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Don't Cut Your Own Bangs
Welcome Back to 'Don't Cut Your Own Bangs': New Beginnings in Video Podcasting!
00:14:02
Danielle Ireland, kicks off the new video era of 'Don't Cut Your Own Bangs' by reintroducing herself, reflecting on her journey from ballroom dance instructor to therapist, and discussing her new children's book 'Wrestling a Walrus for Little People...
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Danielle Ireland
Foreign. Hello. Hello, this is Danielle Ireland, and you are listening or watching. Don't cut your own bangs. I wanted to take this opportunity with this new video to say hello and reintroduce myself. Whether you are joining for the first time or you've been a longtime listener since the podcast first began, I just want to welcome you back and welcome myself to the video podcasting space. I put it off for a long time, mostly because I didn't know if I could figure it out, and I was afraid. But that is also what this podcast is about. When I was transitioning from working as a ballroom dance instructor to building a career as a therapist and all of those twisty zigzags in between, there was a lot of uncertainty, a lot of doubt, and can I freaking do this? And what I have found to be true only every single time is that whenever I approach something new that excites me that I really want, that's just like, just teetering on the growth edge. I feel the same way every time. I don't know if I can do this. This is gonna be really hard. Maybe I shouldn't. And then I do a dance on of Procrastination where I learn a little bit, feel kind of frozen, and will re watch a comfort show. I'll binge Parks and Rec or Gilmore Girls. And then that feeling, that pestering knock on the internal doors like, hey, are you going to come play with us? And so then I try to pick the baton back up and learn a little bit more. And so, inch by inch by inch, I find myself here on video doing a podcast, which actually feels great. That's the other thing, too. It's like if you can get over your fear just enough to try to do the thing, and you start doing the thing you've been putting off almost every time you find out, oh, it was really not as scary as I thought or nor was it as hard as I thought. What I wanted to do was reintroduce myself if you're new to the podcast, and give you an idea of what you can expect in these upcoming episodes, because I'm figuring it out too. And then also just share a little bit about what I've been doing between the last time I was really recording consistently and now and hopefully humanize the gap and just kind of rev myself back up into doing something that I love, which is sharing the space with you. So what have I been doing? I wrote a children's book. It is called Wrestling a Walrus for Little People with Big Feelings. I'm A parent of two. I'm a. A four year old and a one and a half year old and they have big freaking feelings. I haven't decided yet if I'm going to openly curse. Every podcast I've ever done, I let myself curse. But somehow, like this, being on video, I feel different about it. So we'll figure that out along the way too. But I wrote this book, and I actually did a miniseries about the writing process with Emily Sutherland, who is the woman who helped me edit the book, who has been my children's book guiding light in this whole writing, processing and cultivating self publishing process. And so if you want to do a deeper dive into that, you can. It's only in audio, it's not video. But this, this book is a big reason why I'm excited in a renewed way to record this podcast and put it in another format that potentially makes it more accessible, because I believe in this book. I love this little book. It's a little book with a big idea. And that idea has been, I think, the heartbeat of what made me love this work in the podcast space, as well as the work I do as a therapist, which is when we confront a seemingly insurmountable obstacle, and in this case it happens to be a large feeling or a walrus. But when we confront something that seems impossible, we will use every well worn, familiar, mostly ineffective way to tackle that obstacle. Because what we want is for the obstacle to not be an obstacle. What we want is for the obstacle to change. But what I know through my own lived experience and what I know through walking hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people through their most painful processes is that what makes the obstacle move is an internal movement. Emotions are energy in motion. They want you to move. They have something for you to learn. And that's what I want to talk about here in this space. So we will have a combination moving forward of solo casts where it'll be like this with me, just you and me here in this space, talking about really key, specific takeaways that come through my practice as a therapist. I'm not going to be sharing any secrets from what clients are divulging personally, but there's this beautiful balance between specificity of a moment that seems so unique to an individual that almost the deeper you go in, what you find on the other side is this universality, this common thread that is bigger than the individual, that's bigger than the story, and it's something we can all learn from and grow from together. And then beyond the solo casts which will be generally between 20 and 30 minutes. We will have interviews again. I miss interviews. That was how the podcast began, mostly because I was afraid. I was afraid of the format. So I thought if I just bring someone along with me and I talk to them, I'll have something to talk about. Turns out I have no shortage of things to say. We want to have guests back. I want to talk to. I want to revisit some of our most popular interviews. I want to have them back and catch up. Where are they now? Because as a creator and as an ever evolving, growing person, when you shift out of the starting something phase and you're in a I need to keep it alive phase, that's a different point of view, that's a different energy, that's a different focus, and that's going to lead to a different conversation. And I want to know where people are, because I was right in the beginning of my podcasting journey with some of my favorite interviews of all time. And I've grown, I've