Embracing Change: Navigating Elections, Resilience, and Personal Impact

"Cristina Amigoni: If I focus on how I show up, and that creates the beginning of a spark of something, then maybe the outcome will be what I would hope it is."

Alex Cullimore: Welcome to Uncover the Human where every conversation revolves around enhancing all the connections in our lives. 

Cristina Amigoni: Whether that's with our families, co-workers, or even ourselves. 

Alex Cullimore: When we can be our authentic selves, magic happens.

Cristina Amigoni: This is Cristina Amigoni. 

Alex Cullimore: And this is Alex Cullimore.

Both: Let’s dive in. 

“Authenticity means freedom.”

“Authenticity means going with your gut.”

“Authenticity is bringing 100% of yourself not just the parts you think people want to see, but all of you.”

“Being authentic means that you have integrity to yourself.”

“It's the way our intuition is whispering something deep-rooted and true.”

“Authenticity is when you truly know yourself. You remember and connect to who you were before others told you who you should be.”

“It's transparency, relatability. No frills. No makeup. Just being.”

[EPISODE]

Alex Cullimore: Welcome back to this episode of Uncover the Human. It's Cristina and I today here just to react to the general state of the world. We are recording this as our first podcast post-election, which was and is traumatizing. We're just going to go with that. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. And given that word, it should be a good preview for anybody that doesn't actually want to listen to this or know our opinion. 

Alex Cullimore: Yes. You can guess our political leanings right now. And if that's the problem, that's fine. You can skip this episode. Or you can listen and see if you learned something about why this is hard to take. 

Cristina Amigoni: Which was actually really interesting. That reminded me that I think the day after the election results, I don't know, a couple of days, sometime last week, it's all very foggy. It was snowing. It was gray. It felt like Groundhog Day because the snow wouldn't stop. And it was the same cycle every single day. At some point last week, I was talking to a client who actually shared that part of what she was – it was a coaching session. Part of what was going on with them at the moment was just the election results and the election week. But because we hadn't openly declared our political views, it was a very – 

Alex Cullimore: Tiptoeing conversation.

Cristina Amigoni: It was very hard to provide acknowledgement and validation but not know how far to go because it was really more of a like are you grieving or are you celebrating? I want to lean towards grieving when somebody says that's part of what keeps me up at night is the elections. 

Alex Cullimore: Probably not just out of jubilation. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. 

Alex Cullimore: I just can't give myself to sleep. I'm so worked up. 

Cristina Amigoni: And I've had the same situation actually with my therapist where without even going down, she actually did a fantastic job. I wish I had that session before I was in the same position with other people. Because she did a fantastic job at not having to actually establish where we stood personally to then still be able to create the space and talk through what is it that you're processing. What concerns you? I'm pretty sure I know where she stands given the question she was asking and some of the things that she was bringing up. But I was very grateful for how well she did navigating that space and giving it. She was willing to give it a whole hour. And we just took 15, 20 minutes. And I was like, "Okay, I think we can move on to the next thing." 

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. It is interesting how much of life kind of is like that currently, especially with news like the election. It's something so large and yet so distant from our day-to-day experience immediately. I mean, it's not that it won't affect us continually, but it is – the initial shock of it is something that is kind of distant and it is something that is – I mean, the shock is present, but the actual impact is not immediate. 

Something I've noticed in the last week too is that it does take some acknowledgement and it's worth sitting a bit with, but it doesn't take too much to feel like, "Okay. But here's all the other things that are also going on much more close to home, much more close to my existence. Whatever I'm currently worried about." 

Alex Cullimore: Yes, definitely. Yeah. One of the things that actually did help me not feel completely hopeless and really starting to pray for the asteroid to hit Earth, which I'm still there a lot given the overall consciousness of the world where it's hurting as a collective consciousness. We're hurting. I would very much like to be part of the animal kingdom right now. I think they're far superior beings, especially cats. Watching my cats sleep herself through life. I forgot what I – my Swiss cheese head. I forgot what it's about to say. Yeah, it's gone. Never mind. It'll come back. 

Alex Cullimore: Yeah.

Cristina Amigoni: Oh, yes. Yeah. And narrowing it down. Sorry. I'm back. I'm back. I had a light bulb. One of the things that actually helped me was to narrow it down to Colorado. Colorado, it's like, "Okay, as a world consciousness, there's a lot that's not what I would like it to be." But within Colorado, I need to actually go investigate what happened in the state, in my backyard. Well, maybe not my backyard, but in the vicinity of my backyard. Close enough. Places where I go. The tangible. I can be around this air. What's the energy? Where do I find the energy? And that was very relieving. Some of the election results within the state of Colorado actually give me a little bit of hope that maybe their consciousness is not going to just collapse and implode in the next 60 seconds. But maybe we get 120. 

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. Yeah, we'll get a whole hundred and twenty seconds before that. I think one thing that it kind of hit me immediately and that I've been having a hard time with is just the idea that this is a long lasting impact. This is one – this election has – as all elections have an impact that will inevitably kind of change the course of how things are going, there's enough just kind of worrisome signs on this one that are just hard to swallow. And I think recognizing that we're in for a slog. That we have a lot in front of us. And it's not to say that everybody has to jump in immediately and we have to try and fix things. But we have a lot of things we're going to have to do if we don't want to slip too far into some very scary things. 

