Dana Skaggs (00:01.156) Hello, my friends. Welcome to Phoenix in Flame. As usual, we have an amazing, incredible guest with us today that I'm so excited to get to talk to. Her name is Andrea Johnson. Now, Andrea empowers executives and founders to lead with authenticity, conviction, and confidence so they can make a positive impact on their lives.
organizations and communities. Her passion is equipping female leaders to define a culture by trusting their own ability to think critically, create imaginatively, and lead effectively. Andrea, welcome to Phoenix in Flame. Andrea Johnson (00:48.878) Thank you, I am so happy to be here.
Dana Skaggs (00:51.908) This is awesome. Now I want to share a little bit more about you because you are a very interesting person and it just goes on and on. So you were raised on the mission field in Seoul, South Korea and as a third culture kid, as you termed yourself, you're familiar with navigating cultural diversity to find your own place of belonging. There's also a family history of obesity, which showed up early along with bulimia and depression. Andrea Johnson (01:14.638) Mm -hmm.
Dana Skaggs (01:20.58) So your determination to become healthy led you to gastric bypass surgery and a testament to your persevering spirit. my goodness, where do we even begin? There's so much here that you have experienced that I'm just chomping at the bit to get to any of you. You start wherever you want to start and I will follow you and we will get to all the good stuff.
Andrea Johnson (01:41.102) Well, I will start by saying, here I stand, right? Here I am. I am healthy. I am happy. I am fulfilled. I am doing work that I love. I am kind of living out, if you want to say the purpose that I was created to do. And I still struggle with accepting that because of all the things that we've been conditioned to believe. And no matter where you are on your journey, no matter what it is you have been through, no matter what you are in right now.
you too can be standing in a new place tomorrow and or the next day or 10 years from now. I don't know what your journey will be. Mine has not been short. Some of those things started with me at age seven, you know, and I'm 57. So it, you never know how long your journey is going to be, but no step is wasted.
Dana Skaggs (02:34.916) That's it. I love that. I love everything that you're saying. Now, I was really attracted to several of your several topics in your bio, but one of them was the cultural diversity because I really I love cultural diversity. And I also know that frequently, if we're being very honest in our conversations, we have a hard time. You know, understanding where people are coming from, creating that space or different.
types of individuals feel accepted and feel like there's space held for them. What was your experience in you were growing up in Seoul, South Korea? And so that's what that was. You were the you were the odd man out. You were the oddball. So what was that like? And what was your what did you learn about cultural diversity?
Andrea Johnson (03:22.158) Well, to be clear, we did not live out. We had a mission compound that we lived on. We had an expatriate community that we did so many things with. I went to a school that's an international school and it'd been there. gosh. Long time ago, they had a hundredth anniversary. So, and I graduated in 84. So, it's been there a long time and it was started by missionaries. And so just, just to be clear, I didn't go to Korean schools. I was not that, there were some that were that immersed in the culture.
Dana Skaggs (03:39.012) Got you. Andrea Johnson (03:52.014) But in the 70s and 80s, it was still a time that Koreans really loved having Americans there. And there's no end of the war, it's still an armistice. And so there were things about being there at that time that were just a little bit charmed because it was not bad being the odd person out. It was good being the Mikook Sada, the American person. But...
In my school though, I had 65 different countries represented at any given time. Ambassadors, kids, heads of overseas, branches of companies, missionaries from all stripes, all kinds of business people. And so for me, like, I don't know if y 'all will remember this, but if you're anywhere near my age, you're going to remember like the Iranian hostage crisis and literally walking down the hall, seeing the Iranian kids with black
jackets on that said Iran on the back, you know, it's like you cannot, you cannot not be friends. You cannot, you can't let those kinds of things divide you. I mean, there were 30 people in my graduating class. This is not, this is not a big school, right? So you learn early on to find the things that you connect on rather than that divide you. And sometimes that's language.
For instance, walking down the hall, I might hear Chinese or German or Dutch or Spanish or French or Korean. And then I'd go home and we had a woman who worked in our home that kind of helped us with a lot of things because my parents as missionaries, my dad traveled a lot, my mother did a lot of things. And we also kind of, I was raised as if I was a rich American person, but we were poor.
