Nichole Christian is a writer, artist and mother from Detroit. I want to collect your favorite advice from this year. The advice that you're actually practicing in real life that you learned from this show. Tell me what that is by writing me at ZAK@BESTADVICE.SHOW. Or you can call the hotline, 844-935-BEST. I'm gonna collect your responses about the best, Best Advice, and put together a week or two of greatest hits episodes. Embracing Discomfort with Wendy Walters - https://bestadvice.show/episodes/20201019_embracing-discomfort-with-wendy-s--walters/TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: Since the start of COVID and actually long before that, I've been on a quest for comfort. My friend, Nichole was also on that quest. But now she says she's given that up and suggests, maybe, we do the same.NICHOLE: Kill comfort. Choose now. ZAK: So is now uncomfortable?NICHOLE: Yeah. Yeah. It's completely uncomfortable. But it is what it means to be alive. The more I let go of comfort, the more I accidentally open myself to surprise. To now. To things I've just forgotten. And I think that that's really where life is. Now is a lot richer, even with all of the hell surrounding it, now is a lot richer than we allow ourselves to believe.ZAK: And for those of us who are comfortable in comfort, what's an exercise to tap into embracing the discomfort?NICHOLE: I've had comfort but I think comfort requires a kind of clinging and grasping that you do it so long you don't even know you're doing it. And so the things that you're holding on to...like you probably know what you love to eat, you know where to go for this, you know where to go for that. Well, when all that's gone, who are you? So, what if you didn't choose the thing you always chose? What if you didn't say the thing you always said? What might that teach you? Comfort is transactional. You give something and you get something back. Discomfort says you go through it, the understanding may not come for a while. And if you are ok with that, you might find some surprise. You might find yourself able to do things you never thought yourself capable of...to talk to people you never thought you would...to learn from things that, um, you'd completely shut yourself off from. ZAK: This advice kind of feels like a koan to me. It's gonna take some real work to unravel and figure out how to practice. But that's why I like it so much. NICHOLE: My name is Nichole Christian and I am a writer and a deep believer in the power of creativity. ZAK: Discomfort has been a theme on a couple of episodes of this show. The most recent one was with Wendy Walters.WENDY: Discomfort is a real gift in terms of teaching you how to get past something that is completely internal. ZAK: I linked to her entire episode in our show notes. You've been listening to The Best Advice Show and we are coming up to the end of the year. That means I want to collect your favorite advice from this year. The advice that you're actually practicing in real life that you learned from this show. Tell me what that is by writing me at ZAK@BESTADVICE.SHOW. Or you can call the hotline, 844-935-BEST. I'm gonna collect your responses about the best, Best Advice, and put together a week or two of greatest hits episodes. Talk to you soon. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow---Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST---Share this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow

Laura Hawley is a psychotherapist and artist living and howling in Philadelphia. She has a side gig running a support group for hospital clowns.To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BESTTRANSCRIPT:ZAK: When I get new messages from you on the advice hotline, it makes my day. Especially this one.LAURA: Hi Zak, this is Laura Hawley. So here's my advice to deal with stress and grief and also just kind, wanting to be connected with other people and also to be slightly, oh I guess slightly absurd, which is, my advice is to at a specific time of the week, just go ahead and tip back your head and really howl. Like, just howl for whatever you're feeling at the moment. Maybe grief for somebody. Or maybe outrage. Or maybe just a kind of longing to be nearer to other people. It's a very satisfying practice. I've been doing it for awhile now and I send out invitations to my friends and I'm hoping at some point I will have sent out enough invitations that I'll hear them while I'm howling at 7 PM EST on Fridays. Anyway, that's what I do.ZAK: Ok, do you want to try this with me? Let's do this. HOWWWWWWWWWLLLLLLLLLLLLLL. I want to hear your advice. 844-935-BEST. That's 844-935-BEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSST. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow---Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST---Share this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow

