It’s about damn time. Finally releasing episode 1 of my podcast and I’m pumped. This podcast is for you if you have any interest in any of the following: parenting, self-growth, career, entrepreneurship, fitness, healthy living, judgement, books, and more. Ultimately, how can we be BETTER in the context of all of these things? Tune in!
The Scoop
- I’m here now! Why it’s taken me so long to publish
- Who will benefit from listening to this podcast
- Doing things we want to do vs. the things we THINK we want to do
- Is this a project for me, or for someone else?
Links & Currently Reading
Currently reading The Mother-in-Law by Sally Hepworth.
Transcription
**This is a direct transcription of the podcast and is not meant to read perfectly.
Hi everyone and welcome to Be Better with Daffnee Podcast I am your host Daffnee Cohen and a warm welcome. I am super pumped to finally launch my podcast. It’s something I have wanted to do for so long and I finally took a leap of faith and I have decided to create what I think is going to be a really hopefully meaningful, interesting and guiding perspective on many, many different things and I am personally excited about and passionate about.
I really want to share with you guys why I took so long to do the podcast actually and in effort to be really transparent which is going to be really kind of an underlying theme of this show is me kind of putting myself out there and being able to be vulnerable and sharing some things that I didn’t necessarily want to share prior.
I was really, really terrified so there it is. I was so scared of launching a podcast that nobody would listen to, if you know anything about me you know that I am a little bit perfectionist. I try and do everything in my life 110% and I found that I was trying to measure the success of this podcast in all the wrong ways.
You know I think this is something that maybe you guys have also experienced in some part of your life where you think about if you do something, or if you take a new risk, or jump into new, you know a new project or whatever that might look like. You know, is it going to be successful? Is it going to fail? Is it going to be what you wanted it to be?
I realized that instead of creating this podcast and doing it for the right reasons I was kind of in it mentally for the wrong reasons and I want to share what that is with you. You know I could imagine this is where my brain goes, so I would imagine someone asking me literally like at a party of something asking me, “Oh hey Daff, how’s your podcast going?”
I would be nervous that I couldn’t report on a certain number of downloads or a certain number of reviews of you know or was I getting sponsors’ and all of these things that maybe for some people are really important and that’s fair, and maybe if they’re doing it for certain reasons those things are really, really important and I just…
I realized that I needed to step away from that this isn’t a business for me at least not right now. It’s something that I just wanted to do for me. I just wanted to have an outlet to share some of the things that I’ve learned over the course of my lifetime and some of the mistakes that I’ve made and some of the things that I think have made me a better person which hence the title of the podcast Better with Daffnee.
It took me a long time to overcome that but when I did it was actually really, really liberating and it was really empowering for me to kind of put some of those fears aside and realize that as long as measuring the success of this podcast for myself rather than for other people then I can’t really fail.
For me now when I think about the success of this podcast… You know if anybody tells me that they liked an episode or if anybody tells me that they learned something from one of my conversations then that’s enough for me. I think I… It makes me feel content to share the things that I’ve learned that I think are beneficial and helpful and that is enough so here we are.
Here I am recording my very first episode and I’m so pumped about it and I do want to thank you guys for tuning in and hopefully you will subscribe and hopefully you do find something interesting here. I want to talk about another fear on this note.
One of the reasons I hesitated so much in doing this podcast is I felt like I had to fit myself into a mold that a lot of other podcasts are in which is what is the focus of your podcast. Is it a business podcast? Is it the Zumba podcast? Is it them, I love rescue dogs podcast? Like what is this podcast about?
I struggled so much with that because I realized that I don’t fit into one box. I don’t fit into three boxes. I am passionate about a lot of different things and I really made an effort to put myself out there and try things and learn from things and I have more to say then than one or two things.
I said, well how do I put a podcast out there if I’m just all over the place? Like that’s not going to be good, it’s not going to be organized. I just kind of realized like you know what, once again this is for me I want to talk about 40 different things and I’m going to talk about 40 different things so it’s okay.
