This episode reveals the positive messages and the readers’ journey as they enter Elizabeth Barry’s new book,
Design Your Mind To Be Kind, featuring the three habits of effective communicators: catch yourself, fly above, and speak your truth. She also talks about six personalities to embody your highest self: The Self-Exploration Warrior, The Awareness Chief, The Master of Let It Go, The Active Listener, The Curious Sage, and The Freedom Spirit. Readers get a glimpse of how this book helps them to unravel any BS stories in their lives as they go beyond their ego to find their courage, strength, and wisdom to live a happy, healthy life.
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Design Your Mind To Be Kind
Finding Your Path To Happiness
I’m going to take you on a journey through a book. The book is called
Design Your Mind to Be Kind. It’s my third book. Whether you’ve read it or not, I want to give you the author’s point of view and give you a little bit of a deep dive into what it was like to put a book together. I don’t know if you’re inspired to write your own self-published book or if you’re looking to create something in your life that’s beyond your normal routine. Beyond your 9:00 to 5:00 job, beyond something that you ever thought that you could do. You can do it if you put your mind to it. Not everyone that sets out to say, “I’m going to put a book together,” puts a book together because we’re not all writers. I know a lot of people have publishing services that put their books out for them. I write all of the books myself. I come up with all of the tactics.
I’m proud of this book because it has personalities and lots of journeys and lots of analogies and metaphors for all of us as adults to tap into our personal and professional development in a way that is understandable, bite-size, and that doesn’t take leaders or CEOs and make them think its foo-foo. In a way that people who are on a meditative journey or someone looking for peace, harmony, and joy in their lives. They can take this book and put it to use with practical and tactical take-home tips. That’s what Beyond Ego is all about. I set out to create this show and this platform that houses my books and my
Facebook group and my Instagram page, which is
@TheKindCommunicator. All of these digital houses that I’ve built are within a community that asks us to go beyond who we think we ought to be and develop our natural persona that lives within behind the mask of the ego.
This book is special to me. I wrote it with my love beside me and I finished it with his angels next to me. Everyone that purchases a book receives a beautiful white feather bookmark as a message from him, from the heavens and a dedication for me to give to him as he left this earth too early. His spirit is inside of one of the chapters at the end, it’s called the Freedom Spirit chapter. The book’s subtitle is
Finding Your Path To Happiness. There are many self-help books out there. There are some good ones and there are not so good ones. I’m hoping that when you get this book, you’ll think, “This is one of the good ones. This is written from someone who is inspiring but makes me believe in myself again.”
We’re all adults struggling to adult. When you think of the idea of adulting, it’s rather difficult. We have schedules. We have kids. We have families. We have bills. We have epidemics in society that we’ve been faced with in 2020. We all have this chance to transform within ourselves to find our path to happiness and I know that every reader will tap into that. Whether you’re looking for business, career advice or looking to find more joy in your life, it’s all found within these pages.
The first part of the book is dedicated to the three habits of effective communicators. I talked about them as such to catch yourself to fly above and to speak your truth. We’ll start with catch yourself. It’s all based in nature. The book has an underlying theme of the dichotomy of the flight of birds and the grounded, rooted tree within the earth. That feeling of flying free but yet having that grounded stability, we all fight with the flight and then the grounding. It’s a little bit of an up and down, an ebb and flow for us, but this book takes nature into consideration. It talks a lot about trees, routes and the flight of birds. The idea to catch yourself is like how a bird has a good flight on a summer wind. You can learn to catch yourself in real-time.
What does that mean? Catch your habits. The entire book is based on changing your habits in real-time in the moment, and the way that you can do that is by catching yourself. Catching yourself is twofold. When you catch yourself, you can physically know when you’re about to say something that’s not great, when you’re about to see something that should have been kept inside and maybe thought about a little bit better. I call it solutions-based thinking and speaking. When you come up with a solution rather than pointing, blaming or judging, we can catch ourselves before we say something that’s not going to come out in the right way. Also known as being a kind communicator.
We can also catch ourselves by holding in our thoughts and our feelings that we want to share with the world. I know that there are many of us that hold things in and this book is an inspiration and motivation for you to speak up and to talk things out and to share them kindly, directly and thoughtfully so that you can share what’s inside of your heart and your mind with the world. Catching yourself when you’re holding something in and you want to say it is such a powerful habit, it’s as powerful as not saying something that shouldn’t be coming out. That’s the power of catch yourself.
