Things we dive into in this episode:
Tips for making journaling feel less overwhelming
How Ted Lasso’s themes are relevant to examining your own life
Finding community and chosen family wherever you are
Carolyn is a US trained therapist for over 20 years, working with women, teens, families and couples. Primarily right now I am focusing on my therapeutic journaling classes which range from a class based on the t.v. show Ted Lasso to classes on Emotional Processing, grief, poetry, and much more.
📘Resources
📌Episode Highlights
What advice do you have for someone who hates journaling?
Gentle structure is helpful, especially when you don’t know what to write about and feel overwhelmed by journaling.
Try writing for just 5 minutes. Knowing you’re only sitting down for a short time will make it feel like less of a chore to cross off the to-do list.
Remind yourself that journaling is for you - no one is grading you on the quality of writing.
If you don’t know what to write about, use the 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 method. This grounding method is often taught as an exercise to do in your head, but it’s a great journaling prompt:
5 things you can see, 4 things you can touch, 3 things you can hear, 2 things you can smell, and 1 thing you can taste
It also doesn’t have to be exactly this method, but writing about what you observe is a great place to start when journaling feels overwhelming.
What are some tools for finding a chosen family?
Building community takes risk and vulnerability.
Be open to things that you never thought were possible.
Willingness to try new things and keep at them takes courage, but the only way to know if something is right for you or if a person is meant to be in your life is to actually give it a try and not give up too quickly.
Don’t put guardrails on the types of people you might connect with. You never know who you’ll jive with! A friend could be 20 years your senior or your junior. Deep connections are not solely with people your own age.
Keep showing up and putting in the effort. It takes time to build a community and chosen family.
Thanks for listening! 💖 Stay tuned to Caitie’s website for more episode updates and other exciting programs and resources.
Transcript
Caitie: Our body is designed to be able to vent out emotions and we should be able to, or we need to be able to trust that. We can metabolize sadness, that it's gonna move in and through our bodies. Our body is designed to do this. Often we get stuck in wallowing. Like we get stuck in being afraid to feel rather than in the feeling. And it's the fear of the feeling that we often get stuck in rather than the feeling itself. And I, yeah, and I can see that. And I've experienced that as I was watching the show too.
Welcome to Whole, Full & Alive, a podcast helping you feed yourself, feel yourself and be yourself. I'm Caitie Corradino. I'm a Registered-Dietician Nutritionist, a body image coach, and the founder of Full Soul Nutrition, a method that combines nutrition counseling with a powerful toolkit of somatic healing modalities. I have guided hundreds of clients to freedom with food, their bodies, and every aspect of their lives. I've also been through this healing myself. And on this podcast, I want to help you eat with confidence, embrace your body, form aligned relationships, and create a life that you're in love with. I'll share actionable tools, no bullshit stories and interviews that will remind you why you have everything you need within you to feel whole, full and alive. Are you ready? Let's get into it.
Hey, welcome back to another episode of Whole, Full & Alive, the podcast helping you feed yourself, feel yourself and be yourself. I am so grateful that you have tuned in for another episode and especially this episode because we are gonna be talking about two of my favorite things today, journaling and Ted Lasso. I promise the two are deeply connected in a way that you haven't thought about before and in a way that I think, it's gonna, it's gonna really help you. Like we're gonna talk about really tangible tools to use a TV show like Ted Lasso to process your own life experiences, et cetera. I'm not gonna over explain the whole thing in the intro. And we're also just gonna nerd out on Ted Lasso. So if you're just like generally a fan of the show, like keep listening. I have a very special guest coming in today.
Before I introduce her, I wanna invite you to take the deepest breath that you've taken all day today. So wherever you are tuning in from, give yourself an opportunity to remember that you have a body and take a nice deep breath in through your nose, feel your back expand as you fill up and then take a nice deep exhale, full exhale out your mouth. Take as many of those as you need. And as we're moving through today's show and you're picking up little nuggets and little tools and having fun hearing about Ted Lasso, I invite you to listen not only with your brain, but also with your body. What feels good for you? What resonates for you as you listen to today's show?
And before we dive in, I also want to remind you that I have some spaces open for both one-on-one and group counseling with nutrition body image and self-confidence if you are interested you can find my website fullsoulnutrition.com or head to the links in the show notes to learn more about all of that stuff.
Okay, today's episode I have Carolyn Herman on the show. She is a trained therapist, US trained therapist for over 20 years working with women, teens, families, and couples. She is primarily focusing on therapeutic journaling classes right now, which is something I'm deeply interested in. And I just wrapped up taking one of Carolyn's classes. And these classes range from a class based on the TV show, Ted Lasso, to classes focused on emotional processing, grief, poetry, and much more. I love this idea of therapeutic journaling. Carolyn, welcome to the show. I'm so excited to talk to you today.
Carolyn: Thank you, thanks for having me. Thanks for the breathing too. It's always good to take that pause and do that for sure, so thank you.
