Try something new, TSN. We have a saying that you should TSN every day. When we look at that from a medical perspective, trying new things, whether it's trying a new food or trying a new crossword puzzle, trying to do an activity that makes you uncomfortable, like reaching out to people when you have social anxiety. Anything that stresses you beyond your normal safety zone, when you try new things, you are flexing that muscle and growing your strength to be able to handle the next transformation to the next level. Welcome to Becoming Virtuosa, the podcast that encourages you to become your best virtuosa self. Each week Dr. Susan Crockett goes where the scalpel can't reach, exploring conversations about how to be, heal, love, give, grow, pray, and attune. For the first time ever, she's bringing the personal one on one teaching that she shares with individual patients to you on this broader platform. A weekly source of inspiration and encouragement designed to empower you. By evolving ourselves as individuals. We influence and transform the world around us. Please help me welcome board certified OB-GYN specializing in minimally invasive GYN surgery, internationally in the top 1% of all GYN robotic surgeons, a certified life coach, and US News top doctor, your host Susan A. Crockett, MD. Well, hey, you guys. Welcome back to The Dr. Crockett Show. I'm your host, Dr. Susan Crockett. I am a board-certified OB-GYN practicing in San Antonio, Texas. Welcome to the show where we go where the scalpel doesn't reach. Get it? That's kind of cute because what I do as an OB-GYN is I specialize in minimally invasive GYN surgery. That's right. My whole goal for being in practice is to make surgery easier for women. So I do all kinds of things like hysterectomies, endometriosis, fibroids, complex medical problems, patients that have complicated approaches from lots of different surgeries or obesity. Those are all the things I do as a minimally invasive GYN surgeon. We are the complex benign experts of the GYN world, and it is a total blast. I like to say I get to do video game surgery for a living and it is so much fun to see the great outcomes of our patients. Stay tuned for more of that as we are opening up our new office on Monday. We just finished moving our office. Yes, it's been five years in the making, but we have a brand new facility, and we are expanding to help do a better job of not only taking care of women but teaching more too. But today, we are filming The Dr. Crockett Show. I'm here with my host who is taking a nap next to me. Y'all, what do you think about this new color of scrubs? I walked in to the hospital this week with this color scrub on. They are the newest, I think it's called Sky Blue color from FIGS. I swear y'all, I need a sponsorship or at least affiliate links to FIGS because I am a walking model. Everywhere I went this week, everybody was like oh I love that color. Oh, those are cool looking FIGS. I'm like yeah look, even got this pretty little string, contrasting string. They feel like you're wearing pajamas all day. So, God, I love my FIGS. Anyway, the reason I'm wearing the light blue FIGS today is because we're talking about the fifth seed of the seven seeds. So for those of you just joining us, we have a curriculum that we teach here, and it is based on our logo. The seven seeds each represent a part of what we're teaching. We call them the seven seeds of the soul. The book is coming at the end of this year, but right now I'm doing teaching about each of the seeds. So the first one is be, that's about self-care. Heal, love, give, grow, which is what we're going to talk about today. Pray, and attune is the last one. So today we're talking about growth, why it's important, why growing is a vital part of being healthy and staying alive and living your best virtuosa life. So the last couple episodes in the last month, we've done some talking about just some really tough transformations that I've been going through lately. In fact, I call it going through the pinch of the hourglass. So the interesting thing about this metaphor is that we all go through times in our life, well most of us anyway, where we're going from one way of being or living to growing into the next stage of whatever we're supposed to be doing. So a great example for this would be like when kids graduate from high school and then they go off to college. That seems like a really amazing thing going from high school to college, but y'all, there's a lot of pinching in the middle there. It's very stressful. That stress of going through the pinch and the difficult times are exactly what create our growth and are the benefits of us that we can use to then teach others and provide value to the world. So going through the pinch, there's a country song. Golly, I used to listen to it when I was going through my divorce. It's something like if you're going through hell, just keep going. There's a light at the end of the tunnel kind of thing. So there are times in my life that I've been through serious difficulties. I've been through near bankruptcy. I have been through the loss of my first husband to a heart attack, the father of my children. My father recently passed away. I went through a miscarriage. Like the life has not been just a total piece of cake. But I can honestly look back at those things and see where my growth went through them. The most recent example that I talked about on the show, I think, was the two and a half year divorce that I went through that began in 2020. That process was so long and drawn out, and the education and the blessings that came out of me learning how to be someone who came out on the other side of that process with a greater capacity for love and teaching and sharing and patience and confidence and being able to handle my finances that I hadn't had before and pay attention to detail. There were like so many really rich lessons that I went through, and that was going through the pinch of an hourglass for two and a half years, y'all. People go through the pinch of the hourglass much longer than that. But I was going from being in an unhappy or unhealthy marriage to being a single person and thriving. That pinch was like this. So right now, our practice is going through something similar where we just physically moved our practice from a small building that we've been in for the last eight or nine years into this brand new facility, which is a new idea. So we’re moving from smaller budget, older office that cannot grow with us for the capacity that we want to be able to do the service that we want to do for people into a newer office, which is a stretch. It's more expensive. I'm going to have to make it work. We as a team in our office are going to have to figure out how to adjust our workflows to be able to accommodate all of the people that are wanting to get in so that we can take care of them for surgery and so that we can grow and teach others how to do the same thing so that surgery is easier for more women. So more doctors learn how we do what we're doing and