Dear Valentine

From the episode:
"I don't know what it is, and I'm okay with not knowing what it is." - Brandy Little

"You're also only seeing through your own lens too, and your own lens is so limited." - Tonia McIntosh

"You basically break your own heart constantly just by the thoughts that you have, because you put yourself through situations, you start visualizing all these scenarios, and you become completely immersed in these thoughts. Your heart is breaking because you believe that it's all true. You break your heart a million times, and you didn't even need to do that, because none of it really happened." - Tonia Mcintosh

"We have to leave room for our assumptions to be wrong." - Brandy Little

"When I travel abroad, I started to change my assumptions. After being burned and scammed quite a bit, I decided that, if I wanted to be safe, I had to  assume that everyone was out to hurt me, harm me, or scam me. It really sucked because sometimes you just want to trust people, and I probably shut the door on potential cool experiences." - Brandy Little

"It's such an art form to learn how to weave through these things and like not let it change you." - Tonia McIntosh

"If you had to assign high school me two adjectives, one would be too trusting and the other would be naive." - Brandy Little

"If you lead with trust, those things can still happen, but when you're leading with fear, it's almost like you're guaranteed fear to come." - Tonia McIntosh

"I do believe everything happens as it should." - Tonia McIntosh
 
"Tonia and I have followed a non traditional life path." - Brandy Little

"That's what I need, and 'need' is the key word. If someone identifies something they need, listen, listen, listen." - Brandy Little

"I think the one thing that I trust the most of all is that everything does work out as it should." - Tonia McIntosh

"I do think that people that are meant for us are going to love you through all of that, and if you lose some people along the way, then maybe they weren't meant for you and maybe they'll come back." - Tonia McIntosh

"Don't force something to stay in your life, especially if it doesn't bring you joy." - Brandy Little

"I am just going to love what we had, release it, and look at what I do have." - Brandy Little

"You can look at what you have, or you can look at what you don't have." - Tonia McIntosh

"To trust myself enough means if something comes up, I'm going to be able to figure it out, or if something bad happens to me, I'm going to be able to make it through it." - Tonia McIntosh

"There's all these times where we're like, 'Next year I'll be on that trad path,' and it just never happens. And we realize that we're just not on the path that society's laid out." = Brandy Little

Quotes Mentioned

"Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me." - Randall Terry

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From the episode:
"If you ever go into the bookstore and realize Tonia is in this bookstore, there's three sections you will fine me in: One is the notebook section, because I keep buying notebooks. The second section is the main section I'll be in, which is the self help section. I'm obsessed with self-help. The third section is the new age section." - Tonia McIntosh

"Tonia doesn't use notebooks. If there is anything I could succeed at, it might be to get Tonia to just write things down in her phone or a notebook, or really anywhere." - Brandy Little

"I devour books." - Tonia McIntosh

"The heart of it is beautiful and the heart of it is real, and that's really all that matters at the end of the day." - Tonia McIntosh

"You have to embrace the parts of yourself that are harder to love. You have to love yourself holistically, like as a whole being. You have to love all the parts of yourself. So, you can't just be like, 'I love this and this about me, but this and this, these parts of myself I hate, or I'm not even going to acknowledge these parts of myself.'" - Tonia McIntosh

"There's intent and actual outcome. My intention is best, but is the result also going to match that intention?" - Brandy Little

"Everything you do is a trade off - When you say yes to something, you're saying no to something. When you're focusing on something, you're not focusing on something else." - Brandy Little

"Everything really just comes down to what you're maximizing, but there's usually some sort of costs involved, and so you have to figure out what matters most to you." - Brandy Little

"There's certain places where you can shine the light, but if you're shining the light on these areas, then there's going to be a shadow and in different places, because a light breaks." - Tonia McIntosh

"Light and dark are kind of two sides of the same coin." - Tonia McIntosh

"The goal is to get to a point where you're just fully loving of all parts of yourself and embrace them as they show up and in whatever manner that they show up." - Tonia McIntosh

"Love yourself as a caterpillar - you don't have to wait until you're a butterfly to love yourself." - Brandy Little

"It really is about the journey and not the end points." - Brandy Little

"Light and darkness is a spectrum." - Tonia McIntosh

"We're all capable of casting light and we're all capable of casting a shadow, because that's what it is to be fully human." - Tonia McIntosh

"Sometimes you have to make a loving choice for yourself and it ends up hurting people. Sometimes you have to make those kinds of hard decisions." = Tonia McIntosh

"Sometimes our actions create shadow." - Tonia McIntosh

"It's also worth recognizing not just the shadow within yourself, but the shadow in others, and try to make space for those people. But also, forgive yourself for the space that you can't hold for someone." - Brandy Little