Caitie: Yeah, it's like so easy to just take off like a racehorse in these conversations and it always is very helpful for me to to record.
Carolyn: Totally, especially after, well this is like the end of your day too, sort of, right? Like it's the afternoon, so makes it's a whole, yeah, yeah, thank you. Good way to start.
Caitie: Yeah, yeah. So please, in your own words, introduce yourself to everyone. Tell us a little bit more about you before we dive into therapeutic journaling and how you combine it with Ted Lasso in a way that I love. Like, where are you based? What's going on? Tell us more.
Carolyn: Let's see. Yes, I am. My name's Carolyn, like she said, and I live in Costa Rica. Actually, I lived in Costa Rica and Tamarindo, Costa Rica for almost 13 years. We moved here when our kids were little. We wanted them to have just a, well, we wanted just a better family time, a little bit more quality, a little slower life. So you know, my husband runs a business, which I ran with him for several, for a long, long time. We live in a really small town, so being a therapist was a little tricky when my kids were little, so I didn't do it for a really long time. I did a lot of work at their schools. I did work at some, you know, volunteering at various organizations and really started to fall in love with the idea of therapeutic education more than therapy. I do some therapy, but therapeutic education is like my passion.
And during the pandemic, what really happened is I like most of us sitting at home and it was just not connecting and feeling like I had something that I could give and I had started doing a fair amount of writing myself again. And I started taking classes. There's a great place called the Therapeutic Writing Institute. It's started by a woman named Kay Adams, who's kind of the the current guru of therapeutic writing. She's amazing. She's written tons of books. And in 2021, January of 2021, I just threw it out on Facebook. I'm gonna do a class. I filled up two classes, like everybody was, we're so desperate in 2021 for connection and health and all of that. And I have been teaching classes since then. So, and I love it. It's something I love. I actually have a brand new class that I'm creating right now that starts today. And it just, it's so much fun for my brain to create new ways for us to dig into life using writing and using connection and connecting with other people and yeah, and the Ted Lasso, I mean I can tell that story too, how that kind of happened, but you want me to tell that? So how I made a Ted Lasso journaling class? Yeah.
Caitie: Yeah, I mean, let me tell you how I found it. So I am also a clinician. And so obviously, all my friends know that about me. And I'm also a Ted Lasso super fan. So you know, all my friends know that about me. And one of my friends came across your class on Instagram and DMed it to me and was like, Caitie, there's a class that combines Ted Lasso and journaling. I feel like this is right up your alley. I'm like, first of all, how did you find this? But second of all, thank you. This is amazing. I think my favorite type of people are people that combine two seemingly unrelated passions into one thing. And I'm always thinking about how, how can I do that in my work? How can I combine two things that really light me up to create something that's never been created before? And yeah, I'd love to hear how that came about.
Carolyn: That's great. Totally. Yeah. Well, you know, Ted Lasso was also a pandemic find for me. I started watching it like halfway through season two. So, you know, started at the beginning and then caught up and then, you know, watched it live from then on out. And I have a 20 year old daughter and she and I have probably watched it. I don't know how many times. I've watched it more than her at this point in time, but she and I are rewatchers. And so we would just rewatch it. Every time I would rewatch it, I would be like, holy cow, like the themes within this show and the writing within this show and the depth of the emotional processing in this show is unbelievable. Season three is where it all like comes to, came together for me. And I was like, this is a class. Like every episode, I was like, you know, at this point, I probably, what was that? Was that about a year ago that it finished? I feel like maybe, Todd Lasso. And you know, so by this point I've written and done, you know, lots and lots of these journaling classes and every time, and lots of my original writers that have written with me since the very beginning are also huge Ted Lasso fans. So we'd be talking about it in class. You know, I did a series in one class on the idea of hope and we used, you know, the hope that kills you scene. We used some Brene Brown stuff. And so I just, I started doing it in small ways and then all of a sudden I was like, this is easily a six week class. Like this is like, no problem can I come up with six weeks of a theme. And it was, it's probably, it was absolutely the most fun class that I've ever created because I just got to watch the show over and over again and find things. And what I love about it is it's not so much like, it's just that, like you said, like, can you connect to a show that's funny and all the things and like, and connect it to your real life? I think that's really rare. I don't know of a whole lot of other TV shows that I've ever watched in my life or I'm like, holy cow. I mean, there's whole sections, you know, you could do a, I could do a whole class on relationships with parents, like from just, you know, like six weeks of that. So I just love it. I love, love, love the show to a point where some might call it an obsession, but it's a healthy one, I think.
Caitie: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And I think as a as a therapist, what makes you feel like that show specifically is so much more applicable and like, the ball to real life. Yeah.
