googling my name, but anyway, thank you all so much again. I cannot wait to do this next week, and I'm so excited that you all tuned in, so thank you so much.