Kay:
Hey there family and welcome back. We talk a lot here on the Kay & Shi Show about what to do in order to live your best life. But today we’re going to talk about things that we don’t do.
Shi:
In this series of installments, we’re looking to bring you some of the actions and activities, and behaviors that we intentionally do not partake in and engage in.
Kay:
Now, a lot of these are things we do not participate in now but that we have participated in in the past and that have come to bite us to the point where we have removed them from our lives.
Shi:
So, all four of the things in these series are things we used to engage in, and we want to start off with one that we probably did the most, and this is something we no longer do and that is talking smack.
Kay:
Now talking smack is a really fun thing for many, many people also known as sh*# talking…
Shi:
Or judging.
Kay:
…or judging but it can really honestly make you feel good in the moment.
Shi:
Right. Being able to criticize or raise an eyebrow at someone else, instantly bonds you with whoever you’re raising that eyebrow to. We like to think of this as that lowest form of social currency, that easiest way to connect is by making yourself feel included with someone else which means identifying someone else as an other and in a world where everything from fashion to hair choice, to music choice, to the shoes and socks you wear can be judged or criticized. You can make an “us versus them” out of anything and this is what is the trap of smack talking is because it allows you to bond with somebody but in a pretty negative and low vibrational way.
Kay:
Well, one of the sneakiest things about talking smack about other people with other people is that as that becomes a part of your vernacular, eventually it wiggles its way into your own mind until you’re talking smack to you about you and the world around you.
Shi:
And what you focus on expands. So, if you’re focusing continuously on criticizing and judging others, you’re just training your brain that that’s what is acceptable and what you want it to do. And boy, we let our brains get trained down that direction for a long time and there are lots of nefarious ways that this comes up, not just in that, oh, I want to be hurtful to be hurtful. But we have an instance that we want to share with you that was really, I think the turning point and that clarity epiphany moment for us that this was something we needed to address in our lives, and it happened on an airplane.
Kay:
Back in 2018, we had just landed in; I forget what airport it was, or I think probably Orlando.
Shi:
Yeah.
Kay:
…and as is customary on an airplane, you know, people got up really quickly and instantly flooded the aisles. Now, a woman particularly got into the aisle and rushed forward and immediately rushed maybe three seats in front of our seat from the back of the plane. It didn’t really seem like she had any place to go and just rushed to that point of rushing to get ahead of the crowd.
Shi:
Yeah. You can imagine this. You’ve probably been in this situation before, right. We all know the protocol is that we’re going to single file exit from the front rows towards the back. So, when someone stands up in the back immediately upon landing and rushes to the front of the plane and inevitably gets stuck by other people. She happened to get stuck in front of our seat and the level of indignation that we felt about not being able to deplane and deboard in the way that we think and agree is socially acceptable really had us fired up about it to the point where we were commenting on it, pointing to her, talking to each other loudly about it. In fact, loudly enough that she could hear us.
Kay:
We talked so much smack about this particular woman that she actually ended up slowly taking steps backward until she was almost at the seat that she had originated at and when we were finished with this encounter, we deplaned. She actually did deplane right before we did and we were in the airport lobby kind of waiting on our baggage and Shila and I looked at each other and said, do you know what? I don’t think we want to be those kinds of people.
Shi:
I do not feel good about… Sure, I got the behavior change that I wanted, and we shamed her…
Kay:
Yep.
Shi:
…into stepping back, but we felt so gross about it, and we realized that we had come from this place of self-righteousness and total indignation about our expectation of what the world needs to look like. Now, of course, there’s something to be said for how we hold people to social norms and expectations, but that wasn’t what this was about. This was about the fact that the characters that we want to be aren’t the kind of women who act like that in a trivial situation where somebody surged forward a few seats and we would let our emotional status get hijacked to the point where we were talking so much smack and focusing so much on it that we did affect the behavior but we probably also affected her psyche and self-esteem and was that really worth the cost to do that to another human being? We ultimately decided it wasn’t.
Kay:
Now you’ll be happy to know that since that instance, we have worked very hard on not being quite so vocal when those situations happen, particularly the airplane example. Now we fly quite a bit and the flight that we had right after that flight, somebody got up and surged forward and Shila and I kept our mouths shut, but we gave each other a big look.
Shi:
Big looks.
Kay:
Right. And now it has evolved to this point four years later where I barely even know when it’s our time to get off the plane because not paying attention to the people in the aisles has become the new way of doing things and we’re more relaxed. We are not focused quite so much on others, and it saves our internal experience from getting riled up and then projecting onto someone else in a way that you’re not proud of.