Carolyn: It's a good question. Hmm. You know, I think because they do a really good job showing genuine emotions that and not fixing them immediately. That's probably one of my favorite things about the show is that the emotions are allowed to be felt and they very rarely wrap up in one, you know, like you think about your traditional sitcom where there's the problem and then the problem is solved by the end of the sitcom. That's just not how, there's a lot of sitting with discomfort throughout the show, especially as you rewatch like the whole thing. And so many, and I think that was my, that was probably my favorite part was just watching. And obviously it's still a TV show. So they do resolve their problems a little easier than you and I can.
But, they, I don't know if I've ever watched a show in my life, maybe I'm being hyperbolic, but that, which I can get about Ted Lasso, that really shows the depth of human emotion and people caring for each other and the empathy. I mean, these people, I mean, if we all had friends with that much empathy, like it, I mean, it's, ugh, like, go on and on. I also love how they show the therapist. Like, I love, you know, I don't know, again, as a clinician, a lot of times therapists are not shown in the best light on TV and they did such a good job with the Sharon, Dr. Sharon character of like showing her as a human and showing her, yeah, really. Yeah, so good.
Caitie: Yeah, yeah, I agree with how there is a range of emotions that aren't immediately resolved and portrayed in a realistic way. And I also feel that as much as the difficult emotions, such as like the grief of divorce and the grief of betrayal and all of that stuff are depicted, there's also a depth of positive emotions that are depicted in a really realistic way in a way that you just feel somatically. Like when I think about Ted Lasso, I really do think about how I felt in my body during certain scenes, like certain scenes of the characters connecting and, you know, just like Rebecca's redemption moment and like the Beards Forgiveness moment with Nate. Like just the way I, when they're on the bus and they're singing the Bob Marley song in Amsterdam, like I felt those in my body and I think that's what I love about the show too is like, yeah, there are actually a lot of shows that portray negative emotions and they drag them. but it's like, there's like art made from the negativity without also acknowledging that there could be light within the dark. And that's what I love about Ted Lasso is like, yeah, he's, he's corny. He's punny. He's like funny. He's all these things and he's the sad and they showed that and it's like, I really, my passion is like the range of aliveness in life. How it's negative and positive, it's dark and it's light and it can all coexist and I just feel that coexistence so profoundly in that show.
Carolyn: That's a really good way to say it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, in the class that you took, I love, I love the author Susan David. She's a PhD. She's an emotional science, social scientist. She's all these amazing things. She has a book called Emotional Agility. And I use her work a lot in all of my classes. It's my, it's, but she talks about the idea of the both and, the both, the hard and the good or whatever you want to call it, the heavy and the light and how when we're at our healthiest, we're able to feel all of those things at the same time without waiting for the hard to go away, without waiting for the bad, negative, whatever heavy things to leave in order to be able to feel joy or to feel peace or to feel content. And I 100 % agree with you. Like she says, one of the things that she says is she's like, being able to feel that range of motion is what makes us human. Like that's what, that's like the gift of being a human. And sometimes it doesn't feel like a gift. Obviously, you know, like there's some emotions that most of us, many of us would prefer to avoid, but when we feel them and we learn that we can feel them and we're not going to fall apart or whatever kind of word you want to use and that we can also be happy at the same time or we can feel peace in the middle of the storm, that's when there is a balance to life that is so beautiful and really whole.
And like you said, like it is a body thing too. I think you can't, until you can kind of connect your feelings to your body. It's hard to trust it. It's hard to trust the heavy and the light or the hard and the good or whatever you want to call them.
Caitie: Yeah, I remember. So I just finished taking Carolyn's Ted Lasso six week class. And one of the things you said during class, I forget what week it was, that really stuck with me was that our body is designed to metabolize emotions. Our body is designed to be able to vent out emotions and we should be able to, or we need to be able to trust that we can metabolize sadness, that it's gonna move in and through our bodies. Our body is designed to do this. Often we get stuck in wallowing. Like we get stuck in being afraid to feel rather than in the feeling. And it's the fear of the feeling that we often get stuck in rather than the feeling itself. And I, yeah, and I can see that. And I've experienced that as I was watching the show too.
Carolyn: Yeah, and I was talking to a friend about this yesterday. And, you know, you think about breathing, like you had a start at the beginning of this podcast with and something I've been working on in the last nine months is to actually like create and have a meditation practice. It's not been easy for me. I mean, for anybody out there that's like, I can't do it. It is a practice. It's just like anything else. Like it's something that I've had to be kind of, I just have to try it and do it.
But what I am really learning is I think that, I know having done it now for the last nine months or so that meditation allows me to connect to that. What I think is one of the most powerful things to me about meditation is finding that emotion that feels good, whether it's peace or joy or content or secure or safety and meditating on that and actually allowing yourself to connect to and feel it even when you're not feeling it. Like that's something that I think is what I love about our bodies and our minds is that we can do that. We can connect to those feelings that feel good through breath and through meditating and through writing even when the middle of our life is a big old tornado. So yeah, that's something I've been working on a lot which I love to talk about.
