Welcome to the Living with Empathy Podcast: a podcast that gets us thinking about how we feel towards ourselves and others. I’m your host, Miriam Otero.

Hi everyone! Today, we’re going to talk about something that’s a bit more on the painful side that nearly everyone I know has gone through at one point or another. Many of us can probably look back to the first time this happened, usually around middle school or high school, but for some reason, it hurts much more as an adult.

What am I talking about?

Going through a friendship breakup.

Now, this episode is really focused on friendships that end on not so good terms. Sure, we’ve all had friendships that naturally fade over time. You get busy, they get busy, and before you know it, you’re catching up for the first time in 10 years at a mutual friend’s wedding. Here, I’ll be talking about those friendships that sound more like a Taylor Swift song. Even if there isn’t necessarily bad blood between you, there’s tension and there’s no way to mend the friendship for the foreseeable future. 

Like I said, I know plenty of people who have personally gone through this. In fact, I went through one of these myself with the only person in my life I ever considered a best friend. Don’t get me wrong, I have many dear friends and a great support system, but that sisterly bond that I have with my younger sisters was only matched by this friend. She was like the older sister I never had.  

And it never occurred to me that there would come a time where we wouldn’t be friends anymore and yet, here we are. It’s been long enough now to where the many years that have passed between then and now have healed the wounds, as cliché as that sounds, but it’s also helped me to look back on everything through a more objective lens. 

There’s a saying that goes: 

“People come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime.”

And as corny as it may sound, this saying gave me a framework for how to mourn the loss of my friendship, learn and grow from it, and get to a place where I feel nothing but gratitude for the time that we had. So today, I’m going to share that four step framework with you. 

As with any loss, it’s important to give yourself the time you need to mourn it. We all have different ways of coping with this. I know for me personally, in the past this looked like shrugging it off as “everything happens for a reason” and then prioritizing more positive things in my life. Very Captain America in Avengers Endgame to look at the bright side of things and say it’s ok. 

When I went through my own friendship breakup, I had several major shifts going on at once, so I just focused on dealing with those and on staying as present as possible. So I never quite came to terms with my friendship ending until about eight months later. And it took me another year after THAT to fully dive into the feelings of it and release what was left. 

This is going to look different for everyone, but just allowing the feelings to come up and dealing with them in healthy ways, helps to slowly clear away the sadness of it. Most of the time, the sadness we feel is from the space that person leaves behind and the person we felt like when we were with them. 

You don’t need to rush the process of trying to fill that space with someone new. Give yourself the time to acknowledge what it is you miss about the friendship. Cry if you need to. Sitting with the emotions to work through them is always a good place to start.

One of the most helpful action steps in any process is empowering ourselves. In this situation, it’s empowering yourself with the knowledge of what your contribution was to the ending of this relationship. This doesn’t mean finding something to blame yourself for, but taking an honest evaluation of how things played out and what your role in it was.

In my own situation, it came down to a lack of understanding and compassion on my part. It’s as simple as that. The dynamic we had throughout our decade long friendship was a sister-like bond, but we had never weathered any of life’s greatest challenges together. 

She always looked out for me and I was always there for her, but in her moment of greatest need, I didn’t understand the type of support and compassion that she needed. I was in denial of this for the first year after we stopped talking, but in the second year when the feelings had faded, I finally understood. 

How did I get there? Well, part of it is just getting past that denial stage.

In the denial stage, you’re still clinging on to what was and sometimes, the anger of it all falling apart. We can fall into the trap of the blame game, pointing fingers at what the other person did wrong, to try to feel above the drama. 

Once that fades and  you start getting to more of a place of love and missing that person, you naturally start to question what went wrong and that’s when you’re more willing to take an honest look at your role in it. Shame often plays a role in us not wanting to take stock of where we messed up, but if you’re willing to look shame in the face, the answer that you seek will be right there in front of you.

Whenever there are still difficult feelings around a situation, it’s hard to look at it as a lesson, but every challenge in life is. What can you take from this moment in order to grow into a more well-rounded human being? Was this situation one you find yourself in regularly or was it your first time confronting this type of thing?

I learned that you never really know what your perspective is on something until you’re put into that situation. I learned that there are times when being the straightforward friend who just tells it like it is doesn’t have to be the only card I play when a friend needs some advice. Yeah, I finally learned the hard way what people have been saying about Sagittarius’s not having a filter. 

Sometimes support means being there to listen or being a shoulder to cry on and that it’s still enough. It’s supporting your friend how they need to be supported and not the way you think is best.

When you finally get to a place where you’ve worked through the shame, have taken ownership of your role in the situation, and can honestly say you learned something about your interactions with others from it, then you can arrive at a place of gratitude. 

Gratitude means asking yourself: How was my life made better from having had this person in my life? Even though you two aren’t friends anymore, the love that you had for that person doesn’t have to go away. You can still wish them well and send them good thoughts. It means remembering the good that came from your friendship and knowing how much you’ve grown because of it. 

A couple of years ago, I found myself on a weeklong backpacking trip in the American Southwest desert with some quiet time out on top of a mesa. And as I sat there, I pulled out a notebook and wrote my friend a letter that I never ended up sending. 

In it, I thanked her for the years of friendship she had given me. I’d never known what it meant to have a best friend until I met her. 

