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So good, so good, so good.
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You know, lately I've been feeling the grace to push. You know, something shifted recently. And, you know, I think you can feel it too, you know, like there's been this. This pull. And it's almost like, you know, a. A restlessness as well. But it doesn't feel like anxiety. It feels like. Like an appetite, you understand? Like a restlessness that is an appetite. You know, on this podcast, we talk a lot about grace. I think grace is a beautiful thing, and we need to have grace for ourselves. The grace to rest, the grace to slow down, you know, and the grace to take up space without producing anything, without performing anything, without proving anything. You know, the grace just to be. And I stand behind every single word every time we speak about that grace, because it's real and it's necessary, you know, but we are human beings, and the human experience is not a fixed point. It is a spectrum, isn't it? And right now, some of us are standing at a different place on that spectrum. Some of us are ready to move. You understand? You know, grace doesn't only look like stillness. Sometimes grace looks like deciding you're finally ready to find out what you are made of and who you are. And that's why today we are giving ourselves the grace to push. The grace to push. But we have to be a little bit careful with that word push, because it does hold energy for some of us. It carries the weight of every time someone used it to shame us. Or every coach, every parent, every internal voice has said, push harder as a way of saying that you are not enough. No, no, no, no. That's not what we're talking about today. Because you are enough. What I'm talking about is something different in hindsight, something necessary, something that lives on the other side of all. All that work in that healing that we have been doing, because we can. We take a moment for that. The work and the progress that we have been doing. I know we get so far ahead of ourselves and we lose track of our progress. It happens. But you are doing beautiful. I am doing beautiful. We are in this together and we are giving ourselves the grace to push from a different source, though, from a different intention. Man, intention is so important. I've been. I've been studying intention as of lately. For some reason, the word just kept popping up in my mind and I'm like, let's go deeper into what intention really means. So, you know, in some upcoming podcasts, we will be speaking on that. Because intention is a beautiful force. It's not just something that we say we want to do, but it's actually a signal we send out into the whole cosmos and universe to the most high. The next thing you know, all the energy that also was a part of bringing everything into creation starts to assist us by bringing what we want into creation as well. Intention is a force. I remember back in like 2019, I burnt out really bad. I was like doing more projects at once than probably I ever experienced. And I was making more money than I ever have received. So I was enjoying it. But it felt nearly impossible for myself to say no to so much opportunity. And it truly caught up with me. I pushed so hard that I broke my brain. I literally felt something pop in my brain, I remember, and I was forced to slow down. I was forced to learn how to be softer with myself. Not as a destination, but, you know, to nurture my foundation. And then I created a very strange relationship with pushing myself because I almost had like a form of ptsd of like pushing myself to the edge again because I never wanted to burn out again. So anytime I felt like the energy to go super hard, I'd reload myself back in. But then I realized the grace to push is an invitation, right? It's saying, I've done enough internal work to now be a little bit harder on ourselves, but from a place of love rather than lack to be more demanding of ourselves. Not because we are afraid of falling short, but because we. We are genuinely curious about how far we can go and what we can create or who we can become. Curiosity might be the only form of self pressure, I believe that doesn't leave a bruise. Simply being curious of like, what can My life become? Who can I become? What can the relationships in your life become? Can they become stronger, more beautiful, more intimate, more loving? The relationship with yourself, the relationship with your craft, with your work, with life, your lifestyle, whatever it may be, simply curiosity. You know, we know that there's, like, no end to the universe. It's limitless, which is a mirror. The universe is showing us that we are limitless as well. There's no ceiling. If we want to keep climbing, we can climb. If we want to chill, we can chill. If we want to discover more, there's always more to discover. And if we are content, we can be content. And some of us, we are in a space where, yeah, we want to push ourselves a little bit more, but we have to give ourselves the grace to push. Think about what typically drives us to push ourselves. Like, really just think about it for a second. In your own life, underneath the goal setting and the vision boards and the morning routines, what is the actual fuel? Because for a lot of us, if we are honest, it is fear. Fear of being left behind. The fear of disappointing someone, our family. The fear of, you know, our partner out outracing us. Or it's lack, you understand? It's lack. Like this gnawing sense that we. What we have isn't enough, that we aren't enough, and that if we just do more, achieve more and become more, then finally we will feel happy. So we're pushing from a wound, you understand? And that can be a great source of fuel. Like, I don't want to demonize it. It works. Yes. And we're gonna use that type of fuel at some point in life, but that's not the fuel that we can truly thrive from. That's the fuel we can step out of survival from. Because pushing from a wound feels like discipline from the outside, but on the inside, over time, it will feel like. Truth is, it will feel like punishment. And that's why it never lasts. It never sticks. And that momentum eventually dries out. And momentum is such a beautiful thing, having momentum within ourselves. Energy, that is just emotion. Because an object in motion stays in motion. You can only sustain punishment for so long before some part of you starts to quietly resent the life that you're building. You can only sustain punishment for so long before some part of you starts to quietly resent the life that you are building. If you are only pushing from fear, you may build a life that you start to resent because you never learned how to truly love it. You only learn how to create it from fear. So the grace to push is different. It's to push from presence, to push from permission. Permission you truly give yourself, not permission you're waiting on from someone else, but the grace to push from purpose that you actually believe in, in your presence, not purpose you inherited from so much fear.
