Unlocking Your True Power—How Self-Compassion Strengthens Resilience & Helps You Advocate For Yourself with Aundi Kolber
Episode Notes
Have you ever wondered how to transform daily stress into personal strength and resilience?
In today's must-listen episode, Dr. Alison is joined by the incredible Aundi Kolber, a trauma therapist and bestselling author of Try Softer. You’ll hear the backstory behind Aundi's latest book, Take What You Need and learn tools needed to develop and practice self-compassion. This episode covers:
* How to recognize when you're outside of your window of tolerance
* What most of us have gotten wrong about developing resilience
* The research behind self-compassion and why it leads to unexpected strength
* A beautiful metaphor from the Bible to empower and encourage you on your own journey of healing
Leave us a question or comment on The Best of You Podcast question form
Resources:
- Take What You Need: Soft Words for Hard Days by Aundi Kolber
- Past episodes with Aundi Kolber:
- Bonus Episode: Aundi Kolber & Dr. Alison on Writing & Launching Books
- Episode 60: How to Make New Friends, Overcome People Pleasing, Identify Red and Green Flags, & Extract Yourself From an Unhealthy Situation with Aundi Kolber and Dr. Monique Gadson
- Episode 45: Strong like Water—Finding the Freedom, Safety, & Compassion to Move through Hard Things & Experience True Flourishing
- Episode 46: People Pleasing as Survival, How Jesus Regulated Emotions & the Problem With Toxic Positivity and Spiritual Bypassing
- Books by Aundi Kolber:
- Boundaries For Your Soul by Dr. Alison Cook and Kimberly Miller
- Psalm 23
- Instagram @AundiKolber
- AundiKolber.com
If you liked this, you’ll love:
- Episode 129: Understanding Anxiety—A Step-by-Step Guide to Finding Calm, Advocating For Yourself, and Cultivating Inner Resilience
Thanks to our sponsors:
- This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/BESTOFYOU and get on your way to being your best self.
- Get ahead of the New Year with a routine that helps you now by going to Seed.com/bestofyou and use code 25BESTOFYOU to get 25% off your first month.
- Go to Quince.com/bestofyou for 365-day returns, plus free shipping on your order!
Music by Andy Luiten/Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
© 2024 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage without permission from the author. While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Transcript:
Alison Cook: Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I'm so thrilled you're here with me this week for this week's episode. We have a great episode today. I loved this conversation with my dear friend, Aundi Kolber, and I'm so thrilled to get to share it with you today.
If you have questions or comments or topics that you'd like me to cover in upcoming episodes of the podcast, I hope you'll leave those for me. You can do that on The Best of You Podcast question form. We'll link to it in the episode show notes as well as on my website over at DrAlisonCook.com.
I've loved hearing from you on that doc, as well as through email with comments and notes and topic ideas. The notes of encouragement mean a lot to me too. I've got to tell you, thank you for taking the time to leave those for me. They mean a lot. Brenda, you wrote to me about the episode on the 12 steps with Ian Morgan Cron and Julie, you shared a beautiful message for me about the episode with Michael Cusick and what it meant to you.
I really appreciate it so much. I can't tell you how much it means to hear from you and to know how this podcast is resonating with you. It's not easy to find spaces that bring together our faith, our desire to walk with God, along with really good and helpful and wise insights from the field of psychology.
Your support and your help in spreading the word about this podcast is so deeply appreciated. It truly makes a difference in this world. This work of healing is the work that we are called to do in partnership with God's Spirit. So thank you again for being here, for writing to me, and for sharing about the podcast.
I'm so thrilled to welcome Aundi Kolber back to the podcast today. Aundi is a dear friend of mine and she's a friend of the podcast. She's appeared several times on the podcast in the past. If you're new to the podcast or new to Aundi's work and want to hear more, we'll link to those prior episodes with Aundi in the show notes. You can hear more from her.
She's a trauma therapist, author, and speaker. Her work has resonated with so many of us through her bestselling books, Try Softer, and Strong like Water.
