Let Me Tell You This About That

Planting New Seeds and Spiraling Up

• Delbert and Hess • Season 1 • Episode 23

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Join Hess and Delbert in this heartwarming episode as they share their reflections on life's small joys and big lessons. From marveling at a stunning sunrise to delving into meaningful dialogues about emotional resilience, friendship, and personal growth, the duo explores a variety of topics. They discuss the significance of gratitude, humor, mindfulness, and positive routines in shaping our daily lives. The episode also features touching anecdotes about family, history, and the importance of having a growth mindset. Tune in for an uplifting and insightful conversation that encourages you to find beauty in every sunrise and sunset.


Help my friend José wipe out the Stage 4 cancer in his body!
https://gofund.me/e6f61999

In addition to being a podcast host, Hess is also an LCSW--if you'd like to learn more about her work as a therapist, check it out at www.jessicabollinger.com

One of her mission's is for all of our lights to shine--when we see each other and allow ourself to be seen--and we can say to the person in front of us, There You Are! the world will be an amazing place!

Delbert is a realtor in Louisville, KY, and you can find her at Kentucky Select Properties

Her philanthropic work to continue her sister Carole and niece Meghan is Carole's Kitchen. Blessings in a Backpack helps feed the many hungry students in our schools.





Hess:

Good morning. It's Sunday morning and it's, let me tell you this about that. I'm Hess

Delbert:

Good morning. I'm Delbert again. Live from the green couch in Louisville, Kentucky. I was just telling Hess boy, we had a beautiful sunset this morning. All the colors, all my favorites, pink and purple, orange and yellow. It was gorgeous.

Hess:

Sunrise. Delbert Sunrise.

Delbert:

I keep saying sunset. Yeah, it's morning. It was a sunrise. Sorry. I have only had one cup of coffee.

Hess:

They're very similar one's coming up, one's going down.

Delbert:

Yeah, but she, yeah, we got a whole day ahead of us, so It was gorgeous.

Hess:

We do, and I'm looking out on the green pastures and the green grass in the yard and I was really excited.'cause yesterday my buddy brought two renovators, pasture renovators and two big tractors and his guys worked all day yesterday planting new seed. So that's really cool on a farm is to do some pasture renovation

Delbert:

So hopeful to plant those seedlings.

Hess:

right.

Delbert:

I was like planting my little flowers. And Hess is I've got two tractors and two seeders, and you're just, yeah you're going to town on plant. You got all kinds of hope out there.

Hess:

I do. I do. Oh, yeah. I heard this one thing. If you wanna be happy for a year, get married. If you wanna be happy for 10 years, get a dog. If you wanna be happy the rest of your life, plant a garden.

Delbert:

That's

Hess:

Oh.

Delbert:

perfect. That is so true. That is so true.

Hess:

Oh Martha said that right now, watch Martha's documentary.

Delbert:

gosh. I love her. Yes. I love how she tries to make things so special for her friends and family. You and I have talked about that when whether it's making a dinner or a cup of tea or whatever when you just try to make it so special for somebody even a group of people, I think they really notice and I think that's a wonderful gift to have.

Hess:

My friend Laverne, she loves to set the table first before she even starts cooking. To prepare for these people. Coming over. It's just this, the setting, the table setting will be this beautiful spot for everybody to sit around. So she does that first.

Delbert:

I love well, and I have a lot of dishes. I always decide which dishes I'm gonna use and I don't cook a lot and I don't have people over that much, but God, I love to collect dishes for it. I've got six different sets of dishes and I'm running outta places to put'em, but I just love having them. I love to make things fancy and nice.