And we paid her a little bit and she would cook some meals for us and she would be there when we got home from school. And we call it kind of called her our auntie or something. But she spoke what we called Konglish. It was like half English, half Korean. And so I learned early on how to start translating, like not necessarily literally, but figuring out what somebody means when they say something. And it just felt natural to me. It was one of those things that I want to know.
Andrea Johnson (06:14.126) what you think and what you believe. And I really want to be understood, right? Everybody wants to be understood. We want to feel seen and we want to feel heard. But then I came back to the States as a college student. And because I was from this, and third culture kid is actually a, it is an actual term. A third culture person is someone who,
is raised in another culture other than their own, but still retains that. So they have a mixture. It's like brackish water, where salt water and freshwater come together. It's like a mixture. So there are things about the way I think that are very Eastern that don't make any sense in a Western world. It's all about the community. It's all about the connectedness of everything that don't really mesh well with American individualism. And so for me coming home,
home to the states, to Houston, Texas to go to school was a real eye -opener. And I just did not, I could not find a place to fit in. I could not, I didn't identify with any of these people. I even literally had this conversation last night with a woman in my church. I told her by the time I was 21, I'd moved 17 times. And she said, I just can't even imagine what that's like. And I said, one of them was from Texas to Wyoming and then back to Texas and to Georgia and then to...
Korea and then back and she said, I just can't even imagine. And her husband's, her and her husband have a farm and in Virginia, the farmer's license plate is a silhouette of their farm. Okay. So, right. So I said, I can't imagine what it's like to know generations going back of being in one place and being able to say, and we love each other and we love the perspectives that we bring to the situation or to the conversation is very important.
But I lost some of that when I went to college because I wanted to fit in so bad. And it took me many years to come back to that. So as where I stand now, I've fully embraced this idea that I see things from many different perspectives because I've looked at my own personality types. I'm a personality type junkie. I know my anagram, my human design, my disk. I'm a disk consultant. I'm certified with the Maxwell team for disk.
Andrea Johnson (08:32.462) behavioral analysis as well as speaker trainer and coach and understanding the patterns with which other people speak and understanding the community that they come from makes a difference and it is hard work. Let me tell you.
Dana Skaggs (08:46.82) Well, you know, and let me just jump in really quickly. And I wanted to to focus on something you said a few moments ago when you were talking about communication and you were talking about how we want to be understood. But you also said that you wanted to know what the other person was trying to communicate. I think so much. It seems like people are so focused on getting their point across.
but they don't sometimes have much interest in what the other person is trying to say. It kind of gets a little out of balance. I mean, has that been your experience or not so much? Andrea Johnson (09:15.822) Thank you.
Andrea Johnson (09:26.606) Yes, that was who I was. So personal experience and experience in my family and in my work and in the type of work that I do now. And part of it is I find that we are very defensive when we are not 100 % sure of who we are. And we feel like we have to defend our beliefs or our perspective on something when we are not
when we don't have a good solid ground. Like if you think about a good taproot on a tree, it goes very deep and the tree can grow very tall and it can bend with the wind and the waves or whatever, a tsunami comes over it. But if you don't have a good root system, a good wind, I mean, we've had a lot of hurricanes, I mean, excuse me, a lot of tornadoes recently here in the United States. And I mean, those trees are going, they're uprooted really fast. So if you think about the taproot being,
Dana Skaggs (10:05.316) Yeah. Andrea Johnson (10:23.342) you understanding who you are, you understanding why you believe what you believe, if that's not very deep, then you want to fight against that. You don't want the wins to come. You want to make sure that nothing comes along that's going to blow you over. So what I advocate for and what I coach and what I work with people on is developing that understanding of themselves, is developing that taproot to say, all right, this is who Andrea is.
It doesn't matter who Dana is. It doesn't matter who my husband Steve is. It matters who I am and I have to in all integrity stand in that. And when other people come along, I've noticed the better I get at understanding myself, these are internal boundaries that are set. I don't have to worry about it. I'm not saying I never argue with anybody, but I even had one the other day and my husband pushed back and I said, I'm sorry. Dana Skaggs (11:12.228) Hahaha
Andrea Johnson (11:18.062) I have to disagree with you again, you know, but I don't need to go out and quote, convert people to my way of thinking about things because I'm comfortable in who I am and I believe in myself enough. And this is a long road. Don't get me wrong. This has been a long road and it's still, I'm like, did I say that right? Or am I thinking that right? Am I the only one who thinks that? And then I'll say it out loud and people will be like, no, I think that too. I'm like, okay, well I'm not nuts. At least not today. And,
So, you know, when we think about that, the onus of communicating our message is on the communicator, right? This is what I teach in my communication workshops. It is my responsibility to get across to you what I want you to understand. But if I just try to yell it at you, it's like me walking into a Korean store, asking them for something in English and having them sit, give me an answer. And then I ask them, what do I do? Even louder, right? That's what we do. We like, we ask it louder as if that's going to make a difference.