Today, Aundi and I are going to dive into her newest offering, Take What You Need. It's a beautifully contemplative book that invites us to pause, reflect, and care for the parts of ourselves that most need tending.
Before we dive in, I want to highlight some terms that Aundi and I use throughout today's episode. Again, in case you're new to the podcast, I don't want to assume that some of this language is familiar to you.
There's a concept that underpins a lot of Aundi's work. It's called the window of tolerance. This term was coined by Dr. Dan Siegel, and it's a way of understanding how our nervous system processes stress. When we're within our window of tolerance, we tend to feel more balanced, more present, and more able to handle life's challenges.
It's very similar to what Kimberly Miller and I call the Spirit-led self, as we describe in our book, Boundaries For Your Soul. It’s that place inside where we tap into the best of who we are that's calm, clear, and creative. It's not that the stressors of life go away. It's that we can access that place inside and lead ourselves through life's challenges with clarity and confidence and from a calm place inside.
However, when life's pressures push us outside of that window, whether due to trauma or overwhelm or day to day stress, we might swing into hyper-arousal, where we feel anxious or panicked or reactive, or what we call hypo-arousal, which is where we feel numb or disconnected or shut down.
The goal is to stay within that window of tolerance. This is what Aundi's work is all about. It's about teaching us how to expand that window of tolerance so we can recenter ourselves even in life's hardest moments.
That's what makes her new book, Take What You Need, so special. It's an invitation to slow down and ask what our bodies and souls truly need, whether it's rest, whether it's nourishment, whether it's courage.
As you'll hear us discuss later in the episode, this kind of compassion toward ourselves doesn't make us weak. It actually strengthens us and equips us to advocate for ourselves more effectively. You can find Aundi's new book, Take What You Need, wherever books are sold. I am thrilled to bring you my conversation with Aundi Kolber.
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Alison Cook: I'm thrilled to have this opportunity to talk about you. We talk often, but this is a unique opportunity to really talk about you and talk about your work. So many of my listeners are familiar with your work. They have read Try Softer or Strong Like Water.
It's a really fun opportunity for me to get to ask you about this new book and in general about what shapes your work. So thanks for being here.
Aundi: It is so fun to be here, such a joy to get to share it with you, and I know we have such a shared love of so many concepts. We always have such a fun chemistry, and I respect your work so much, so I'm so grateful that we get to do this.
Alison Cook: It's pretty neat. I was talking to Ryan, a mutual friend of ours. He shared with us about OCD and he was saying that he met Chuck, our other mutual friend, online. I was saying that's how you and I met. These are the gifts that social media can give us. So I'm very grateful for that.
Aundi: That's amazing. I love that.
Alison Cook: Okay. So I want to dive in, Aundi. Really your whole body of work, including this newest offering, is grounded in the idea of a gentle approach to healing. Try softer, right? Instead of trying harder, white knuckling it, to use your phrase, we're trying softer.
And “strong like water”, initially, you think about that and you're like, wait a minute. Yeah, water is strong, very strong, but it's not necessarily the first thing we think about when we think about strength. It's flexible, it's pliable, it has movement.
Tell me a little bit about how and why this gentle, compassionate approach to healing has been so important to you and why you think it's so important for all of us.
Aundi: Yeah, great question. The first thing I would say is that I definitely didn't start writing about these concepts or haven't been drawn to these concepts because I automatically have an affinity for them. What I mean by that is to say, I love these ideas and they have become embodied in who I am, but because of my own story of childhood trauma.
The white knuckling, the pushing hard, there have been ways that strategy has saved me in my life. It felt like it was a lot of my personality growing up–having to be such a hard worker, having to be so ahead of the game, having to be hypervigilant or over-accommodating others or having to be the “strong” one.
What's tricky about it is, it looks impressive often, right? In our culture, whether you're talking about wider culture or Christian culture, these ideas get a lot of praise, and a lot of that is because they get things done. You know what I mean? There's something about it that works. There's parts of it that work.
