Giving yourself that completion of the door shutting is what it takes to move on to the next thing. One thing that I've noticed is that anybody that builds great things, if you listen to their stories, they're not hanging on to all the things from their whole life going back whatever, many years. They're not hanging on to it.

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.

Welcome, welcome. I am Dr. Susan Crockett. I'm a board-certified OB-GYN in San Antonio, Texas. I specialize in minimally invasive surgery for women. That's robotic surgery for women. I do all kinds of non-cancer, we say benign, complicated, really complicated medical stuff. So, tons of fertility work, endometriosis, fibroids, lots of hysterectomies for various things. I do a little bit of pelvic prolapse and bladder surgery, and anything that has to do with the female reproductive tract surgically, actually, that's not cancer.

So, if you're interested in seeing me or one of my new doctors, Dr. Alsup or Dr. Koshy in San Antonio, Texas, you can check us out at virtuosagyn.com. The other new thing that we're launching soon is a new outpatient surgery center. You'll hear me talking about that a little bit more. It's an epicenter for teaching other doctors how to do women's surgery. We are going to do a little episode on that in a minute.

We're also launching our vitamin line. So, lots of you, over the years, have asked me what kind of supplements you should take. I've worked with a partner manufacturer that I've worked with for a long time. They do FDA manufacturing processes. We've created our own vitamin line called Virtuosa Vitamins, also linked down below. We have discounts available there.

We're not trying to be like everybody's vitamin world. We just have 12 basic vitamin supplements, and they all fit together. So, we're calling this the world's first boutique curated vitamin line. I liken that to doing a capsule wardrobe for a trip or a closet. You pick your pieces that fit together, and they mix and match really well.

So, we want to make sure that you're getting quality product and that you're not overdosing or double dosing on what's going on. You're not spending your money unnecessarily on things that you shouldn't be taking or that you don't need to take. So, anyway, that's all that.

Today, I'm doing an episode called I Don't Live There Anymore. This is kind of the culmination of two huge storylines in my life. One is the seven seeds that you see behind me. So, for those of you joining us who haven't known or learned about the seven seeds, this is our teaching curriculum.

On The Dr. Crockett Show, we go where the scalpel doesn't reach, and we're bringing you all the wellness and advice and the conversations that I have with my patients that have to do with helping their bodies heal better and to stay out of my office and how to live a healthier, happier life. So, the seven seeds episodes have all posted already. This one called I Don't Live There Anymore is the final culmination of all of them.

So, the seeds go be, which is self-care, heal, which is fix the things that are broken, love, give, grow, pray, and attune. I really like the attunement episode. We did that one last week. So, if you haven't seen it yet, go check it out.

The interesting thing about all of these things is we're helping people transform their lives from where they are to where they want to go, where they want to be. That's the biggest reason that we're doing what we're doing because we feel that if people heal themselves and they're able to transform themselves, then they transform the world around them to make it a better place.

So, that's our strategy for world domination. It's not domination. It's a world service. We're serving you by bringing this information to you so you can feel better and have a healthier, happier life. That, in turn, will have a ripple effect around the world around us.

So, we started off at the very beginning of this series with a talk about having the idea in your head of understanding that there's something different out there. We're ending today with I Don't Live There Anymore, meaning we've arrived at our final destination, and we're looking back at where we started and closing that door. This is a really different kind of talk. I'm not sure I ever heard anybody talk about this before.

So, I told you this episode is a culmination of two big storylines in my life. One is that it's the final chapter of the book in putting everything together, but it is also the end of a story that I've been going through on my own. You may remember on July 10th, we did an episode called How to Speed Up Transformation. That was actually a talk that I did for a group of women at the hospital where I work.

I started the talk with a song by Bo Burnham, who's an artist that my son likes. He and I are fans. The song is called The Chicken. The story is a chicken wakes up, and she realizes she isn't where she wants to be in life. The story is about her crossing the road.

When I was giving this talk to these women, I said I am right in the middle of the road. I'm right in the difficult, right in the middle of the hard, right with the headlights in my face. I was in the middle of trying to sell this house. At the same time, I was moving my office and building this new office. I'll let y'all log on to YouTube, and you can watch the rest of that. So, the song is about the decision to realize that there's something better that you want to move on to, and then the process of crossing the road.

When I did that talk in July, I talked about the difficult times and what it's in the middle of that transformation and that change and all the challenges. I tell you, that house that I was selling, I loved that house. I walked into it eight years ago, and I was like oh my goodness, I can't believe I could ever get to live here. It's a house that raised my kids in, and we had so many good memories. I loved it so much, but it's too far away from where I'm working now. It just was time to let it go.

Also, I wanted to use the equity that I made in the house to help fund the transformation that I'm doing with my office, the transition from being a small little private type office to this big jump that I'm making into a larger office with the new outpatient surgery center and stepping into a national platform for teaching surgery to other surgeons. In fact, we have another platform coming on YouTube, which is going to be our surgery teaching videos. Those are coming in fourth quarter of this year.

