This is Dr. Rhadi Ferguson and welcome to another edition of coffee with Rhadi. I hope you’re having a great day. Up to this particular point, I wanted to share a few things with you about what’s been going on in my life. As you know, we’re getting ready to celebrate Thanksgiving in this part of the globe in the United States. This is a week where people eat an enormous amount of food and stuff themselves to the point of redundancy, all in the name of being thankful. Well, I have not participated in this tradition and yours. For those who follow me, for those who know me, you are not very aware that on Thanksgiving when everyone else is zigging and zagging. I go super hard in the opposite direction during the fourth quarter of the year, because Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas tend to tie in with fourth-quarter weight gain, and people attack during the New Year New Year’s resolution always end up in the same places they were in.
My weight currently is as high as it’s ever been. I’m going solid 247 pounds, I’m not happy about it. I’m not sad about it at the age of 46. I know what needs to be done, and I’m currently doing it. I know you can’t work this off, you can’t run it off, you can’t back it off, you can’t lift it off. And I’m putting in the small steps of discipline to get the weight off. I’ve hired a coach. I know some of you are saying, oh boy, aren’t you a strength conditioning coach? Don’t you coach health and wellness? Yes, I do. I’m giving you the same advice that I give my clients, I’m taking the same advice myself, which is everybody needs a coach and I need a coach too. So like you, I hire a coach when I need a coach.
Some of you guys don’t hire coaches, because you think you can do it on your own and listen, more power to you. But I understand that the best way to do this is to get a coach. So I got a coach, and I’m making the adjustments and the changes. it’s going pretty well. Now, what’s been going on in my life? Well, many of you know that I got divorced a few years ago, as much as I don’t like to think of my life as being like pre-divorce or post-divorce. The reality is, that’s really how it is. And it’s really how it is until you get past the hump in your maturity process. This therapy and there’s healing and there’s forgiveness and there’s reconciliation and continued therapy and then the reconnection with God. Then there’s so not your personal life, and then you go through this, “I’m not good enough” stage and then you go through the “man fuck that bitch stage.” And “I don’t need that motherfucker stage” and then you go through “all my life is ruined stage.” And then you go through this whole, “I’m living my best life,” like, you know, you walk around on top, “I’m living my best,” you’re lying, you’re not living your best life.
You’re living the life that’s been given to you, you’re doing the best you can with what you have. And then you go through this, you know, oh my God, will my kids be okay? stage. And did that ruin my kids? Or what do my kids ruin in the process? And how can I save my kids and then you realize you have to save yourself if you can save anybody. Then you go through this whole feeling guilty for wanting to save yourself first, and then it just gets to be a lot, I didn’t realize that there was so much more to the whole divorce process, I could probably write five books on it. The problem is that going back and writing all that stuff down and, and going over those thoughts and those feelings again, might put me back in somebody’s office again, back on the couch, I don’t need to do that any more than I need to do it. You go through all these thoughts and sometimes they happen in waves, sometimes they happen concurrently, and some go away and some lesson with time. But through it all, the key is to work on becoming more and more compassionate.
Understanding that I’m not the only person that’s going through this. Other people have gone through it before and they’ve gotten through it, some people are going to go through it and some people have gotten through it. And I talk about being compassionate because the divorce process can make you very callous, just by the way of the process.
After all, some of that callousness is required to push through and get to the other side. And that was good. So I used to get pissed when people say it’s better when you get to the other side of it. And I had no idea what the hell they meant. But now I do. And I’m on the other side of it, I’m not done with it. I’m on the other side of it. And you know, it’s better. It’s not necessarily great as I have some more to go but man is better. You become okay you can even become great, but you always worry about the impact of the process on your children. You know, you have to devote time in that divorce process to personally, recalibrating, and personally revising and personally restructuring yourself and your life and you wonder why you’re doing that for yourself, how much your children got chipped up in the process, I had to go back and reread a book called The legacy of divorce by Judith Wallerstein. She did a longitudinal study on it.