The first time we met, she was confident, assertive, and she spoke her mind. She was intelligent and well-read, in a way that was worldly and cool. She drank tons of coffee, smoked cigarettes, marched to the beat of her own drum, and was unapologetic about it. We couldn’t have been more different, yet the kinship we shared said otherwise. We could spend hours at a coffee shop, laughing until we cried and almost peed.

She modeled what I had always hoped I’d be some day and when our friendship was over, I was sad to not have her in my life anymore. 

But years later, I also realized something else: I finally became that which she exemplified so well. 

“People come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime.” And the reason she came into my life was to show me that I could be the person I had always envisioned I could be. She taught me how to do that; she modeled it for me, and for that, I’m ever so grateful. 

I often wonder if that’s another reason certain friendships have to end: to make space for the new. Even though I hate to admit it, the absence of her friendship created a gaping hole in my life, but having had that friendship allowed me to be super intentional about what kind of people I let into my closest circle of friends. 

Over the next few years, I filled it with a solid group of new friends. The qualities of that friendship are now dispersed between the members of that group, ones that have brought something I needed to cope with this part of my life’s journey: career changes, depression, a spiritual awakening, and redirection. I can’t imagine having gone through those things with anyone else, but them. Despite that, no one will ever replace her or the role she played during that part of my life. 

If you’ve been through a friendship breakup, you may be able to relate.  

For those of you going through this now, I’ll recap what we just covered. So keep it handy and use whichever one of these steps resonate with you:

Number 1: Give yourself time to mourn its loss - As cliché as it sounds, time does heal all wounds.

Number 2: Acknowledge your role in the situation - There’s no need to play the blame game here, but take an honest look at yourself within that context.

Number 3: What’s the lesson here? - Growth is sometimes painful, but what could be something this situation is trying to teach you.

And Number 4: How are you grateful for them? -If any of you have heard the song, For Good from Wicked The Musical, you’ll get a sense of what I’m talking about here. 

I hope that if you are going through this, that this episode helps you out even if it is just the tiniest bit. 

Well dear listeners, that’s it for today’s episode. Thanks for listening & I hope you enjoyed it. If you’ve liked the podcast so far and want to come back for more, head over to wherever you listen to podcasts and hit subscribe. And while you're at it, go ahead and rate it or leave a review for others to find it. 

Last but not least, I wanted to again say thank you for all of your wonderful feedback thus far. Throughout my life, I’ve realized the power of sharing our stories and how it can lift others up trodding on a similar path. I share my experiences and the lessons I’ve learned from them because more often than not, I always have a handful of people who tell me it was just the thing they needed to hear during a difficult time. 

If there’s anything I’ve learned in 30+ years of life, it’s that often the biggest difference we can make is to work on making our own light brighter, so that others aren’t afraid of the way forward. With that in mind, if you know someone who might benefit from hearing we talked about in today’s episode, feel free to share with them. Thanks again and I’ll be back next week for another episode! Take care!

Welcome to the Living with Empathy Podcast: a podcast that gets us thinking about how we feel towards ourselves and others. I’m your host, Miriam Otero.

Today’s episode is one we don’t talk about nearly as much as we should. What is it? BOUNDARIES. YES.

This is an area where I have personally had to do the MOST work throughout my life. I am by no means perfect at it, but it’s something I’ve put a lot of energy into especially these last five years and that’s why I wanted to talk about that today.

So, why would one have to set boundaries and what does that even mean? To put it in the simplest way, boundaries are the line in the sand. Boundaries are the expectations you set for how you want to be treated. Usually, the hardest part about setting boundaries is enforcing them, often because you don’t want to hurt other people’s feelings. And this is where most of the struggle often happens. 

Why are we bad with boundaries? Everyone has a different root cause, usually stemming from early childhood, and I highly recommend finding a licensed therapist to help you do that work if you have no idea what I’m talking about. For me, it’s been one of the best investments I’ve made in myself. It’s helped me to develop healthier relationships with my family, which is where most of my own boundary work has taken place, but it’s also helped me with new people as well. 

So, while I’m not a therapist and can’t dive deep into each listener’s past to find the root cause of all your boundary problems, I can approach it from a coach’s perspective. 

As a coach, I coach people with situations they are dealing with in the here and now. We look at the thoughts behind the actions you’re currently taking and make modifications to your thought process to then change your results. I thought I’d go over some common themes that come up in my coaching practice and as a teacher. So, I’m going to list the three most common types of people you end up having to set strong boundaries with.

This one comes in different forms. Maybe you have a family member who always shows up unannounced, wanting to help out. This could look like a friend who is constantly trying to get you to go out and meet someone because according to her, “You’re just too smart and pretty to be single.” The parent who jumps in to solve their kids problems before the kid has a chance to try it on their own or makes suggestions to the teacher on how they should run their class. Obviously, these are just examples and exaggerated ones at that, but I’ve heard enough of them to know that they exist. 

These people mean well, they really do. What they don’t understand is that their “thoughtfulness” and you can’t see me, but I’m putting it in quotes, can feel a bit intrusive. That’s why this one is usually the hardest one to set boundaries with because we know they’re just trying to be helpful, but we don’t want to hurt their feelings, but the interaction always leaves us feeling frustrated or even angry. So, what do we do?

The first thing to realize here is what the situation is triggering. When your friend is trying to set you up on dates, does it make you feel like they think you’re pathetic for being single? Or if you’re that teacher getting feedback from a parent, maybe you’re already doing the best that you can at your job, and this just feels like you’re falling short. It’s always good to get to the bottom of our frustrations first.