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You understand, the thing is, the goal doesn't change, it's just the direction. But everything about how it feels changes. And that's what we're trying to do, right? We're trying to reconfigure, recalibrate, refine our source of fuel. You know, this happens to artists and creatives, you know, which we all are. You know, many of us may have started from a place of genuinely loving our craft. You know, rushing home from school or work just to paint for hours, edit for hours, sing for hours, whatever it may be. And then somewhere along the way, the very thing that gave us oxygen, we find ourselves starting to procrastinate or even trying to escape, you know, and the craft didn't change. Like the thing that we love didn't change. But what changed was the environment around it, the intention behind it, the system that got built on top of something that used to be magical for us. This happens with relationships as well. Beautiful, romantic, engaging in the beginning. And then over time, the environment changes and the thing, the person that you once loved, the intimacy you once had, starts to dwindle. But it doesn't mean that it's gone. No, it means that it needs a different feeling. Fuel source in the beginning. Ah, you're going off of newness a year later. Not many things are new anymore. So what is fueling you, you understand? And that is when we have to give ourselves to grace, to push, to discover, to place, effort to build, because it is precious. You know, I was thinking about how, like, parents work in a lot of homes, there's like a. A good cop and a bad cop. One pushes and the other protects. And when it, when it works, like when those two are genuinely in agreement, you know, that child can feel challenged but held at the same time. Because the bad cop can be harder because the good cop says so. Because they sat down, looked each other in the eye, and agreed we're doing this thing together or doing it for them. And it's in that agreement that is everything, right? Without it, the bad cop is a parenting right. They're just inflicting, you know, what looks like discipline from the outside ends up becoming harm with a productive outcome attached to it. And then the. And then the good cop, right, the good parent starts to See the back cop, you know, as a threat. Because there was never a shared agreement, a shared commitment to the person underneath that pressure. Because there was never a shared commitment to the person underneath that pressure. Most of us grew up and internalized only one side of that dynamic. We absorbed the backup, the voice that holds the standard, the one that calls us out, the one that shames us. And we absorbed it so completely we forgot that it was never fully ours, you understand? And we never got the good cop within us to come with it. And a lot of us operate like this as well. We are hard on ourselves without permission from a loving part of ourselves. No, we just wake up. We shame ourselves. You are not enough. We are the bad cop on ourselves and that's it. We are challenging ourselves, but we don't feel held as well. Because where's the good cop within us? Where's the love within us? Where's the grace within us? If you're going to push yourself, you need to have the good cop and the bad cop within ourselves in agreement. Hey, we're going to do this. We're going to push ourselves. We're going to go to the edge. We're going to discover, we're going to be accountable. We're going to commit. Yeah, we're going to make mistakes. But guess what? We're going to pick ourselves up from a place of love. We're going to give ourselves to grace to push the good cop in the back. Cop within you need to be in agreement or else we'll be running a one sided partnership for years. Hitting goals maybe, and then feeling empty, winning and then not being able to sit in it. Because before we even exhale the voice, the backup is already saying, you haven't done enough. Being hard on yourself without loving yourself first isn't really discipline. It's just a wound that works over time. And that is why the grace to push, it's. It's an agreement again. It's the good cop and the bad cop finally sitting down together. And the good cop saying, I see you, I trust you. Go ahead and be hard and I'll be right here to pick you up. When you need that love for yourself, it's you consciously coming from a place of love and clarity, deciding to be a bad cop on yourself. Not because you hate where you are, but because you believe in where you are going. The grace to push is not permission to go easy. It's permission to go beyond yourself, your current self, with the full blessing of the part of you that knows you are worth the effort, my friend. And that's what changes everything. It's not the pressure, but it's the agreement behind it. Yes, you're going to feel pressure, but there's an agreement behind it that, yeah, we are doing this. Yeah, our tone might shift just like when we're in the gym, right? We want someone to kind of yell, yell at us a little bit, tell us to push harder, right. Get that energy going. But as soon as you do that last rep, even if you fail, what does the trainer do? Good job. Good job. High five. You did that, right. That's the energy we need with ourselves. Some of us don't actually need to learn how to push though, right? We've been pushing our whole lives. The push is not the problem. The push is the only language we know how to speak, the only way we know how to operate. What we actually need to learn, what is actually kind of generally hard for us and countercultural against everything that we know or. Or we have been taught, is to trust that when we do rest, that the rest isn't failure, that the breaks aren't failure, that the season of softness that you were in wasn't a detour, that the slowing down didn't cost you the life that you were building, but it was a part of building it. And that's the grace