Hess:

Sweet. Sweet. So more about this pasture renovation. I bought the seed from Southern states a couple weeks ago, so we'd be good to go. And it was like a whole truckload full of these big bags of seed.'cause I bought, I. 20 pounds an acre for 75 acres, and we unloaded it and put it inside our tobacco barn on some pallets. And anyway, so it was ready to go and you gotta, you, you can't do the seed drill. Now the seed drill is pretty cool because it makes a line in the soil and then the seed drops down in there, and then there's something that covers it up. And so what's cool is later on when you're riding in the big field and stuff, you see these lines. And then you see these little sprouts of these rows of grass, new grass growing up. And if you have a good stand of grass, you have less weeds. And that's what Delbert and I are gonna talk about is having a good stand of thoughts that can help the weeds not pull us down to a downward spiral.

Delbert:

Yes, absolutely. I love that you took that class this week and you called me and we had a great conversation about it and we're like, yes, let's make. That the podcast.

Hess:

Yeah excuse me, Dalbert, sorry, listeners, coughing in your ear. I have to renew my LCSW license this fall, so I. I've been signing up for different CEUs and I thought, why not sign up for a CU that's gonna help me out, so I signed up for 16 key habits of emotionally resilient people, and the presenter, Dr. Kateri McCrae, she's out of Denver. She was a psychology and a theater major, so she was really a great presenter. It was just a really good presentation. From 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM about how we can pull ourself up from the downward spiral.

Delbert:

And it's the bounce back that we talk about. It's getting your bounce back. It's refocusing your brain from, Hess sent me the video so I could see it. And I loved that idea of, when you're in that spiral and you're going down with. These thoughts that you can really give yourself a bounce back. Like I talk about like my mom taught us to do, just redirecting.

Hess:

Or your paw

Delbert:

Oh yeah, Papa Charlie was great about that.

Hess:

And Delbert's paw was in World War II and in some really. Really extensive battles. I think in one battle he was like the only survivor or something,

Delbert:

foxhole? Yes, in his foxhole. He was the only survivor I took one of my darlings out to dinner last night and we talked about Papa Charlie and the bounce back and, one of the worst parts of tour there was when they walked to the, one of the concentration camps and liberated it, and can you imagine just walking down this country and you know where you're going, you know you're going. To this concentration camp to liberate it. And the German soldiers were running out and surrendering and, their instructions were to kill him, and my papa just couldn't do that. And he had a lot of night terrors and stuff about that. But they did liberate and I can't remember the name of it, but I'll look it up. He was the hundred fourth division the Timberwolves in the. Army and they were very famous and actually they are featured in the Holocaust museum for their bravery and liberating that one Camp

Hess:

Say that again. I'm gonna write that down and look that, look them up. The a hundred and fourth division.

Delbert:

the timber wolfs,

Hess:

And so did you find out a lot, did you find out a lot about what Papa did? Just by that?

Delbert:

You can now because you can look it up. When I was a little kid I didn't, he didn't like to talk about it. But my mama I actually have right now at my house and I'm trying to find time to make copies for everybody in my family. My ma saved every newspaper and they're real delicate. You really gotta handle'em really carefully'cause they crumble every newspaper article. She had the menu and the little booklet with the little letter from the president from the ship that they took over there. And they were on it on Thanksgiving Day and they had pork tenderloin and it had the menu on it. And so I have that and have lots of newspaper articles. And then of course now you can Google it and just the things that the hundred fourth did were just. Really amazing. And here he is, 26-year-old guy with four children and a wife at home. He's just trying to get back home. But he did so many brave things and he really had to adjust his thinking every day when he got back to think about something good. And he was such a good example for all of us about looking on the bright side and looking. To the good and really I think he's the reason that the first thing I do after I do my Goldie ha stretch and wake up, I open the window, I open the curtains, and I look at the day, I look up at that sun and that sky.

Hess:

And there's scientific proof that taking in the sun for about 30 minutes in the morning is really good

Delbert:

That's why I have

Hess:

you.

Delbert:

So can the sun in the morning,

Hess:

Yeah. And you face the now double her green couch. It's two sections. Facing each other with a beautiful little coffee table in between. And in the morning you're facing out, looking out the window.