There's a lot that's kind of scared me about this election because it felt like a lot of trying to control other people. And then we ended up voting in what feels like it's going to try and control a lot of people in a lot of very oppressive ways. And that's very hard to sit with. And I think just knowing that we're in for it for a while here, that's the thing that I've had the hardest time. Kind of stepping into and fully accepting is knowing that this is now the long road. The long road ahead of us is a long road. And that's mixed with a bunch of other small emotions of just little frustrations of this, or that, or what could have been better, what should have done – I did hear on a podcast at some point this week, there's somebody who's talking about there's some grief for the good that could have been. I mean, there's things that I've been worried about for as long as I can remember being alive. Climate change was always a worry. And then that felt like it kind of got pushed aside and then we started to get more to the front as we watch the worst hurricane season ever batter the Gulf and batter Florida over and over again. 

And here in Colorado, we just had our our first snow of the year. Lasted for three days, which almost never happens. We usually get maybe a day. In fact, most snows here don't last for that long. Even blizzards just happen in a day. And we're in so many weird weather events. We have all kinds of fires, there's mudslides, there's whatever else, there's just – and so, grieving things like the fact that that feels like it's now farther away to be able to help out with any of that. It's hard to see those take a step where you're like, "Oh, I don't know if we can –" we've had so many doomsday predictions of like we're past the point of no return here. It's hard to see that and realize that the long road is longer and even more difficult. 

And there's people who are worried about the good that we could have had that we won't have, which is a good way of looking at it too. That's a loss. It's easier to see and be worried about the things that are going to be actively be bad. But there is a loss of things that could have been good that feels hard to take. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. That is probably one of the hardest pieces to grieve. If grieving – it's about the loss of something. A lot of the times, the grieving that at least has felt harder for me, it's not the loss of something concrete that existed, but the loss of something that I hoped would exist. The loss of a dream. The loss of a reality that you could feel so close that you could touch it. And then having to deal with that. 

And for me, it then becomes an internal turmoil, not just because of the loss of a dream of, a hope of, an expectation of that reality that didn't turn out aligned or the same way. But also, it becomes a loss of trusting my own intuition. Because then there are some things we're like, "Well, but internally that was the direction." What the hell happened? Energetically, that wasn't the direction. Can I trust my own energy? 

Now I've got the loss itself, the loss of what it could have been, and the loss of trusting myself and my own energy and intuition. It's just this compounding, just calling. I mean, seriously, I'm looking for the ET telephone right now. And I want to get out. Can somebody come and rescue me and get me out? I'm kind of done with this reality around me. 

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. I think you know that something is especially interesting is that this – for one, that's what they talk about when they talk about things like forgiveness. It's not that you forgive another person and you feel okay about them. You have to let go of the future that you thought was going to happen had this other thing not occurred. And that, I think for me, and it sounds like definitely for you, is definitely accompanied by that feeling of I really thought this was the direction it was going. And it's, at the end of the day, kind of a breaking of trust. 

And in this case, it feels like a breaking of trust internally, because it's like, "Hey, I thought this was going this way." And I'm not saying that I thought this was going to be like a clean in the bag, go the other way direction. Everything was saying this was going to be very close. It turned out to not be that close in the other direction. And that's what was especially surprising. I was expecting a very long-drawn-out kind of fight. It was over by like 10:30, at least here. That was wild. 

That changing of expectations does lead to this questioning of like, "What set of assumptions are not right about my mental model of the world that were so far off that this jolting and new reality is put in there?" And I think people feel that way when something that you can't expect, let's say a global pandemic suddenly arises. It's the easiest example for all of us in this generation to know about. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes.

Alex Cullimore: We didn't expect that. Didn't see that coming. And it changes everything about your life. And that's jarring because – and you kind of have to reassemble some amount of your mental models. Because oftentimes, I think as humans, we end up not thinking that such jarring changes can happen. I don't know that we could necessarily deal with our day-to-day if we really accepted the amount of jarring randomness that can happen at any given time. But on something like this where we try our best to predict things, we pull the hell out of the voters and we try and see what's going to happen before it happens. It then becomes jarring when you have this idea that there's some notion of known, even if it's not the decision, but how it will go. Even that is kind of a thwarted expectation. I think it becomes difficult for us to reckon with. And that's natural but challenging. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. 

Alex Cullimore: It's just kind of a feature of this random universe that we exist in. 

Cristina Amigoni: It is. I do believe there's a plan that we're not aware of yet. I do believe that there are choices that we make for our own individual realities. But there's also a limit to what we can control within that reality. There are life events that they really have nothing to do with us. Our choice is how we react and respond. It's not on the actual event happening. And I do believe that there's some sort of master plan that we don't know yet. Or something. Something that will be necessary for it to happen the way it has happened to get to the next stage. Hopefully, the next stage is sometime soon. Either that or it is asteroid. 

Alex Cullimore: Yeah, I think that we always end up reacting as a species to whatever is happening. I was just actually listening to some non-political podcasts recently about things like there's all kinds of panic about the effect of phones on society. And there's plenty of reason to be worried. There's plenty of reason to think that there's some negative impact here. I think that we just don't know yet how to mitigate it. 

I heard it described at one point as it's essentially like a new infection, a new type of disease, and we will catch it. We'll get the fever. We will suffer for a bit of time. And then we kind of become more immune to the effects of it. And I was listening to these podcasts because they're also talking about things like people used to panic about the advent of the TV. And everything on TV was bad. And if you watch any amount of TV, it's horrible. And everything that comes out of that is less good than anything before. 