"Wow! How interesting this shadow episode got dark?" - Tonia McIntosh

"You have to know your own boundaries, what you're capable of, and what kind of space you're capable of holding for someone." - Brandy Little

"Knowing your boundaries is really important, because then you know how much you can give and when you have given all that you can." - Brandy Little

"Maybe the shadow is everything that is behind us." - Tonia Mcintosh

"I think we have like five or six different definitions of the shadow self." - Brandy Little

"I know we don't like to talk about dark things that much, but there's value in it. If it were a book, we wouldn't be in that section." - Tonia McIntosh

"We can't ignore all the parts." - Brandy Little

Books Mentioned
The Social Leap: The New Evolutionary Science of Who We Are, Where We Come From, and What Makes Us Happy | https://amzn.to/3sR1myM
Crime & Punishment | https://amzn.to/3rqEINp

Quotes Mentioned
"I cried not so much out of a sense of loss, but from the pain that almost always comes with change, it has a sad kind of freedom." - Dolly Parton

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From the episode:
"One of the things that I've been just thinking about is our attachment to things that may not really serve us, but we think we need them." - Brandy Little

"We attach ourselves to what's familiar even though sometimes it's not necessarily the best thing for us. We know how to navigate this world, the familiar. We don't know how to navigate a world without it." - Brandy Little

"We seek out the familiar. It's terrifying to go into the unfamiliar and to be vulnerable in that way." - Tonia McIntosh

"Forward note." - Tonia McIntosh

"I think a lot of it has to do with consciously making choices versus unconsciously making choices. It's a whole different ball game when you are consciously choosing something, because you have to be honest to do that, you have to really think, and you have to really look around you and be like, 'I have to say some hard things to say to myself right now. Not only do I have to say some hard things to myself right now, but I have to hear those things that I'm saying, and really know that what I should be choosing something different than what feels good.'" - Tonia McIntosh

"You have to accept the option that maybe the way you were thinking about yourself, the way you're defining yourself, the way you're living, isn't the only way, and that's really hard when you've been living that way your entire life or for years. There's more ways than you can even fathom and you don't have to stay there. At some point, it becomes a choice that you stayed there and you decided to not listen to yourself because it's hard and you made that decision, which means you can easily make the decision in the other way too." - Brandy Little

"Reflections are backwards." - Tonia McIntosh

"Backward note." - Tonia McIntosh

"I'm looking at this point and how I'm this person, and it's evident that I've changed. The question to ask is, 'How much of this change did I participate in?' If you ask yourself that question, you'll be like, 'Wow, maybe not a lot.'" - Tonia McIntosh

"What kind of person do I want to be? Do I get a choice in that? What are my core beliefs about myself, about life, about people? Is this serving me in the best way? Am I diffusing my energy to the point where it's not going to the places that I really want it to land? Just question, question, question, really evaluate and let possibilities that you wouldn't normally think to be an answer to be an answer." - Brandy Little

"We get stuck on autopilot and we're just going through life and we think we know who we are, but forget to listen to ourselves or hear ourselves. We need to synthesize through our hearts and our minds, because your mind will lock in on something and be like, 'This is how it is.'" - Brandy Little

"It's strange to be comfortable in something that's painful." - Brandy Little

"What is failure and how I define that matters? What I'm comparing it to matters, because I can make sure I fail in everything if I compare it to the perfect." - Brandy Little

"I always try to extract the most I can from any moment." - Brandy Little

"How am I reinforcing the things that aren't serving me?" - Brandy Little

"It's hard to take responsibility." - Tonia McIntosh

"Sadness is an interesting emotion, because we so get programmed into how we move through sadness and how we feel through sadness, but if we're conscious while we were moving through our sadness, we can choose to move through that in a new, beautiful way." - Tonia McIntosh

"We have a quote, unquote, good emotions and negative emotions, like they're all beautiful if you allow them to be." - Tonia McIntosh

"What if nothing's wrong with you? How would you move through life differently if you believed that nothing was wrong with you?" - Tonia McIntosh

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From the episode:
Learn more ways to speak love and, equally important, learns ways to hear it and receive it.