Delbert:

If I have company, I let them sit on the side. That looks out.'cause it is just such a pretty view out the picture window. And I sit on the other side, I'm like, no, I'm good. I, I look out that every single day when I say my prayers and, have my coffee and get ready for the day. And I think that's another thing, just having a routine that's positive doing your prayers or meditation or whatever shifts your thought to the good in the morning.

Hess:

Absolutely. Part of my conversation with Delbert after I attended Dr. Kateri McCrae's talk was that Delbert, the, these are all things that she was talking about are all part of your bounce back. It's really beautiful. You didn't even know it.

Delbert:

I didn't even know it. It's to bounce back, but it works. Yeah.

Hess:

So in the morning she was talking about the brain science behind our emotions and our emotions are really super, super important. Super important. I didn't know any feelings or emotions'cause I felt like we don't talk about things as Catholics growing up, at least back then. And I remember when I was 27, I'm seeing a therapist. I'm about to move to the farm. My dad doesn't want my relationship to move here to the farm with me, and I'm seeing this therapist and she goes how do you feel about that? And I'm like I couldn't understand because my dad blah, blah, blah, blah. And she goes, no, how do you feel about it? I'm like because my dad's Catholic. And she goes, no, how do you feel about it? And I go, whoa. I don't know how I feel. I never had any kind of emotions like reflected back at me. What's what is a headache? How do you know what a headache is? What, how do you define an emotion that, so it's people around us that can help us feel, figure out what we're feeling, and I. I didn't really have any vocabulary or feelings. I had 30 days to more powerful vocabulary on my bookshelf, but I had zero feelings feeling words. So our feelings are so important. There's a cool book called the Language of Emotions by Karla McLaren, Karla with a K, and each of our emotions is really important to, to tell us what's going on and like anger. The the message from anger is what must be protected, what must be restored, and we could go into bottom down reactions to the anger, like rage, right? And stuff like that. Or we could go from the top from our prefrontal cortex, from our thinking brain, get that and maybe let it turnstile up to our thinking brain and okay what boundary must be restored here? What do I need to say here? What action I need to take? So it's like moving from feeling the emotion and then moving to what action needs to take place. What can we do?

Delbert:

I love that and I loved how she talked about the prefrontal cortex and the front of the brain that is more developed as we've evolved as humans using that more evolved part of. Your brain to shift your focus.

Hess:

They call that bottom part of their brain, like the reptilian brain, the reactive brain.

Delbert:

the reactive. Okay.

Hess:

But it's important that we feel that, and then we can try to spiral up when we something happens or the state of things. Gets us down and we keep spiraling down. It narrows our focus. And she had us do this little exercise. She said, okay, I'm gonna give you one minute to write everything. You got a piece of paper, got a pen? Okay, go. You have one minute to write everything that has wheels. And if you're in a more, if you're in a, if you're in a calm centered state, you can think of more things. So that's pretty awesome if you're in the downward spiral, it narrows your focus and you can't even hardly think of any solutions.

Delbert:

Oh wow. like restrictive and tight.

Hess:

Exactly. Exactly. You got it, Delbert. You got it.

Delbert:

like a drill, the kind of, a little photo she had of it, with the Immediately. And as a kid I was like, wait, I just wanna feel like this for a minute, gimme a second and get my, almost wanted to get my bearings and what that felt like and I was such a, in touch with my feelings, except maybe because of just the richness that I was around as a kid. My grandparents, I talk about how religious my grandmother was and how, what good vibe she had. I knew that being near her was a good vibration. I. A very spiritual and pure vibration. She wasn't a southern woman that said, bless your heart. And, then said, tramp, she said, bless your heart. And then she said, A prayer for you in, in, in the most genuine way, and so I was just around so much goodness with my parents and aunts and uncles and my grandparents that I did get distinguished for myself. And I was the oldest too, so I feel like I had some knowledge from being around adults a lot that I absorbed off of them.

Hess:

And you had a little bit more quiet time before everybody else came along to saturate that up, correct.