The next thing is to think of other reasons why this person may be doing this that have nothing to do with our triggers. This is where empathy comes in. Maybe the family member coming by feels lonely and covers it up by coming by to “help out.” Maybe the friend trying to get you to go out and meet someone hasn’t gone out in a long time and uses your single life as a way to kill two birds with one stone. More often than not, people are coming from a good place even if the execution is way off. 

The third step is about having an honest conversation. Start with the end in mind. What’s your goal for the conversation? What do you want both of you to take away from it? So often we’re consumed by our desire to be right that we forget about our desire to understand. I’ve had many a conversation like this in recent years and the first few times, it was awkward, but eventually it does get easier. Focus on the facts, not your feelings. Sometimes, it’s much simpler than what we thought. 

One pattern that comes up regularly in client sessions is where the client describes a friend they’ve had for many years. The client will come to me about some action they’ve been wanting to take, but mention that this childhood friend thinks it’s a bad idea. 

When we work through things and work through what their own thoughts are regarding the situation, they often find that they’ve been holding themselves back because they don’t trust themselves. Even if a bunch of other people have encouraged the change, this friend’s opinion holds so much weight, that they often second guess themselves and don’t act. 

Say for example, you’ve always wanted to study abroad. You’ve looked at programs, you’ve figured out how to make it work with your school schedule, and everything is coming together just fine. Then you tell your best friend about it, but she starts to throw in these little comments like, “Wow, Italy is really far away. What if you get homesick? I mean, I know you’ve been studying Italian, but do you really think you can get by with what you know. I’m not trying to scare you, but I heard the metro there is pretty dangerous.”

What is happening here? Maybe it’s their own fears and limitations they’re projecting onto you. Maybe you have spent every summer together and studying abroad would interfere with that. We can probably say that the childhood friend isn’t intentionally trying to hold her friend back, but often, there are some people in our lives who don’t want to see us change because it changes the dynamic in the relationship or they project their own fears onto whatever decision we’re trying to make. 

If you’ve tried to address the situation or the pattern itself and the person hasn’t responded well, that’s when you have to decide whether you’re going to continue moving forward living life for yourself or to please this person. 

This one SUCKS, especially for those of us who want to be helpful friends or family members. When I started doing boundary work, I realized I had some major problems with this one in particular. I saw a tweet that perfectly described my situation:

Parents be like, “I’d like to introduce you to my emotional support eldest daughter”. 

As the oldest of three daughters and as a first-generation Mexican-American, my parents often turned to me when they needed help with my siblings, chores, translating, etc. I got into the habit of seeing something that needed to be done and just doing it before being told to do it. Over time, this has had some negative consequences in my life because I often take on that which is not mine to take on.

I’ll give you a personal example of what this looks like. A couple of years ago, my younger sisters were going through a rough patch with one another. Each of them would call me to complain about the other and as the older sister, I tried my best to mediate the situation, but it went on for months. 

Here’s the thing, their goal with talking to me was to take some of the load off of themselves, but never to fix things with one another. As the oldest, I’ve always been the person they’ve turned to when they needed to talk, and I’ve always been happy to do it. 

Except this time! It was SO DRAINING. I finally realized I had to take care of myself and that even though it bothered me they were mad at each other, it wasn’t my job to fix it. Just because I rolled out of my mom’s uterus first, doesn’t mean that automatically makes me problem solver number one. In the end, I told them I loved them both, but I wasn’t going to be the middle person anymore. Eventually, they worked it out ON THEIR OWN. 

I AM good with problem-solving and great when dealing with other people’s emotions, so naturally, people come to me when they need help with that and maybe that’s the case for you too. And there may be times when people begin to seek you out ONLY when they need you in this way, without ever even inquiring if they can do the same for you. And THIS, dear listeners, is another situation where the boundary comes in. 

In all of the situations I’ve mentioned, the people might have had good intentions, but the people on the other side of that felt an intrusion of some sort. Other times, you may find yourself in situations where people may not have your best interest in mind and intentionally cross your boundaries. 

No matter what the case may be, I’ll end with this: People will never know how to treat us unless we tell them what’s okay and what’s not okay. 

If this is something you need further guidance on, I do offer coaching sessions in 30 & 60 minute slots. Together, we can work through a current situation, breaking down the thought process behind what’s causing a lack of boundaries, collaborate on how to approach those conversations with compassion, and practice saying no to things you don’t want so you can say yes to the things you do. Head over to www.miriamotero.com/coaching for more information.

Thanks for listening & I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. If you’ve enjoyed the podcast and want to come back for more, head over to wherever you listen to podcasts and hit subscribe. And while you're at it, go ahead and rate it or leave a review for others to find it. Last but not least, if you know someone who would like the podcast or this episode in particular, feel free to share with them. Thanks again and I’ll be back next week for another episode!

Welcome to the Living with Empathy Podcast: a podcast that gets us thinking about how we feel towards ourselves and others. I’m your host, Miriam Otero.

Thanks again for tuning into the podcast! How’s everyone doing? Today, I decided to focus on a topic that’s slightly more taboo in today’s American society. Over the last few years, I’ve gotten quite comfortable using the f word, but probably not the one you’re thinking. I’m talking about the other f word: FAILURE. 