You might not like every episode and that is so okay. You might like things that are specific to one topic and you know what everyone is allowed to do that and I encourage you do to do that. If something you know is being discussed on this show and you’re like, “Totally not my thing.” Right, don’t want you to waste your time.
I just realized I didn’t have to follow the rules, you know there aren’t any rules. In fact but I think especially in the age of social media sometimes we look at how other people are doing things and we think we’re supposed to try and follow suit in that way.
I think one of the big things I like talking about is being creative and the fact that you don’t have to fit yourself into a mold and you don’t have to necessarily try and do things the way other people are doing them.
And so here I’m again I want to talk about all kinds of things. Just so you guys know I want to talk about fitness, and I want to talk about marriage, and I want to talk about parenting, and money and your career and your health and how to sleep better at night, and how to be nicer to the people that are hard deal with in your life and how to be happier.
Ultimately this all comes back to how to be better. If we all can be better a little bit even just the tiniest bit every single. Imagine what that looks like for you personally or for your marriage or for your relationship with your children, or your parents and just for the world.
I mean if we all could just focus on optimizing and being a little bit better and letting go of fear and negativity and judgment, I think we would just find ourselves in such an incredible place in two days, in six months, in one year, in 10 years, in 50 years. I mean if that’s not the point of all of this and I don’t know what it is.
This is really the premise of this show, is how can we break down all of the things that are in our lives, complicated things, complex things, simple things, and focus on just being consciously better about them all.
I’m so pumped about that because I realized again that I don’t have to talk about just one thing because we have the opportunity to be better with regards to absolutely everything we do. That to me is exciting and it feels very endless in a good way. It feels very infinite.
I really want to share with you guys something that I read recently. That’s something else we’re definitely going to cover is books. I’m a bookworm if you don’t know that about me right now we will learn that about me. I love to read so much it’s like the best thing in the world.
That I read something recently that it was just so powerful I can never un-see it. It was like stamped onto my brain. It’s almost like I have a file in my brain of things that I just I never forget, never un-see, never unread, never un-hear. They were just so powerful and this is one of those things.
The book is called Big Magic and it’s written by Elizabeth Gilbert who is also the author of Eat, Pray, Love which is a really popular book that you guys might have read as well. She is discussing fear. She breaks it down for us and basically lets us think about fear in a little bit of a different way.
I wanted to share with you… I really encourage you to read the book because obviously the way that I’m going to explain it to you now is not nearly as finesse as Elizabeth Gilbert puts it. Ultimately fear is something that will always be part of our lives. It is always going to be there.
It’s going to be something that you think about. It’s going to creep up on you. It’s going to derail you. It’s going to make you better. It’s just always going to be there. There’s no way around that right which might sound a little bit hopeless and scary and but’s not so keep listening is what.
She tells a story about going on a long road trip and fear is in the car. Fear will always have a seat in the car wherever you’re going. Short road trip, long road trip fear is always going to have a place in the car with you but fear does not get to change the radio station or change the temperature in the car. Fear does not get to dictate where you stop for gas or where you stop for food and that’s that.
Fear is something that will always be there with you but it doesn’t have to take over. It doesn’t have to control. Fear absolutely never gets to drive the car. In theory when I read the story I was like, “Wow.” I was shook. I’m like this is brilliant because yes, you know it is okay to be scared.
I think without fear we would all be in a really weird place so it’s necessary but there are so many ways that you can approach incorporating fear and dealing with fear and moving beyond fear to just be awesome. When I read that story I was like it’s time I got to do the podcast. It’s time because fear is in the car right now with me you know.
I am scared. I fear that I’m not going to do a good job. I fear that I’m not going to articulate myself well but you know what I‘m driving the car right now and I’m going to do my best and I have never done a podcast before so you guys will you know… You guys will hear my mistakes and you guys will hear me sharing these honesties with you but I’m okay with it now it’s fine.
I’m fine with it because I think it equates to something bigger and better than myself. I would encourage you guys regardless of what it is it could be so many things. It could be as silly as trying to cook a new recipe or deciding to go back to school, or having a really hard conversation with an in-law or your spouse.