Shi:
So, the first in our series here was of things we don’t do is talking smack. Certainly, we at least do this far, far less, and bring a lot more intention and attention to what we do. But the next one up is one I’m really excited to talk about, and that is the behavior of drinking alcohol.
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Shi:
Alright, starting off the Kay & Shi Show here in this installment with things we don’t do and this one is drinking booze.
Kay:
Now we quit drinking in 2019 so it has now been almost three years.
Shi:
Three and a half years.
Kay:
Three and a half years of sobriety from alcohol for Shila and I, and man, what a clear three years this has been.
Shi:
A clear three and a half years indeed and the time leading up to that felt the opposite of clear. It felt murky. It felt muddy. It felt like there were tethers on our potential and on our characters and we didn’t realize how much tethering there was until we did this. So, in 2018, we have a few experiences with alcohol that really start to make us question our relationship with alcohol. Now, Shila here speaking, being seven years older, have had a lot longer of a relationship with alcohol than Kay, you have, and particularly Chad and I. It was like a cornerstone of our relationship, but going out to a bar, using it for celebration, using it for consoling, using it for its Tuesday afternoon and you want to cut loose and have fun. It really was one of those things that were really present in our lives and our identities way more than we realized. So, Chad and I had a tradition to take one month off a year just to kind of keep our drinking in check and give our bodies that reset. But at 2018, by the end of it–Kay included–we were all feeling just kind of gross, knew we were definitely doing the one month off but wasn’t sure if we might go a little bit longer than that.
Kay:
So, in 2019 we took off January from drinking, and by the end of January, Shila and I kind of looked at each other and we were like, “Okay, let’s just try another month. Let’s just go into February,” and then by halfway through February, I told Shila, “I’m going first quarter. Let’s make this happen. First quarter,” and she’s like, “I don’t know. I don’t know if I can do it.”
Shi:
A big trip next month.
Kay:
We got a lot of things going on. By the end of February. Shila was on from the first quarter too and by the end of Q1 of 2019, I know I was definitely starting to sing the song of “I’m not sure if I’m ever picking that bottle up again.”
Shi:
Yeah, well, you definitely knew we wanted to, “Let’s go for the whole year.” We can do it for a year and by August of that month, we’d both lost dozens of pounds. We had so much more clarity. We’d saved a bunch of money. We had still created memories that we remembered and that nothing was embarrassing or brown or fuzzy or any of those moments where you have to question. All of that had been removed. So, we had all these amazing, amazing benefits and it was from a single elimination, not a category of eliminations, not daily choices you have to make. Just one thing, turn the switch off, not drinking alcohol and we saw this insane stacking of benefits and we really started to question the prevalence of alcohol in our lives, in our identities, and in our society at large.
Kay:
Well, one of the things that we were nervous about was that eliminating alcohol was going to eliminate the giggles, eliminate the fun, eliminate the silliness, eliminate the let loose. But it turns out that was us and not the alcohol and there was all of that still present in us without necessarily needing that out of ingredient of alcohol.
Shi:
It also eliminated things that we didn’t realize were happening all the time like negotiations, about who would drive on a certain night or negotiations about, “Oh, I don’t want to sign up for that early thing, because that’s a Saturday morning and Friday night means having some drinks” or trying to find that those designated drivers or worrying if you slurred in front of your kids in getting through the bedtime story, because–oops–you just had two champagnes, but you hadn’t had any food. There was all of this mental chatter that went away when we eliminated alcohol and then we realized how much social chatter there is around alcohol. I think our disgust with it really was summed up when we saw a sweatshirt in a shop that said, “I’m not slurring, I’m speaking in cursive.” We just saw that and both of us looked at each other like this is what we’re celebrating. This is something to be celebrated and realized how prevalent it is and how dangerous it can be.
Kay:
Well, it’s crazy how it gets promoted and accepted in such a way that makes people, I think, not realize the harm that it might be doing to their lives. In our family, there is a heavy history of deep alcoholism. We’ve literally watched it destroy people that we love time and time again. So, seeing on the shirt and on the dinner towel and on the “This isn’t wine in here, it’s just coffee,” on a mug and it being this ha-ha kind of funny thing or watching shows that have people that are literally drinking at all hours of the day and they seem just fine in the show, but we know that that is not how that would go down if someone were to be drinking at that level. So, it got almost creepy.
