Are You A Good Team Member?

what is up you guys i'm tyler your wandering therapist here and i'm excited to be with you today and share a couple of extra tips a wholehearted living with you it's finally good enough weather for us to get outside and be a little bit off of the trail and we're back up in the mountains a little bit it's funny I was telling chase on the way up here we're really not that far away from my house probably less than a mile probably less than half a mile away from my house but when you crest up over the first little ridge in the mountains behind my house the sound starts to die down and it feels like you're all alone and it's almost like I get this little breath of serenity even though I'm still pretty much in the heart of cash Valley and and I was just thinking like how wonderful it is that I have the opportunity to find these little spaces even in my busy world where it's nice just to calm down get a moment of peace and just feel the fresh air outside again the Sun is just about ready to come up over the top of the mountains and it's just really a beautiful spring day today today I wanted to talk to you a little bit about a principle and a concept that is really really important for having a wholehearted life that leads to a lot of joy it decreases suffering and it's something that we all are born to do but sometimes we struggle to actually do it and cultivate it in our lives and the the skill and the principle that I want to talk with you today is about the importance of not only building but utilizing and being a good team member I the reason I was thinking about this is this week I had someone checking in one of my groups and it's a one of the guys that I work with he he's a really awesome guy he's doing really really hard work trying to change some things in his life one of the struggles that he has is that he's got problems not only with acting out with addiction stuff but he also has problems with anger and one of the emmos of his problem is is that he his whole life has been taught that he needs to stuff his feelings and he shouldn't show what he's actually feeling and so he shoves it down and stuff sitting stuff sitting stuffs it and then over the course of time thinking he's okay because he's buried things there's not a problem but finally it just builds and builds and builds and eventually the the final straw gets placed on the camel's back and it loads and he's got this explosive anger that leads to all sorts of problems in his life where now he's got problems in his marriage and he has some disconnection with his kids and he has problems at work keeping a job because he can't maintain his anger because he has these explosive episodes and and it's caused him a lot of problems in his life well he came into group this week and he reported as he was checking in that he had felt what it was like to have that stuffing going on in his life he had felt some things building up where he's feeling some stress about some finances in his world in his relationships he's got some marital stress at home that's still trying to be ironed out he could feel those things building and he said I caught it Tyler like I realized what was happening and I realized that I was gonna actually have a blow up in the next couple of days if I didn't do something and I didn't have a blow up and I feel so much better now and I got a release and and I thought that's awesome and so I asked him well what did you do and his answer in his solution was I finally swallowed my pride and I called some of my group members and I actually went out to lunch with one of them and I went to another event with a different one and I was able to talk with them and we were able to sit and visit for a few minutes and just being able to speak everything that I was feeling somehow makes it not seem so big anymore and it was the simple fact that he utilized the act of being able to reach out and this is a skill in life most of us have a really difficult time with this that anytime we have struggles or problems our natural tendency is to go in partly because we don't want to be vulnerable and we don't want to let people see our weaknesses but also partly because we feel like we don't want to be a burden in other people's worlds and nothing could be further from the truth where when we actually reach out when we have a problem most people in our world especially the people who are good team members they're waiting they're looking for ways to be invested in helping they want to do more that they only don't do it because they don't want to step on your toes or feel like they're admitting in your personal space and so you offer them an opportunity to do what they already want to do when you do the reaching out I struggle with this myself this is a really really difficult one for me I I feel like especially in my line of work I'm the one who I was supposed to always have the answers and so it's really really difficult when I have a hard time to actually reach out and ask for help but I can tell you in the times when I have my relationships with the people that I've reached out to have grown and in the times when I haven't but people have just been in tune enough to know and they've followed through and doing something it has increased my sense of love and admiration for them and I get a sense that they also feel a sense of joy in being able to give themselves in ways that allow them to feel like they're basically feeling the measure of their creation so I was thinking about this a little bit further and thinking of a story that I want to share and I'm trying to be sensitive about it because it's personal to my brother but I was thinking about what makes a good team member and I was thinking