Design Your Mind to Be Kind: Featuring the Habits Of Effective Communicators and Personalities to Embody Your Highest Self
Flying above in an imaginary sense also has a bird-like theme to it. If you’re acting in a not so great way, if you’re in a bad mood, if you’re projecting your emotions or thoughts or feelings onto someone and you’re acting in a way that you’re not proud of. If you fly above yourself in that moment, you can recognize the habits, triggers, patterns that you have that you might want to get rid of and you might want to diffuse. When you fly above yourself in an imaginary sense, you get these 10,000 feet above you view, and you say, “I didn’t know that I was acting that way. I didn’t know I was speaking like that.” You can learn to become aware of what you don’t want to harbor anymore and you can stop those patterns. That’s what flying above is about.
Speak your truth is such a beautiful thing. Speaking our truth is another way of using your words wisely. When I say use your words wisely, I mean it in two different ways. One is to start to listen to the inner chatter. Start to listen to your inside voice, your intuition. Once you start to listen to that intuition, you can learn to use your words better. You can learn that any of this self-depreciating talk or any of the depressing things that you’re telling yourself, you’re ruminating about these emotions over and over again cynically. You can stop that pattern. Speaking your truth and using your words wisely will allow you to become more aware of the things that are going on inside of your head so that you can speak them in a kind way. The other thing about speaking your truth is using your words to help people to be a kind communicator, to show up as your better self, as your highest self, which is farthest from the ego.
Those are the three habits of effective communicators. They’re cool to practice and put into practice because none of this works unless you make it a ritual, you make it a lifestyle choice to put into practice in your life. I put out books for readers and I ask them to get the coaching alongside of it because it’s helpful to have someone there holding you accountable. Most of us can’t be the ones that are holding ourselves accountable because we’re lazy and we’re afraid of calling ourselves out. The truth is, once you start to do that with a coach, you then have the tools to do it on your own and you live a happier, healthier, much better second half of life, especially for us adults.
We tap into the six personalities to embody your highest self. How do you live well beyond that ego and live as your highest self, showing up as a better you? The first personality is called the self-exploration warrior. To dig down deep into self-exploration allows us to take ten deep breaths. With those deep breaths, we go ten layers down, digging deep into who we authentically are. Starting to get to know yourself is one of the greatest, most valuable traits that we can have on this earth. Time doesn’t wait for any of us. Dear readers, dear OnBeyonders, the sun is going to come up tomorrow and it’s going to come up the next day. The more you get to know yourself inside and out, the more you get to love yourself. The more you get to own some of the parts of yourself that you don’t like, you can diffuse any of those habits. That’s what self-exploration means. That’s the first personality.
The second personality is the awareness chief. I believe that awareness is one of the greatest tools for adults in modern society. We’re all on our laptops or on our mobile devices. We’re going fast and we end up showing up in meetings and relationships without awareness. We’re rude. Manners matter. How we show up in front of people has everything to do with your awareness about how you show up, who you are, and what your habits are that you can maybe diffuse a little bit or maybe turn on a little bit more, some of the things that you’re doing right. The awareness chief allows you and inspires you to tap into awareness on such a deep level and becoming one with who you are and knowing, in the moment, how you’re acting, how you’re speaking and the things that you’re doing and not doing. That’s the awareness chief.
The third one is the master of let it go. It teaches adults how to let things go. When I say it go, it can mean anything from toxic people in your life, toxic situations, careers that you don’t like, relationships that you’ve been staying with but you don’t want to be in. All of those things have to be let go, the things that we ruminate about, the emotions that we’re cycling in our monkey minds over and over again. Being a master of letting it go allows you to step forward into that freedom space that we yearn to have as an adult.
When you start to think about all of these personalities, the first one is about self-exploration. The second one is about awareness. We’re getting a little bit deeper and deeper into who we are. The third one is letting things go. You’re getting lighter and lighter as you travel inside of the book. The fourth one is the active listener. My body of work is based on kind communication and communication in general because every breakdown is mostly a breakdown in communication. Listening becomes one of the most incredible skills that we can have.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten wiser. I feel like listening is such a better tool than learning how to speak. Although I love teaching people how to speak, I coach speakers for the stages, but listening is such a great tool because it allows us to have humility. I teach people that we can find that humility. Active listening can make you become one of the happiest people. What you say, of course, it matters but you start to think about what you have to say all the time and shush yourself. You become briefer, you become more tactical, and you become more eloquent in your speaking habits because listening teaches you far more than speaking too much.