changed, and I know that they have, too. So we're going to invite some old friends back. Not old chronologically, biologically, in the lifespan of the podcast, but we're going to invite them back and continue those conversations, as well as invite some new friends that either I've never met or you've never met. And we're gonna just grow and have really fun, in depth, meaningful discussion. But here's what you can expect every time, whether it's just me or whether it's me and a friend having a meaningful conversation or interview, what I really wanna do in this podcast is make big feelings feel less scary. I want to help make them feel. Feel easier to understand. And I want to make approaching them feel possible because it is possible. And whenever possible, as much as possible, I want to laugh. Mostly for my own healing and my own, I guess, selfish reasons. But what I have found to be true time and time again is when we are faced with truth, like not just something that sounds true or an interesting fact, but when we are hit with something that is undeniably true, it elicits a physiological response and we either cry in those moments or laugh. I hold a lot of space for tears, for people, and I think for my own sense of balance and from my own selfish need. I wanna laugh. And I think when you can turn challenges into something that amuses you or delights you, that is a real power move. I want to discover that in real time here, and I want to discover that with you. And so that is my goal. That's my goal with this next wave of the podcast. To share a little history and what has been going on in this break. When I got pregnant with my son, who's a year and a half old now, I lost a lot of extra energy reserve, which, on the face value of it sounds like, of course that makes sense. But I have also seen and felt the opposite. When I was pregnant with my first, I had this almost like extra adrenaline edge that made me want to go, go, go and make, make, make, and do, do, do. And with my son, I just felt like if there was like a Bunsen burner for my life force energy, it was dialed down, and not just in a depressive way, but my light dimmed. I was burning more and didn't have extra fuel to put into things outside of where I absolutely needed to show up. Therapy, home, my physical health. And that left me in kind of a limbic space with this. I loved making it, but I had changed, and I needed to allow this to change with me. The process of writing this beautiful little book for little people with big feelings helped me reignite a creative spark that I was missing. I started this about a year ago, and again, if you want to know how the book began, how I wrote it, why all of the little twists and turns into the actual nuts and bolts of how I wrote the book and how I made the book, you can. There's a whole podcast miniseries on that, specifically with Emily Sutherland. But all that to say is that that process of making this idea from an idea to a living thing, help light a new spark in me reignited my excitement, enthusiasm to show up here. The other experience that happened is that somebody tried to create a podcast with the same name, and I had to take some pretty strong action to protect the content that I put a lot of love and effort and sweat and energy into cultivating. And in that process of fighting for it, I had a fork in the road moment where I essentially had to decide, okay, you're gonna fight for it, but what are you fighting for? Are you fighting for it because you don't want someone else to touch it, or are you fighting for it because you still want to do something with it? And what I realized was that little push was kind of. It felt like a nudge, just a gentle nudge, saying, hey, do you still want to play with us? Do you still want to do something here? And then the answer was yes. So that was the other. And. And then I moved. I moved. Oh, I moved houses. And it was. It was a lot I am humbled. There's, there's experiences you hear about and you think you know about until you experience them yourself. And I did not understand what the energetic toll of moving a house with small children and for the people who do that all the time, have done that many times over. Maybe you get better at it with time, but damn, it is, it's, it, it takes a toll too. So for all those reasons and more, I had to, or rather chose to take a pause on the podcast. But I love, I love being back and I love that we're here. And another thing that's important too, especially if you're new to the don't cut your own banks podcast. So we have 172 episodes in the bank in the back catalog and I love every single one of them. But what I want to do is make for new people that are discovering the podcast for the first time. I want to make your lives a wee bit easier. And so what I've done is gone through and combed through the archives and the 50 most listened to most downloaded episodes, those are the ones that are going to remain and everything else is going to stay in the back catalog. A lot of great, great episodes and interviews and solo casts. But what you're going to see if you are just listening to this when you file back, you're going to see the top 50 most listened to most downloaded episodes. I hope you go through and listen to them at your leisure. I know there's a lot of content out there. I know there's a lot of places you can be. But yeah, those are some real gems that are sitting there for you. And mostly I just want to say thank you if you're still listening, thank you for being here. Thank you if you've been there since the beginning, thanks for still listening. Thanks for joining me in this new journey and video. I'm going to continue to learn and get better and hopefully improve. And this is going to be really fun. This is going to be an awesome adventure. And as always, your time, your care, your attention and your presence here, they mean the world to me. I look forward to adding value to your life, making big feelings feel less scary, helping you feel less alone because you're not. And whenever possible, as much as possible, finding opportunities to laugh because we deserve to delight in our life. We deserve delight. You deserve it. So thanks for being here. I look forward to continuing on this journey and just whatever you do, don't cut your own bangs.