Dana Skaggs (11:47.268) You
Andrea Johnson (12:16.526) And it doesn't, we need to actually speak the language. So learning how to, instead of say things louder, being belligerent, argumentative, being determined that our perspective is the only one, if we're willing to step back and see things from different perspectives, allow someone else to have an input and actually listen to it. And that's just, it's so easy to say those things on the surface because the work that has to happen below the surface to make that happen on the surface is a lot.
but it is a place to start where we can see a tangible difference. Dana Skaggs (12:49.188) Absolutely. The example that you gave of the taproot is spot on in terms of feeling more comfortable in yourself. That way you can set those boundaries and allow other people to have their own opinions, even if it's 180 degrees different from ours, because they have a right to their opinion. And that does not diminish our opinion. And when you have that deep taproot, you can understand that.
I know sometimes, it's been my experience anyway, that the development, the lengthening of that taproot, lots of times will come through trials and we become stronger through trials. And so I'm remembering back at some of the things that you shared in your bio and wondering from your perspective, like for example, you talked about the family history of obesity and bulimia and depression and the gastric bypass and...
What is your memory of going through those experiences and how do you feel like now with the wisdom that you have that it helped to to strengthen you and to deepen your taproot?
Andrea Johnson (13:55.502) Well, the reason, and I'll say this to anybody, the reason we weigh what we weigh is because of what we put in our mouth. And because of, but I need to know why I put it in my mouth, right? It's like, you can't just tell me not to put it in my mouth. I need to know why. And my genetic disposition towards putting on weight, I'm only five, one and a half, and diabetes is in my family, made it easy when my...
quote unquote drug of choice when I felt unsafe or when I just didn't fit in, the way I soothed myself was through food. It was an easy way to do that. And if I was lonely, I would eat. If I was scared, I would eat. And there were plenty of things that happened on the Korean peninsula in the 1970s and 80s that were scary. And if you go back and look at history, there's plenty of things that happened. And a lot of times, there's no ceasefire. It's still an armistice, right? So.
And right now, even now, North Korea is still one of the most secretive countries in the world, right? So when I would eat, it would soothe me, and I wasn't looking at what I was afraid of. I wasn't looking at why I was scared or why I was anxious or why I was lonely. And I didn't have anyone to teach me. We know what we know when we know it, and being able to look back on...
the things that I went through and say, I learned, I can see now I was soothing this thing or I was taking care of that fear or that loneliness. The thing about wanting to fit in that can actually help you is that you start, if you're really curious, I call myself, I say I'm terminally curious. If I'm terminal anything, it's terminally curious. Dana Skaggs (15:45.028) I love that.
Andrea Johnson (15:47.182) because I'm always wanting to know why. And that kind of set me on the path that put me, I put myself in the hospital at 20 for bulimia and depression. It was a 12 week inpatient program. My parents had a fit over the fact that our insurance paid for it. And they're like, well, you better lose weight this time. I'm like, I just want to learn. And, and it was a really good program and it taught me a lot. And it kind of put, it was the first time anybody kind of told me to take a minute and take a look at why I'm eating about, you know, what I'm eating for. And, and,
to learn meditation and learn what they call gentle eating, to slow down. And we learn things and then we go backwards, and it's like ups and downs and ups and downs. And by the time I had been married a few years and my husband was a pastor and our church had split, it was a lot, I was back up to 310 pounds and I just couldn't lose it.
And I knew why I was eating because I was very stressed and I wanted to run away and I just couldn't. And at the same time, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. And so I worked at the oncology center at Johns Hopkins University and I knew full well, I was in medical oncology and I knew full well that obesity was, is a, along with obesity comes a predisposition for different types of cancer.