But for me, there came a point, really multiple points, where that way of existing was burning me up. In a way it was still effective, but my ability to even exist was diminishing in so many respects. That followed a similar line as I was doing my therapeutic work with clients. I could see that my clients were trying so hard.
It was like they were stuck in the mud, like when a car gets stuck and you spin your wheels. Gosh, you are exerting a ton of energy, but it's not getting you anywhere.
Alison Cook: Exactly.
Aundi: That really drove me to consider, what if there was a different way? All of my work always comes back to this idea that yes, we want to honor all the ways we survive, but ultimately, we cannot exist without at least some of that compassion, at least some of the gentleness. We are made for it.
Without it, we become rigid. It breaks us in ways that are simply not worth it. Compassion and gentleness make us pliable. It's a way that our body gets to experience safety, even in the midst of really hard things.
Alison Cook: Yeah. You talk about that basketball, athletic side of you, the fierce side of you, that goes hard. So to your point, this isn't necessarily intuitive, this kind of “try softer”. You've gone hard out of survival, out of God-given parts of you. Do you see it as a both-and, where we need those parts of us that push, and we also need to know when to let up? How do you see that?
Aundi: No question. Absolutely. Absolutely. But the caveat, and to borrow some IFS language, it's all dependent on, can we lead those parts? The kind of framework I use a lot is to say, do I have at least one foot in my window of tolerance?
Am I able to, using Dan Siegel's language, can I think about thinking? Can I be with the part? Again, using IFS language, am I blended with the part, or am I differentiated from the part but with? To me, it is a whole world of difference. It literally changes the game.
I know you and I have had so many conversations about parts work. What does it look like to honor ourselves, honor our parts, and yet live in alignment too? It's not to say that our parts always know what is best for our full self. But being able to turn towards those parts with compassion allows us to integrate and to work with them.
Using my own story, I call a part of myself basketball Aundi, and she is fierce. I developed that part in the midst of severe trauma, and for so many years, if I would go to that part, it actually would feel scary to the rest of my system.
It felt scary to feel that intensity. So I would have this ping pong ball feeling in my body, and I didn't know how to be with it. Over time, one of the gifts has been building that compassion and really building an internal relationship with that part.
Now, I can work with that part, and it feels like I get to call that part up. I'm like, okay girl, let's do this thing. We're about to do this hard thing, and let's work together.
Alison Cook: You're in charge of it. You're deploying it with a foot inside your window of tolerance, or from a self-led place, and that's so important. It's not that being soft or gentle or understanding the flexibility of strength means being weak, or means not looking out for yourself.
I had a conversation with a couple about marriage, and we were talking about how, when you learn to do your inner work, your inner healing, and you stop trying to blame other people, it doesn't mean that you don't still at times stick up for yourself and say, hey, I'm not okay with this.
But you're doing that from a place of calm. You're doing that from a place of self-leadership or with that one foot within your window of tolerance. The strength is stronger.
Aundi: Yes, absolutely. This is such an important sticking point for people, because this is always the thing people wrestle with. The question comes down to, will it actually work? What do you do when you're in an abusive situation? What do you do when you're in hard situations where the answer isn't always to be soft?
Absolutely it's never to allow yourself to be harmed. But what's different about this kind of approach is that compassion, often even for ourselves, is part of what allows us to access enough safety that allows us then, using IFS language, to access some self energy.
What that's doing from a broader system perspective is it opens us up to all the resources available to us, right? Including the ability to set boundaries from a place that's not from a place of punishment, for example. It's the ability to hold the line with dignity, with power, and without dehumanizing others.
This is the work of compassion. I really appreciate Dr. Kristin Neff's work around self-compassion through two lenses: tender self compassion, which is often that more soft, gentle, nurturing type, but then she also talks about it through the lens of fierce self-compassion, which is also considered a mama bear energy.
It's a protective energy. It's still rooted in compassion, but it's from a place where, as a mom, if I see someone wanting to harm my kiddos, I'm like, oh, mama bear. Not to dehumanize those people, but that's like a no thank you. You may not do that. You may not pass. We are deserving of that, not only for others, but also for ourselves.