But anyway, getting back to the chicken and the other side of the road, I gave that talk when I in the middle of all this move. In fact, I moved my family out of my house, and I moved my new office in the same weekend. It was absolutely insane. The stress I had for the closing of this house to be on time was absolutely one of the most stressful things that I have ever gone through in my life.

No, it wasn't death. Nobody was dying, but it felt like it because when you don't have money and you're depending on the liquidation of an asset and the timing to come through, it can feel a lot like you're suffocating. It's very hard not to be in scarcity mindset. So, I watched what I was doing as I was crossing this road and all the obstacles that kept coming up.

I'm not going to go into it, y'all, but this house did not want me to leave. It kept finding reasons for me to stay around and hang around and have to take care of stuff. I thought I was never going to get it all done for the wonderful family that's the buyers. It just was this really interesting metaphysical thing to look at. Why is this so difficult to get out of this house?

Here's what happened is on August 29th, I got to the other side. I sidestepped an oncoming truck and made it to the other side of the road, just like the chicken at the end of the, oh man, I just blew it for you. Well, go watch the video anyway, the chicken video. It's really cute.

So I got to the other side, the house closed, it funded. I had the money that I needed to be able to do the next step in my businesses, which are bringing on my two new doctors and furnishing the new office. So, this talk is a little bit about what happens once you get to the other side because I walked through that house, and it wasn't my house anymore. I realized I don't live there anymore.

I closed the door behind me and looked at it for the last time, and I drove away, and I took that into the Labor Day weekend. So the house closed just before the Labor Day weekend. I was so exhausted from moving and everything by Monday, which was Labor Day, I actually didn't labor at all. I sat on the couch and took care of myself. I did be. I did self-care.

I asked myself, what are all the things that I can do to take care of myself and be kind to myself and compassionate to myself with all the stress? I worked on healing my heart, and my heart was I don't live there anymore. One of the things I realized is that metaphor of closing that door. Like I can't ever go into that house. It wasn't just a familiar place to me. That was my refuge. That was my place of rest and self-care and love with my family. It's where we gave so much of each other.

I thought that's so final. I don't even have a choice to go back into that house. Same with my office. I left the old office. I don't live there anymore. I thought what a great thought to have when we're talking about getting to the other side of a big challenge and changing our lives.

What if we thought about that when we were thinking about bad habits that we wanted to break? I don't want to eat Cheetos anymore. Well, instead of just saying I should probably not buy Cheetos, you could be like I don't live there anymore. Like I'm not that person that eats the crap anymore. That's a huge thought difference. It makes it a lot easier when you're like oh, the door's shut.

I remember when I was pregnant with my kids, it was not hard for me to quit caffeine. It was not hard at all because I'm like I don't want to feed this to my kids. It was like a hard stop. The moving of the house is the same. A divorce is the same. I don't live in the arms of that man anymore in that relationship anymore. It's a hard stop.

Giving yourself that completion of the door shutting is what it takes to move on to the next thing. One thing that I've noticed is that anybody that builds great things, if you listen to their stories, they're not hanging on to all the things from their whole life going back whatever many years. They're not hanging on to it. They're letting it go. They're saying I don't live in that mindset anymore. I don't live in that town anymore. I don't live in that business anymore or that relationship.

All of us that are transforming and creating growth and value in the world and service, which is the next one. Be, heal, love, give, grow. We're also praying, which is the next one. We have the ability to say, oh, I don't live there anymore. That's not for me anymore, and to shut that door and move on.

So I wanted to talk a little bit about what's next. Like what happens once the chicken gets to the other side of the road? That's where I am right now. Like the whole song about the chicken was just like making the decision to get out of the scenario that she was in and move to the next one.

I've done the same now with my business and with my life. So now I get to the other side. I'm like, okay, that door is shut. I have a good direction for where I'm going with the businesses. But here's what happened is all of the things that I had been planning for, they all started lining up for me to start working on at this point.

So I took all of those lessons that I had learned before. In fact, I wanted to show y'all this little bracelet is really special to me because my kids like to do, well, one of my kids likes to do tattoos, and she uses tattoos as ways to remind herself of significant things. I always joke with her that I do charms because I like to be able to take them off.

So I have this sterling silver bracelet, which started from one of my grandmothers. Over the course of the last, golly, it's got charms that go a long ways back, but specifically over the last five years, which is how long I've been building the new center and The Dr. Crockett Show and the vitamin shop and all of that and going through a divorce and empty nesting and menopause all in the same time.

So this bracelet has a whole bunch of charms that are very meaningful for me. They're reminders. They're touch points that remind me of the lessons I've learned and what I've gained along the way that's built me into the person that's able to handle what I have now on the other side of the road and what I'm building on the other side of the road because I'm not the same person who started on the other side of the road. I'm not. Crossing the road changes you. So I think I need to add a sterling silver chicken charm to my bracelet.