Caitie: Yeah, yeah, I feel like that's a really good segue into the listener questions, which are about, which are about journaling. Well, the first one is about journaling, at least, and I think that this would be a really good opportunity for you to kind of just keep going on the role you were going on. The first listener question that I did receive knowing that your class is about using Ted Lasso as a launching point for journaling prompts and therapeutic journaling, what do you say to someone who says, I hate journaling? What is your go-to advice for someone who says, like, I just don't like doing it, and I always get stuck on it, I can't motivate myself to do it, I feel good when I do it, but I always have a hard time starting and I don't really like it, and that kind of the general question is just like, I hate journaling. What comes up for you?
Carolyn: Love it, great question actually, because I think there's a fair amount of people that that's how they get stuck. I would say two things. So I have my Ted Lasso class, but I also have all these other classes. And in both of them, one of the things that I think helps, I know helps people is giving them structure. And giving them ways to journal. I think there's so many things out there in the world. There's the you know, books you can buy and all of those things and all of that is great and works for somebody that wants to journal. But some of the idea of like, well, you know, I have like 400,000 notebooks on my desk at any one time. So here you are, here's your huge blank piece of paper, fill it. That's very overwhelming to somebody that's never done any journaling or that has done it and doesn't really like it.
And so one of the things I do in my classes is I'm especially what I call my level one class, which is kind of a techniques driven class is I teach, I think over the six weeks, it's 12 or 13 different, really easily accessible journaling techniques that a person can use when they're stuck. They can be as short as two or three minutes. They can be as long as you want them to be. And I think when a person is given a little bit of structure, it helps. I like to also say it's like yoga. I love yoga. I cannot do it at home. I cannot do it by myself. Like if I put on a video on, there's how many videos on YouTube for yoga? 400 million. And I get tired and antsy after about 20 minutes. But if I go to a class, I love it. I love it. There's a teacher telling me what to do. There's the community. And that's actually where, if I'm gonna talk about why I think my classes are fun, it's because you're not doing it by yourself. You're in community. You get to hear from other people. You get to see what works for some people and what doesn't work. You get to try all these things out. And there's that accountability of like, okay, I'm gonna come to class next week and I know we're gonna talk about this.
So that's probably why I love what I do. And I do know that the I hate journaling is a big thing. The other thing that's really important about the way that I do my classes is nobody ever has to share their physical writing. And that takes some pressure off of people too. I think people are afraid that they're not good writers. They have trauma from high school English class or whatever that happens to be. So what I would encourage somebody is even if you think you hate journaling, can I give two really easy techniques real quick that somebody could use? The first one, it's like a technique, but it's not a technique. It's literally a timer. That's it, so it's a five minute timer. I use timers like you know in my class, partially because it's a class and we have to have some structure. But the five minutes, I call it, it's called a five minute sprint. You make a five minute timer and you just, you have a topic, whatever you need to write about, and then you just write. There is something about knowing that you're gonna be done in five minutes that people are like, I can do five minutes, that's okay, like I can make it. And it's a little bit like, you know, I have some workout stuff that I do and I know it's only a 20 minute, you know, weight workout, I'm like, I can do 20 minutes. But somebody was like, go to your office gym and start lifting weights until you're tired. Like, I'm just not gonna do it. So like knowing that there's a timer is helpful. So that's one, super easy. Choose whatever topic you want. Write about cats or the sky or whatever.
And then the other one I would say is, let's see what's another good one that I would give you. I think the other one that I would do, is the five, four, three, two, one, but written. So many people know the idea of the five, four, three, two, one, it's your five senses. And you write down instead, a lot of people will do it like in their heads, but in writing, you can do it with more adjectives and you can make it more creative. So you write down five things that you see in your world, four things that you hear, I think. I always get the numbers wrong. Three things that you feel tactily two things that you smell and one thing that you taste. And what's beautiful about this exercise is it's very, very grounding and allows you to ground yourself in your space. And it may not seem like it's journaling, but it is. It's mindfulness, it's mindfulness and it's connecting you to your body and it's connecting you to the things around you. And those two things are hugely healing and hugely grounding. So yeah, I guess my encouragement would be to take it easy on yourself and to give yourself some grace and to know that. There's lots of great techniques that are out there that can make it more accessible and a little bit less overwhelming. So, yeah.
Caitie: Yeah, yeah. I want to, I want to comment on both of the techniques that you just shared because I think that they actually are really profound as much as they can seem simple. The first thing with the timer, honestly, timers have saved my life because they make me realize that I don't need that much time. I don't need as much time as I think I do to create a shift. I've started doing the practice wherein I set the timer just for one minute, two minutes maximum, and just sit in silence. And I used to think I needed to like do a special breathing exercise in that time and like, you know, solve world hunger and like, but really if I could just take one minute, which isn't that long, just sit in silence, do nothing. That takes like a lot of pressure off and helps me operate with more clarity. And it's, I have time. I have time for one or two minutes. And the timer ensures me that I'm not gonna get, helps me get insured that I'm not gonna carry away, get carried away that sentence didn't come out correctly and create that gentle structure that you're speaking about.