Alison Cook: That's good. There's more agency there, when you're in command of those parts of you. Tell me about this word, resilience. A lot of your work, this idea of strength, is getting at this word, resilience. It's thrown around a lot. It's foundational, I think, to this journey of healing.
What do you mean by it and what does it look like? How do we know we've developed resilience or we're helping our kids to develop resilience?
Aundi: Yeah. I love that you brought this up because this is something I'm really passionate about. For many years now, to be totally honest, I've had a little bit of a bone to pick, perhaps because I have seen resilience really misused. What I mean by that is, I've worked with many clients through the years who've been called resilient.
And that's not a bad thing, but it's often been used at a time when what they needed was support. But what they heard was, gosh, seems like you got it. You're resilient, right? Or there could be other iterations of that.
So I start there to say, there is a lot of misunderstanding around resilience. Ultimately, I think of resilience as the ability to return to some safety, to some connection, to that self energy. That is the pathway that allows us to ultimately be resilient. I want to give a couple of caveats, because I always have to.
Sometimes we have to push through. I talk about in Strong Like Water situational strength. Sometimes we do the best we can, and that gets called resilience, full stop. My concern with that is that basically we're telling people, hey, go get traumatized. Don't think about anything else. That's resilience.
My hope is to say, look, yes, there are times when we do what we have to do. It is worth all that we can give, all that we can offer, to experience as much resourcing and safety as we go through something hard, because that will ultimately allow us to move through it with less harm.
Alison Cook: Yeah. That's a really important distinction. I hear you saying resilience is not in survival. That may be a part of it, which you lay out so beautifully in Strong Like Water. Sometimes we do go back into survival mode and there's no shame in that. But the resilience is in our ability to come back to safety.
Aundi: Yes. Yes. There's a great quote from Sharon Salzberg, who is a mindfulness teacher. she says, the healing is in the return. If I could borrow her words, I would say, the resilience is in the return. Sometimes, it's not that we return all the way, it's not that everything's perfect or figured out.
It's when we can even get a tiny little toe in that window of tolerance. Neurobiologically, if we're only living from survival brain, what that means is there is no pathway to metabolizing the hard we're currently experiencing. So the only thing that can happen in the absence of safety is for trauma to develop.
It's not to say that we can't honor the way we get through, and it's not to say that the way we get through can't even be reclaimed as we go back and do healing work. But when we only classify resilience through the lens of pushing yourself as hard as you can, no matter what, we really set people up for harm. And I don't think that is true to what resilience is ultimately about.
Alison Cook: We've talked about this, how sometimes that’s a very helpful metaphor for this reparenting we're trying to do for ourselves. If your child experiences something incredibly painful at school, we don't say to our child (and some people probably did have this said to them), “That'll toughen you up”.
Helping our children develop resilience would be honoring the thing that happened that was hard, honoring what they had to do to get through it, and helping them, through that connection to us, have that full ability to cry, to feel the pain, to feel the anger, and to experience safety. That then equips our child to go back to school the next day and know how to advocate for themselves or know how to find a different friend group or whatever the thing is.
I'm pulling that example out of my mind because if we didn't have that experience as children, what we're trying to do on this journey as adults, is teach ourselves. To use your word, that flow of strength, to find that safety where we're honoring all the pieces, which then equips us to potentially have the agency to do the things we need to do to take, to protect ourselves.
Aundi: Yeah. Absolutely. That's so well said. I don't want to reduce this down too much. But to make it a little bit more simple or accessible, what I would say is, when you have pain plus a lack of support and resources, the likelihood of trauma is high. If you have pain or adversity plus connection and resources and support, the likelihood of resilience is high.
That's, really, the difference, right? I often say, pain does not automatically mean it will become trauma. It does not. That to me is so hopeful. Because we don't have to be fatalistic and say, sorry, that's it. That's the end of the road. Instead, the harder it is, the more gentle we must become.