As we travel headfirst and heartfirst getting into the back of the book, we start to think about the fifth personality which is the curious sage. I love marrying the words curious and sage together because curiosity teaches us as adults to start to question things. Stop assuming. Assumptions are such a toxic habit for all of us. When we assume, we don’t know, so we point, blame, judge, and we do it often. That causes us to have breakdowns in communication and breakdowns in our mindset and our hearts. When we get more curious, we teach ourselves to ask questions, to be kid-like. When you’re a kid, you always ask these questions, you have this cute little head tilt and you ask, “Why?”
Sometimes as an adult, it’s difficult to ask another person, a lover, a boss, a colleague, a friend, “Why did you do that? Why did you say something that way?” The book teaches readers to tap into the vulnerability of asking more questions, getting more curious. The word sage allows us to tap into what I had mentioned, the solutions-based thinker. It’s being a wise person. A sage is an all-knowing person. We’re not going to be all-knowing. We want to be continuous life-learners. Being a sage person is someone who is grounded, wise and knowledgeable. You can be grounded, wise and knowledgeable in life when you start to question things and get more curious rather than starting to pummel through everything, trying to know it all.
Habits Of Effective Communicators: We can’t be the only ones holding ourselves accountable because by nature, we’re lazy and afraid of calling ourselves out.
The sixth personality is my favorite one, and it’s called the freedom spirit. Freedom is something that we all can aspire to achieve on a daily basis. Feeling free like a bird soaring in the air, like a tree that’s planted in the ground reaching its arms up to the sky. Freedom is such a beautiful feeling. When I think about the freedom spirit, I want everyone to recognize that we are all souls walking this earth using our bodies. We’re all souls and spirits. We don’t know when our time is going to be up. The feeling of desiring freedom and living within a freedom-based mindset with mindfulness and being calm, peaceful and joyful is such an aspirational trait to have.
Dear OnBeyonders, feel free to pick up this book. If you love the idea of honoring yourself and honoring your spirit and your soul, you have the time to walk this earth to become a better human, to learn how to communicate in more effective ways.
Design Your Mind to Be Kind is made and written for you. The book ends with a chapter that’s called Imperfectly Perfect. It takes us on a nature journey and it reminds us that you are enough. The more we get out our measuring stick for ourselves or other people, the more we have breakdowns and the more we complain, the more we react. Throw that measuring stick out into the ocean. You are enough. You are imperfectly perfect. You are beautiful. I use an image of pigeon because most people don’t like pigeons, but the pigeon is absolutely adorable in that chapter and I love the way he looks imperfectly perfect.
If you’re ever inclined to pick up this book or enjoy this podcast, I do have books available for my OnBeyonders to learn more about how to take a book to bed at night and flow into poetic words and chapters that will guide you to be a better leader in life. That will guide you to be a better lover in your relationship, to be a better friend and a better listener to people that you encounter whether it’s your friends or the person in the supermarket. The better that we can show up in life, the happier we are because there’s less regret, emotion and rigidity.
I say in the book throughout, “Without emotion, we’re left with reality.” If you think about that statement, it’s true. The more we emote, the more we throw our emotions around. The less of a reality that we’re living in because when you let go of the emotion, you’re left with the situation that you’re in. You have a choice to go up or down, left or right, north or south in any situation and that’s the reality. You can be calm and use calm as your superpower. Wear that cape well. Go beyond your ego and be a less reactive person tapping into your responding ways of being an adult that stands for what they believe in and starts to create personal values. Whether you’re 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 or older. We can change in real-time. This book is proof. I’m living proof. You’re going to be living proof when you start to put this practice into play.
This is the description of my book,
Design Your Mind to Be Kind. It’s available at
ElizabethBarryConsulting.com, click on books. I offer packages. You can also buy the volume one, which is
The Kind Communicator, volume two which is
Design Your Mind to Be Kind. I package them both in something that I call The Kindness Innovation. I welcome you to keep reading. If you like me, give me a shout, send me an email. If you have something particularly that you’re going through that you’d like some help with, message me and I can create a whole episode on it. Hopefully, we’re all going to come out of this as better human beings every single day with our breath and a smile because time waits for no one and your time is valuable. Be the best you that you can be beyond your ego.
This month’s podcast is sponsored by Biederman Owens Enterprises.
This Emmy nominated TV & Film production company, is based in Hollywood and have created such shows as: “Who Gets the Dog?” On Animal Planet,“Instant Beauty Pageant”- on E!-Networks and “Earth Angels” on Lifetime. Jerry Biederman and Chris Dane Owens are big supporters of the work I do, and the importance of kindness in all aspects business. Stay tuned for a future project called Empire Queen, a fantasy adventure film produced in association with American Viking productions.
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