And then the five, four, three, two, one thing, I really used to be like, bullshit. Like, what is that gonna do? Like, okay, five things I can see. I can see my window. And if you really do it, I promise you this is one of the things that if you really do it, you're like, whoa, I feel grounded. And we actually did it during your class. And I, at the time, was renting my friend's room in London and was whipping around London doing a million different things that I had to get done while I was there. And I hadn't taken any time to just take in how beautiful her room was. And we did the five, four, three, two, one. And I was like, wow, how lucky am I to rent my friend's room in London for a couple of weeks? Like, and it just, it really shifted a lot. That was getting swirly for me. And I encourage you, if you're listening to try that five, four, three, two, one thing slowly and just be open to it causing a shift or just be open to it allowing you to operate with more clarity. Yeah.
Carolyn: And I'll say this, you don't have to remember which five, four, three, two, one. When I do it in my writing, it's really just like, just write down whatever it is that you see, whatever you hear. And here's what I say to both writing clients and regular clients. This is super helpful if you are having an anxiety situation in your life. And what I say is it doesn't take away the anxiety, it doesn't eliminate it, it doesn't make you, I'm free of anxiety. I always say it's like a little pressure valve release on like a pressure cooker where it just goes, okay, like I am here, I'm in my chair, I am in my car, I am wherever I happen to be. And it allows you to connect, like you said about embodying, back to embodying, a lot of us when we are anxious, we dissociate. So there's, you know, our brains are somehow outside of our physical bodies and they're very disconnected. And this exercise to me, is the first step to reconnect them. To reconnect them and go, okay, I am in my body, still don't feel good, but now I can reconnect to that physical part of who I am and not just be floating above me. So it's another powerful thing about it.
Caitie: Yeah, yeah. The floating above me thing is real. I mean, in a world that is full of notifications and things outside of us and the fact that we can be connected to news that's happening so far away from us, it is very, very easy to live in your head. It makes a lot of sense if there's an urge to do that. And at some point we've got to drop back into our bodies and operate from our bodies. So yeah, I could even start this podcast with five, four, three, two, one. That would also be a good one. Maybe I will. So next week, tune in.
So in the spirit of combining our passions, we're back to Ted Lasso with the next question, which is, you know, as someone who is super fan curious, this is not my question. This is someone who's starting to get interested in the show. What are your favorite fun facts that you've learned about the show as you've been researching it? And honestly share whatever comes to mind.
Carolyn: I follow a ton of Ted Lasso Instagram accounts. You probably, maybe you do too. These people are like the real researchers. It's impressive. These people, yeah. And there's one that's called, there's so many. There's one that's like the Ted Lasso Easter eggs, where it's these funny things. What I think is, I don't know if I have any weird facts, but as I am rewatching it. So Caitie just took what I'm going to start calling season one, Ted Lasso journaling. It's not really season one, but I'm going to create another class because people want it. I think I've taught it four or five times and people want me to do a whole new, so it has research. I am having to watch the entire series again, which has been real, real burden on me. And I just finished season one like last weekend. And what is so amazing to me is how amazing the writers are. Like how the writing connects all the way back to the very first episode, all the way to the very last one. And that's where I think, I mean, gosh, that's where I think, that's why I think this show is so amazing is that the, and what I also think is crazy is written by lots of different people. It's not just Jason Sudeikis. I did have a dream. I met him the other day. He was so nice to me.
Caitie: I’m sure he would be.
Carolyn: Because I would be such a ridiculous super fan it would be embarrassing. But so I just think every time I watch it even just this last time I was like did have you ever noticed and maybe it's only in season one so you know like the door that goes into the training facility by the parking lot they're in the first season they're often in the parking lot. It's the Rupert Manning training center have you ever noticed that? Like that's like what's on me either. I like I've watched this so many times. So I'm curious to see if that changes by the end of the third season. Like there's a sign above the door that says Rupert Manning Training Center. Crazy. So the other thing that I love is I went to Richmond last summer with my daughter. She was studying abroad in Rome. We met in Rome and then we went all over Europe. And there is this most adorable store right across from where they filmed the entrance to Ted's apartment, you know, so like where Ted's apartment was. First of all, if you can go, you should go. It's so, have you been there? Have you gone? It's so great. Like it's not touristy. It looks exactly like it does in the film. And I just wanted to live there. I wanted to move to Richmond. Have you been to this little store that I'm talking about? You know what I'm talking about? They're like a Italian like couple and they make these beautiful suits and I always think that's probably where they went to buy Ted's Nate suit. This is my, you know, making of things. But like I have this most adorable key chain that they like hand embroidered. So cute. They're just, I mean, I just love it. And I think, and what I love is that these people love Jason Sudeikis and the whole crew, which makes me go, these people are real. Like they were really kind to the people that they interacted with in this town or the town wouldn't still embrace them, like wouldn't be making Ted Lasso merch. I was kind of thinking there'd be like merch stands on the corner and there's not. But this cute little embroidered key chain from my office. But yeah, I don't know. What would you say? What are your like fun Ted Lasso facts? Do you have any good ones?