Also, there were panicking articles that are pretty hilarious to read about the advent of bicycles. People were terrified that this was too fast. It was going to stop people from being able to walk or whatever else they were lamenting the changes of. And we will become more used to how we have to operate in the world as it changes. And I think we always do that. And in retrospect, the things that we can pull out of that always become some new source of strength that we would not have had without experiencing the adversity that we feel. 

And I don't mean that as a – trying to silver lining. I think everybody should take the time to feel the things that they're going to feel on this. I do think that just in the scope of having seen changes happen enough times, people eventually – you get something out of it. That doesn't mean that you prefer that this would have happened. It just means that there is something that will happen because of this that would never have happened otherwise. 

Does it make up for it? No, it's not about making up for it. It's just about the reality of the situation that this will inevitably change things. And not all of that will be bad. And there will be things that we never could have done if we weren't exposed to this level of adversity and this level of some kind of change that we weren't expecting that we didn't expect to have to work into our life plans, our day plans, and our emotional landscape. 

Cristina Amigoni: Well, and that's the piece. I actually read an article. I think it was from The Guardian. And I don't know if I read it or somebody shared it. Because, thankfully, there's a community of grievers that find each other. And in that article, they actually pointed out all the things that have happened. I guess, thanks to – or due to the election results eight years ago, and how all those things would probably not have happened. They're positive. They're positive movements. They're positive policies. They're positive awareness. There's positive direction that is a little bit more towards equality and respect, and making the world a better place for everybody, equally. 

And so, it was actually one of – in the grieve, that article helped a lot because it's pointing out, I'm like, "Hey, it's not just one event. Things can actually happen due to that event." There was actually a show called The Good Fight, which is a spinoff of The Good Wife from a few years ago. And in one of their alternate universe – well, they actually created an alternate universe in I think the last season, which was a little weird. But one of the main characters actually fell and hit her head as she was in this dream state. That's when she felt like she saw the effects of this alternate universe. And in this case, Hillary Clinton had won in that alternate universe. And that inciting incident had then spiraled all sorts of not unwanted consequences that actually made things worse for a lot of groups and people. And so, it was kind of back to like, "Oh, wait. There is a path even when the inciting incident maybe a little bit traumatizing." 

Alex Cullimore: And even when the incident is not traumatizing, it doesn't mean all the outcomes are good. 

Cristina Amigoni: Exactly. 

Alex Cullimore: I remember moving to New York, I was super excited to go. I mean, I wanted to be in like a big city for as long as I can remember. I think when I was like five, my parents had taken me to San Francisco because we were out visiting some family near there. And I remember being enamored with cities from that point on. And every time we got to visit one, every time we were there, that it was just – it was always incredible to be in there. 

And of course, New York has its own extra layer of just incredible energy that comes out of being there. And I remember moving in and being super excited to be there. And that was a good inciting incident. There's no getting around the fact that's not all positives. There's lots of jokes about – like you go travel to escape your problems and you find out that you're the problem. So you just kind of take them around everywhere you go. And some of that is just true. You go to any location and, yes, you've changed locations, but not all of it is positive. And it's not to say that it's a bad place to be or it's not the right thing to do, but things that happen that are seemingly positive on the surface do not just have endlessly good results and seemingly negative – do not just have endlessly negative results. And none of that makes that pain to experience better than that is to say that we can all just brush this off and be fine. We are going to have to do so much. And that's unfortunate. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, it is. It is very unfortunate. And especially as humans, we don't tend to change unless we're deeply disturbed most of the times. We can grow into a place where we will tweak and change for the sake of growth, not for the sake of escaping something that deeply disturbed us. But that also is higher consciousness. Getting to that point is higher consciousness of deciding. I am consciously choosing this comfort. I'm consciously hunting this comfort in a way so that I can let go of the comfort that's holding me back. 

I know it is not going to be easy and it's going to feel harder than staying where I am. And I'm not going to wait until I'm deeply disturbed and there's no choice to do that. I'm constantly going to look for those opportunities and putting myself in that state of growth through discomfort and fear. 

But typically, there is a tendency to stay where we are, to stay in the status quo and to really look at like the devil I know, it's better than the devil I don't know. And I don't know – the unknown is way too scary. Yeah, this is not great, but I'll take it until we don't have a choice. Until Oprah says, "The universe whispered. You ignored it. And now a brick wall is falling on your head." So now you don't have a choice. 

Alex Cullimore: Yes. It's hilarious you bring that up in that way particularly because, politically across the world and just now in our country, incumbents have done terribly. They've been voted out of office. People are looking for change. In this case, it was not waiting and sitting with the devil you know. It is that there was something – there are forces, macroeconomic and climate forces that are strong enough that people are done with the status quo. And there's a thousand absolutely understandable reasons to be so sick of so many of the things that are happening. And I think that that is probably a good lesson to take from this, is that we weren't going to change until we're deeply disturbed. 

And the fact that we did go for a seeming change here, even though it's kind of a regression, a seeming change does speak to the amount of widespread pain that is already present. And I would argue personally that I don't think this is a good move and that's not going to help the amount of pain. 

Cristina Amigoni: Oh, no. The pain is going to get worse. We're not done being disturbed. 