Delbert:

Probably, not at my house, but at my grandparents' house. Yes.'cause I would stay there a lot when my mom would go in the hospital and have a baby. I was thinking about her this morning'cause I dreamt about her the other night and I'm thinking God. She was pregnant for 12 years. I'm like, my mom never smoked or drank when I was little. What? She couldn't, she was pregnant the whole time. I was a teenager before she went. She was like not having a baby or in the hospital. So my first six years maybe of my life, I was at my grandparents a lot. I.

Hess:

That's beautiful.

Delbert:

It was amazing. It was I'm so grateful and thankful for it, but I did get to sort things out and say, no, I'm not gonna bounce back right this minute, but I am gonna bounce back. And I, I'm very thankful for that.

Hess:

Yes. Something that I do that, that Dr. Kateri talked about was gratitude journaling, and at the end of each day, I'll write down a list of things I'm grateful for, and then that's pretty cool to go to bed with that mindset.

Delbert:

Oh yeah.

Hess:

Humor and humor. Delbert. She mentioned that, and you talk and you shared with us on the pod like you'll just, you'll listen to some YouTube of some comedians that you like a lot.

Delbert:

Lovely. Leeanne Morgan and Kathleen Madigan. I will I'll just listen to something funny and that is so uplifting.

Hess:

She talked about laugh clubs, and I'd never heard of one before. She's given a talk she said this one person in the, in, in the group was just so stoic and never, just sitting there. And then when I'm talking about this, she said, he goes, oh yeah, I go to a laugh club. And she goes, this just like really astounded me. I it wasn't the same impression I had about him, but you're in a circle or you get paired up with somebody and you're just supposed to just start laughing. And once she said, once you start laughing for 20 seconds, you just get into a big belly laugh and it's a natural laugh. I gotta try that.

Delbert:

oh, I love that. Okay. Tina Keller and I used to do that all the time. We just say, okay, let's just start laughing and see how long it goes. And we laughed all the way from Rough River to back to Louisville and her parents I think wanted to kill us.

Hess:

I tell you one, one reason I like to listen to the podcast, to re-listen to it, is to hear myself laugh, just just then. Yeah.

Delbert:

it is

Hess:

I love it.

Delbert:

feeling. So comedy thinking about gratitude what else are ways we can turn our thinking has When

Hess:

Moving to good social support. Surround yourself with people that can lift you up, that's real important.

Delbert:

Yes, that is so important. My friends are so important to me. So many different friend circles and during Covid I had to depend on the checkout person at Target to lift me up and sometimes they'd let me down, I gotta say but. When you were just sequestered in your house during Covid, that was the worst for me because I'm very social and I'd go to Target just to talk, and sometimes I wouldn't get any response from the person that checked me out. So I'd go buy something else and check out again at a different point. I'm like, you people aren't giving me what I need. Yeah. Oh I meant to buy a pack of gum. I'm gonna go back through this checkout.

Hess:

Okay. Another thing she talked about that I thought was cool, and I know about it, but it was fun to hear it being defined because I know sometimes I could be like this or meet people like this instead of having a fixed mindset to have a growth mindset. And let me tell you what a fixed mindset is, and that's people that believe like just their basic qualities. Their intelligence or talent are simply fixed traits, and they spend the time documenting their intelligence or talent instead of developing them. They also believe that talent alone creates success without effort. So a fixed mindset, that's what that is. And a growth mindset is people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work. Brains and talent are just the starting point. This view creates a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishment.

Delbert:

Oh, that's awesome.

Hess:

Yeah. Yeah. I had a brother that was a natural athlete Jesse, boy Natural, and then my brother Andy, Pete worked at it, and Andy, Pete went really far and still does in golf and other things because he works hard at learning something.

Delbert:

A lot of recruiters will say that, give me the person that works hard. the talented person Thinks they can skate by. Yeah.

Hess:

Yeah.