more patients get the benefit of the great care that we're doing and learning about and teaching. So right now, I'm going through this pinch. When you move, it costs a lot. You have to create the new space. You pay for movers. You're like unhitching the utilities and getting the new utilities, all those things. They're very stressful. Am I going to like it on the other side? Am I going to make it on the other side? Do I even want to be on the other side? These are common themes for no matter where we are growing in our life. But it's super important that we did this for a couple of reasons. One is this is one of those places in life where if you really want to grow in your capacity to be able to help each other or help other people or create more wealth or create more relationships or create whatever you want to create in the world, you have to be willing to go through the pinch of the hourglass, the stressful part of growth. Because that is where you learn the things that you teach and expand into on the other side. So as you increase your capacity from doing all of these great, amazing things, you're also increasing your capacity to tolerate or to have tolerance for when things aren't so great. This is equally important. People think that when they say oh, God will only give me as much as I can handle. A lot of times we think of that in terms of God only giving us or the universe or your circumstances only being the bad things. That life won't give you any more bad things than you can handle. But it actually is both the bad things and the good things. The universe, the world, our circumstances, God, they will not give us more than we can handle that are good things too. This is super obvious when you look at people who inherit a whole lot of money, but don't have the tools and the skill set and the emotional mindset to be able to handle it. Look at what happens typically with lottery winners. They've been given this lump sum of money, but they haven't grown into the people that can have the capacity to handle the good and the bad and the managing and all of the detail. So frequently they become broke again until they learn the skills. So this growth mindset is super important. Here on The Dr. Crockett Show we have a saying, it's TSN. Can you guess what that stands for? Try something new, TSN. We have a saying that you should TSN every day. When we look at that from a medical perspective, trying new things, whether it's trying a new food or trying a new crossword puzzle, trying to do an activity that makes you uncomfortable, like reaching out to people when you have social anxiety, anything that stresses you beyond your normal safety zone. When you try new things, you are flexing that muscle and growing your strength to be able to handle the next transformation to the next level. It's also part of what keeps your brain neurons going. It's what keeps your body physically healthy going. When you stress your body with exercise, you increase your muscle mass and your strength, and that increases your metabolism. Well, the same thing happens with your brain and your mind. As you continually try new things, especially as people get into their geriatric years, keeping active in creative endeavors and learning new things every day is one of the things that prevents downslope into Alzheimer's and dementia. So try something new. I want you to think about it this week about what things maybe you've been putting off that you could try and not be afraid of, like have the courage to step into that next thing that you haven't tried. The third thing I want to talk with you about is something that I've shared on the show before, but it's been a minute. I want to talk with you about the Virtuosa Transformation Tool that we have. It's called the 7 Steps in 7 Minutes Transformation Tool. So, whenever you go to decide that you're going to try something new or go through a growth phase in your life, maybe it's starting a new career, maybe it's moving to a different city, maybe it's starting to date somebody else. Whatever the growth process is, when you are moving from the way you have been being to the next level or the next iteration of yourself, the first step is to realize that there's a different way that you could be. So that awareness of the realization that there's something different and the idea that you could transform into that next level is the first step. Then after that awareness, you have to figure out how you're going to get from point A to point B. How are you going to get from the top of the hourglass to the bottom of the hourglass? Also realize that there's a pinch in the middle. The pinch is the work that you have to do to get from how you are now to how you want to be. So say you're somebody that comes home every evening from work, and you go straight to the refrigerator and start binge eating, and you become aware that's not so healthy. Maybe you're eating too much sugar, and all of a sudden you have this awareness that doesn't make you feel good. Well, we have a lot of ingrained habits and behaviors. So, becoming aware of wanting to change is the first step. Once you've done that, then you need some tools to help you go from being the person that comes home and goes to the refrigerator for the cake to being the person that you want to be, which is somebody who makes healthier decisions or feels better about how they're handling their eating habits. So we're going to put a link to the PDF for the transformation tool. We'll put that in the show notes below. There's also a place where you can go on our sister podcast. So the podcast that started way before The Dr. Crockett Show, it was called Becoming Virtuosa. A lot of you are listening on that now, and thank you so much. We've continued the podcast by taking the audio from The Dr. Crockett Show and continuing the podcast episodes. In fact, we're coming up on 100 episodes later this year, and I'm so excited and just grateful to all of you that have made this a success. If you go back to the very first episode of Becoming Virtuosa, which you can find on Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, all the places. If you go back to the very first eight episodes, they are the introduction to this transformation tool and each episode will take you through the seven steps of transformation. So we'll put links for that in the notes below, in the show notes below, and I hope you find that helpful and useful. It's just a little worksheet thing for you to use to help guide you through the process of whatever you are working on that becomes your next area of growth, and hopefully it's not your waistline. Y'all have a great week. Thanks for joining me. I'll see you next Tuesday. Bye. Thanks for listening to this episode of Becoming Virtuosa. To learn more, come visit us at DrCrockett.com, or find us on YouTube for the Dr. Crockett Show. If you found this episode helpful or think it might help someone else, please like, subscribe, and share. This is how we grow together. Thanks, and I'll see you next week. Love always, Sue.