Alex Cullimore: Yes. Yeah, we just gave ourselves a fever on top of already having a cough, but that's okay. That's where we're at. 

Cristina Amigoni: Or the plague. 

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. I mean, at this point, I'm just waiting for the next pandemic. If we're going to repeat history, then, everybody, bring out your masks. You know you have them because we're re-repeating history. Give it a couple of years at most and we're going to have a whole other pandemic. 

Alex Cullimore: I remember you sending me an Instagram on that a couple years ago. It was just a little after COVID restrictions started to wane a little bit. And it was something along the lines of like if the year is 2054 and you reach into your coat pocket and you pull out a surgical mask and you laugh to yourself remembering the pandemic as you pull on your gas mask and walk outside. 

Cristina Amigoni: Well, and it may very well be where we're headed. I think that nature is way stronger than we are. I think we can try to control it. And it is going to keep slapping us back. And at some point, it's going to get sick of it and really slap us back. Because we are destroying things that we should not be destroying. We're destroying our survival. And also, we are impacting the well-being of so much more than our own survival that, at some point, the Earth has existed way longer than we have by a lot. 

I think my kids, at some point, we're talking about like, "Oh, what do you think humans will be like 400 years from now?" I'm like, "Humans won't be here 400 years from now." That's sort of what I think. Unless something radically changes, we are headed for extension of our own doing. 

Alex Cullimore: I think that's not so far off. I think that – 

Cristina Amigoni: No. 

Alex Cullimore: One of the things that, in lighter moments, I do find genuinely entertaining and, truly, it makes me laugh sometimes. Not in these times, but occasionally when I'm not totally overwhelmed by it, the human species is so absolutely incredible. I mean, we are a species that evolved to be able to create complex societies. We have buildings building codes, giant governments. We have a global – it is way beyond our scope to actually comprehend to the point where that is part of the problem. We have outgrown ourselves a little bit. But we are the species that is able to adjust this fast, adjust this rapidly. And we figured out and knew that there is evolution that happens that created that got to our species. And we are so far there. We also can't ignore it and say that that isn't true and decide that these things aren't real. And we can know that things are dangerous for our survival while continuing to invest in them. And as a whole, we can be so brilliant and so able to absolutely kneecap ourselves. It is truly one of the funniest and most horrific portions of being human. 

Cristina Amigoni: It is. And it's all for this obsession of power and money. Because that's really what it is. When they say you watch movies and they always say follow the money, this is the same case. It's follow the money. Every decision is made of some number that when we hit the end of our journey, which we all do, that is not an option. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what number we hit. And so, it's pointless. This is where, as a species, we're hurting ourselves because we're trying to build on something that it's not a thing. It's not a thing that will last. That thing won't last 400 years. That thing won't last the day your heart stops. 

Alex Cullimore: We are so good at investing in those patterns though. Those things like the stock market. We're like, "We have to make it grow. We have to make it grow." And it, over and over and over again, corrects, and has to come back down, and has to blow up. And maybe it'll do it in a new and absolutely spectacular fashion here sometime soon or sometime later. It'll happen at some point. There'll be some kind of correction. But we always reinvest and then get super focused on this. Like, yeah, "But I can just grow up for just a little bit longer, but just a little longer, but I could probably just keep going for a little bit more." And then we inevitably run ourselves off of a cliff. 

And I think you hit on an interesting point of money and power, because I think money is just a proxy for power. In this case, we use it that way. So we gather it so we can have some power. And that's definitely just a natural kind of evolution piece. We fought for status. We continue to fight for status. That's why it's terrifying to us when we feel like we're losing it or we feel like other people have it over us. It's a very challenging biological experience because it was such a necessity in tribes to understand your status and try to increase it enough to increase your survival odds. It is truly just stepping on our survival buttons over and over and over again. 

And there's books where they talk about people will comment that moths occasionally fly circles around candles and then end up burning themselves. And it's all just a big evolutionary misfire because they are used to navigating by the light of the moon, which that's why they can continually turn on, and that's where they would go. But they were not meant for there being a source of light that exists, that is stable and so close to them that they're continually turning right next to this flame or next to a light bulb, and they're just used to navigating that way. That's what I feel about sometimes our human evolution is we were there to be status-driven creatures. And that was something that worked at a time when we were so much smaller than we were. And I'm not even going to say necessarily that it worked. It just was enough that we could continue to survive. It wasn't like the best way to do things. It just was the way that worked. Just like navigating by the moon isn't the best way to do things, but it works. But it works enough that people survived. And then we way outgrew ourselves. We expanded society so big we can't even possibly comprehend the scale of it. We were meant to be able to digest about 150 people total. And we have 8 billion on the planet. There's no way we can understand this in our actual brains and actual comprehend of what is happening. And we have so naturally outgrown. And we're seeing the consequences of still having that mindset that was built for something that we are so not in. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah, that's true. And what hurts? What hurts consciousness? What hurts the fact that we are one consciousness? We are all connected as energy, as part of energy, and as energy sources, that what hurts is the fact that our grab for power, our grab for status, it's done in certain cases, in a lot of cases, by causing suffering for others. 

It's back to being that moth. It's like, "But we're all connected. We're one consciousness." This is not going to last. This grabbing power by hurting others, by diminishing the well-being of others, by disregarding and actively going against the well-being of others, it's only going to turn itself on us. It's going to be the light bulb, the flame of the moth that burns us. But that notion, it's not thought about. The immediate need for power, it's really against that, which it doesn't make any sense to me. 

