DON'T BE A PARROT

dive into what I mean when I say, don't be a parrot. And like so many of my other shows, these ideas that I get like or when something pops up into my consciousness, or it's on my mind and in my heart, and I want to talk about it a lot of times, it's inspiration from a couple of different places. As you all know, I'm a wicked, big animal lover, and throughout my life, I have had exposure to actually, different kinds of parrots, like

actual physical parrots. You know, I had parakeets when I was a little kid, my aunt and uncle, who my sister and I went to go live with after my mother was killed. They had a cockatiel named Bird. Bird, so original, right? So and bird would like, sing and cat call and whistle at you and repeat little things. My best friend KT, has two beautiful little parrots, and my sweeties, um, stepdad, who he kind of considers his dad, also has a beautiful parrot. And those parrots, like, can last

for like you can live for like up to like 70 years. It's incredible. And one of the things I noticed, though about birds and parrots, that while they do make their own unique sounds, they have their own unique voice. When it comes to like speaking or saying phrases or whatever, what they're really just doing is they're parroting. They're repeating, right?

They're just repeating things that they heard in their environment, or they're repeating phrases and and songs or whatever sounds that people in their environment are teaching them. So it's not like it's a unique thing. They're just kind of, again, using that phrase, parroting back what has

been told to them. And the reason why this is on my mind, I'm going to come at this from a couple of different angles, but so often what I see is that people will people will just regurgitate and repeat shit that they hear in their environment,

rather than finding their own voice. Now, one of the things where this can get a little tricky, and I see it a lot, and I've experienced this throughout my lifetime, is dealing with or talking with or trying to have relationships with, people who all they're doing is regurgitating from their own childhood. They're regurgitating what their parents told them, what school told them, what the teachers told them, what the

priest told them, what whatever told them. And they never got curious enough to find out for themselves what they think about what they were told, what they believe about the things they were told how they feel about the things they were told. A lot of times we just end up taking on, you know, the the stories, the beliefs, the identities, the whatever from our childhood, and then you don't question it. And I see so many people, you know, I've, I've had these conversations, you know, one in

one in particular, with a with a guy I dated. I remember the story, and I'm like, you don't even know what you believe faith wise and religion wise. You just basically drank the Kool Aid of your parents, and now you're just regurgitating it. But if I ask you to explain to me what that even means, you can't tell

me. And so often people are just parroting, like I said, Back shit that's on the news, shit that's on, you know, something that they saw online, saw on social media, some quote or whatever, and they haven't found out for themselves what they think about it, what they feel about it, what their unique perspective or spin might be on that thing because they've spent a little time thinking about it, right, and being with it and

sitting with it and going like, hey, yeah. Like, I know. I know my grandparents always said this money doesn't grow on trees,

right? But how do I feel about these things? And we have to be paying close enough attention to catch ourselves when we're just kind of regurgitating and parroting shit from again, whether it's our childhood, our parents, our churches, our school teachers, right, our siblings, whatever, it's really important that we take time in this lifetime to figure out what the Fuck we think, what we feel, what we believe, what we know to

be true, right for us. And I want to talk about this in a particular way too, because when we end up just kind of parroting, the world misses out. And I've told this story before, but I'm just going to tell it really quick. I'm. There was a period of time you all know, well, you all know, I don't know. Some of you might not know, but if you've been around for a while, you know that I lived and worked with Marianne

Williamson. You know, the writer the spiritual right. She wrote a return to love, 1000 other you know, she was written so many books, New York Times, best selling books. She's a spiritual thought leader. She's a teacher. She's a lecturer. She ran for president a couple of times. Okay, so I used to live and work with Mary Ann in California. And at the time, like I was in my 20s, I was so impressionable. I was so like, oh my god, like she

was, she was a mentor of mine. She was a teacher of mine. She was a woman, you know, an older woman that I, that I looked up to, and, you know, read all her books, etc, and during my time of working with her, I went to go see, you know, a woman who did, she was an intuitive. She did readings, tarot readings. She like, you know, would basically just, you know, do it like a reading for you. And I remember going in, and I sat down, and I was all like, you know, just like, if you can't

see me, I have my hands in my face now. I'm all just, like, wide eyed, and I was just like, Oh, I was so excited to be there. I had heard wonderful things about this woman, just how like, spot on she was, and just how caring and kind she was. So I was kind of like an open book, you know, like, I just, like, sat down in her room at her house, and so she obviously knew my name, and she's like, so, you know, tell me about yourself. And I'm like, I'm Karen Kenney and blah, blah,

blah, blah. And she's like, so tell me. She's like, you know, who are you? Like, what do you want to do? And, you know, to kind of, like, kick off the session. And I said to her, I want to be the next Marianne Williamson. And I was so sincere, I was so earnest, like I really meant it, and not that I wanted to be Marianne. Like, looking back, I can look and see

