Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Start your week smiling with your friends kathy Zant and Michelle Frichette. It's time to get ready for some weekly motivation with WP Motivate.
Happy Friday, Kathy. Pgif.
[00:00:16] Speaker B: Happy Friday. And happy first day of December. Did you Black Friday?
[00:00:22] Speaker A: I did. Barely. Where the heck did this year go?
It's been, like, the longest year and the shortest freaking year ever all at the same time.
[00:00:33] Speaker B: Yeah, it's blown by. But there have been some months where it's just like, can this phase just end now? Like, summer and relentless heat?
[00:00:47] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. I see you have a stocking up behind you and a little Christmas tree.
[00:00:54] Speaker B: And the little tree back here, that one is up because that one gets put away in a closet, and then.
[00:01:02] Speaker A: I just take it out.
[00:01:03] Speaker B: It's already decorated. I love it somewhere.
[00:01:06] Speaker A: I have a Christmas tree in my living room, so it's not in my office, obviously. So my tree is up with literally probably 300 ornaments on it because I've been collecting them since I was an infant. My mother started collecting ornaments.
And so it's funny because as I was growing up, my favorite ornament was always this one same ornament.
It's a little yarn doll with, like, bright yellow hair. And I remember thinking as a child, this is the most beautiful ornament in the entire world. And every year it would get handed to me, and I'd hang it where I wanted in a place of honor. And I remember at about maybe 15 or 16 years old, that came out, and I got all excited because for the most beautiful ornament, and for the first time ever, I saw that ornament with more adult eyes than, like, childhood eyes. And I was like, this isn't beautiful. It was beautiful to my child's eye. I mean, it's cute, right? Don't get me wrong. And maybe I'll post a picture of it when I put the transcript up for this episode so people can be like, she thought that was beautiful. But I think there was definitely a lesson to me, right? That we see things differently through child's eyes. And as we grow up, we become a little more jaded. We become a little more skeptical, if you will. And this is so embarrassing to admit to you, really, truly embarrassing, because I'm an intelligent woman, I promise you. But when we were kids, we didn't like vegetables. Like, a lot of kids don't like vegetables, right? So we didn't like cauliflower, and we didn't like broccoli. I love them. Now, don't get me wrong, I absolutely love them. But as a kid, it was like, I don't want to eat that, right? So instead of like, oh, those are little trees, my dad told us, you don't like broccoli? What's wrong with you? That's what they make chocolate out of. And so I started eating broccoli.
The three of us started eating broccoli as children because that's what they made chocolate out of. Do you know that those truths that you just hold in your head because your parent told you literally in college. And I go to take a bite of broccoli, and I'm thinking to tell my friends, this is where wait a minute, this is not where chocolate comes from. Literally had that paradigm shift where I was like, what the heck? Chocolate does not come from broccoli. Right?
Along the same lines as a little beautiful doll. But she's cute. Like I said. Don't get me wrong, she's cute. She definitely shows her age. She's 55 also.
Yeah. Children's eyes and children's minds and the things that we learn and whatever. Anyway, it's one of my holiday stories.
[00:03:45] Speaker B: Yeah. Oh, that's funny. Yeah. I've got all of the childhood ornaments too. We've got some weird ones from the 70s when disco was, like, a thing.
Well, we call them the disco pairs. They're pears, but they have the mirrors.
[00:04:00] Speaker A: All over them, right?
[00:04:01] Speaker B: Yeah, I have the disco pairs. My brothers did not get the disco pairs. I got the disco pairs. They were our favorite because and every.
[00:04:11] Speaker A: Year that you hang them on your tree, you have that memory, that core memory, that's part of them. Like, I got the pears, and I remember having the pears as kids and all of that kind of stuff, and it's fun, isn't it?
[00:04:22] Speaker B: Yeah, it is. It is cool.
And these ornaments mean, like they mean more for me, but they don't mean anything to my kids. I don't know, I'll pass them on, but to them, they're just like, okay, weird things that Grandma gave us, right? So they don't mean anything. But my son was here for Thanksgiving, and it was kind of funny watching him and Claire bounce off of each other and what's important to them, like, things that were just like, yeah, okay, whatever. But those were like they are their core memories of what were their defining moments. And I was like, wow, I didn't think about that.