Which is why when I go to a healer, an energy healer, and they tell me, "You're struggling in this lifetime because you're not from here. You're an alien." I'm like, "Yes. Thank you. Because I don't understand what's going on around me. I don't understand what's happening." 

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. That's I think true. I think we do just grab these small pieces and it's so intangible to see the larger results, but it's also so – in some ways, it's intangible. But it's also tangible if you look at the larger system. You might not know exactly what the impact of every decision is, but you can see the long broad strokes of what's happening if you continue to make small power grabs. What happens at the end of that? Or if you continue to hold power over what happens at the end of that. 

And there was one message that started to come out towards the end of the campaign that I thought was well put and needs to be better understood like on a species level, is just that having power over people, having control over things is not power. And Brené Brown will always talk about power over versus power with. But I think it's very much a position of weakness when you need to do things like control the media. It's a point of weakness when you need to do things like control other people and to put them down. 

I'm not saying that doesn't have dramatically terrible consequences. You can exact horrific things with that power over mindset. But we do need to understand, I think, better as a species, and it needs to be said more often that that is not actual power. That's weakness that you're just trying to hold onto and desperately oppress other people to get to hold onto some amount of control. And that's not actual power. That is continual flailing weakness, which any psych 101 course could teach you. But that's where we're at.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah, it is. It's true. And so, in this reality which we can't change, because we can't control it, part of the grieving or part of what was hard to process is how do we contribute? How does our contribution matter in any of this at the individual level? There is a contribution to the overall consciousness. But how do we feel that our lives are providing contribution? That our lives – our presence creates a situation in a world that would not be created otherwise. And we use that to sustainably keep going. 

Alex Cullimore: That's the million, trillion-dollar question. It's easy to feel despair in that. It's easy to feel that an individual contribution isn't going to be the thing that makes the difference. And it does push things. This is, again, a harder big-picture thing to see. If you're pushing a little, a few things, you may never know that that's the thing that ends up making a difference. You may never see that. And so, it's really hard to hold onto that individual contribution. I personally don't do a good job of it. I have no idea how to hold onto that. I lose a lot of faith quickly. And I don't know how people do stick to it. I would turn that back on to you. How does one know that? How does one get there as I don't? I've had moments of seeing pieces of it. I have a very hard time sustaining that. 

Cristina Amigoni: I would say what has helped me is really, really zooming in to what do I want to be remembered by or as? Or both. By and as. Because, to quote Maya Angelou, "It's not what we do that people will remember. It's not what we say. It is how we make them feel." So how we make people feel, or how we can't make people feel, but how the environment that we create so that people can have certain feelings, because we create that type of environment, that kind of space, it's something that stays with them and could possibly influence a different action that will determine different reaction and that will determine different paths of a journey that we don't know. For the most part, we probably won't know. I mean, if we're open and honest and have the courage to, we can share how people help us feel so that they know what their contribution is in our lives. That's fairly rare. Probably more rare than it needs to be. 

And so, we know that there's an end. We know that that's non-negotiable. We don't know when it comes. And so, I zoom into the day, the moment to the point of thinking like, "At the end of today, if today is the day that my number is up, will I feel like I have contributed in a way – will I feel that people will remember me as or buy something that made their lives a little bit better that maybe they can carry with them and pay it forward? Will it feel like I've done something worthwhile because of what I'm leaving in people's hearts?" Because we can be the ones that invented VHS and then look at today and be like, "Well, that was a waste of time." And it wasn't. Because it was necessary to get to here. But if we look for the tangible, if we look for the thing, the thing is going to go away. And so, what stays in our heart, it's what goes into consciousness. And what goes into consciousness is what spans time and space, because we have no idea where it's going to go beyond what we did. 

Alex Cullimore: Yeah, I like that way of looking at it. I think there's maybe just a huge game of acceptance to be played in knowing that we can't fully know it. And we never will. And it's not on anybody's fault. I mean, you can have had a very small interaction with somebody that you've entirely forgotten about that made a big difference for them. And you don't even know that it was just a stranger you happened to know very briefly on an elevator or whatever for two minutes. And that was it. And it might have made an impact on them. And you'll truly never know. And that maybe it's just a level of acceptance to reach. 

And I do like the idea of just expressing the gratitude we feel for the people around us. More often, I try and do that all of the time. Every job I've ever left, I try and tell the people that I really appreciated whatever help was given. I really appreciated whatever they did. It's one of the best parts of coaching is that you get a chance to tell people what you see. Because when you notice some people making their own shifts and making their own changes, you get a chance to explicitly note for them. Like, "Wow. You really seemed to have a lot of awareness on this. And it's incredible that you have the ability to look at how you as a person here plugged into that and you've leaned on a natural gift here or whatever." And it's just really nice to be able to do that. And that's something I've tried to do for a lot of life, but I definitely could continue to improve that. And that's a good one to do, just to have people maybe raise the awareness of what the things they're doing are impacting things around them all of the time and see how far I guess it can go. Because it's hard to keep that faith if you're trying to work that in something that makes a change to the things that you see in the headlines. It can sometimes be hard to hold that. But it doesn't mean that it's not there. And everything you see in the headlines is only made possible by a thousand of those interactions. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah, exactly. And so, when we think about what is it that we can't control, which, especially the last week, we've been slapped around on what we cannot control quite a bit. It's really what we can control is how we show up. That's the only thing we can control. We have zero control over anything else. We have control over how we show up. And even that, we stumble and it's bumpy when we let our lower consciousness and autopilot take over. 