Delbert:

person that's got, the rituals and the, all the little tasks that they do each and every day to be successful, always the most successful. Then you, and when you pair that with talent, then you know it's amazing. But you can be equal to that talented person through your perseverance and your discipline.

Hess:

Amen. And Dr. Kateri, she's a researcher and she did this. They did, she talks about this experiment. They did. With the really naturally smart people they gave them a math test and then somebody that didn't have as much acuity for math, they gave them a math test. And the people that were good at math, I. The way that it was a computer generated is then they get, as they got a right answer, they get harder and harder and harder questions. And the other people that weren't as good as math, they just got pretty basic math and they scored in 80%. The people that were really good at math scored in 80%. So then everybody gets their paper back, their test back, and the people that have a. They had a fixed mindset because they know they're already intelligent. They just go, oh, 80%, and they just threw it back down. And the people that got an 80% that weren't as good as math each group was asked, Hey, do you wanna know what questions you got wrong? The people with the fixed mindset. They said, no, we don't. I don't wanna know. And the people with the growth mindset that weren't as good as math, they go, yeah, I wanna know. I wanna know which one I got wrong so I can learn how to do it. That was pretty cool. Yeah so that all boiled down this week as an example for me is my friend Juve that works here at the farm, his daughter Heidi said, I wanna be an actor. And I just found out this year. So anyway, I found this class on Saturdays at the Woodford Theater, and it started last Saturday. It started yesterday. So I just found this, found, discovered this like last Wednesday. And there and there was this opportunity in these different classes and Heidi said, no, I can't sing, so I don't wanna, I don't wanna do the musical theater, but, so then the 9:00 AM to 10:00 AM class I. For people in middle school that was canceled. They didn't have enough people. And when I talked to the person in charge, they said, oh, she will love this musical theater class. The teacher is so good. I said, but she said she can't sing. They said she won't have to do any solos. She can sing with other people. And so I told Heidi I said, you gotta go to the 11 to 1230. Musical theater. She goes, oh no, I can't sing. She's texting me. And she does that. She does the repetition of

Delbert:

You know how she's talking'cause she's. In it

Hess:

yeah.

Delbert:

I love it.

Hess:

Oh, no, I can't sing. And I said,

Delbert:

on the No.

Hess:

yeah and I said, look, you don't have to sing solo. You can sing with other people. It's supposed to be really good. And she said. Okay,

Delbert:

A-A-A-A-A-A-Y. Okay.

Hess:

So Delbert. Yesterday at one o'clock, I'm driving to Louisville, see my mom and I get this text and it's just so cute to get a text from a 12-year-old. I get this text, she says, yeah, okay. It's at one 14. Hey, Jesse. Just to update you. It was amazing. I absolutely loved it. We did a bit of, we did a bit of singing. We also did a dance with the song. It was very fun. Thank you so much. She's in a growth mindset. She's in a growth mindset. Yeah.

Delbert:

Oh, that's beautiful. That's so great that you opened that up for her. Just

Hess:

Planted a seed.

Delbert:

up and she goes in and grows. Yeah.

Hess:

Oh man, man, she's just gonna be like those rows of pasture renovation out there. I can recall our classmate, she was a year ahead of us, Nell Pierce. She told me I can't sing, and it just stuck in my head. That's no good. Don't want to hear that.

Delbert:

let's sing in the shower.

Hess:

Yeah. Yeah. That's a fixed mindset. Yeah. And I was talking to Heidi's little brother, to Heidi's big brother yesterday morning, and I said, Hadie said she don't want to, she don't want to do it'cause she can't sing. He goes, she sings all the time at home. So boom, so cool. So cool. And she risked it. She risked it, she did it. I'm so proud of her. She's amazing.

Delbert:

took a lot of bravery too.

Hess:

Yeah. I think the way that you wake up in the morning when you do your Goldie ha stretch, that's a way to wake up and to be positive and look forward to something, and you trying to find the sunrise and those kind of things. What, tell us more about the Goldie Ha stretch.