I understood now, like what I really meant. But she said the most profound and powerful thing to me and I and she looked me right in the eyes, and she said to me, why don't you try being the first. Karen Kenney, and she knew something then that my brain had not like realized yet, right? Like my lived experience had not caught up to yet, which is this, like I needed to be the first. KK, because the world doesn't need another copy of

somebody else. What the world needs is you, and the world needs your particular take, your particular voice, your particular point of view, your lived experience, your own unique and creative and brilliant and wonderful and whatever you know point of view. The world just doesn't need us. You know, remember how, like, when you would like, I don't know if you ever worked at a place where there was a copy machines, like nowadays we all have, a lot of us have copies at

home built into our printers. But back in the day, when you worked at a place and there was, like, a Xerox machine, right? And you would just get up to all kinds of shenanigans, as you can imagine, right? I'm just having some memories flash through my head here. But if you take a carbon copy, if you take a copy of something, even if you did carbon copies, remember back in the days with the credit card things, and you'd have to go, chunk chunk,

right? I'm just sliding my hand back and forth like chunk chunk, to get an impression. This is the thing. When we're making a copy, we're only getting an impression of something, but we're not getting to the root source of where that impulse, that creative energy, and that creative impulse, comes from. And if you just make a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy, it gets it gets weaker, it gets lighter, it gets blander, you can't even read it. It's like, where did this even come from?

And so I'm really a champion of people owning their own unique experience and their perspectives and their stories and their special, you know, characteristics that that, because when you show up in the world and you're like, hey, here's what I think about this, you now give all of us a new, unique point of view, and it might be a way of looking at a thing, or thinking about a thing or experiencing a thing that

we've never had before. And so if we're just so concerned about sounding like everybody else, looking like everybody else, being like everybody else, regurgitating what's already out there, then we kind of like Rob ourselves, the experience of really coming to know ourselves. And I think of it like the Divine is expressing itself through us. We've all been given in A Course in Miracles. It says like our own individual

assignment. You have your own individual curriculum, your own divine assignment, and so only you came here to express through you in your own unique way. So why do we want to just repeat what we hear other people saying and doing and being like the joy and the thrill of this is figuring out, what do I think? What do I believe? Or why do I think that? Do I believe it? And

a lot of times, we can trace the breadcrumbs right back. We can trace that thread back to something from our past, something that was said to us in childhood, and in the work that I do as a spiritual mentor and a coach, and, you know, as a hypnotist, and all the ways that you know, you know that I work with people, one of the things that I often see is that people are repeating stories. That's why, you know my work, I talk

about your story to your glory. And so often I'm tracing this thread, this belief that people have this thing where they're getting in their own way of not believing that they're lovable, or not believing that they're good enough or smart enough, or they're too much, or whatever the thing is, I'm too dumb, I'm too lazy, I'm too this, I'm not good with money. A lot of times,

there are these beliefs that are like, put in place. And when we trace the thread back, when we trace the trail of bread crumbs back, it's something that was said when they were a little kid, you know, they had a teacher that, with their red pen, like, you know, mark their paper, and they thought they were stupid, because maybe their spelling wasn't that great, you

know. And there's a great thing that I, you know, I was just listening on the radio the other day, and somebody used this phrase, and I wish I could remember what it was, but it was something about, like, the way that I reiterated it in my head is that story of, like, don't judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree. We all have our own unique gifts and talents, and I'm not going to expect a fish to be able to climb a tree, right, but that fish can swim like a mofo, like in the ocean,

like, you know what I'm saying. So it's like, I want to, I want to, like, hear and see where people are shining a light on their own brilliance. And that's another thing. Like, we're often really willing to talk about our traumas, our dramas, our bullshit, the places where, like, Oh, you don't know how bad, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, Yeah, okay, we gotta own

that stuff too. But let, like, let's also own our brilliance in the places where you're wicked smart, or you get you're really creative, or you have a really unique perspective in your art or your podcast, or the way that you create meals, or, like, whatever the thing is, and I don't want to get robbed of not seeing your beauty and your creativity in your genius because you're so worried about looking or sounding like everybody else and just wanting to fit in. And I understand that

we are pack creatures, you know? I understand that we feel safety in groups because it's easier to survive when we're like, pad up and stuff like that, you know. But the people who have really changed the world are the ones who are willing to, like, go outside the framework and do something totally new, and not just take the well worn path, right? It's to do something

different. So I just want to encourage you, like, if you find yourself, like, just kind of, you know, repeating shit that other people have already done or already said, or, like, whatever, like, you know, some people will say there's no unique ideas out there. Like, all the songs are just kind of