to push. Knowing that we're going to go through seasons, you understand, and every season is a part of your becoming known. Some are going to feel a lot better than others, some are going to be difficult. And we're only going to realize in hindsight after what that season was doing for us. And I believe the true trick is knowing the difference from pushing from love and pushing from an old fear. Wearing a new outfit, right? Like, how do we know when that voice that says go harder is our highest self? And when it's just maybe your wound again or your fear getting creative. And I really don't think it's a clean answer or a 1, 2, 3 step process. That's not what we do here. I think it requires real time, honesty and reflection and, you know, checking in with yourself along the way. And just ask, is this curious curiosity or is this punishment? Am I excited by this new edge I'm trying to discover or am I afraid of what happens if I don't reach it? And sometimes it might be both, right? That's just the human experience, right? The motives aren't always pure. They don't have to be. The fear doesn't always leave. The goal is not purity. The goal is to have enough awareness that you can catch yourself mid push and ask a question. And if you need to adjust that alone, just the asking is different from where most of us are operating from. Right. That awareness right there is the medicine. Giving ourselves to grace, you understand? So we're shifting into a push with permission, with purpose, with presence. That's the difference in this season. Yeah, you're gonna go and get it, and you're permitting yourself to do it with purpose, with presence, which looks like setting a standard for ourselves and knowing exactly why that standard matters to us. Right? Not to anybody else, but to ourselves. You understand? This season looks like being willing to be uncomfortable, genuinely uncomfortable, and then making that place a new place of comfort for ourselves and being able to stay in that discomfort long enough to discover what it has for you. Because discomfort is not always damage. Sometimes discomfort is just growth asking you to expand. Discomfort is not always damage. Sometimes discomfort is just growth asking you to expand. So the grace to push, that's what, you know, that's what we really meditated on today. It looks like celebrating the push itself, not the result. Noticing that. Yo, you showed up. Yeah, you showed up. You've been showing up. You're literally still here, still alive, still breathing, which means you have been showing up. Even just clicking on this podcast is a form of showing up. You know, this podcast is not a distraction. This podcast is something that nourishes you. So you already chose yourself today in a way, and that matters even before the outcome arrives. So the grace to push looks like keeping the bad cop and the good cop in the same conversation and letting yourself be challenged and cared for. Can you challenge yourself and care for yourself at the same time? That's the magic. That's the sweet spot. Not in separate seasons, but at the same time, by the same you. Somewhere inside of you, there is a version of you that already knows exactly what they are capable of. They've always known. They've just been waiting for you to stop punishing yourself long enough to get curious. The grace to push is the invitation to finally go meet that version of yourself. Not to become them overnight. No, no, no, no, no. But we are knocking on the door and we are walking through it. And we are giving ourselves the grace to push, to see what happens. And not from fear of who you'll be if you don't. No, not from fear of who you will not be if you don't. But from love of who you will, who you might become if you do. I. Before I let you go, I heard something. The other day, I think it was on the gram and it was like an indigenous person sharing something and they were like, it's so interesting how people smudge their homes with sage to get rid of the negative spirits. And they were like, we, we smudge not to get rid of the negative spirits, but to fill the room with so much good energy that nothing negative, that nothing negative can even come into the room. And that's the perspective shift. Operating from good energy, from love, you understand, and rooting ourselves in that. And you will see how beautiful and abundant you will become. And you done know, in hindsight, everything is gonna be more than all right. I'll see you soon.
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Host: HINDZ
Date: June 22, 2026
Episode Theme:
A reflective journey exploring the nuanced idea of "the grace to push"—balancing gentle self-compassion with intentional self-challenge, and how to approach personal growth and ambition from a place of love, curiosity, and presence rather than fear and lack.
In "the grace to push," HINDZ explores an evolved understanding of personal drive. He invites listeners to examine not just how and why we strive, but the energy propelling us—suggesting that the most fruitful and healing form of ambition arises from love, presence, and authentic self-permission, not fear, shame, or lack. He draws from his own experiences, psychological insights, and cultural anecdotes to illustrate how we can gently, purposefully push ourselves toward growth while honoring self-compassion and balance.
HINDZ’s reflective style blends storytelling, gentle challenge, and affirmations, making this episode both calming and galvanizing. He reframes striving—not as punishment, but as a form of loving curiosity about one’s potential. The central lesson: real growth comes from allowing both the “bad cop” (discipline) and the “good cop” (self-kindness) to work in partnership, giving ourselves permission not just to push, but to do so from a place of presence, curiosity, and love.
This summary is intended to capture the essence, insights, and tone of the episode for new and returning listeners alike.