You know whatever that looks like think about fear as something that just has to be there next to you but is pushing you in the right direction and making you think strategically about how you approach the things in your life. With all that being said I… This episode really is a little bit of an introduction.
Some of you might know me just from school and things like that or follow me on social media and some of you might not and that’s great too. I just wanted to give you a little bit of background on why the podcast and what it is that I want share and what we’re going to cover.
The last thing that I want to share with you guys is one of my definite insecurities around this podcast was kind of asking myself the question about why me. You know why would someone listen to me? Why do I have the right to talk about any of this stuff? I don’t have a degree in all of these subjects, I don’t have certifications, I’m not a life coach.
Why do I get to come on here and speak to you about any of these things? And it really ate at me for a while. It really was something that made me question whether I should be doing this or not and of course fear was trying to drive the car here and try to take over this really fun creative project for me.
You know this is what I’ve come to. I don’t have to have a certification, or a degree or anything to talk about anything really. I mean that’s actually the premise of really free speech. I can just say whatever I want to say but what I want to get at is that I have made a lot of mistakes.
I’ve learned many, many things, many things over the years that I think have helped me. You know and they were not all beautiful and pretty and easy and some of it was hard and painful and sucked. I learned from it and I really try my best to look at those situations as something that has the ability to teach me something bigger and better and that is what I’m sharing with you guys.
I should add to all this that I am not her to judge anybody else. I have never walked in anybody’s shoes but my own. I try so hard to be understanding and compassionate about everybody’s situations. I think so much of this stuff is easier said than done but I feel very, very, very passionately.
If there’s just a few things that I know to be true it’s that we all actually do have the potential to be better people all the time, every day to ourselves and to other people and that is why I’m why. No I don’t have a degree in finance or parenting whatever that even means but I’m learning and I’m looking in the mirror and having really hard conversations with myself because I care about being better.
I want to be a better wife. I want to be a better human for myself. I want to be a better mom. You know I want to be a better friend. I want to have more money. We are all entitled to have money and to not be stressed and to sleep well at night and to feel healthy and good about ourselves.
You know as fruitful as that might sound it really is kind of where I am just as a really small example of we will dive into this further in another episode. I think back about the things that I’ve done right and wrong over the course of my life and just so you know too because age does not freak me out at all.
I’m 31 years old. I still sometimes feel like I’m 12 and that’s really fun too. When I graduated from college I was the most dirt-broke person I’ve even met in my life. I had nothing. I had no money. I couldn’t even buy groceries. You know I just kind of basked in that for a while and I realized that…
Eventually I just didn’t want to do it anymore. I just didn’t want to be broke. I didn’t want… I realized that I’m bigger than that. It was just that I didn’t understand money. I didn’t understand how money worked. I didn’t understand debt. I didn’t understand anything. I mean no one taught me these things.
I just really decided at some point like the less I know the less control I have over my own life and that seems to be just nonsense. It doesn’t make sense. I made it a point to educate myself and to learn, made a lot of mistakes and I am not rich. I should add that. I don’t stress about money the way that I did.
I can buy groceries. I can buy groceries for days. I have made it a point to prioritize things that matter financially and things that don’t. I’ve made it a point to understand how debt compounds. I mean there’s just so much that we have the ability to learn without… It doesn’t even have to take up that much time.
I’m also speaking to things that I hear a lot from my circle of friends and from my family members and from people that I connect with and so that’s also a guiding light for this show. It’s like I hear these things and like, “But you’re so… You’re such a good person. You’re so smart and you’re so positive like…”
It doesn’t have to be that way for you. And so I want to share again the things that I’ve learned and the mistakes I’ve made and kind of the rock bottoms I’ve been up because I did find a way out of many of those things so you know I am still finding my way out. I am far from perfect and I have so much to work on but I’m going to do it here on this podcast with you at least in part.
I want to thank you again for joining me. I’m very excited to keep digging in and be sure to subscribe on iTunes and we’ll continue to connect here. Thank you so much tuning in.
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