And so I said, I have to do something. On top of that, we'd been married a while and we weren't pregnant. And I was like, I'd like to have a baby. And so I started looking at what my options were and gastric bypass sounded really scary, but I was already in counseling for depression, because I had gone back into depression and I'd taken meds and I found one med would like start not working for me and I'd switched to another and switched to another. And if you've...
been somebody who's tried all the SSRIs and SBRIs or whatever they are, STRIs, whatever the things. I mean, I got to the place where I couldn't take any of them. I mean, I took Wellbutrin for a little while and couldn't figure out why I was having like these, I ended up with micro seizures because, yeah, so if you feel like a little electric shock as you're walking down the hall or something, it's like, I have to stop this. And so, it... Dana Skaggs (17:41.828) Yeah, yes.
Andrea Johnson (18:01.454) It meant that I really needed, I had no option there. I had to work really hard to find out what it was. So I spent about seven years in counseling, really kind of looking at myself. And when I realized I need to do this really drastic thing, because I need a tool in my toolbox. I have all these psychological tools, counseling tools, you know, Bible study tools, you name it, but I need a physical tool. And so I...
told my husband, I said, I think I want to do this. And he said, whatever you want to do, I will support you. And he changed the way he ate. He was willing to eat differently. We cut almost all the sugar out of our diet and he ended up losing weight too. But, you know, it was, that was 19 years ago and it has been one of the best decisions I've ever made. But walking through that process, I learned a lot about the identity that I had placed on myself, the things I was.
telling myself I was and wasn't and a lot of that is things I've been through, the church split. And my counselor looked at me one day and said, Andrea, I just have to tell you, because we were getting close to the end. Because if you've worked with a counselor, you know that you get to a place where most of the time you get to a place where you kind of resolve what it is you're working through. And they'll let you know if they think there's something else you need to work on. But this has happened to me twice with two different counselors. I think we're...
we're to the end. I think you're in a good place and unless you need something else, you can come back, but I think it's time to let you just, you know, fly, be free." And he said, I have to tell you, I've never watched anything more courageous in my life than what you've done in the last three years. And the whole, because gastric bypasses, there's no surgery that's benign. There's no surgery that's free from risk. And it's a total changing of your lifestyle. You know, I haven't had a soda in 20 years. And
just because, you know, and I watch people use a, take a tool and use it for something that you're not supposed to use it for. and so I just, I'm all for whatever it takes to get you healthy. But what I learned about myself through all of that was I can do really hard things. I can do hard things. I can fall down. I can get back up. I ended up having that surgery twice in three weeks because I ate a shrimp. Dana Skaggs (20:22.084) shrimp.
Andrea Johnson (20:22.606) Yes, and I don't tell that part to everybody, but they like went because it was labroscopic. They went right back in the same holes and they I was in so much pain because I just little tiny, you know, if you know anything about gastric bypasses like and it was my body was still all swollen and he's like who told you you could eat shrimp and I'm like it was on the list and he's like, I don't think so. But you know, I just wanted something besides mush, you know, but but I you know, I did it twice.
So I had to go under the knife twice. And so now it's like, I don't do anything that compromises my health in that way. And because I've learned that this is a tool that is really going to help me do what I need to do. And so in other areas of my life, I have other tools. I've even just doing podcast interviews is a tool to keep me honest. It's a tool to help me remember.
I don't always tell my story walking around in a daily life. And when you get on a show that somebody wants your story, you remember, I really have gone through these things. So it's a reflection tool. So there's a lot of tools that I use. And I think learning to take the taproot deep means that you've developed a lot of tools for yourself. You've been willing to look at a lot of stuff and you've been willing to take the heat as well as the victories that come when you do that.
Dana Skaggs (21:25.028) Yeah. Dana Skaggs (21:48.292) That is just a wonderful description of your of that chapter of your journey and I I love that you said I Learned I can do hard things Is that that's that's pretty phenomenal I mean it's one sentence but it I mean the meaning of it is is a pretty significant thing because it once you learn I can do hard things Then maybe I can do the next hard thing just because it's hard doesn't mean it's impossible Andrea Johnson (21:58.67) Mm -hmm.
I don't like them.