Because it is in that place of connection, safety, support, however that needs to be expressed, where we can do that inner work. If that's with our kiddo, absolutely, because we are probably one of the best resources our kids have available to them. This is Allan Shore's work, a “neuro psycho neuro biological regulator”. I might be getting that wrong.
But essentially, we are part of what helps them regulate their bodies. So when we are regulated, they can tap into that. That allows them to experience hardship through the lens of having enough. There's a place of abundance rather than lack.
Alison Cook: This is hard and I have what I need. Both of those things can be true. That's so good. That's so powerful. This idea of resourcing leads us right to this new book you have coming out very soon. It's a little bit different than some of the other books you've written, and it's toward the end of resourcing.
It's called Take What You Need. Tell us a little bit about what led you to want to create this offering and what's unique about it.
Aundi: Yeah, I'm really excited about this particular book. It is a little bit different than my other books, and part of that is because I've drawn on a lot of my previous writing, Try Softer and Strong Like Water, and worked with my editor to look at quotes that people have really resonated with through the years, what has stood out to people, what has been meaningful.
And as I've thought about that, one of the things that I hear a lot from people, every time I speak publicly, in my email, my DMs, everywhere I go, people will say to me, I love your work so much. This has been really meaningful, but about 40 percent of people will say to me, it took me a while before I could even start your book because I was so overwhelmed.
When I first heard about it, I didn't even feel like I could begin this particular book. A lot of times, when I post on places like Instagram or in my email, people are so outside their window of tolerance, or maybe they've got their pinky toe in their window of tolerance. They're barely holding on; they got a little fingernail holding on, right?
I get it, because I've been there. Sometimes it's hard to metabolize a lot of information. What I tried to do with this book, and Tyndale, my publisher, has been wonderful; my editor was really open to this different idea. To set up this book and think about these different categories of where people might be in their story.
Things like, take what you need when exhaustion looms large, when you need to know God is with you, when you need a strength that is soft, all these different categories. There are probably 20 categories, and we took these quotes and tried to discern, where do these fit?
The encouragement to the reader, and the way I've tried to design it and set it up, is to be very picture/image forward. There is beautiful greenery and very gentle, contemplative imagery, to invite people to actually check-in with themselves. To say that phrase I've been using for many years now–if you were to take what you need, what would your body say that you needed?
If you were able to settle your breath and your system and your spirit and your body, what is it you would need?
This book is designed to help you strengthen that muscle that allows you to tune in, so that you might participate with God in offering to the parts of yourself who are hurting, who are exhausted, who are feeling alone, who are depleted–here is some hope.
Alison Cook: I love that. I love that you're naming that. It's really true. I can remember in my own life, feeling overwhelmed by what can feel like a Pandora's box of pain during seasons of my life. I remember an early experience with a therapist where she was actually very astute in hindsight, but in that first session, she put her name on a couple of pain points in my life.
And I never went back. I was like, wow. In hindsight, she was right on, but it was too much. I love what you're saying with this book–you're trying to empower the reader to honor it, to use a phrase I hear you use a lot, to honor the pace of their own bodies. To say, I need this today, versus feeling like they have to open up that whole Pandora's box of all the different things that they could take or do.
Aundi: It’s actually a really common experience for people. I've had that experience too, where the right thing at the wrong time is not the right thing. That's why I even tell people when they're like, I'm going to read your book, 80 percent of the time I say, hey, take it at your own pace.
I say that a lot, because it's not that I don't want people to read my book. I would love for you to read my book. I believe in the work I've done, but I also want to make this work. I know you are passionate about this too–accessible care. How do we take it out of the ivory towers of academia?
How do we take it out of even our therapist's office, which is wonderful? I love that people are getting to therapy. I love that it's discussed on all these levels, but I have always wondered, how do we get these resources to the people who actually need it the most?
Alison Cook: Yeah. Yeah.
Aundi: Because sometimes you have a little more capacity maybe to read something and that's not bad. Thank goodness that there can be folks who are more resourced. And my hope for this one is it's the kind of book that, whether it's for you or whether you're thinking of someone in your life going through a heck of a season, you could say, hey, here's something to consider.