using the same chords. All the stories have been told, all the songs have been written, and it's like, I understand where they're coming from, but nobody is you, even if you're an identical twin, your identical twin is not having the same exact experience as you are. And there is something right. I believe, again, I believe that it. Call it. You can call it whatever word you want to call it. You can call it God, you can call it source. You can call it creative intelligence. You can

call it the universe. You can call whatever you want to call it. But I believe that there is something really, really powerful, call it love, that is trying to move through you and express itself in its own way. And this is another reason why, like, I think like, I'm going to shift gears now a little bit like about not just parroting what you hear out there what you

see out there. Right now. It's a very, very, very, very dangerous time to just be repeating stuff and not getting your sources in check, not knowing what the true meaning of a thing is not knowing if it's actually true what you're sharing or saying. So you know how I told you I worked with Mary Ann when I worked in live with her, one of the things that I did, because she has this famous quote, right? Most people know it. A lot of people know it. You know it's, it's, in her book, a

return to love. I you know, it begins like, Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. We ask ourselves, like, who am I to be? Brilliant, talented, gorgeous, blah, blah, okay, that quote back in the day, right? So this, this was in, let's see, this is in the 90s, so, like, probably, like, around 9697 and the. That quote was getting attributed to, like a Fauci like, mostly Nelson Mandela, also to coach kada in the movie.

But then people were also like sharing it and not giving credit or attribution. So one of the things that I did in my work and my job is I would find this, I would find where it was being misattributed or whatever, and then I would send an email or write a note, or I'd make a correction, and I'd say, Hey, this is actually from, you know, Marion Williamson's book, a return to love, like on page 90 and 91 whatever. And I would

like tell people, and I'd make the correction. And that that doing that again and again and again is probably also part of what, why giving credit is, like, so important to me, like, why I'm like, please don't steal other people's shit. Please

don't plagiarize. Please have a fucking original thought in your own head and and if you are going to take take something that somebody else taught you, or that you read or you heard or you learned right like, Please give credit or attribution, but even take it one step father, one step further, because there's another thing that I see happening a lot, and it happens like, again, I tend to catch it with things that I have spent a

lot of time with, right? Like, there's a quote from A Course in Miracles that basically says, Your task is not to seek for love. Your task is to seek and to find the barriers that you have built against your own awareness of love's presence or

whatever, right? I cannot tell you how many people attribute that to Rumi, and I just like want to bang my face off the desk, and I'm not being mean about those people, but what it tells me is they saw it somewhere else, and then they just attributed it to Rumi, but they didn't do their homework. They didn't bother to see if it was true. And in this day and age of everybody screaming like fake news and, oh, you're just

saying that. And this one's that I'm always like, hey, check your facts, check your sources, check your resources, check the studies, check the science, check where you're getting this thing from. If you're please don't be lazy. Please don't be a lazy parrot and just regurgitate something when you don't know if it's true at all. I see people, especially as a vegan, too. Again, I can only speak on the areas that I've spent a lot of time in, right learning, studying, living in my own

evidence, living it. And people just say the most ridiculous shit, the most ridiculous propaganda about like, Oh, it's so hard to grow muscles on a vegan diet. Oh, being plant based, you need to eat animals. No, you don't. No, you don't. No, you don't. I cannot stress this enough. Read some fucking books. Do some do just do the math. Read some books, find some studies, you will find out it's all a lie. It's all propaganda.

Oh, my God, but we see this happening a lot, especially in politics, and it's so dangerous and so like, if you're going to, like, please just don't regurgitate shit you hear on Fox News or, like, any news outlet, like, do your homework. You know, there's a woman named Heather, Heather Richardson Cox, and why I like to read what she has to say. First of all, she's a historian. She's a professor. I don't care what kind of like, I mean, whatever side of the aisle, you know, but she kind of

looks at things from a historical perspective. But you know what she does when she writes a piece at the bottom. She cites like any, like everything that she talks about, whether she's mentioning a social media post, whether she's mentioning like something from history, she will cite exactly where the with a link, where you can see it for yourself, where you can go read it and think for yourself where you can go find out for yourself, like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So she's

not just regurgitating stuff. She's basically taking these things in watching what's going on in the world, talking about it from her perspective, and then backing it up with like facts and science and like links and stuff like that. And these days, you just have so many people who were just chugging the Kool Aid and regurgitating stuff and parroting stuff, and they're not checking things out. So I'm looking at this from two perspectives. I'm looking at it from what you're putting out

into the world, right? Do your homework if you're going to quote something, do a little digging before you give attribution to somebody, because it's probably it might not be them, because the frigging internet is like the wild wild west, and nobody's really checking. You know what I'm saying, any idiot can say anything at any time, and people just go like, Oh, well, so and so said it on his blog, and we're back. I'm just taking him. I'm rubbing my eyes like, Holy