But that's really what we truly can control. And so, look at it from an equation point of view, we can influence outcomes. That's not something we can control. We can't even influence action. We can control action. We can influence feelings. And feelings determine actions which determine outcomes. That's where I go back to how – if I focus on how I show up and that creates the beginning of a spark of something, then maybe the outcome will be what I would hope it is. And most times, it will be something way beyond and above what I thought it could be. Because that's where my control ends. 

I just had a conversation with another client a couple of days ago where he asked me, "How do I know what I should be doing about situations when I would like to see something happen, but I don't know if I have control over it? Or I'm trying to decide which path to follow?" And my answer was like, "I can't tell you what to do. Let's see. You have to decide what to do. That's not – I can tell you what I would do, but that doesn't help you at all, because that's me. And that's my own decisions. That's my own consciousness. That's my own way of looking at like how did I show up today? And is it acceptable to me how I showed up today." 

But what I told him, "One thing that you could think about is, when you go to sleep, can you sleep based on how you showed up? Or will you feel that you've missed out on doing something? Or you took inactions when you wanted to take action? Or you can't really accept who you were before you go to sleep and it's disturbing that piece of thinking –"again, if tonight is my number, I'm okay with that. That's it. And what that is, it will probably change multiple times a day. It will probably change every night. What allows you to fall asleep and be a peace one day could be the total opposite the next day because of all the things we cannot control around us. 

Alex Cullimore: That's a really good way of looking at it. I think there is a huge amount of truth to the idea that, at the end of the day, we really only have ourselves that we're answering to. I mean, that's the person that we stare at when we're in the mirror and when we're at those last moments of the day when you're just going to bed at night or can't sleep, whichever way it goes. That's the person we're answering to. And that's a good thing to remember. It is the one thing we can do some control over and to try and remember that where our range of control really is. How much we can continue to show up as we want to show up? And there's only so much we can do on that. We can't control how people are going to react. We can just do our best to create a situation to hopefully elicit positive reactions.

And we can't control whether people actually do it. We can put the baton out there. We can't get people to pick it up. And they might. They probably will. A lot of people will respond well. And some people won't. And that's just part of the reality of being alive, being human, and being with other people. And that's not even necessarily a bad thing. It can be a frustrating thing, but it's not a bad thing. And it doesn't make it less true regardless whether it's frustrating or not. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. Yeah. The question really is like when we are in those moments of frustration. When we do lose hope. When we are in darkness. When you feel like nothing we do really matters. Or we're unsure about what our contribution is, if it is any? If we're contributing at all. What do we do? How do we find the light in those moments? How do we remember that when everything around us is dark is because we may be the light? 

Alex Cullimore: That's an excellent question. I've been in a bit of a hole on that for the last couple of months, just generally. And I don't know that I have an answer for that. I have things to try. I have plenty of exercises I know of and things that I can try and lean back on. I think that one thing that sometimes helps is just reevaluating your own values and understanding of whether you're leaning into them or you're not. And if not, then what can you do to re-engage those? 

Yeah, for me, one of the grieving portions of the election is that I think a huge value for me is fairness. It's something that even when I was like three years old or two years old and couldn't quite speak yet, my parents like to tell the story of how they were trying to punish my older brother for having done something. And I stepped in the middle and tried to tell them off and told them they couldn't speak to him like that. Or some version of that. But I think that's just been an ingrained feeling that there is some unfairness. 

And one of the hard parts about an election result like this is that one of the reasons I didn't want us to end up in this is that there is a dramatic amount of – and that's why I'd also really hate the control over power, over dynamics is that it's inherently unfair and not okay to treat other people like that. And I feel that at my core. That is a double-edged sword when you face a moment like this, where it feels like something. I'm not saying that the election wasn't fair. I think it was – the votes were counted. I don't think that that was an illicit count. I don't think there was an unfairness in how this was done. But I do think that the results of this are going to create a lot of unfairness that didn't need to happen for people. And that's really hard to do. 

And so, in leaning back into values, I guess it's trying to figure out how to encourage or create some structures of that. And that then spirals pretty quickly into how do you make that impact a little bit larger? And if not larger, how do you even just get started so that you feel like you're doing something in your immediate circle to honor that? And I don't know that I have answers for that, but that would be one place maybe to start is to evaluate your own values and whether you are living in them. 

Cristina Amigoni: What can you control? If you look at your values and you're wondering if I'm living in them, what can you control about that? 

Alex Cullimore: You can control what you do. You can control what you choose to do. It's easier said than done. 

Cristina Amigoni: It is much easier said than done. You can control how you show up. 

Alex Cullimore: Mm-hmm. 

Cristina Amigoni: Do you show up with fairness? Do you show up with curiosity? Because that's another one. That's a big core value. Do you show up per your core value? 

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. 

Cristina Amigoni: That's the end of all you can control. Literally the end of what you can control. 