Alison Cook: Yeah. I could see it working in one of two ways. I love that on the front end, where someone maybe doesn't even realize, maybe as a friend, you're aware, oh, they're going to need to do some of this stuff. But I don't really want to buy them a book–that's overtly saying, you have trauma, or, you need to work through this.
I could see it working on the front end, either for yourself or someone else, where the subtitle is “soft words for hard days”, right? I love that. I could also see it for folks who have worked through your other books. It's the ongoing work that we're doing, even when we have gone into Pandora's box and we have looked at it all.
We’ve maybe pushed on some of the bruises and for the most part, we can tap into that resilience. We still have hard days where we need to give ourselves the gift of those soft words. So I could see it working in a lot of different ways for folks.
Aundi: Yeah. I love that. It's my hope. I've been calling it a contemplative coffee table book, however you want to take that, because to me, sometimes, and I am a really deep thinker, I tend to think about 12 layers for one little idea. I know you and I are similar in thinking about it from so many different angles.
Sometimes, partly because I'm a highly sensitive person, I do have a history of trauma, all these things, what I need is not more, I need less. Oftentimes having something that's smaller, that allows us to take that bite size, like here's something, see how it lands and see where it meets you. See if it could be a resource to you. See the ways that this might help.
You and I were talking about this resilience conversation I'm so passionate about, because the pain is not going anywhere. Jesus said, “In this world, you will have trouble. But take heart, for I have overcome the world”. What a beautiful promise.
Here's what we know: the pain in this world is not going to magically go away. Certainly we want to work towards things like justice. We want to work towards all the things. It's not that we want to cause pain on purpose, but I love considering, what are all the parts of the equation?
What does it look like to participate with God in meeting the needs that are present in that other part of the equation?
Alison Cook: We've talked a little bit about this, but I'd love for you to share with us more about this contemplative coffee table book and how our spiritual practices and our faith practices work into this “take what you need” approach to mental health. So for example, this book that you've beautifully put together and written reminds me a little bit of a book I got as a teenager.
Someone gave me one of those books of Bible promises where you can look up the thing you're struggling with and find the scriptures that kind of address that. I always thought that was a cool categorization. I'm angry. Okay. Here are 10 things that might meet you at that point.
I almost sense that there's that kind of energy with this offering. So how would that dovetail with your spiritual practices? How does this work dovetail with that?
Aundi: Yeah, what an important piece of this. I want to step back a little bit to say, one of the things I write in the introduction of this book regarding healing is that in many ways, in God's hospitality to us, the table is a really important metaphor. It's personally really meaningful to me.
There's this abundance and God invites us to come and partake. In Psalm 23, “he sets a table for me in the presence of my enemies”. There's this imagery of God setting tables for us in the wilderness. There's this important theme of healing as hospitality, God's hospitality, hospitality to ourselves.
In many ways, trauma has been the opposite, right? That's an understatement. Where there has been need, there has been lack, or there has actually been pain or overt harm or abuse. Oftentimes that has taken away our voice or our choice. It has cut us off from the God-given wisdom that God placed in our bodies.
To me, this concept of “take what you need" is meaningful because I see it as a repair. I see it as the repairing that occurs as we participate with God's spirit to say, no, you do not have to sit here and pretend that you're a robot. I promise to be with you. My spirit is with you. I gave you wisdom in your body. That is our birthright. God gave that to us.
When I think about this through the lens of spiritual disciplines, I think that as we restore and re-empower folks to, and on a very visceral level, that interoception, which often gets cut off when we go through trauma, it actually allows us to take this holistic posture and say in participation with God's spirit, God, what do I need?
We can take it out of the sacred into the secular and it can become, okay, maybe this breakfast is holy right now. Maybe receiving the beauty outside is what I need and it’s God's goodness to me. That also includes things like scripture.
That includes things that we're supplementing, things like The Book of Common Prayer or whatever that we're doing, we get to ask, is this in alignment? Does this honor? Is this in participation with?