Shi:
It did and look, we’re not condemning alcohol. It has been a fixture of the human race for all of recorded history and in times of revelry or reverence or a celebration, it very well may be the appropriate thing. But if your family is like our family and has a history of alcoholism or if anything that we shared with you sounds a little close to what your experience with your relationship with alcohol is, we would definitely encourage you and invite you to join us and just trying out not drinking for an extended period of time and give your body and your mind that chance to recover.
Coming up next. We’re going to talk about another thing that we don’t do anymore and this one I’m excited to talk about in particular because it’s inspired by one of my favorite characters, Miss Lisa Simpson.
Kay:
That thing is eating meat and you’ll hear about that more tomorrow.
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Kay:
If you’re looking for a little bit of a deeper dive into the dos and don’ts of the Kay & Shi lifestyle, we want to invite you to our Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter channels.
Shi:
Please join us on social media. You can find us at kayandshi, K-A-Y-A-N-D-S-H-I. We’d love to have you over there and connect with you and engage with you. As Kay mentioned, we share all kinds of things that we do and don’t do, and we love to encourage you and support you over on the social media universe. So, we hope you’ll engage and connect over there and we’ll follow and like you back.
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Kay:
Okay, fam we’re back at it again with things that we don’t do, and we’re really excited for today’s episode because this has been a real game changer and it was kind of a random thing that we didn’t really intend on doing that just happened and this thing that we don’t do is eating meat.
Shi:
That’s right. We’re both vegetarians. So, we still engage in dairy and eggs, but we do not eat animal flesh as they like to say. We don’t eat meat at all and this decision for us came together towards the end of 2019. So, if you tune into the last installment, you know, that was the year that we gave up alcohol by the end of that year. It’s not like we were looking around ready to give up the next thing. It was just sort of this next progression. We both had been encountering materials that were talking about how good it is for the environment, encountering materials that we’re talking about how terrible eating meat can be for your own personal body and your health, and really wanted to start exploring this, which is actually a passion for mine–sister Shila here–from back when I was a kid. I was inspired by Lisa Simpson who goes vegetarian on the Simpsons and did a long time ago. I think I was 10 when I first gave up red meat. I was around 14 when I gave up red meat totally and was vegetarian until about the age of 20 so I was glad to get back to these roots here. But we felt so good when we gave up eating meat.
Kay:
Truly. It wasn’t like we’ve said something too that wasn’t intentional and…
Kay & Shi:
on this day!
Kay:
…we’re going to give it up. But I think it was about three weeks prior to Thanksgiving of 2019 and we had just finished out about a month prior reading through the book, “The Untethered Soul” which if you’re a listener here, you likely heard about that in our book club episode from last week. As we finished that book, there was just this sense, at least for me, personally, of this oneness with life and the unity of things that were alive. I couldn’t, for me, separate me and the meat that was on the plate. Now our mom has been vegan for many, many years and we’re very proud of her for helping to crusade in this way for our family. But it was the first time that it clicked, at least for me and we were a couple weeks into it. I was a couple weeks into it, and I said, “Shi, I haven’t even meat in a couple of weeks” and Shi, you were like, “Me neither.”
Shi:
I’m like,”Weird, me either. I haven’t.” Then we said, “Well, maybe that’s the thing we give up for next year,” but neither one of us even touched meat really. I actually had three bites of chicken at the John Maxwell Christmas party in 2019. That was the last meat that went into my body. But other than that, you and I hadn’t even touched meat. So, by the time we got to January 1st, we were looking at, you know, four, six, almost eight weeks at that point and we just felt so good with it. It really felt like an easy life adjustment to make.
Kay:
Now, Shila mentioned it earlier, but it really is the number one thing that you can do for the environment. So, even if you’re not ready to give up meat wholeheartedly, maybe trying to just lessen the amount of meat that you intake in your diet as respect for our Mother Earth, because we need fast action in order to help curb some of the horrible things that are happening to our planet so that we can keep living here for as long as possible.
Shi:
Yeah, join Kay and I in not eating meat, and actually, you’ll join the three Morris children as well all do not partake in eating meat. They choose to be vegetarian on their own and Chad only eats about five ounces of Turkey a day on a sandwich. He has his ritual. It is what it is, but we would love for you to try it out too and we think you’ll notice a difference just like we did in feeling lighter, feeling better, and definitely feeling more connected and grounded.
Kay:
Tomorrow we’re going to talk about another thing that we don’t do, which is wasting time and we look forward to talking a little bit about how we maximize the hours in our day in order to not waste the precious time we’re given.