Caitie: Yeah, well, I have a fun fact, which is pre -dates Ted Lasso, but it is about Jason Sudeikis and I being connected. So Jason Sudeikis' sister was my Bible study leader in university, which is ridiculous. First of all, fun fact, I used to be a Catholic. So that's the first fact that I'm a recovering Catholic. So maybe there's two fun facts here. The second fun fact is that Jason Sudeikis' sister was my Bible study leader when he had his first kid.
Carolyn: That's so cool. Can you write her and be like, can you get Jason on my podcast? Like, do you remember me?
Caitie: I feel like she would definitely remember me, like for sure, because it's a small Bible study. But it's hilarious because it's like now I'm such a super fan of his and at the time I was like, who's Jason Sedakis? Jason Segel? I was like, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Jason? But I just, I had no idea who he was and now I'm such a super fan. So that's a fun fact about me.
But what I love to learn too is the ways in which they kind of foreshadow all the different things that are gonna happen later, like how they set up the whole like Wizard of Oz kind of thing and him moving back to Kansas. And I thought that that was really, really beautiful. And I'm trying to think of something else. I love the story of how Roy Kent was cast. I love that he was not supposed to play Roy. I love that he wrote the show and then he was just like, this is really embarrassing, but I, but I think I want to play him. What do you think? And I just, I love that story because it's also one of those stories about like a door that almost didn't open that was always supposed to. And all the little things that fell into place to kind of make the show what it was. And I mean, he's obviously like one of my favorite, favorite characters in TV of all time. And yeah, I would go for that. I really would.
Carolyn: My daughter went to his standup. I was so jealous. She went to see him live. So good.
Caitie: I really want to go to his standup. And I love the way the cast is so genuinely close. And like you were saying, in Richmond, people do have stories about them walking around and being so kind while they were filming. And they're like, yeah, while they were filming the Christmas episode, like we were talking to Jason. I'm like, are you serious? He wasn't like, I'm on the clock. Like, you know.
Carolyn: Ugh, I love that. Yeah, nah, yeah, right? No, I love that. I also, my other funny thing, this is just a Instagram funny thing is I had, I posted probably, actually, I think it was before I created the class. Because there was some episode where I was like, holy cow, in the third season, I'm like, this is insane, like how much they are. Can you hear my dog whining?
Caitie: Yeah, but it's okay. Don't worry about it. We keep it real.
Carolyn: Pebbles. Come here, good girl. Anyway, so I tagged a bunch of them, including Jeremy Swift Higgins, and he reposted my story. It was like my biggest, I felt so famous. I was like, look, Jeremy Swift reposted my post. And I was like, my kids are like, mom, he has like 10,000 followers. So I don't think you're gonna go viral because of Jeremy Swift.
Caitie: I mean, I love that my friend still found your class though. I don't know how she was connecting with you.
Carolyn: I know how. One of my biggest fans is the person that runs the Ted Lasso inspo class. Inspo, and so she actually, it's awesome. She's now taken three of my classes, but she reposted me, let's see. And that's how I've, it's actually been really, really fun because she did the repost and then she, where is it? Yeah, and she just keeps reposting for me. So that's where I get, which is really fun because yeah, it's the Ted Lasso underscore inspo is the one. And she, I just tagged her once for just randomly, like, cause I'm really not very good at Instagram. It's not my fave, it's hard and she reposted it. And what's so much fun is that I have been getting so many really true fans from this post because the people that follow these Instagram accounts, they love Ted Lasso. And that's probably one of the, I mean, you experienced it in our class. There's something about us, Ted Lasso lovers that I don't know. I think there's something that like, I mean, so many people love the show, but people that love it enough to write about it, there's a camaraderie. I mean, in that class went really deep, really fast. And people were sharing about real life things and in appropriate ways, but like in really cool, beautiful ways that just were, you know, everybody was connecting. And that was super fun. So, but yeah, that's how your friends probably found it was through that, that Instagram post would be my guess. Yeah, because I'm literally the worst marketer in the world. It's like my least. Yes.
Caitie: But the power of a group though is so important and that is how other people find it. And that's the last thing I wanted to talk about today because one of the things that really hit me about the show that just made me feel a surge of inspiration was the way Ted moves to a foreign country and finds this chosen family and goes really deep with these people who he hasn't known for that long. And it was in a way that felt so heartwarming and realistic. And in a way that as a traveling digital nomad who just found home in Lisbon made me feel so hopeful. I was like, you know what? I can go find my chosen family somewhere. I can go find my team. I can go find my thing. And that's something a lot of people who listen to the show really struggle with is like, finding community in a digital world and finding community in an increasingly isolated, intense world. And you're someone who moved to Costa Rica, you know, not from Costa Rica originally. And I am curious if as both a therapist and someone who relocated to a different country, you know, what tools do you have for building that chosen family, finding that chosen family, finding that community, yeah.