Failure is the one other f word Americans, adults especially, don’t like hearing. I’m not sure when the tide turned. For many of the students I’ve had, it’s their greatest fear. But it’s not just them that fear failure: It’s their parents; my friends, colleagues, clients. And I’ve seen a growing trend of anxiety and indecision that comes from not wanting to be anything other than perfect. 

Here’s the thing: our definition of failure is off.

We’ve come to equate making a mistake with failing, or not being absolutely perfect, with failing. Not hitting the milestones that society has set out for us as failing. And my favorite, comparing ourselves to others to prove to ourselves how we’re failing. And our fear of it is holding us back from taking risks that could change our lives exponentially. The fear of failure kills our curiosity, creativity, and our originality. 

Let me ask you a question:

When was the last time you failed at something and it ended up being the springboard for something new?

I’m going to tell you a story that I typically always end up telling my students at the end of every school year. This is dedicated to my former students, to any parents of school-aged children, and anyone who is afraid of making mistakes. I’m about to share one of my biggest ones. 

During the first semester of my senior year of high school, I was like most kids in my grade. We were thinking about our last year and how to make the most of it and many of us were also preparing for what would come next. Fast forward to the end of that first semester and my English teacher handed out a preview of what the grades on our report cards would be the following week.

I had 69.3% in the class. 

Just like that, my dreams of heading off to a four year university right out of high school were gone. The cruel irony was that the week before, our teacher was handing out extra credit if you brought in a tissue box, and with that I would have gotten myself to a C. Unfortunately for me, I hadn’t brought in that box and when I asked if I could bring it in the next day, she gave me a firm no. 

I could give you a lot more details as to what led to that grade and all of that, but I’m not going to, because that’s not the point of this. The point is that after a week of pouting, I took complete ownership over having earned that grade. There was no changing it. There was no having my parents go in and coerce the teacher into raising my grade up to a C, which is something that I’ve seen happen as a teacher. But I’m glad my parents didn’t try to swoop in and save me. Let me be clear that my parents were not upset. They were like, “Sweet. Community college is much cheaper.” To them, college was college and I was going to be the first one to go no matter what.

It was me who was devastated. I had to figure out how to pivot from that failure now that plan A, which I had formulated for most of my life, had now vanished into thin air. I just didn’t want to dwell on it for the rest of the school year. It just seemed like the wrong way to spend the last six months of my last year of high school. 

And so, I remember making a promise to myself right then and there:

I want to look back on my senior year and know that I did everything to enjoy it and take it all in. 

It sounds super cheesy, but I’m a sucker for when songs describe your life. That year, all I could think about when I thought about graduation was the Graduation song by Vitamin C. That would remind me that I didn’t want to spend that time worrying about the future. I did the best I could to end the year on a high note, which let me tell you didn’t result in me striving to get straight A’s. It meant going to every single football game that fall, even the away games. It was owning up to my leadership position I held in choir. It was showing up for my friends when they were having problems at home. 

One of the things I got really curious about was this performing group that had done a workshop at my school the year before. They were called the Young Americans. It was a group made up of young people, mostly between the ages of 18-21. And I was captivated by them. They were such confident performers, owning the room even just by walking into it. I had been too scared to actually participate in the workshop, so I just ended up helping out those three days. By the third day when they performed alongside my peers, not having done that workshop was my biggest regret up to that point.

So during this period of just enjoying my senior year, that group had a show at Knott’s Berry Farm, which is an amusement park out here in Southern California. And so I decided to go. They were having auditions afterward. Even though I didn’t have the slightest bit of confidence and couldn’t sing anywhere near as good as they did, I went anyways. It would be months before I got word about whether or not I had gotten in.

By the time senior week rolled around, I still had no idea what was next. As my peers celebrated their acceptances into different colleges, I just took in the moment. I no longer felt the sting of my D in English, I just felt gratitude for it all, even the not so good stuff. And so, it was shortly after graduation that I got my acceptance letter for the Young Americans and it changed the course of my life. 

I tell you this story because so many of us think that by making one mistake that our whole life will be ruined. In his 2005 Stanford commencement speech, Steve Jobs said that you can never connect the dots moving forward, only looking back. At the time, I didn’t know that doing so badly in class my senior year would end up being the best thing that could have ever happened to me. As a teen, I aimed pretty darn low. I didn’t have any confidence then. I didn’t believe that someone like me could dream anything that hadn’t already been achieved by someone I knew. 

I often think of Robert Frost’s poem, The Road Not Taken, when I look back on that time. 

My plan had been to go to a local state school, study education, maybe go back and teach where I’d gone to school. To live where I grew up. Maybe one day, I’d finally take a trip to Europe, like I always hoped I would. But that’s not what ended up happening.

My three years in that group opened me up to see the world through the lens of possibility. The confidence and presence that I so greatly admired in the young people that came to my school my junior year, I then embodied myself. So it’s no surprise that when I finished my three years with the group, I hit the ground running. I went off to community college, doing school and work full-time. I became a lead and trainer at Disneyland. At school, I made the dean’s list for two years before transferring to UCLA. And each destination I’ve reached since then, I would have NEVER imagined was possible for me.  

Had I been so hyperfocused on my bad grade senior year, I wouldn’t have sought out other opportunities for growth. I would have been limited by my quote unquote failures, and I would have moved forward in life with a victim mentality. And having a victim mindset is one of the most detrimental ways we can look at life because it infiltrates everything we do. 

I mean, have you noticed I don’t have intro music for my podcast? Probably. It’s because I’m a one-woman show right now and I’m a slow learner, but I didn’t want to stop myself from creating this podcast just because I don’t have any damn intro music. 