[00:05:02] Speaker A: Right?
[00:05:03] Speaker B: Yeah, their perception of it is so different. It's funny.
[00:05:07] Speaker A: Well, Lydia's had her own home now for over ten years and has never put up a tree. I still have all of her childhood. I had packed them separately for her one year when I took the tree down after she had moved out. And I packed all of them in a lovely little rubbermaid tote, nice and moisture proof and everything. Not that my house is wet, but, like, moisture proof, all of that kind of thing. So when do you want your ornaments? Oh, you could throw them away. I was heartbroken. I'm like, I'm not throwing them away. I've saved these for you all these years. So someday she may want them, and if not, she can throw them away after I die, because they're not going there until then.
I'm divorced now. I live alone, and I think, as people know, I'm disabled, and so I can't stand up to put together my tree and to hang the ornaments on my tree and to put the tree topper on my tree. If I stood on a stool to put the tree topper on the tree, and me would be on the ground. Right. So all of those things. So I have to rely on other people to help me do those things. Because my daughter doesn't live nearby, my parents are more disabled than I am, and so I have to either hire somebody or I have to ask friends if they want to come over and help me do those kinds of things. And you and I were talking a little bit before the show about how important it is to be able to accept help and ask for help. And so my tree and like I said, I'll put a picture of the tree and the special ornament in the show notes for this one. I'll take my camera over there after this.
But it wouldn't be up this year if I didn't have somebody who was willing to come over and I unwrapped the ornaments and told them the history of every single one. They were probably like, I think I hear my mom calling, but they got to hear me talk about my memory lane with some of those ornaments, too.
[00:06:59] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:07:02] Speaker A: There'S a lot to be said for. And you don't have to be disabled to ask for help and accept help.
[00:07:08] Speaker B: Right? Yeah.
I don't know what it is about me, but I'm very much just let me just get it all done. I'll just do it. I'll just take care of everything. And this lesson, the stuff that I go through with Mark, I've had to ask for help. I've had to orchestrate help. I've had to deal with all kinds of social workers and all of these things that are sound wonderful, oh, let them just take care of it. And then realize, oh, you are just clocking hours. Let me claim your clock. So you'll actually help me.
Asking for help and demanding help and accepting help, that comes in packages that like, well, I don't really want this person in my house. But you know what? I need them. I need their help.
I don't want somebody to clean my house. I've had time periods where I've had people come and I've had cleaning ladies, and they're always ladies, but I've had people come clean my house. But it's kind of a meditative thing for me. I clean my own house, and it's not always perfectly clean.
My life isn't perfect, but I'm now looking at my life, and I'm like, it might be time to let go again and just let somebody do that. But it's hard for me to ask for help. It's hard for me to let help in.
[00:08:42] Speaker A: I used to be that way too.
And you're sitting in the place of not being the disabled person in your home, and so you have that burden in your own mind of I should be able to do all these things for myself and for my family, and I'm capable. I have two legs that work and two arms that work and all of these things. But that doesn't mean that you should have to bear the whole mental load of it too, and that your time isn't also valuable, right? So for me, I used to be the person who was like you like, I'll just do it, I'll do it, I'll do it, I'll do it. I could do this. Or maybe if the cleaning got overwhelming, I had a best friend that would come over and help me. I'd go over, help her, because it's easier when there's two people. And my ex husband, his idea of helping clean was going to the Dollar Tree, buying the cleaning supplies and leaving them on the counter and then going off on his own so that I could that was his idea of there's a reason we have exes. And that was one of my reasons with him.