Andrea Johnson (22:16.686) Well, and Dana, we also have like things to measure against, you know. I've been through two church splits, but the second one wasn't as hard as the first one. And partly because I learned in the first one how it's not really about me, how it's not really about even my husband. It's about things that were already brewing and it's about other people's problems. And the job of the pastor is to, and this could happen in a team, this could happen in a society group, this could happen anywhere, but it's the job of the leader to...
continue to tell the truth and to be, you know, and to stand and be, as I've seen my podcast, Stand Tall and Own whatever it is that you've got. And the second one wasn't as hard. It was devastating and it was real and it was rough and I wanted to run away again. But as you do that, I now can look back and say, yeah, that second one wasn't as hard, partly because I was a grown woman. I was a 27 or 28 year old when it happened the first time. But now I was like 50.
you know, when it happened a couple years ago. But when you learn you can do hard things, then you have something to measure it against. You know, it's like, it was really hard to be told that my eggs were old at 38 and that I was in early menopause. And it was really hard to go through private adoption. But man, if I can do that, I can do anything. You know, that's one of the reasons I was just a couple minutes late this morning, because this week is standard of learning for high school.
So my 15 year old ninth grader is like, did you get it all? Did you get it all? So we're all exhausted. But yeah, when you learn you can do hard things, you have a measuring stick. And it may be that you have something that's the stick is really tall because it was something really bad that you went through. My mother's death was like that. I have several things, but then you can say on that stick, well, this is only half. I can do that. Dana Skaggs (23:49.348) You
Andrea Johnson (24:13.294) It doesn't mean you have to like it, but you can then say, what have I been through? Look down the mountain, see how far you've come, not just at the top, and that makes a difference.
Dana Skaggs (24:24.228) That makes a lot of sense. Now I wanted to give you some space to be able to answer some questions here. Now one of them is you really focus on intentional optimism. And before I kind of give you the mic, I'm a psychotherapist and I'm known as the queen of boundaries. And I also love, love, love.
the intention, I love the way that you put intentional with optimism because we truly, it's just my opinion and I'm very interested in yours, but it's my experience that there's so much negativity in our lives, there's so much frustration, both external and internal, you know, what we struggle with in our own minds and also what's going on around us, that in order to be optimistic, it takes intent.
And so I just love the fact that you put those two things together. So tell us a little bit about your journey and coming to that focus on intentional optimism.
Andrea Johnson (25:30.19) sure, if you go looking for me, that's how you're going to find me because Andrea Johnson is very common. When I was a kid, I was the only Andrea around, but now evidently it is a very common Andrea and then Johnson. It's like that, like I might as well be Brown or Jones. My maiden name is MacEachern. You can find me under that if you want, but pretty much only on Facebook. But if you're looking for me, you're going to look for the intentional optimist. And a lot of that is born out of the story of my mother's...
Dana Skaggs (25:36.036) Hahaha Dana Skaggs (25:46.276) Yeah Andrea Johnson (25:59.918) the loss of my mother. And I turned 50 in August of 2016. And in September, we put her into hospice. She had been 17 years with lupus and breast cancer. And it was just to that place. And it was metastatic. But I had an eight -year -old adopted son, and I watched her. She fought hard, but I watched her die with grace. I watched her die well.
I watched her make sure she would get knee to knee with me and just say, have I told you everything? Do you have your grandmother's cornbread recipe? Have I apologized for all the things I said to you? Because moms do that to their kids, right? We say things that are flippant and realize later we need to apologize. And so I watched her tie up all the loose ends and want to make sure that she didn't leave anything out.
and the Sunday before she died on Tuesday, she was on the floor playing with my son. And yeah, and so while we're never prepared to lose a loved one ever, and I'm just a person that believes that death is not beautiful, it is hard. And...
there are things that we can learn from it. And a grief process is powerful, but what it did for me was I was unfulfilled in my career. I was unhappy. And I knew that I didn't, I like, all right, I'm 50. Do I have 50 more years? I don't know. Maybe I have 75. I mean, I'm not promised tomorrow, but let's just say I have 50 more years. What do I want to do with them? And how do I want to show up?
My mother was very what we would call sanguine. And as a psychotherapist, you probably understand that term. It was an older term that we used for the different humors and the different personalities types, you know, that disc is based off of. And it just means she was like happy and bubbly and yellow was her favorite color. And you can see I'm in this poppy red. It's like there are ways in which I'm very much like that. But I am more realistic, more detail oriented, more I just say realistic instead of pessimistic. But.