In that book, they go over case studies of children who went through a divorce with their parents and adults who watched us parents experience divorce in adulthood and looked at the effects that it had on them on their spouse. It looked at relationships from both kids who come from a divorced household, their ability to stay together, let’s just say that, you know, the best are added like a 55% failure rate. People who come from divorced households, man, they’re fighting a losing battle. And they’re going uphill. Just the divorce experience has tainted my kid’s worldview and that lens about marriage about family. It has brought a level of cognitive and experiential ruination on their lives that they can’t get through a run-pass as it pertains to the marriage process and per the data. I mean, you can listen to me and you can shake your head no and you can tell when you can run around and speak in tongues and throw some oil on and pray… You can, I believe those things too that everybody doesn’t fail. But the ability to succeed is less than a great deal when you marry somebody who comes from a divorced household, it makes things super, super difficult.
I know parents who are together and their first piece of advice to their kids when they get older is man doesn’t marry anybody who comes from a divorced household. And I can understand why they would do that. I get it. But I had to reread that book by Judith Wallerstein. I see some of the things that I need to talk to my kids about so that they can head off some things in the past, you know before they enter as they enter into their lives, because there are just some things they just can’t fight. They watched things go well. They have no clue about why we split, I don’t have any further in-depth reasoning behind that either. To be honest with you, I wish I did. They don’t have any clue at all. All they know is everything was going great. And then everything was not. That provides them want to lower their anxiety when dealing with anybody to the point where they think, Hey, man, one day somebody just got up and just leave. And I get it, that’s their experience. That’s what they saw. That’s what they know. That is their particular truth and That’s going to be a tough one for them to deal with. Because they don’t see it as being a problem right now.
My kids are young, they’re not going to therapy for that. And I’m also sending them to therapy for stuff that may happen in the future. That’s just something they have to deal with and work through just like everybody else. Being in the street and the dating challenges? Navigating the dating world, man is it’s strange. When you’re single, you’re over 40 You aren’t the catch, you know that you thought you were, and even if you think you are, the fact of the matter is this is you what’s left. I mean you what’s leftover that all the good stuff was taken already and you got dumped back out, you got thrown back out into the pile of cards. You’re what’s left and not necessarily what’s best. And that’s what and that’s how you think of yourself. You got to kind of reframe how you think about yourself. And nobody goes to the grocery store and grabs the milk with the close to the expiration date on it when they sort through the milk and grab you know, the youngest milk if you will. And nobody picks the fruit that has all the brown spots on it and the bruises that we know when it comes to some fruits like plantains and if it’s brown like that, I mean it’s ripe, but nobody’s looking for that. they pick the one that looks fresh and untainted.
With that being said… I had to find out that everybody who was out here is not what’s left. Some people left. Some people got left. Some people made a left when they were when they should have made a right. And some people are far too left this for the right people. And that that means that people are just different men. You know, therefore, the people who are in the pool of the available people. As one of my favorite Soca artists, Kerwin Dubois said in a song right for somebody, he says, You know, I may have, I may have been wrong for you. But I’m writing to somebody. And you have to go into the dating world and with this with that mindset that might not have been right for you, but I am right for somebody. And you have to get to the point where you when you say I hope you find the right person for you to get that’s just part of the healing process. And I want everybody to be happy. I want my kids to be happy man, I want my ex to be happy. I want them and I want everybody to be a happy man. Listen, if I can look back and know that I did my best. And to know that in my doing my best things worked out best man.
You know that is exactly what faith is. And what I did is I jumped all in on the marketing side and they make a ton of money, but I didn’t invest so much that I was able to make it to the pandemic and this is what I want to leave you with today all of the issues of life and all the situations that you go through require some type of investment. So be very aware in life that what you invest. Where you invest. Where you invest is where you are. Where you invest your most important currency, which is your time. That’s what your heart is. And understand what your heart is, is what your mind is also, and your mind and your time must be protected and properly invested at all costs.
In the meantime, be on the lookout for the Black Friday sale that will drop very, very soon. The two of them one is at www.gripfighting.com The other one is at www.SwitchIn6.com
. Those particular Black Friday sales would be that’d be kicked off in the next one or two days here and take care. Remember, I love you but God loves you best.
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