Books Referenced:
The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love That Lasts by Gary Chapman | https://amzn.to/2IhkeF8

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From the episode:
"Perfectionism is the random rules that someone made up. Who gets to decide what perfect is?" - Tonia McIntosh

"Just start or keep on going, because I think so many times people won't unless it's perfect." - Brandy Little

"You denied its existence, because it wasn't perfect, and if that's how life worked, none of us would be here." - Brandy Little

"There's nuggets of gold in everything." - Tonia McIntosh

"Instead of pigeonholing it into this idea that you've created it to be, you can let it be something else you could never have conceived." - Brandy Little 

"Assign a different meaning to it." - Tonia McIntosh

"That's what perfectionism is - it's judging everything that you don't feel like you should be." - Tonia McIntosh

"It's tradition." - Brandy Little

"I don't know why we do this, but we tend to make things more difficult, like things do not have to be as difficult in life as we make them. A lot of times, we create our own problems. I encourage you to sit down and ask yourself, 'Does it have to be this difficult,' 'Am I getting in my own way,' 'Am I making this harder,'  'Is there a way that I can make this easier,' and 'Do I need to live in this pain?'" - Brandy Little

"How we define perfect is very important, and maybe there is no such thing as perfect or maybe being perfect is being flawed. You hold yourself and other people to these fictional bars that you've set for yourself and others. Let the bar go and let yourself and others be where they are. You don't know the experiences other people have walked or where they came from, how could you think you have the measure to judge them by?" - Brandy Little

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From the episode:
"It really is a gift to yourself to fully let stuff go, to see yourself as the new version that you are, to allow yourself to be that person, to not let your past define you, to not let certain things define you, even the things that you like about yourself, and to really go into things with that newness." - Tonia McIntosh

"For real transformation to happen, you have to let go of who you are." - Tonia McIntosh

"You think things need to be a certain way, and it doesn't." - Brandy Little

"You have to let go in order for a choice to be made, because anytime you make a choice you're saying no to one thing and saying yes to something else. It's always a trade-off." - Brandy Little

"I want to discover the path instead of a carving out the path ahead of time and trying to follow that carved path." - Brandy Little

"The life of an explorer is never knowing what you are going to find." - Brandy Little

"We only value what we do, because we felt like we struggled to do it, but the thing is, you're always going to struggle. You don't need to manufacture it, you don't need to force it, you don't need to hold onto it, you don't need to make it your identity, and you don't have to add onto the struggle." - Brandy Little

"Just look for the next track and then choose which direction you want to go." - Tonia McIntosh

Books Referenced
"The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life" by Boyd Varty | https://amzn.to/2KKcUUh 

Quotes Referenced
“Some people try to turn back their odometers. Not me, I want people to know 'why' I look this way. I’ve traveled a long way and some of the roads weren’t paved.” - Will Rogers 

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From the episode: 
"Each person has a different relationship with 2020." - Brandy Little

"For 2020 for me, it's like a scratch off. Here's your penny, and you need to scratch it to find out what is underneath, and different parts of you will emerge that you didn't even know existed." - Tonia McIntosh

"I always pick a word to have my year themed by, instead of doing a resolution." - Tonia McIntosh

"I don't have to carry all of my entire past with me into the future." - Tonia McIntosh

"The future is a blank slate.  There is room for whatever you want to create, and I think that's the gift of new beginnings." - Tonia McIntosh

"In less stressful times, we have the comfort of doing things that allow us to ignore feelings within us. We don't even realize that we find things that mask those feelings from ourselves or what's really going on." - Brandy Little

"Change yourself, that's the only thing I can focus on and control in my life." - Tonia McIntosh

"For real transformation to occur, you really do have to let go of who you are now and trust that who you're going to be is the person that you're meant to be." - Tonia McIntosh

"In doing the inner work we become pillars, and those pillars become something that people can lean on, or see an example from - that's where we elevate as a society." - Brandy Little

 "I just had this crazy thought and I have to interrupt you with CaterPILLAR!" - Tonia McIntosh 

"I think that's been a struggle with 2020, we just feel like victims to all of the things that are happening around us. People are just reacting to it and they feel powerless, vulnerable, alone and scared, and that is a terrifying place to be, but it's also the place where you become stronger." - Brandy Little

"We all have different capacities to serve." - Brandy Little

"Just because you can't see it, it doesn't mean that what you're doing doesn't matter." - Brandy Little

"Zoom in. Take a break from taking on all of the stress of the world and just notice what's around you, and just take those moments to be grateful for all the things." - Tonia McIntosh

"What we focus on affects us." - Brandy Little

"We're talking a lot about inner work and everything, but also there's times where you can't do it alone. In 2020, what people are struggling with is feeling alone, and no one should feel that way, because we're all in this together. As much as it is important to be a pillar, it's also important to allow other people to be pillars for you. Receiving is equally as important as giving. We forget that because receiving feels selfish, but it's not, because, when you're receiving, you're allowing someone else to be that pillar - you're allowing them to give, and that's a gift in itself." - Tonia McIntosh