Delbert:

It is just something that I watch a lot of videos of, just self-improvement and Goldie, Han's got some kind of program she does for children. for the emotional and I, I don't know how it's a certain way of learning that she's got like a, some kind of program for that she was just talking about that, but first she was talking about the way she woke up in the morning and she just, takes a real deep breath and she gets. flowing to all of her limbs. So she'll stretch her arms and her legs and then she opens her eyes really slow. And if I don't do that in the morning, I'm like, shoot, forgot my Goldie hand stretch because I like to open it. It is nice to wake up like that and just open your eyes really slow and take a deep breath in. Just gets you ready. It's a way to ease into it. and it just sets the pace Just a really good day. So

Hess:

Beautiful.

Delbert:

remember to do that. Yeah, it's just a, and it's just a little thing, but I'll have to look that up along with the concentration camp that my my papa liberated. I'll look both of those up for next time. Friends, I'm sorry, I Didn't know we were gonna talk about it, but Yeah. She's really into, just mindfulness and wellness of your mind and learning. So I just love that about her and I love all her movies. If I'm ever sad, I watch Overboard. I love that movie.

Hess:

So that gets you back up in the upward spiral.

Delbert:

it gets me back up. Yeah. Leanne Morgan, Goldie Ha Kathleen Madigan. I love when Kathleen Madigan says the nuns told her not to bother Jesus. Bother your guardian angel, she's there 24 7 You with all your personal needs. If your guardian angel can't help go to the saint of that particular, she's so funny. I

Hess:

Yeah.

Delbert:

And

Hess:

Yeah.

Delbert:

grew up Catholic, she's even funnier. And I'm, we talked about that. Having our guardian angels, once I learned about cheerleading, I had mine just sit on my shoulders in school, I would just picture my angel sitting up on my shoulders.

Hess:

One, one of my clients re listening to Mel Robbins, said that the, one of the good tips she got from Mel Robbins is to give herself a high five in the mirror in the morning, and I gotta get in the habit of doing that.

Delbert:

that's good. Oh, I That. Yeah,

Hess:

yeah. Positive reflection of yourself, believing in yourself. We got this. Yeah.

Delbert:

have this.

Hess:

Yeah. And Mel has a big thing now. Mel Robbins is this thing about let them, and a lot of people are getting that tattooed on'em. I'm not into tattoos, but I appreciate beautiful tattoos, but let them just being able to let go the reaction of something that's bothering you or something that's done to you. Let them, and then that's, then the important part is then to say, then let me, what can I do then?

Delbert:

about that last week. Yeah, just let it go. And that's when you've let things go, you're expanding and it's pushing that drill up out of the ground, right? It's undoing the spiral when you let it go. And let, just let them do it. Let me work on myself over here.

Hess:

Yeah.

Delbert:

good things I can do.

Hess:

Yeah. Yeah, so everybody, you, everybody has the potential to do all of these things. And it's just us chain harrowing the fields before the renovating pasture we renovated the pastures with the seed drill is you're fertile. You're, you're ready. Get your ground ready to be able to do the spiral up and move to joy.

Delbert:

Whether it's, planting some flowers or looking out at the sunrise or sunset, being with your friends if you're feeling down, I. Go out, take a walk, call your friends, have a cup of coffee, sit and watch the sunset and have a glass of wine. It'll help you out of that spiral.

Hess:

Yeah, everybody, I want you to, I want to thank you all so much for joining our conversation. I feel so much better right now before I started, and I hope you do too. Every Sunday. We'll put a new episode out. Please give us a review, subscribe, share it with a friend, and this beautiful song that Carla Gover wrote on our on our intro and outro. So beautiful. Carla Gover. She's making a new album. Anyway, everybody, we love you. Please share.

Delbert:

Peace and love everybody. We hope you find a beautiful sunrise and a beautiful sunset. We love you friends.