Jesus on a crack up. Okay? But mostly, what I wanted to say is this, I'm not trying to, like, wag my finger at you, like, don't be a parrot. Because, like, I'm saying it because the world needs you. It doesn't need you being a cat, like a. Cheap copy of somebody else, right? So again, find out for yourself, do your research. Read, gather your own experience, gather your own empirical evidence, and then make your report to the world, right? Then go out and make your report. And you know, I read

this book once. It was called stay and fight by Madeline Fitch. It's a fantastic book. Book. It was a novel. And there was a character in this book named Pearlie, and he was the son of these two women who lived in the Appalachians and life was hard. They had to stay and fight right? They had to stay and fight for their life. And I, I'm paraphrasing, but the kid was taught by his mothers, and he would say, like, to be

steadfast, to be resolute, and to make his report right. And so I started saying that like to my friends, like, Hey, be steadfast, be resolute. And then then go out, go out and experience things, and then come back and make your full report. And I'd be like, come tell me your stories. Come tell me what you learned. Come like, using your own voice, break it down for me, so I can see how you process things, so I can see the

world through your eyes. Because that's what makes it all a kaleidoscope, having all these kind of different voices and points of view. And, you know, I remember there was a period of time like in the in the 90s, maybe the early 2000s and it just sounded like there were all these bands. They weren't really rock bands. They were weren't really grungy, they were like,

whatever this new kind of like thing was. And I remember I would flip through the stations on the radio and I'd be like, I can't fucking tell these guys, one from another, they all sound the same. And I'm like, I don't know if they're trying to sound the same. I don't know if one just thought, Oh, this is how you like, you know, sell records is like, you copy the other guy. And there was also this thing that was happening in country music where they had basically gotten this formula. And, I

mean, you can look it up, you can Google it, right. There was like, this formula where it was like, insert this here. Insert this here. Do this, do this. And all the country songs. And I'm not a country fan, in fairness, in fairness, not a fan. But a lot of, a lot of the songs were just like, red truck, red solo cup, Red Dog, red something, right? I was just like, what? Like, what is happening right now? And I was like, please, for the love of God, can people get original? Can you stop going for

the cheap and the easy sell? Can you stop going for the click bait? Can you stop trying to just like, repeat and

regurgitate and parrot the crap that's already out there? And I think this is part of the assignment right for us to go out there and for us to not be parrots, to not be parakeets, right to be persons, to be people with your your own unique voice, your own unique point of view, your own unique experience, and your own unique stories, and to question the ones that were given to you, those identities, those stories, all those things that you were told about yourself as a kid.

Keep the ones that are good and loving. Keep the ones that are good and true. Question all the other shit question, don't parrot. Don't parrot these stories. You know, from what your, what your, your your maybe your emotionally unintelligent parents may be said to you right their own scarcity and fear and lack of knowing that generational trauma that just kind of like rolled downhill and like landed on you. We gotta, we

gotta. We gotta, like, I'm brushing my body right now. We gotta, like, dust ourselves off and brush ourselves off and shake off the cobwebs and shake off the dust and shake off those old stories and really step into the glory of who you really are, because the world doesn't need another watered down version of a bunch of other people. What the world needs is you. Okay, that's what I had to say. That was what was on my heart, in my mind. I hope it was helpful to you in some way, and

just know that I celebrate you. I can't always see you right, because I you know I'm the one on the video, but when I say I see you and I hear you, what I mean is like I understand, right? I my compassion and my empathy, like I understand that we're all out here, and we're we're hopefully doing our best, and we're trying to learn, and we're trying to grow, and we're trying to, you know, just kind of shed, shed the old skins, shed the old shed, the old feathers, the things that you

know aren't helping us to fly anymore. And just know that I that I do see you, I do hear you, especially when you write to me. And I appreciate you, and I have a lot of gratitude for you for being here in my world, listening to the show. So just thank you so so so much. You know the drill. If you ever want to work with me, if you ever want to join the nest or do one to one mentoring, join a yoga class, whatever, you can just find me. I'm easy to find online. Just spell my last name

right, and I'm pretty easy to find. It's k, e, n, n, e, y. Karen Kenney. Kenney, go to Karen. Kenney.com, Vaness, the quest all that stuff is there. Thank you so much wherever you go. May you leave yourself and leave the animals and leave the environment and the other people in the planet better than how you first found it. Wherever you go, may you and your love and your presence and your energy and your unique point of view your Eunice, right? May your Eunice be a blessing. Bye. You.