So here's what's next is I had this like vision of this remembrance from my childhood. Every Christmas we would go out into the woods near my house. I grew up in East Texas, and it's just loblolly pines everywhere. We would cut down a Christmas tree on my dad's property and, and we would haul it home. It was probably ugly as sin. Those loblolly pines, the long needles and everything, but we thought it was amazing. It was our family tradition, and it was beautiful.

My dad had a Lionel train set, electric train set that he had from his childhood. Every Christmas, we would set that train set up on the tracks underneath the Christmas tree. I don't know if any of y'all can relate to this or not, but we used to spend hours like laying down sideways on the floor, putting the engines on the track because the engines would have like eight sets of wheels that swiveled, and they had little grooves in them.

If you didn't line them up exactly right on the track, then the train would fall over. Then all of the little cars behind the train also you had, they didn't have as many wheels, so they were easier, but you still had to line them up on the track so they rolled right. I remember just spending hours doing that and really enjoying it.

I told two of my besties last Saturday, I said we'd gotten through the sale of the house. I'm getting the ability now to move forward, getting to the other side of the road. I said now it feels like setting up those trains and all the little details that we have to do to get the new engines going and the momentum going for things to really fly for them to take off. Just how much I enjoyed that as a kid.

It was a reminder to myself to enjoy the time that I have this week in the office, which I did. We had a fantastic week in the office. Dr. Alsup started. Dr. Koshy was in the office. We finished furnishing out the wing that hadn't been furnished. We had tons of patients coming through and just a really good energy and everybody was happy. We were like knocking out the little things that needed to get done one by one to make our train go faster and to make it more efficient.

So I was going through all of that. I told my friends about that on Saturday. On Sunday, I had to go back to the final walkthrough on the house with my son. The movers had moved almost everything out, but we were going through because there were a few things left.

I came across this picture. It was the last picture left in the kind of the trash remains that were in the closet of my study. So this little crumpled up picture, you can see how it was wrinkled. This was sitting in a stack of my scrapbooks from when I was growing up way before digital media. This is my little kitty cat, Skitten. You can see the loblolly pine Christmas tree with the decorations. This is from Christmas of 1980.

I kid you not, y'all, look at this. That dang train track is sitting right there in this picture. I looked at it, and I just, I hit an attunement. All of the things fell together. I'm like, I can't believe I'm sitting here holding this. Like why of the thousands of pictures in that closet did the movers leave this little picture with this train track?

I took it as a wink from God is what I like to call it. I know we all have different ways of thinking about God, but for me, I took it as like, it's a confirmation. It's a synchronicity. It's an attunement. I took it as a note of confidence and peace that I'm on the right track. All of the emotion of the last week and all of the what do you do next when you get to the other side? It just, it all kind of came flooding together and is this just really cool. So now I've taken this picture, and it's sitting on a frame at my desk at the office as we go forward, putting all our little trains on the track.

So the other thing that happened that morning, that Sunday morning before Labor Day, after we had closed was also this really spectacular little thing that happened. So my realtor, before I got to the house on Sunday, she did a walkthrough and picked up things that were left in the house. The movers had been in the house the day before with the doors open a lot.

This little bird in her hand, this little bird, he was trying to get out of the window above my door. So the house had big double front doors and a window over it. The bird was just, it's this baby hummingbird. It was just beating itself up against the glass.

She went to my workshop and found a ladder, and the thing just tired itself out trying to chase, thinking it was being chased and trying to get away from her. She was finally able to gently capture it and get it outside.

So the interesting thing about this is when I started my practice 10 years ago, Virtuosa GYN, our original logo idea was to have the hummingbird as our logo and as kind of the mascot for the practice, as the symbol of the practice. So in our office, there's this beautiful watercolor hummingbird painting that I still have. It's in our break room.

Even though we don't use that for the logo anymore, when I saw this hummingbird, I thought oh, this is the house. This is the house closing the door. Like this house that has not let me go. It's finally like saying you don't live here anymore. It's like it was giving over the equity and all of what it had meant to me and built for me and in giving it to me to give to the business, the hummingbird. So I'm going to show this little clip for you. It's real short, but it's stunning.

So for those of you listening on the podcast, she's got this itty bitty bird in her hand, and it's just kind of sitting there, stunned a little bit, looking at the outside now. It's a little ruby throated baby. She has a little close up of it. The bird is just kind of sitting there looking around. It's this beautiful, brilliant green color. She's talking to it, telling it that it's free. You're free. You're free. Stunning. Yeah. Why do I keep doing that?

So I don't live there anymore. I hope this is helpful for you. I hope you can see how the seven seeds all kind of come together in this culmination of what happens when you get to the other side and how you start getting the chains on the track and you still start moving forward and you take all the lessons that you learned, and you build to the next level. That's how we transform and grow.

So I want you to be reminded of this little hummingbird. You know, it was struggling to get out, was trying to get to the other side. Sometime we all have a helping hand that helps us get there. So all of you who have been there for me, thank you so much for all my patients and friends and family and business support people. I'm looking forward to what we do now on the other side. God bless. Have a wonderful day. See you next week.

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.