Certainly, there are tons of caveats that I could name. Yes, there are times when we need to be uncomfortable. That’s not a bad thing. I'm not saying that we don't do things at times through a lens of even sacrificial giving. And I know this is something that you are so passionate about talking about and untangling, of saying, but this is different.
This is different because we need to make sure, in order to heal, we have to be able to actually connect to the truth of our experience. These things have a very significant intersection.
Alison Cook: It gets back to that idea of agency, which is what's taken from us when we've been hurt. I have a choice here, and God gives us that. He gives us that. He empowers us. I imagine that table as you're describing it, that smorgasbord of items to learn ourselves.
Maybe this is what will help. Maybe this is what will help. Ooh, that was too much. Oh, that wasn't quite enough. That's that “take what you need” idea. It’s so empowering because it's restoring our sense of selfhood, our sense of agency in partnership with God, to discern. That's so empowering.
This is what actually helps me. This doesn't. Now I know, and that's wisdom that I can take with me going forward. I love that this book is a resource in the very way it sets out an invitation for people to do that inner work of, what do I need at this moment? I love that.
Aundi: That's so well said. I geek out at the way these ideas tend to intersect. The thing about truth is that it cannot help but reveal itself and create. There's a beauty in recognizing how much these things build on each other.
Alison Cook: I love that. All right, Aundi, I want to ask you before we end. First of all, tell us where folks can find the book, how they can find your work, all the things.
Aundi: Take What You Need is available wherever books are sold. So I'd love folks to go to their favorite bookseller and that would be so meaningful to me. I hope it will be a resource for everyone who orders. You can find me on Instagram @AundiKolber, and you can also find me on my website, AundiKolber.com. I have lots of resources there so feel free to sign up for my newsletter as well.
Alison Cook: Sometimes you'll post the phrase “take what you need” in the sphere of social media. Sometimes I get overwhelmed with all the influencers that talk about an overwhelming potpourri/smorgasbord of options. People telling you different tropes or cliches or memes, and sometimes they're good, but it's like, which one of these should I apply?
I notice that you will often, when you post something, say, take what you need. Again, it's that invitation of, I'm going to offer something and you take what you need. It's that invitation to agency that is so beautiful. I love that about your online presence.
That is such a breath of fresh air in a place where there are a lot of expert voices. There are a lot of people telling you, this is what you should do. It's such a powerful phrase, “take what you need”.
Aundi: Oh, thank you so much. And, yeah, I appreciate you, and I feel like it's one of those things of trying to figure out, how do we do this work? I know you and I are always talking about: how do we innovate in a way that really honors the people that we are writing for?
It's not about likes, it's not about those things. How could it truly support folks, that they would feel the agency, even if it means that it's not supportive to them, to say, okay, I'm going to pass this time. God bless that. I love that.
Alison Cook: Exactly. That would, to me, feel like a win if someone said, this is actually not helpful to me today. Because that's what we need, that kind of discernment, that sense of agency within ourselves, where we can find that safety within ourselves to go, no that's not helpful. Or ooh, that is.
For folks listening, look for that kind of energy and that kind of approach in the people that you look to and in the people that you follow and in the ways we're showing up in the world. It gets back to that gentleness that we started with. Aundi, to close, a question I like to ask all my guests is, what is bringing out the best of you right now?
Aundi: Yeah, great question. The thing that feels most present in my life is that we were able to go to California. I had a speaking event and my family was able to come with me and we were able to go to Disney. It was a really special trip and it reminded me of the resource of play.
I can be a little bit of a serious person. I feel deeply and I have lots of compassion and all those things, but play is not an automatic thing. When I can connect to it, gosh, it opens me up so much. That is really bringing out the best of me right now.
Alison Cook: I love that. I love when you posted photos of your whole family with Mickey Mouse ears, because you're talking about serious topics. You're a very deep person, and I love when I see those because I know that's a beautiful way that you're being gentle with yourself.
Thank you so much for being here and for sharing your wisdom with us and for putting out so much goodness into the world. I so appreciate you.
Aundi: Thank you so much. I appreciate you so much.