Andrea Johnson (28:10.734) I decided that I needed to figure out how I wanted to live because we all will have things that we will, if we have the opportunity at the end of our life to apologize for, we will do it. We will have things. but I would like to minimize that. I would like to make it as little as possible. I want to live differently so that when I reach that point, if I don't have six months of hospice, that I can go whenever it's time.
and not feel like I left anything undone or unsaid. And that is a very scary and courageous thing to embark upon. But what it did for me is it gave me the opportunity to kind of like say, well, what do I want to stand for? How am I going to do this? And I brain dumped a bunch of words, like pages and pages, and pulled them all together into, after a lot of iterations, about basically six main columns. And these are what I call my six tenets of intentional optimism. Dana Skaggs (28:48.1) Mm -hmm.
Andrea Johnson (29:08.014) And when I was looking for a business name, I wanted to be like something sanguine. And my friends were like, Andrea, nobody knows what that means. You can't do that. Just do happy or optimistic or something. And I'm like, but it's more than that. This is not sunny toxic optimism. This is not everything's going to be all right. I mean, I love that song myself, but it's more than that. It means that I am. Dana Skaggs (29:15.524) Ha ha ha!
Andrea Johnson (29:33.998) pursuing it and I am looking for it even when I don't feel it and So my six tenets are where I started and we do this a lot You know, we work from the outside in and so those were the I now call them my personal growth lifestyle It's the attitudes and mindsets that we embody in order to live out our goals our dreams and our core values with excellence and I started there and then I kind of worked in and So when I work with my clients?
if I can start them with core values, which is who we are, and then how we communicate, which is disk, then we end up with this is how you implement them, this is how you live them out, this is how you live your daily life, knowing who you are and how you communicate. And it's been really fun to share them with people. I can give you the six real quick. Dana Skaggs (30:24.836) Okay, and I, you can, if it's, if we have not much time left and I have one last question for you.
Andrea Johnson (30:29.23) Okay, then I'll tell you what they can look on my website. Dana Skaggs (30:33.028) Excellent! That way, the handlers like this, y 'know, y 'all have to go and look at the six tenets on our website, because you know, you wanna know what they are! Andrea Johnson (30:37.774) Yeah, just Google intentional optimism and Google what is intentional optimism and you'll find a freebie.
Dana Skaggs (30:46.02) And I will absolutely have that in the show notes too. So, Andrea, I want to leave you with a question because I know we talked earlier and you're a realist, I'm a realist and I have my own story that I've walked and I have walked alongside so many other people that have come to see me for therapy and I know that life sometimes, many times actually is very hard and complicated and frustrating. And so I'm interested in your thoughts.
as we wrap up this episode of how you, how your, your tenets of optimism would help someone who is in, you know, relationships with people or let's just say relationship with a person and the person is consistently dysfunctional and it's not going to change rather significantly and consistently dysfunctional and it's a
a pretty close relationship or relationships difficult to walk away from. So that's, you know, because I'm thinking if there's a listener thinking, well, this sounds great, but so and so, you know, my daughter, my mom, my husband, my wife, whatever is an alcoholic or is a, you know, manipulator or has borderline personality disorder or fill in the blank. Any of these significant things that are well entrenched.
they're very dysfunctional and they're not going anywhere and these people have no intention of changing any of it. So how would you help a listener who is listening to you and thinking of that person in their life who they can barely stomach but is a pretty close relationship like in terms of familial attachment or whatever, how do they use your tenants to apply to that relationship given the reality of what it is?
Andrea Johnson (32:42.446) She gave me a heavy, heavy, heavy question. I see that is, that is the, if it were a client, I would be referring them to someone like you for some specific help because I am not licensed for some of that stuff, but I will tell you that I have experience, even as a pastor's wife with, you know, people with situations like this. And the first thing I would say is I would encourage, Dana Skaggs (32:44.164) Yeah. Dana Skaggs (33:01.284) Yes.
Andrea Johnson (33:06.35) If this is you in a situation, I would encourage you to know who you are in the situation because that is the most important piece and it is the most, I've been in codependent relationships, it is the most easy thing to lose. It is the most easy thing to let what's going on outside of you completely control who you are and completely change who you are and how you show up. And when you lose that identity, that's when you lose hope.
and you can please stop me if I say anything that does not mesh with, because I think that when you have at least some hope that you can still exist in your own integrity and your own authority, no matter what these other people in your life do, that's where you start to build your resilience. And so when I talk about core values, that's where, if you're the boundary queen, Dana Skaggs (33:39.396) Well, keep going. Yeah.