And we all do this in one way or another. 

So, what’s the solution here?

Well, the first thing is to look at your life and ask yourself how you pivot when things don’t turn out the way you want them to. How’s your tolerance for adversity on a scale from 1-10? Do you put yourself down when making mistakes? We’re bound to make them, so it’s all about how we handle those mistakes that really makes the difference.

Then, you’ve got to start finding ways to add opportunities for growth that are low stakes. Have you ever taken a ceramics class? I have. You mess up almost EVERY SINGLE TIME. Ceramics not your jam? Are you a more active individual? Nothing makes you laugh at your mistakes like playing a game of ultimate frisbee with your friends. At some point everyone ends up missing a catch or making a terrible throw.

One thing I’ve done in my work and personal life is to keep a list of dragon slayer stories AND stories where I’ve failed. It helps you when you’re in interviews, but it allows you to see a pattern of growth as well. If all you ever do is run from your mistakes or try to bury any failures underneath all of your accomplishments, you’re always going to be afraid of making more.

No matter what you end up doing, always remember sometimes failure can be our greatest teacher. Speaking of teachers, I’d like to end this episode by thanking my 12th grade English teacher for not budging on my grade and I apologize for pouting for a week. 

Thanks for listening! If you’ve enjoyed this and want to come back for more, head to wherever you listen to podcasts and hit subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. 

Alright that’s all for today, take care!

Welcome to the Living with Empathy Podcast: a podcast that gets us thinking about how we feel towards ourselves and others.

I’m your host, Miriam Otero and this is episode three.

Hello dear listeners! Today, we’re talking all about how to treat yourself as you would a friend.

When I was on the verge of turning 30, I remember how stoked I was to be leaving my 20s behind. Mostly, that came from countless stories from friends that were already in their 30s. They told me that you just don’t care as much about what other people think when you step into your third decade of life. 

Well, now that I’M in my mid-30s, I can tell you that this statement is both true and false. I had trouble wrapping my head around how to explain it, until I came across an interview with Brooke Castillo from the Life Coach School Podcast. If you’ve never heard of her or her podcast, I HIGHLY recommend it. I’ve done a lot of work with her model and IT WORKS. 

I’ll link the interview in the show notes because it’s VERY good. There’s a moment in it when she says: “I just decided that my opinion of myself was so bad when I was trying to get everyone else’s opinion of me to be so good, that I decided I should just switch it”. You know when you hear something and you have that sort of aha lightbulb moment?

I’ve been doing some deep inner work for the last five years and this was the first time that I really acknowledged the fact that much like Brooke said, I wasn’t being consistent with my opinion of myself. And just like that I decided I would change it and let me tell you, it’s working. 

This really got me thinking about why it is that we tend to treat others better than we treat ourselves.

I realized that many of us grow up being told to focus on the way we treat others, yet very rarely build awareness around how we talk to ourselves, what we think of ourselves, etc. Much of how we learn to treat ourselves comes from observing the adults around us in early childhood. That’s why when parents would bring up their kids phone use at home during parent teacher conferences, I’d often ask them about their own relationship with their devices because kids learn mostly by what we do, not by what we say.

When I examined my own life and the way I show up for others, I thought about the core ways I do that and decided to show up for myself in the same way. I came up with three main ones: self-talk, prioritizing your needs, and treating yourself.

One of the first things that came to mind when Brooke Castillo said that was the way that I would talk to myself when I’d make a mistake. It could be the simplest, meaningless thing, yet my response every time would be, “Ugh, you’re such an idiot.” Sometimes I’d say it harshly, but most of the time, it was just a throwaway comment.

Who can relate?

Now, while this may not seem like a big deal to some, imagine if every time your kid made a mistake, you told them they were an idiot. Now does it seem worse? 

The neural pathways in our brains become conditioned to what they experience on a regular basis and strengthen in that way over time. I’ve noticed a HUGE shift in the way I think since stopping that negative talk. 

As an empath, it’s very easy for me to feel what others are feeling and I naturally gravitate towards making sure they’re ok. Growing up, I was always taught to look out for others. When I got into my 30s, I realized that I had never learned how to look out for myself first. I love the saying, “You can’t serve from an empty cup” because it emphasizes the fact that you must take care of yourself first before trying to take care of others, or else that’s just called martyrdom.

I remember about five years ago when I started my first year of teaching here in the U.S., the entire school did overnight camping trips by grade level during the first week of school. I was part of one of the middle school teams and we went into one of the camping grounds in LA. It was ROASTING there, so we kept telling the students to drink water AND get their electrolytes in. While I was super diligent about making sure their hydration needs were met, I wasn’t as careful about my own. 

I was drinking A TON of water, but no electrolytes, and I learned that lesson in my 20s, so now at 30 there was no excuse. By the end of the first day, I started feeling dizzy, nauseous, and confused. Well, as it turns out, I was the one who ended up with heat exhaustion. I was of no help for the rest of the evening and it could have been much worse, but luckily some electrolytes and a nap seemed to do the trick. When we went on our weeklong backpacking trip later on in the year, I DID NOT make that same mistake.

We can all point to a time when we’ve been so focused on the needs of others that we forget about our own. This could be tending to someone’s emotional needs as a way of not dealing with our own or prioritizing other people’s wants before our own needs.