Alex Cullimore: The other thing that I personally struggle with and I assume a lot of people listening also struggle with this is there's some amount of back and forth. And it is, at the end of day, a bit of a guess and a bit of a judgment call of how much do you lean in? How much do you rest up? Because we're all going to need both. And we needed that before. We'll always need that no matter what happens in life. We're always going to have times where we need to protect our energy so we can continue to use it and not burn ourselves out. And we have times where we need to lean in because we have to push on the things that we feel are important to push on. 

I've been having a hard time finding that one this month just for a number of personal reasons went entirely wrong. We had a couple of losses in the family. Multiple. And I've had other just health issues going on with like pets. And it's been just a very emotionally draining month on top of short of all the external factors that we're discussing here. And I have a hard time finding that balance personally. And I think other people probably struggle similarly. How much is okay to step back and take a break when you know there's things that need to be done? When you know there's things that are active? Fires, so to speak, on your life. How to know when to take that break and when to step back in? And I think we can all get better at listening to our bodies on that. And there are some people I know that are very good at that. I was raised not to listen to any piece of that and to mostly feel a lot of guilt overtaking things, so that makes it particularly difficult. 

Cristina Amigoni: Guilt overtaking? 

Alex Cullimore: Yes. Yeah. Guilt overtaking that time. If there's something that needs to be done, that's more important. 

Cristina Amigoni: Oh, okay. Taking the time to – okay. 

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. If there's something to be done, you have to work on that first. Or if there's work to be done, do that. That was an okay thing. 

Cristina Amigoni: Oh, yes. That's a fairly common, yes, narrative. Yes. 

Alex Cullimore: You can see why people do that in schools. You can see how you try and instill some discipline for school kids to like do homework before you're out and playing. You want to instill some amount of responsibility. I'm not blaming people for instilling that. I think that's a good thing to teach. I think that that didn't work for me personally because I ended up taking that so far to heart that I neglected a lot of other things, a lot of self-care along that. And I hope other people are taking the time to do some of that. Or knowing when to do it. Or better at doing that. It just turns out life is not – life doesn't stop, doesn't matter what you do. Work is very easy. In school, you can go burn yourself out on a semester, but you'll get a break. So you kind of know when the endpoint is. That's not true with work. You'll have a project that will start to overlap with the next project when you're doing that project. I mean, there's not going to be a time when it stops. You have to be the one to raise your hand, pull up break and choose to do that. 

I struggle with finding the ways to do that. I assume that other people have similar struggles with when to set that boundary and how to set that boundary. And there's clearly a lot of impetus to push people to continue to work. And I hope that people don't get burnt out on that. But not only on the work of whatever their job is, but the work of life and what that will require. 

Cristina Amigoni: That's true. Yeah, finding that balance, I would say it's a lifelong journey. I don't think we ever really get there and we're done. It's not a medal. We don't get to the point of like, "Oh, now I know exactly how to balance what I can control and what I can't around me. How to balance different aspects of life. And how to show up with integrity to my core values every minute of the day." 

Because if I think about – you said one of your key ones is fairness. Well, then the question really is, what does fairness look like in this situation to me? And what does fairness look like in how I show up for others? And finding that combination, it's going to be challenging every time. It's going to be a little bit different every time. Because it could be that one day, the fairness scale is more about me. And some days, the fairness scale is I can take on more to help others, to show up for others. It's not the same every day. 

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. That's a good way of looking at it. That's a good reminder for all of us, for life in general, and especially anybody who's feeling a little also worn out at the end of this week post-election. But this is all going to change day to day. And that's okay. It's better to accept the change and know that it's going to change than think that, "No, but I really missed yesterday. Or I really hope it's better tomorrow." Those can all be true. 

And what's really true is that you're here now. And this is your choice. And it's also good to remember at that point, there's not really a wrong choice. We can do our best to try and avoid things that create – as long as we are doing this towards what our actual value set is. And it's very hard to sometimes see that. And it's very hard to do that if we're lower on energy. It doesn't mean that that's really the one thing we get to do, and it's always the present choice. And as much as we may grieve the past, or wish for it, or hope for the, or grief of the future, whatever direction it's going. As much as we may be tied up into that, we really only get the choice in what's happening now. And that's always, always, always true. Because now is always now. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, it's so true. I was talking to a coach friend of mine in sharing some current struggles. And she asked me, she's like, "What would you like to see happen?" I'm like, "Well, the only thing I can control is how I show up." I would like to see that I can show up differently from autopilot. I would like to see that I show up how I want to show up per my values today. Not how I've been conditioned to or where I default to in these types of situations, because that's the easier way out. That's the muscle that exists. I want to stop that muscle. I can't control what other people do. So that's not in the what would you like to happen? Because I can't control it anyway. But I can control what my perspective is. I can control how I look at a situation, which then will determine how I show up. That's the change I can control. 

Alex Cullimore: And maybe it's not terrible to know that you would like people to show up differently or that you would like changes to happen for other people. I think maybe that it can be a helpful starting point to get us back to that singular action because it tells us what we want to see. And now we cannot get attached to that outcome because, obviously, we cannot control that link. If we get attached to that, we're setting ourselves up for pain regardless. And that's not going to help in the long term because then you're going to suffer the consequences both ways. And you're going to feel more tired. 