Andrea Johnson (34:02.254) Dana, I talk about core values, helping you build internal boundaries and like a house, right? Nobody walks up to my house and just walks in the front door. If they do, they will be surprised. But most of the time they knock on my door. It is the accepted thing to do. Someone who's in a codependent relationship or a traumatic relationship or an alcoholic relationship forgets there's a door there, you know, and learning how to, even if it's internally, shut the door.
internally walk away from those kinds of things. And you know, I'm sure you counsel people as well. There may be times when you have to walk away from it physically. But the hope that gives you the courage is what's available in understanding yourself and what's available in understanding how you communicate and these six tenets of intentional optimism, because they include things like optimistic and being hopeful.
being present and understanding that that means a whole lot less about being where your body is and more about being open to wonder and generous and kind and energetic where you are focused on life and you look for life things rather than death things. And I mean that in a very stark way because some of the things you're describing, Dana, are what I would call death things. They are not life focused. Dana Skaggs (35:23.364) Yes.
Andrea Johnson (35:25.678) And when you can do that, and then all of a sudden it's like you start building up your own energy and your own joy and you can, your brain starts functioning better. And that energetic also includes industriousness, figuring things out. I spoke earlier about courage. That's another tenet of it where you learn how to be adventurous and resilient, even in times of, like you said, real struggle. But one of the main pieces, the wisdom piece helps you understand like,
Steve Covey's the one who said seek first to understand and then be understood and that's where I get it But we lead the first person we lead is ourselves and so we need to understand ourselves and we need to understand others and Once we do that, then we can like live with respect, you know and act with integrity in those situations whether or not they respect you so much of it is focused on Knowing who you are having that taproot and being willing to say
Alright, am I staying here or am I not? And if I am, how am I going to show up? That's the only choice we have.
Dana Skaggs (36:29.924) I love that. I love your response. And I just kind of toss in before wrap up is that the way you and I kind of seg together is that doing what you're saying, you know, what's going to happen is that there's going to be people that are going to not understand and they're not going to understand our choices in these relationships. They're not going to agree with our choices in these relationships. They may criticize, they may judge. And I have walked that path.
and it's very hard and so it's very helpful to have other people around you that know the things that you're describing, that know who you are as a person, who know your core values, who know why you've made the choices that you've made. So you have those people around you, they understand you, they know the whole story, they get it because there's going to be people out there that don't understand the whole story. It's too complicated. Andrea Johnson (37:16.622) Yeah.
Andrea Johnson (37:27.278) Yeah. Dana Skaggs (37:27.524) and they're gonna judge and to be able to walk that walk and to be true like you're saying to who you are, to your core values and to use those tenants and to be able to do that in the real world where people don't understand. It's the real thing. It's the real deal. I appreciate that.
Andrea Johnson (37:49.71) Yeah. Well, and we were talking just two weeks ago in my church to this one woman who is really going through, she's going through physical trauma. Like it's like chronic pain, all kinds of stuff. And she has these women around her that are just so supportive. And I said, it's like you're this little sapling in this clearing and you've got this copse of trees around you that it's a little bit like a windbreak that is protecting you. And every once in a while they have to come in a little closer. And she said, yes.
And so I think that is a good example of what you're talking about, building up the people around you and finding them and being willing to tell them, I'm going through this thing. It's like, find people that are safe for you and be willing to share.
Dana Skaggs (38:32.708) That's wonderful. Andrea, I am so grateful, appreciative of you and the walk that you've walked and your willingness to come on Phoenix in Flame and be transparent and open and share that with my listeners and spending your time and your energy to do so. Thank you very, very much. Andrea Johnson (38:52.27) Thank you, it's been my privilege.
Dana Skaggs (38:54.404) Alright guys, I know that you have heard numerous things today that Andrea has said that you're like, my gosh, I need to know more. So you go to the intentional optimist .com and that you can get all kinds of information. Is this correct, Andrea? We get all kinds of information about you there. And also guys, we want to grow our Phoenix and Flame community. So take this episode, copy and paste the link and text and email.
put it on your favorite social media sites so we can continue to grow our Phoenix and Flame community so we know that we are not alone. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. This is Dana on Phoenix and Flame.