Carolyn: Great question. You know, I think a big part of it, you know, and where we live here is a pretty, there's people from all over the world. Tamarindo is, it's almost like this bizarre little melting pot. It's amazing. I mean, there's Argentinians and Italians and Costa Ricans and Colombians and people from the US and Canada and Europe. And, you know, so it's this really amazing, I always say like when the World Cup happens in the soccer world cup. It's like literally you can go to a different restaurant in town and you find all the different countries watching their shows.
But I think a lot of finding community depends on the stage of life you're in. So I don't think there's one answer. You know, like I think there's when you're in your 20s and I think that can be a really hard time. There's not, you know, like of trying to because everybody's kind of finding their way. I mean, it's a very long time ago for me, but I was kind of lucky to fall into a group of friends that at that point I was also pretty involved in church and so it was a group of church friends and those friends are you know and we just lived life together and you know and I think you know and then I had children and so there's you know you kind of make community with that way and now I'm an empty nester and when I, if I think about trying to move to a new community now, I have that thought a lot of like, how do you rebuild a community? Cause it's super important to me. It's one of my highest kind of values. And I think it takes risk. I think it takes a little vulnerability. You know, you think about if you want to go back to Ted, which of course we do, and you think about how he starts off by bringing cookies to Rebecca. And she's like, mm-mm yeah, no, we're not doing this. Like, we're not doing, you know, like how many of us would be like, well, I'm not bringing her cookies ever again. Like, forget that. She doesn't want to talk to me. I'm going to like, just take a step back. And he didn't. He just, you know, obviously not most of us are maybe not quite that persistent, but he, he took that risk to every day to build that relationship. And I think that's the biggest thing in this digital world is that we can hide behind our screens. We can hide behind, I mean, and hiding is maybe too strong of a word, but we're in our screens, we're back here, but when we are willing, we have to be willing to try new things. We have to be willing to keep trying and to keep going. And so like, let's say you go to something, you know, you decide you wanna, I don't know, you wanna go to a, you go to a writing class. Like you go to like a writing group, you know, like a physical writing group and you're like, the first time it was not good. you know, sometimes you just gotta try twice.
I always told my kids when they were little, when they would start a sport and activity or they didn't want them, like you gotta do it for one month, just one month. If it's horrible and like somebody's being mean to you, that's one thing, but it takes time to build that community and it does take risk and vulnerability, which is not always the most fun thing, but it's beautiful when it happens and yeah. And I think when I think about my classes and my groups. I love that I've created digital community because I don't think that's easy to do. I have about 100 people that have taken classes from me over the last three years. And I have a group of about 10 or 15 of them that have taken like eight or nine or more classes from me. And that is a community in and of itself. I call them my OG writers and they have, we have this, there's some people in Canada, there's some people here, there's some people that are nomads like you and they're a little bit all over the place all the time. But they have shared their life with each other in this digital way and it's worked. And now we are a community. When we're all in town, we get together and we have lunch and we try to kind of connect when we can, which doesn't happen very often, because it doesn't really need to because we have this online relationship. So, yeah.
Caitie: I like that, time, risk, and openness. And I think some other things that come to mind from the show too is the intergenerational friendship between Keely and Rebecca, right? Just like being open to like, maybe my friends aren't gonna be my exact age. Like I have a lot of friends who are 20 plus years older than me, who are some of my deepest connections and…yeah, individuals who you would never think maybe you're going to connect with might become really profound and important connections for you that you have a lot of fun and meaning with. And yeah.
Carolyn: Well, and those relationships, the intergenerational ones can be so healing if you have intergenerational challenges from your own family. And you know, there's, I think those are, I agree with you, gosh, if you can find those. I have some great women in my life who, you know, are 20, less, some of them less than 20, 15, 20 years older than me. And I love those relationships. Like they are so important to me. They're such a, a huge thing in my life in so many ways. So I feel very, very lucky to have had those. But they also, they took time and commitment and all those things. It wasn't like an overnight kind of situation. So yeah.
Caitie: Right, right. And I think like there are some ways in which we can kind of accelerate connection via openness and risk. I do think if we're going to accelerate connection in any way, it does need to be you putting yourself out there and being open to different types of things happening and, you know, showing up. And the time piece is really important. I'm starting to notice after spending almost a year here in Lisbon that I'm finally in a place where I'm walking down the street and people recognize me and I walk in the pink coffee shop and I can say hi to people like this feels so good And yeah, yeah, I'm trying to there's something else I was gonna say about the show, too.