of my brother Rex he is the ultimate example of what a good team member is and what I mean by that is is that if you are a friend to Rex there are no lengths that he will go to to help you if you're in need I remember this story of probably just over a year ago he had a friend who was having some really big challenges in his life and he has kind of become estranged from his family he had moved from Utah out to California he was all by himself he was having some pretty severe mental health issues and one day he he had called home and he basically was saying goodbye to his family to call on his parents in San Hey look I'm I love you goodbye kind of almost like a suicidal type of tendency and so his parents they called Rex and said hey we're really really worried about our son we don't know what to do and my brother Rex this is the kind of Brotherhood that you have when you got a good team member without even thinking he left work he got on an airplane flew out to California when he landed he called his friend and made his friend pin him where he was located and his friend was at this point already kind of threatening suicide and struggling with things and he pinned a spot that was overlooking a bridge out on a country road so my brother Rex then rented a car drove to the country road it was at nighttime by the time he got there he couldn't find his friend he walked around the bridge he tried to look off the bottom he couldn't see the bottom because it was dark he stayed on that bridge through the night and then when he woke up in the morning and looked around and realized that his friend wasn't there and that his friend hadn't done anything to harm himself he called his friend again several times and finally his friend's phone rang again and this time when he answered it was a police officer calling from his friend's phone and his friend had gone and ridden a bike off of a cliff and the police had gone and picked him up and we're there Rex got in his car his rental car drove over picked up his friend got him taken care of with some stitches and some medical care and then after that he used the rental car to drive all the way home with his friend back to his parents place and drop him off where he could be taken care of and have some safety when I hear that story I think how many people do I have in my life that would go to those lengths to care for me when I was in a time of need and I challenge you guys to think about that in your own lives and how many people in your life do you have right now that would go to those lengths when you're in a time of need most of us are lucky if we have one or two people like that and if you have someone come to your mind I would suggest that you maybe put that in your mind and do some type of reaching out and show some gratitude for those people in your life that you know would go to those lengths with you one of my favorite quotes that I used to hear my dad say all the time when he tuck us in at night he called me and my brothers the brothers at the buffalo for some reason I don't know why I was just my dad but he'd like lay down by us at nighttime and he'd usually quote something to us and he'd say things like what's on shirt right here he'd say carpe diem seize the day boys and and one another thing that he would say and this is a quote that goes along with the topic today is he'd say a friend is a friend for a mile or two but a brother is born for adversity and my challenge is to you is to not only think of the people in your life who were born to travel with you and adversity but who are you in somebody else's life in the sense that are you born to go at them through adversity what lengths would you go to for those people that you care about to take care of them to support them to help pull them out of a dark place when they're struggling and and it's a hard it's a hard line of work for us to do that because it's not always convenient to do that but if you're willing to go those lengths you will experience deep deep connection with those people that you serve and you love you will experience a greater sense of confidence in knowing who you are and at the end of the day that's kind of what life is about is that we're here to love each other we're here to take care of each other we're here to grow and bind in strength with one another and and that's kind of what it's all about so time and time again in my practice I see this happening I was talking to another women's group the other day and this woman was saying I was feeling my fear cycle come up again and I started to worry about all these things are it beyond my control and I knew that I just I was starting to feel crazy and I I felt like I was going nuts and I felt like I better just pull away and not talk to anybody else and she said I caught myself and the old me would have just gone on living my life going through my duties and eventually I would have just pulled away and been a shell of myself and she said instead I reached out to a few of the ladies in my group and I woke up this morning feeling so light and feeling so new and feeling so fresh simply because when I reached out and I had a space for my words to land and I had people meet me back with empathy I realized that I wasn't crazy I realized that I was human having a human moment and that life was actually pretty ok and then I'm a pretty lucky person to have the kind of people in my life that I do so something to think about what kind of a friend are you what are the links that you're willing to go to I think of the old old Hollies song he ain't heavy he's my brother go look it up listen to the lyrics ask yourself if you're willing to go to those lengths thank you guys hope you have a great day [Music] you [Music]