For me, I know that besides my basic survival needs, I need the Four S’s: Sustenance, Sleep, Sun, & Silence. I’m an ambivert and need that balance between extroversion and introversion. I’ve found myself in many circumstances in recent years where I’ve had to tap out at a certain hour of the night (usually 10pm - life of a 30 something year old) only for the sole reason that I’ve had too much people time and I need sleep. Period.

The first time this phrase really stuck was when I started watching Parks & Rec. Such a great show. This phrase means different things to different people. For me, it means treating yourself like you would the person you love most in the world. Often we wait our whole lives for someone to come along and shower us with the love and care that’s missing in our lives. Here’s the thing, the reason why it’s missing in the first place is that we aren’t giving it to ourselves.

Figure out what this looks like for you. You don’t even have to spend money, it’s just about the intention behind the action. For example, my sister and I have both formed a habit of spending many of our birthdays alone. Some of my friends think it’s weird; my sister’s kids get mad that she doesn’t want to spend it with them. But if you think about it, there is no other day that is dedicated to celebrating the relationship that you have with yourself. I tend to spend milestone birthdays celebrating with friends; otherwise, it’s a day to do what I want to do. 

Now, treating myself on my birthday looks differently than treating myself on a regular day. I tend to spend my birthday outdoors hiking, if weather permits. My sister usually goes snowboarding because it’s the one thing she can’t really go full out on with her three kiddos. 

During the year, treating myself might look like being at a bookstore for hours or getting myself some beautiful peonies when I stop by Sprouts to get groceries. Sometimes, it just looks like taking my time drinking my coffee in the morning. You have to find what works for you.

Just by changing the way you talk to yourself, prioritizing your needs, and finding simple ways to show yourself love and kindness, you’ll start seeing a shift in the way things unfold for you.

One thing is for sure, is that the opinion we have of ourselves informs everything else we do in life, and it all starts with being aware of it.

Thanks for listening! You can find the show notes for today’s episode on my website, miriamotero.com/podcast and if you’ve enjoyed the episode and want to come back for more, head over to wherever you listen to podcasts and hit subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. See you next week for another episode!

Welcome to the Living with Empathy Podcast. I’m your host, Miriam Otero and this is episode two. 

How’s everyone feeling? Is this the first time you’ve been asked that today? So many of us start our day by getting straight to business, when we could take a brief moment to stop and connect with someone, even if it’s just for a couple of minutes. Loneliness is on the rise all over the world, especially here in the United States, and often this small act might not seem like a big deal to most, but it could really make a difference for someone who needs it.

In every class, I always take five minutes to ask my kids how they’re doing. It may not seem like much, but when you add up an entire school year of five minutes a day, it can really change a kid’s school year. 

And that is the perfect segue into today’s topic: the simplest ways to start building more empathy. 

In the introductory episode, I gave an overview of what my intention is with this podcast. This season, I’ll be focusing on topics that anyone can relate to in some way, shape, or form. These are topics and questions that have come up with friends, family, and clients in my personal development coaching. 

So, today, I’m going to talk about three simple ways to start working out the empathy muscle.

Much of what I do these days is informed by my experiences as a teacher. When you’re a teacher, you practice seeing things from multiple perspectives on the daily and whenever I confront a difficult issue in my life, I often think about what my students would have to say about it, because of the way they look at the world. 

It’s incredibly true that teachers often learn far more from their students than their students learn from what they teach. Take it from me, I’ve taught people of all ages, from age 3 to 89, in the United States and in Spain, history, music, and language.

You see, children below the age of 11 already have a natural pull towards caring for others, almost as a default. There was actually a study done by the Ben-Gurion University Bio Empathy Lab that was published last year in the British Journal of Psychology, where they did some experiments and found that children under one year of age can already display empathy towards bullied victims. So young children already have more of a tendency to be more empathetic towards others.

Now, when we move onto middle school, kids start to go through a ton of changes. I don’t have a study to quote here, but we can all look back on our own middle school experiences to understand what that was like. Despite middle schoolers going through what I often call the “human sour patch kid” phase, they often teach me the most about empathy through their own unique ways.

For one, there are developmentally appropriate, complex conversations you can have with middle schoolers that you can’t have with younger kids, where they’re able to provide really thoughtful insights. When I started teaching history to them, we’d often talk about current events and what I found fascinating was their ability to talk about things in a way that is constructive, something that is getting increasingly harder for adults to do.

They also have this ability to empathize harder than anyone in a way that only a middle schooler can because they feel things so deeply. Adults tend to be more fixed in their views. Look, we all develop stories about ourselves and the world pretty early on in our lives. By the time we’re adults, we have so much evidence to support our story, that unless you have an earth shattering event happen or you MAKE the decision to change, your opinion tends to be firmly cemented in place. Kids and teens are learning a lot from observing the adults around them. 

The first step to developing empathy is being aware. Ask yourself, “Would my kid be proud of the way I’m showing up in the world?” If you have a middle schooler, start building a habit of asking them questions about real world topics. You might be surprised by what they have to say. 

If you don’t have kids, then ask yourself, “What would my middle school self think about this?” Sometimes, we tend to forget that somewhere in there, there is still a kid who dreams, hopes, and believes in the possibility of something better. 

Growing up, I was always curious about people. Maybe it’s because I grew up in a multicultural community, where everyone had a culture and experience that was different from my own. I don’t really know how it started, but I always had this innate desire to understand people on a core level. 