But gradually going from being somebody who was able to walk and able to do all those things to losing that ability over time meant that I had to rely on other people or live in squalor. Because there are some things I can't get up and vacuum, I can't wash floors, I cannot get on my knees and wash the bottom of my tub and then expect that I'll be able to get up again just because of the way that my body works or doesn't work right now. And I don't see that getting better anytime soon, right? And so for me, I had to come to terms with the need to have others help me. And so I pay somebody. A girl I've known since she was a kid has a cleaning business. She and her mother come every other Tuesday, clean my whole house for me, take out the trash, like, all of that stuff. And then I get home and it's like clean sheets on the bed and all of those kinds of things. And they find ways because they know me so well. And I'm sure she does it for other customers, too. They find ways to fill the time. So if the house isn't as messy and she's committed 2 hours, then I come home and my refrigerator has also been organized and wiped out. And they do those different things for me. And so it was a no brainer to send her money as a Christmas gift this year because she goes above and beyond to make sure that I'm able to work within my own home when there's not somebody here. And hiring somebody was the first step to me actually being able to ask people for help and admit that whether I'm able bodied or not, I can use help in certain areas of my life to make the rest of my life work the way it's supposed to. And so it's like, when I went to work Camp Asia last year, my friend Jeff went with me, right. And he was my travel assistant, and he managed the scooter and all of the things and the luggage and the things that I have difficulty doing. When I went to Greece, my daughter came and did those kinds of know, when you and I were in Phoenix, you were so helpful to me, and being able to say, I need somebody to help me do these things so that I can do the things that make a difference is super important.
[00:11:47] Speaker B: Yeah. You think about it.
I was listening to a video this morning when I was out on my walk, and somebody said something about how time is more valuable than money. So if you can use your money to get yourself more time, do it.
[00:12:03] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:12:04] Speaker B: And if you're going to grow a business and stuff like that, you can't do everything all yourself. You need to be able to scale. It just makes more sense. That whole idea of time is not money. Time is more valuable than money. And to have time to I think about I claire took me down this whole Taylor Swift thing, and now so all of the algorithms are like, oh, you like her.
[00:12:29] Speaker A: We've got plenty of content. And I'm just like I don't like.
[00:12:33] Speaker B: Really, I don't but it shows up all the time, and yeah. So Taylor Swift is she going to know. She's got an army of people, I'm sure, that are just, like, helping her be the best that she can possibly you know, we're kind of that we're important people that are doing important things, helping other people. Right. Like, we're of service to a lot of people. You are, especially, and yeah. So if we're going to really maximize what we're good at and maximize our impact in the world, we have to allow other people to help us. And we have to almost demand that of our world, that people do support us, that the universe supports us in every way possible so that we can do the things we need to do.
[00:13:19] Speaker A: Yes, exactly. A couple of weeks ago well, more than a couple of years ago, about ten years ago, a local artist friend of mine wanted Lydia, saw pictures of Lydia, said, she's gorgeous, I want to paint her. Right? And so she and this other artist had Lydia come over. They do a huge photo shoot so they could use those photos as reference for painting. And I saw two of the paintings. I didn't realize at the time that the one artist did, like, five paintings of my kid.
She was an adult, but she's still my kid, and so I'd seen two of them, and I had always loved them. And there was one especially I'll put pictures of this in the show notes, too, of Lydia, and it just looks like she's soaring through the sky. It's just the most amazing, beautiful photo painting. And I had inquired as to how much would these paintings cost, and the other photo that I'd seen that Lydia liked better was, like, $2,500.
And I was making less than $50,000 a year. I was just freshly divorced. There was no way I had $2,500 to buy a painting. So now that I have a little bit of money from my dad's estate, et cetera, I thought to myself, oh, I should go back and look at those paintings. I had not looked at the price of the other one, which was less than $1,000. It was under $800 and with free shipping. And so I ordered I paid for this painting of my child. It sits on top of my piano now.
It's painted on wood. It's the heaviest motherfucker I ever seen.
[00:14:53] Speaker B: Oh, my God.