"All of the setbacks are really steps forward, even though they don't seem like that." - Tonia McIntosh

"2020 time doesn't have to be a throw away. It's like we're rushing to the end of the pain, but that pain is always here.  You're always going to be dealing with something. I just want to challenge us all to find a way to still grab life for ourselves and make it matter. I just don't want us to think that we have to wait for that to end before we can live again, because you can live and you can find moments to live within pain. These moments are only here once." - Brandy Little

"I'm hoping that 2021 is what everyone is hoping it will be." - Brandy Little

"2020, I will remember it with great fondness, because it's the year that broke me out." - Tonia McIntosh

Therapy Resources
Half of Us | http://www.halfofus.com/
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services | https://findtreatment.samhsa.gov/
Psychologist Locator | https://locator.apa.org/

Books Referenced
"The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life" by Boyd Varty | https://amzn.to/2KKcUUh 

"Devotions: The Selected Pomes of Mary Oliver" by Mary Oliver | https://amzn.to/3aSMavm

Quotes Referenced
“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.” - Mary Oliver

Podcasts Referenced
The Aubrey Marcus Podcast

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From the Episode: 
"You can find evidence for whatever you believe. You have to choose what you believe, and I don't think there's any more important cause in the entire universe than to believe in yourself." - Tonia McIntosh

"Your magnet, that sense that lives inside of you, if you don't get to share that with people, other people might not have that spark inside of them go off. It's a chain reaction." - Tonia McIntosh

"Whether you believe in yourself or whether you don't, you're going to find evidence for that." - Tonia McIntosh

"Surround yourself with people that do believe in you, because even if your muscle isn't strong in believing in yourself right away, you have those other people who see something in you and eventually you're going to see it too." - Tonia McIntosh

 "I'm a big advocate for hyping yourself up the same way you hype other people up." - Tonia McIntosh 

"I understand that these thoughts exists, but I'm not going to let those thoughts keep me from doing what I want to do." - Tonia McIntosh

"You can take your weaknesses and shift them into strengths." - Tonia McIntosh 

"A lot of growth and a lot of confrontation with yourself happens in the hardest moments, the darkest moments in your life." - Justin Green

"I want to make sure I love what I'm doing or else I can't do the work." - Justin Green

"You have to eventually listen to your heart, because it doesn't get easier. It's only going to keep getting harder and harder. You'll keep finding a deeper rock bottom until you decide to make the dreams that you want to see." - Justin Green

"What helped shift my mindset on this, especially goals that we set on ourselves, is not to necessarily think of them as goals, but think of them as targets. Because, if they're targets, you're heading towards them while they feel right and keep getting bigger and bigger, and through that process another target might show up and it's bigger than the one that you're heading towards. You can just shift where you're heading and go a different direction. It's great to have goals, but don't be afraid to shift those goals and when you realize they are not necessarily working out for you or a bigger target pops up." - Justin Green

"Trust the timing of your life. The timing is all aligned for a reason and the way that it's meant to be aligned. Everything that you've learned, all the experiences that you've had because of the path you've walked so far, are gonna lend themselves to wherever you're going now." - Tonia McIntosh

"It only makes sense backwards." - Tonia McIntosh

"You can't help, but be an artist when you're an artist." - Tonia McIntosh

"If you're catching yourself consistently putting off trying, because you're afraid to jump, at some point you do have to make the jump. I don't think anyone else can decide when that time is besides you." - Justin Green

"It's hard to let go of things." - Tonia McIntosh

"I do think there's a lot of adventure and really great things that can come out of just making a choice and going with that." - Justin Green

"Advocate for yourself." - Tonia McIntosh

"There's no right or wrong way to do life and it's always shifting and changing, and your journey is always shifting and changing. I guess if I had to like boil it down to one piece of advice, it would be just don't be afraid to follow where your path is taking you because the more that you resist it, the harder you're gonna make it on yourself." - Justin Green 

"Sometimes it is best to fold and try the next hand and see what happens." - Brandy Little

"I think a lot of people think that giving up or not seeing something through is a failure, and it's not, it's a lesson." - Justin Green 

Quotes Referenced
Still looking for the fashion designer quote Tonia mentioned. 

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From the episode:

Books Referenced
"What to Say When You Talk to Yourself" by Shad Helmstetter | https://amzn.to/3ongMtk

Quotes Referenced
"Comparison is the thief of joy." - President Theodore Roosevelt

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From the episode: 

Books Referenced

Quotes Referenced

Connect More
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instagram | https://www.instagram.com/listenhearter/
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