Over the years, this innate curiosity and this genuine desire to understand others strengthened my empathy because I was constantly putting myself in situations where I had to interact with new people. 

A prime example of this is when at the end of my 6th grade year, my family moved about 25 miles east of where I grew up. I was not only going to start middle school at a new school, but also in a town where I didn’t know anyone. Despite that, I could understand that we were all going to feel awkward in one way or another just by the pure fact where were all about to get on the struggle bus that is puberty. 

That’s also part of the reason I love teaching because you don’t know what your students’ experiences have been, so you have to approach everything they do, good or bad, with curiosity to be able to understand their motivations and build trust with them. 

So, how does this translate to someone who is trying to build empathy now?

Be curious about people. Start with where you are, with the people in your life. The next time a coworker is having a bad day, don’t just write off their grumpiness as a character trait. We automatically tend to jump to conclusions about the people we’re in contact with every day without ever taking the time to understand where they’re coming from. There’s probably more under the surface than you can see. 

You know, I remember starting a job several years ago where everyone was intimidated by this veteran teacher. They said she had a bit of an abrasive personality, so they always tried to avoid her unless they really had to interact with her.

I hadn’t even met her yet, so I decided to ignore what they said about her and approach her with curiosity. You see, in elementary school, I had the teachers that were labeled unapproachable because they were a bit more stoic than expressive in their faces. And guess what? They were the ones who went above and beyond the call of duty. If it wasn’t for them, I wouldn’t have learned English as quickly as I did in elementary school (Spanish was my first language). 

The first interactions were direct; short and to the point. I made it my personal mission to go out of my way to say hi to her and ask her about her day. I would make small talk by the coffee machine. Slowly, but surely, I got to know her really well. She was incredibly kind and caring. What most people failed to notice was that she always came to work early and was always the last one to leave. 

What other people saw as an abrasive personality, was actually a woman who was direct and to the point, in an environment where people weren’t always authentic in the way they presented themselves. It was refreshing to me, since I had just come back from living in Spain, where people are friendly and VERY direct. 

Had I just written her off, I would have probably had the same opinion everyone else had. When I left that job a couple of years later, she was one of the people I was most sad to not work with anymore. I’ve been so fortunate throughout my life because curiosity has led me to meet some truly amazing people. It could do the same for you and with that, get you in the habit of questioning your assumptions about people before getting to know them. 

Now, the last point might get some resistance for some, but it is the one way out of these three suggestions where it’s more internal. 

I’m not going to go all teacher on you and go over all of the benefits of reading, but reading stories about people that aren’t real and have very different experiences than us can help us to understand others on a really deep level. And for anyone who is trying to come up with excuses, I’ve already thought about most of them and found a solution for each one! 

For those who say you don’t have time to read, reading children’s books solves that dilemma and they have pictures too for those of you who are visual learners. Audiobooks are now a popular option too, if you prefer to listen on your long drives to and from work. 

If money is the issue, I can tell you from personal experience that your local public library is a great free resource. In fact, I read all of my library books on the Overdrive app, but I always say it’s great to pay the library a visit. I have a handful of friends that are librarians and let me tell you, they have a wealth of knowledge that is just waiting to be tapped into. They’re going to have the best recommendations to suit your needs and preferences.

I will make just a few recommendations for specific books. These are books that have been imprinted on my heart since reading them and if you’re looking for empathy, these are great books to start with. 

The first is a children’s book I read when I was just a wee kid called The Hundred Dresses by Eleanor Estes. The book tells the story about a girl who shows up to school wearing the same thing every day. Girls in her class taunt her and ask her how many dresses she has. She says she has 100 dresses and they proceed to make fun of her because they can see that isn’t true. When she stops showing up to school, the girls begin to wonder what happened to her, and the answer leaves them filled with regret.

In 2004, the author’s daughter wrote a forward for the book and she tells the story about how her mother wrote this book because this was similar to what happened to a girl in her class. She always regretted not standing up for the girl who was taunted and wanted others to learn from her regret. Even though this book was published about 75 years ago, it still rings true today. It’s a children’s book and a short one at that, so it’s a great one to start with.

The second recommendation is actually a series, one for children and young adults, but one I read only three years ago (I also never watched the movies because I didn’t want to spoil the books for myself). You may have guessed it: The Harry Potter Series. Now, the main reason I recommend these books is simply because they are incredibly well-written and researched and because the books themselves have been used in empathy research. 

Take for example the study done by the University of Modena & Reggio Emilia in Italy, where they split elementary school kids into groups and had them read different passages from the series. Some related to prejudice and others didn’t and then they would have discussions about them with a researcher and then be assessed. They did this several times over a period of time and found that those who read passages related to prejudice had developed more empathy towards real life marginalized groups.

If you’re wondering about how that could be, think about it. Stories that are set in a life that is completely different from ours allows us to disassociate from any preconceived notions we have. That’s why these studies often recommend reading fantasy over any other fictional genre. Though the study was done successfully with children, adults can learn a thing or two from the experiment, even if it’s just questioning why children are far more able to build that empathy muscle. 

Even if these aren’t scenarios you necessarily relate to, the practice of putting yourself in the shoes of another is what helps to build empathy. In fact, many of the people we tend to have these passionate arguments with tend to be people we think we have little in common with, so practicing through reading stories of people that aren’t like us, help us to pause and ask ourselves, “What am I missing?”