Carolyn: Let me say, I have one thought real quick of the other thing is that sometimes we find really cool connections when we become the mentor of somebody else. So like go younger too. So, you know, if you're in your twenties or your thirties and you're like, I have a passion for like for you, you know, like some, I have a passion for young girls. And I mean, and I know you do it in a professional way, but like, you know, is there a cool way to connect with somebody teenagers in because like, even if you maybe they don't become your closest friends, there's such an amazing gift of that connection. And you're giving them a gift, but they're giving gifts to you too. So like sometimes the looking younger is a beautiful direction to go to, to fill that kind of community bucket.
Caitie: Which kind of, yeah, it kind of reminds me of the Roy Kent, Jamie Tart dynamic as well too. And I'll come back to the Roy Kent, Jamie Tart dynamic and the willingness to forgive and the willingness to, yeah, be open and let people evolve. I think that there are a few people in my life who I was like, eh, no, we don't really jive. Like the first couple years I knew them and then suddenly we did. I think that happens a lot with our siblings because our siblings are people who don't leave our lives ever, but can you give that an opportunity to happen with friends? and people who kind of come back around in your life and maybe have been there for a little bit in the background. And, yeah, I love those conversations. Yeah.
Carolyn: Well, something you might find too, living outside of the US is that I found here is my closest friends are people that I probably, if I had lived in my US world, I wouldn't have been friends with. Like, not like the, it's just, we have very different, we wouldn't have necessarily been in the same circles. And it's something that I love because I've met so many different, come here. She's like, it's time, it's time to go outside. I've met so many different people from so many different walks of life and so many different, you know, and it's just such a really, it's a really good, cool gift of being willing to meet people that you're like, okay, maybe they're not who I would expect to be in my community, but that could be the coolest community you could possibly have, so, yeah.
Caitie: Right. Yeah, I agree with that too. I mean, travel has a way of reminding you that anything's possible and to just open up your mind. So I really am grateful for that too. And yeah, I really loved this conversation about combining two passions, journaling, community, kindness, all of it. And I look forward to having it again. Maybe we'll have a season two episode. You can tell us what you're learning.
Carolyn: I'm excited. I have so many ideas after watching just the first season, so we'll see how they're gonna go. So, it's fun.
Caitie: That's great. Yeah, I mean, I really I hope I can take the season two class and now that I'm actually settled in one spot, you know, be able to come to every single class and not watch the recordings of some of them. But Carolyn, can you just tell people how they can find your work, how they can find your classes?
Carolyn: Yeah, probably the best place to find me is on Instagram. I am @your.story.cr, which is my name, Carolyn, and my middle name, and also Costa Rica. So your.story.cr, or my website is yourstorycr.com. And my dog would like to be a part of the end of this conversation. That's probably the best place. And I am not great at Instagram. It's social media. I'm trying to figure it out, but my children call me a boomer, even though I am not a boomer. But I do always post new classes on there. That's probably the only thing I really use it for. And if you want, you can contact me and get me, you can get on my email list. So when I send out kind of my whole list of classes and so, but you can do all of that from my Instagram. Instagram is probably your best bet. And then I try to keep my current classes on my website as much as I can.
Caitie: The fact that you and I are connected is evidence that you're not bad at Instagram. I mean, I think that there is a very, I don't, I don't like it either in a lot of ways. I try not to be too boxy about it. I'm like, I, you know, it's not like I hate it, but it's like, yeah, it's just very challenging to be like, it's hard.
Carolyn: It's uncomfortable sometimes for me, but I think it's hard because here we are in this world of trying to heal people from or help people heal from a variety of things. And I took a really great marketing class that was for people like us that are helpers. And it was like, you have to remember that you are trying to connect people with the things that you can give. Even if it feels like it's yucky because it's social media that, how else are people gonna find it and how else are people are going to get the healing that they need. So you're great. I love your Instagram. It's super fun. You do a great job. So, but yes. But the fact that you found me, yes. Thank goodness for Ted Lasso inspo for reposting me to get me outside of my personal little tiny bubble of followers. But yes, I love, I'm always teaching new classes about every two months I start a new series of classes so people can connect and I have, I'm trying to fill a Ted Lasso class now, by the time this posts, maybe it'll already have happened, but people can reach out and I'll put them on a list and yeah, super fun.
And I'll say this, even if you don't love Ted Lasso, I have so many other classes. So you can take a journaling class that has nothing to do with Ted Lasso. If you want to just kind of learn how to journal in a way that feels less scary, you can take my level one class, it's super fun. So just no Ted Lasso clips in that one. So that's the only downside.
Caitie: Yeah, the only downside. I don't know why someone wouldn't want to do it, but yeah. Thank you so much for your time today. If you enjoyed today's episode, please leave a five star rating on Apple or Spotify or wherever you're tuning into this show. More importantly, though, share it with someone if you think there's someone who would really benefit from hearing content about journaling emotions community Ted Lasso Carolyn and her work and moving to Costa Rica You're just an interesting person. Like I love that we're connected like this. and Yeah, this I will be back here next week with another solo episode nutrition Q&A and until then I hope you have a peaceful rest of your day Take a nice deep breath before you dive into it. Bye.
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