But it can be helpful to consider like, "Yeah, I would like this to be this way." What does that tell you about your values? What does it tell you about what's possible? And then that can help you work backwards into, "Okay, now that I really consider from that lens, this situation is now untenable. I have to leave this specific situation," which is oftentimes when people are in coaching sessions and especially when it comes to things like career transitions, that's what it comes down to. There's always frustrating aspects of a job. The real question is can you get down and get clear on what your threshold is for how much action you can take or are willing to take? What would determine that this is no longer a viable option to stay in and you to leave? Because it's always option two. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah, and that's a great distinction. That's not to say that you shouldn't wish for things to happen in a certain way and drive your action, and thoughts, and how you show up in that direction. I mean, I want a healthy planet. That's the action. I want complete fairness and equality. I want humans to thrive as a community and all these things to happen within nature. I want consciousness to be a hell of a lot higher and not be all about power and grabbing. And power grabbing and power over. 

And so, how it's that then turning around to I can't control what other people do. And I can't control the outcomes. I have wishes for the outcomes and behaviors. But what I can control and do is how I show up in this. What I can control and do is think. When things are happening around me that don't actually impact me directly because I am in a privileged situation or in a type of situation where that's pretty much never going to touch me on a day-to-day basis in a way that's painful, that's when I can stop and say like, "It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that's not happening to me. It matters that's happening to anyone. That's what matters." And so, I have a role in that future. 

Alex Cullimore: Not to dive incredibly somewhat politically, but they did a study at one point where they're comparing. I'm not going to say what they were comparing, but they were trying to compare the two political parties. And the definition of conservative versus liberal was really how wide you cast your circle of empathy. They were defining liberalism as based on the wider net that you're casting for people that you feel and understand there or try to understand their experience for. And on the conservative end of things, it's a smaller circle. We could obviously dive deep on to the implications of that and the truth or not truth of that. But regardless of how you decide to split up the parties, that is an interesting way of looking at things. It is a good reminder that that circle is really important of deciding and still indulging in it and knowing that it can be a very painful process to keep that circle wide. And knowing that it is the ultimate privilege to be able to turn away when other people cannot turn away because it is their experience. 

That is the real definition of privilege at the end of the day is not having to care about things that other people will have to care about and will get no choice in not caring about. If you can keep that circle of empathy wide, you can keep that understanding. And there is still some self-protection in that because you can also be exhausted by keeping that and understanding and feeling that for everybody. No one to rest up so that you can keep that net wide, so you can help when it needs to be done. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah, for sure .Yes. And in that spectrum, my circle of empathy is it's enough to get us to Mars. Let's say it that way. The type of person that I will physically feel pain at the thought of somebody else being in pain. 

Alex Cullimore: I think that might be more true for people than they will admit. And I think that there's a lot of times we condition ourselves to lower that because it can be incredibly painful to be feeling all of those things all the time. And maybe there's some default settings. Maybe there's some amounts of like here or there. I definitely don't think it's a fixed thing. I think everybody can learn to expand or contract it. And I think that there's a lot of understandable reasons that it feels good to sometimes shrink that. And back to value set, how much are you willing to accept that? 

I don't feel able to accept that personally. I think there are people who maybe are able to accept some of that. But I find it difficult to allow for that knowing and not trying to act on it. And I think that's one of the reasons that people reduce that knowing so that they don't have to feel that impetus to action. And I get that, I don't think that's – I think there is some helpful self-preservation in that occasionally. But when we make that the habit, we also disconnect and we lose the ability to help and to affect the change that we are hoping to see. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, that's one of the outcomes is the effect of the change we want to see is diminished because we're not participating in it fully. And not to say that you have to participate in it fully all the time. Because that's burnout. You still need your own oxygen mask on.

Alex Cullimore: Yes. Yeah. If you don't have any oxygen, this doesn't matter anyway. You're out of the game. You're unconscious.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, exactly. It's that balance that changes all the time. Back to core values and figuring out like we go to bed at night, tonight. Can I go to bed feeling like I have – not no regrets, but minimal regrets, which a lot of the studies on regrets are about inaction, not action. We regret the things we haven't done, not the things we have done, more than the things we have done. I'm sure there's plenty of things I have done that I regret doing. But it's mostly the things I haven't done. 

Alex Cullimore: Those are the things that haunt us, I think, much more. Things we haven't done. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah.

Alex Cullimore: That's a good point too. That's a good question to ask yourself, but it's not like that you should be aiming for – if I'm not answering that with affirmative yes every single day, I'm failing. No. Just telling you that you might need to make some changes, you might need to adjust, you might – there should be no expectation. And there's never going to be a time where you feel like you're perfectly on top of that at all times. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah, that's not a thing. Well, the future is really up to us in whatever way we can do it. 

Alex Cullimore: Stick together. Talk it out. And good luck. Give yourself some breaks when you need them. Step back in. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. Thanks for listening. 

Alex Cullimore: Thanks. 

[OUTRO]

Cristina Amigoni: Thank you for listening to Uncover the Human, a Siamo podcast. 

Alex Cullimore: Special thanks to our podcast operations wizard, Jake Lara; and our score creator, Rachel Sherwood. 

Cristina Amigoni: If you have enjoyed this episode, please share, review and subscribe. You can find our episodes wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Alex Cullimore: We would love to hear from you with feedback, topic ideas or questions. You can reach us at podcast@wearesiamo.com, or at our website, wearesiamo.com, LinkedIn, Instagram or Facebook. We Are Siamo is spelled W-E A-R-E S-I-A-M-O.

Cristina Amigoni: Until next time, listen to yourself, listen to others, and always uncover the human.

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