Kids, curiosity, and reading are just a few ways to start building empathy. If you have other simple ways to build empathy, feel free to share them below!

That’s it for this today! Thanks for listening. If you know someone that would love the topic we covered today, go ahead and share it with them. I’ll catch you next week for another episode. Take care!

NYT - A Year of Living Better - How to Be More Empathetic

Scientific American - Why Everyone Should Read Harry Potter

NPR - Americans Are A Lonely Lot, And Young People Bear The Heaviest Burden

Thank you for joining me for the first ever episode of the Living with Empathy Podcast!

Transcript: Episode 1 - Introduction Episode

Hello and welcome to the Living with Empathy Podcast.

I’m your host, Miriam, and I wanted to take this episode to introduce myself and this podcast. I’m going to talk about how this podcast came to be, give you a little glimpse into who I am, and share a taste of what’s to come. 

So, let’s start from the beginning. Like I said, my name Miriam Otero. The idea for the name of this podcast actually came about from me looking back on my own journey as an empath and a highly sensitive person and thinking about how the perception of that has changed over the last 30 years.

People always perceived it as weak, but now, more and more people are realizing and recognizing how powerful empathy, sensitivity, and compassion can be during such tumultuous times as these that we are currently living in. And over the years, I’ve had a lot of practice in building these into strengths and skills that have served me well throughout my life. And while I now see these as a gift, they have also come with some hard earned lessons. 

I’m a middle school teacher and personal development coach, so much of the work that I do these days is focused on the social-emotional development of young people who will one day become the adults that inherit the problems we’ve left behind. Over the last five years, there’s been a big push on social-emotional development in the classroom, but if there’s one thing I’ve realized, its that they aren’t the only ones who need it. 

That’s why I decided to create this podcast. A place where people can come to learn about how to raise their emotional intelligence, to be more empathetic, and hear some of the lessons I’ve learned along the way from teaching this to middle schoolers. But ultimately, empathy is also about perspective. It’s being able to understand and feel what other people are going through. But how can we understand how others feel and what they’re going through when we don’t even take the time to understand our own feelings? It’s about zooming out from our tunnel vision to see situations from different angles. In doing so, it really allows us to creatively brainstorm solutions to our own problems and the problems of the world. 

Working with middle schoolers has reminded me that just because we grow up, it doesn’t mean we can’t continue to be innovative when approaching our lives. 

A couple of years ago, I was teaching 7th grade history. It was the beginning of the school year, and like most teachers, I spent the first week doing activities to get to know my students. I wanted to know how they approached problem solving in difficult situations. Would they work together? Would they come up with different types of solutions? How would they justify their choices? 

So on one particular day, I began class by introducing the Trolley problem. The Trolley problem is a common thought experiment, an ethical dilemma that takes a look at our morals. There are different variations of it, but basically it looks like this:

There’s a runaway trolley speeding down some railroad tracks. Up ahead, there are five people tied to the track. You’re standing next to a lever that can switch the trolley to another set of tracks. The only problem is that on those other set of tracks, there’s a person there. 

What would you do?

Do you do nothing and let the trolley kill those five people?

Or do you pull the lever, save the five people, and kill the one person on the other set of tracks?

I told my students that they had to choose one or the other and then justify their answers. I gave them some time to think about the problem and when we came back to discuss it, I was pretty surprised at how it went. Despite clearly stating the rules (several times, might I add) they were INSISTENT on coming up with any solution that meant no one would die. I tried SO HARD to get them to kill somebody, basically, but they couldn’t fathom letting someone die. 

After class, I talked about it with my co-teacher about the activity and how it went and we realized something we hadn’t noticed before. The students had decided that their mission was to save every single life in this hypothetical situation. Adults wouldn’t even question the rules. They would choose one of the options, even if it was a difficult choice, and they would justify it. They abide by the rules of the game and there’s no questioning THAT part of it. 

To me that’s a perfect example of what gets lost as we become adults. We conform to society’s expectations of where we should be at any given age of adulthood and we strive to reach the milestones set by the many generations before us. Sometimes, we’re ok with that. Other times, we wake up one day to find ourselves deeply unsatisfied with the life we’ve chosen, never realizing that there was another option: to live our lives based on a set of rules that we created. 

In another class, I wrote in big letters on the board: What can adults learn from kids?

I’ve learned so much from all of the students I’ve taught that I wanted to know if given the choice, what would they teach us?

It got me thinking about my middle school self and I wondered if she would be proud of the adult I’ve become. What about you? What do you think your middle school self would think about adult you? I mean, there are countless movies that address this, right? 13 going on 30. BIG. 17 Again. And they all seem to point to the same thing. 

My goal for the podcast is to ask you questions and create a space where you can come to focus on the “kind” in humankind. 

I’m going to leave you with that for now and I hope you’ll join me next week for another episode. 

If you want to know more about the human behind the voice, then head on over to www.miriamotero.com/about to get to know your host: me. If this is a podcast that you think someone you know might like, pass it on. It’s always nice to get a thoughtful recommendation from someone you love. Until then, thank you for listening and I’ll catch you next week for another episode. Take care!

In this first season, I’m going to focus on topics that have come up a lot for my coaching clients and loved ones in my own life. I’ll share strategies for how to question and approach these topics in your life. I’ll also share some insights from what I’ve learned about empathy through living abroad, teaching middle school, and the challenges life has thrown my way.

New episodes will be posted here weekly or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify Podcasts.