[00:14:54] Speaker A: So this Ups brings it in and just sets it up for me. I shuffle across the room later and I'm like, Holy moly. So I managed to get it all unboxed and all this huge it's like almost the size of the top of a bright grand piano. Huge painting. I'm like, I cannot clear the top of my piano, lift this thing above my head. And so I texted a friend of mine who's actually Lydia's age, who lives a couple of streets over, he and his fiance. The fiance is my massage therapist. So I texted Tony, I'm like, hey, I happily pay you for a half hour of your time if you could come over and help me put this up. And he's like, Well, I'm not available, but Gavin said he'd come over. It cost me $25. Gavin came over. He cleared the top of the piano off. He put the painting up where it belonged, and then I had confidence that the cats weren't going to knock it down. Nothing was going to happen to it sitting where it belongs. And the fact that I had people I could ask that of in my life, and they would have done it for free, but I wanted to respect their time as well. Right, so you're coming over to work for me? I'm going to pay you for the work.
But, yeah, it's important to like you said, the time is worth more than the money.
And if you can't afford it, that's a different story. Right. But when you can afford it, and when you can afford to pay for the things that you don't want to focus on so that you can make more money focusing on the things that you can or contributing in other ways, it's important, I think, for sure.
[00:16:24] Speaker B: Yeah.
I think in a lot of ways, if you don't ask for help, it's almost like you get pushed into situations where you have to ask for help. True. And I think it's really easy for some of us to speaking for a friend to fight through the I can do it. I can do it. I will soldier through this. No matter how hard it is, I will make this happen. I will be the hero. I will be will get done. Watch me. Soar and sometimes it's just like it feels almost like ego humiliating to just say, no, this doesn't make sense for me to torture myself. Let this person who's better at this do this.
[00:17:17] Speaker A: The other thing is, if you think about it, you like to help people. I like to help people. You like to get paid for your work. I like to get paid for my work. When we create those opportunities for other people to help or get paid for their work, we have done for others what we like for people to do to us. For us. So if I have a need and somebody can feel good because they help me do it, or I have a need, if I can hire somebody and put money in somebody else's pocket and make their life a little bit easier that way too, why wouldn't I, if I have the ability?
[00:17:50] Speaker B: True.
Yeah. I was listening to something one time a while ago, and it kind of stuck with me. And every time I clean the cat boxes, I think about it. And it was like this interview about there's a visual for you, but it was this interview of someone about the Indian cat caste system, where it's like, oh, well, you're in this cast and therefore this is like, how you will be. Which I disagree with and I find just gross. But they were talking about how it might have been somebody who moved to India, and they had the cat box person, and they came from the cat box cast or whatever, and for a dollar a day, they cleaned people's cat boxes, and that was what they did. And the person was feeling, like, bad that this was going on, so they cleaned the cat box, and the person who did the work got very angry. Like, this is how I pay my this is how taking care of my family. And you might not understand it, but don't do what's outside of your cast. And it just hit me of this, just like it was weird, because it wasn't something that I would consider. I find the whole system kind of reprehensible, and people should have upward mobility, and maybe this person has got an IQ of 200, and they're born into the cast of cat boxes. That doesn't sound right, but that was their system. And it was just like, let people help you. Let people do the job. Even if you feel like you can do it, let them do their job.
[00:19:19] Speaker A: Step off.
[00:19:20] Speaker B: Let it be. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know what the lesson is from that story, but I remember it until now, every time I clean the cat boxes, I think of that. Well, not every time. Half the time I'm complaining about it, and the other half the time, I'm like, wow, that was just there's people who like, that's their life, and it's just EW.
[00:19:40] Speaker A: Well, I used to think, like, why would you want to be a trash collector? Why would you want to deal with other people's trash, man? There's some of the happiest people I know. If you watch TikTok and you see these little kids that are admiring them, and they love the big trucks, and why look down on anybody for the job they do if that's the job they're choosing to do and they enjoy it, right? There are probably people who are like, you do marketing. Why would you do marketing when you could actually create? I'm like, how is marketing not creating? Right? Well, I'm not the developer. I'm not the whatever. And no, but I still have part of the whole community of the company, and doing the work that we do and all of that and the work that I do enables other people to have jobs, and we all fit in there somewhere, right? And I realize that some of what I've said today sounds incredibly privileged because I have risen to a place in company that I can afford to have somebody clean my house, and I have worked hard to be able to do XYZ, and I have the money to hire people to come put painting up for me. And it wasn't always that way. And I don't want it to sound like we're coming from a place of total privilege today, even though I'm acknowledging right now that that's where we sit most of the time.