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Shi:
Alright, welcome to the final installment of the Kay & Shi Show here on the series, talking about things we don’t do. Now, in our first installment, we talked about talking smack. That’s the thing that we don’t do very much of and definitely bring as much attention to it as we can. The next two installments drinking and eating meat are things that we absolutely abstain from. Going to end off this series here with one that we’re going to talk about, wasting time. Another one that’s a little bit of that gray hat area. Of course, obviously, we waste some time. We are not efficient robots maximizing each and every moment and second. But we do, I think, do a very good job of doing our best to utilize and maximize the time that we do have and even some of those activities that might seem like wasting time, combining those with ones that are not wasting time in order to neutralize them out, I think is a great strategy I’m excited to share about today.
Kay:
I’m so glad Shi that you said that this is one of those gray areas and that we do find ourselves occasionally wasting time. You cannot be perfect 100% of the time and…
Shi:
Yes, we scroll on social media too long sometimes.
Kay:
Yes, but bringing more awareness to it. I think just at the beginning of this year, Shila, you said “I’m spending too much time on Reddit,” and you put a cap on that for yourself.
Shi:
Yeah. I actually moved it off my front page into my fourth page of apps on my phone. It just helps me because now as I’m taking that intentional swiping action to get there, I have the opportunity to ask myself, “Is this really what I want to be doing right now, and is there something more productive that I need to be doing right now?” “Wasting time,” that spending time not doing things that are productive is an important piece of your human development and your overall wholeness and balance. But what we really have tried to do is bring intention and attention to that time so that we can say, look, this is rest time right now and not letting rest time be, oops, I let 90 minutes get hijacked this afternoon. So, that was my rest time and now I’m going to take rest time is just one of those ways that we’ve been able to, I think, curb this a little bit.
Kay:
When we talk about being productive too, we’re not talking about producing only in the capitalistic sense. We’re not talking about maximizing every moment to work absolutely everything. But like Shila said, bring more intentionality into doing the things that we like. It doesn’t mean that scrolling on social media is wrong. It’s just that, is that automatically happening on your behalf or are you intentionally doing that, spending that time in a way that you intend to, instead of just allowing the time to pass as it passes based on the habits that have constructed in your life?
Shi:
So, one of the ways that I’ve been able to kind of compress this one here is I love keeping up on pop culture shows and certainly have my favorites and my genres and things. But there’s not a lot of TV time happening in our lives. So, I only watch the show that I want to watch while I am on the treadmill. Now, I spend five hours a week on the treadmill, which means I get five hours a week of watching something ridiculously not productive at all. “Marvelous Miss Maisel,” “Game of Thrones,”
Kay:
“Bridgerton.”
Shi:
“Bridgerton,” “Outlander,” “Emily in Paris,” “Ted Lasso.” I feel like I’ve been able to keep up on some of the best shows and that gives me a connection point, which I really appreciate, but not willing to spend five hours a week that’s not coupled with another activity for me that could be productive. So, this is one way where I get that wasting time without actually wasting the time.
Kay:
Back in 2016, we attended a Tony Robbins conference and I set a goal to read 50 books in a year. Now, the only way that that goal was going to get met–because there’s not a whole lot of hours in the day with businesses and with kids and all that good stuff–was to utilize time that I already had in my life and add books onto that. So, the time that I chose was car time and now our car time has become audiobook time and now we’ve added in the shower because we’ve been working from home quite a bit and car time has been less and less. But it’s allowed for that level of productivity and goal setting to come into a time when my mind is already open and would likely be spent either just listening to music that I’ve heard a million times already, that same playlist that you just put on because it’s in the background, or that I would spend thinking or ruminating maybe in the shower on something that isn’t as productive as allowing a book to come in and fill my learning cup.
Shi:
Right, and we also love to do audiobooks while you’re doing your laundry or your dishes, or maybe some of your food prep. If you want to groove and boogie, music is an amazing tool, but even if you took half of that time and just started listening to books then you can accumulate like Kay did and get 50 books in a year just by adding that to something you’re already doing. We’ve seen those things compress. So yes, we do waste time, but we do our best never to waste your time which is what we always say is your most precious resource and we do our best to maximize our own time as well so that we’re being intentional with the way we approach our time management.
Kay:
We’ve had so much fun getting to talk about the things that we don’t do here this week and appreciate you being with us. We will see you again next week.
Shi:
Thanks for tuning in to the Kay & Shi Show.