But it's also good if you can look at what you have and share that with others through not just charity, but hiring and doing those kinds of know. Mandy mandy needs people. Her job is to clean houses. She loves cleaning mean, she loves it, right? That's what she loves to do. She's made a career. She's got a business. And so by hiring her to do that work for me, I've given her the job that she's looking for.
I struggle every Wednesday, I should say every Wednesday. I struggle sometimes to get my weekly Wednesday posts out about work. And when I miss a week or two, people come out of the woodwork saying, hey, where's your post? Where's your post? And I'm like, I didn't have time this week, but I had somebody approach me through Twitter, and, please, everybody, don't suddenly ask me for jobs on Twitter, because I don't always have the ability to hire people. But I did have somebody ask me about it. He said there was looking for an internship, unpaid internship. He just wants the job experience. And so I said, well, I really don't have anything like that right now, but I need help coming up with my tweet thread every Wednesday because I'm just in a place right now where I'm swamped. I said, but I don't want you to do it for free.
It's not a lot of work. It's maybe 20 minutes a week, but I'll give you $50 a month if you'll help me do this. And he's like, sold. Right. So now I can continue to do that weekly tweet thread. I can compose it, I can do it. I can vet the work that he's done, but I haven't had to do all the legwork, and it doesn't negate the work that's being done. It doesn't say, well, Michelle didn't come up with all of the tweets, all of the jobs this week, so we're not going to read it. No, it's still valuable work, but now I'm actually paying somebody and giving somebody a little bit of money in their pocket and experience to help me build that. And I will thank them in the last tweet of the thread and acknowledge them so now that they get a little bit of press or whatever as well. So never underestimate the fact that asking other people to help you helps them, too.
[00:22:44] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:22:47] Speaker A: But that no is a valid answer.
If I ask somebody and they say no, like, okay, good enough, I can ask somebody else now.
[00:22:57] Speaker B: Yeah.
I mean, you're giving opportunity.
Yes, you can do lots of things, but by giving other people opportunities to try to do something new, to learn from you and your guidance as they're learning something, I think that's important, too. And then, like you said, I feel good being of service to others. Let other people feel that, too.
[00:23:27] Speaker A: Being of service. Why wouldn't you share that?
[00:23:29] Speaker B: Yeah, I love it. I feel like a new person. And now that part of some of my entourage of help here in Texas and taking care of Mark has left, I have another on my to do list of getting more people to help me out with what doing.
[00:23:47] Speaker A: So for sure.
Absolutely.
Next week, I want to talk about what you want for Christmas, because I've got a list, and I want to see what's on your list.
[00:23:56] Speaker B: Yeah, I already have that ready. I'll be ready for that episode because I saved up a bunch of gift cards and on Black Friday I went nuts for recently.
[00:24:06] Speaker A: Oh, I love that. I ordered a bunch of stuff for everybody else, but nothing for me.
Anyway, make sure you tune in next week. We're talking about we've done a few episodes of our Favorite Things. Now we're going to do an episode of The Things We Want.
[00:24:24] Speaker B: Yeah.
Or the things that we have.
[00:24:29] Speaker A: Like right here, but the things we wanted. Next time. The things we wanted and got.
[00:24:35] Speaker B: Yes. I'm not going to wait around for treating myself.
[00:24:39] Speaker A: That's right. Sometimes you got to, right. They can't wait for other people to do everything for you.
Exactly. That's awesome. All right, well, we'll see you all next week. Thanks for hanging in there with us and tell us what you want for Christmas too. We're not buying it, but we just want to know we're nosy.
All right. Take it easy. See you later. Bye bye.
This has been WP Motivate with Kathy Zant and Michelle Freshette. To learn more or to sponsor us, go to wpmotivate.com.