Heather Radke (@hradke) writes essays, criticism, and reported pieces on subjects including the gender politics of ponies, the utopian possibilities of jumpsuits, the early days of public radio, the dark history of eugenics and the cultural history of the female butt.Man Against Horse by Heather Radke and Matt Kielty is a story about your butt - https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/man-against-horseExorcising the Icky with adrienne maree brown - https://bestadvice.show/episodes/2020519_exorcising-the-icky-with-adrienne-maree-brown/TRANSCRIPT: Today's advice comes out of a project the writer Heather Radke has been working on. It's a forthcoming book about...The cultural history of the female butt and people always ask me why I'm writing this book which is like, fair enough, that's a good question! But, I think the most straight-forward answer is I have a big butt. I grew up in a place and at a time where that was a thing to be, sort of, ashamed of or at the very least it was not considered beautiful or sexy or good. And so, I felt a certain amount of shame about it and I feel like the project is sort of an investigation of that shame and I guess my advice is actually to investigate your shame because I feel like that as an artists as a writer, its been a very fruitful part of my practice. I've done it in a number of different ways and I also just feel like as a person when you start to really get curious about why you're ashamed of something, you end of finding out so much more than you could have ever expected and in this case, you know, and I think in a lot of cases, you end up finding really interesting political material, you know? That the shame around a certain kind of body is a shame around race and gender and gendered ideas of bodies and racialized ideas of bodies that we kind of hold in ourselves without ever knowing it. Because the nature of shame is that almost don't want to bring it into your consciousness fully, so, that means that there's a lot you kind of don't understand about it and you don't experience...unless you really think about it and you really try to unpack it then you don't fully understand what's creating the shame in the first place. ZAK: What do you think is on the other side of taking your shame seriously and investigating it?HEATHER: I was thinking about this just this morning because I think that the answer that you want to be the answer to that question is that your shame goes away. But I don't think that's true. It's almost like lancing a boil or something. There's still a scar there. It's not gone but there's some weight or kind of...there's something that's diminished by taking it seriously and getting interested in it. ZAK: Yeah. And I wonder how much of the, the investigating of shame for people, like what percentage will come back to race and capitalism. HEATHER: I mean, well you know I think 100 percent is answer! hahahah. And that's a joke I have about this book. It's like come for the butts, stay for the critical race theory, you know?ZAK: Totally. HEATHER: But I also think it's a good just in the storytelling mode, it's a good...ZAK: Oh, my God, it's literally a back door!HEATHER: Hahahaha. There ya go. Also, full of puns. ZAK: Heather Radke's book about butts is coming soon. But if you want to hear more in the meantime, she did this amazing story on Radiolab called Man Against Horse. I've linked to it in the show notes. And then there's another episode from this show with the writer and pleasure activist with adrienne maree brown called, Exorcising the Icky, which I think goes well with today's episode. The thing I know for sure is if I share it with someone, some of the ickyness goes away.You've been listening to The Best Advice Show and I want to hear your best advice. Give me call on the hotline. I'm always here for you. 844-935-BEST. That's 844-935-BEST. Talk to you soon. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow---Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST---Share this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow

Jack Cheng (@jackcheng) is a Shanghai-born, Detroit-based author of critically acclaimed fiction for young readers. His debut children’s novel, See You in the Cosmos, is winner of the 2017 Golden Kite and Great Lakes, Great Reads awards for Best Middle Grade Fiction.Share Your Good News With Us! - https://somethinggood.show/TRANSCRIPT:ZAK: With COVID raging on and us spending so much time indoors, it's really easy to feel disconnected from our hometowns. And now, probably more than ever, what we're reading online feels like the only, or at least predominate reality and it's not pretty. But the writer, Jack Cheng recently had an experience that reminded him there is a chasm between stories we read online and the actual reality happening outside our door. JACK: So I signed up to be an election worker earlier this year and I worked both the March Presidential Primary and then the August Local Primary and I worked this past November General Election and just, like, going into it I think I had a lot of anxiety around...cause I was reading all these things in the news about, like, oh, you know, open and concealed carry and issues with like, potential challengers and poll-watchers. Yeah, I was just really on edge going into that day but once the day started and once people started coming in to vote, you know, we ended up seeing a lot of the regulars we saw in past elections in our precinct. And I think it was just this feeling of relief and this feeling that, like, maybe things aren't as crazy or as bad as I thought they were gonna be. I actually was trying to jot down little notes in my phone throughout the day and like, one of the notes that I wrote down was, "I will not let fear rule my life." And I think what that meant to me was I will not let this imagined world I've created in my head from reading all the news and from scrolling through the twitter feed...It's like, I will not let that become my reality. But, yeah, we had a number of challengers on site and they were all very respectful and all curious about the process, rather than looking for faults in the process. They were just trying to understand the work we were doing that day. ZAK: Yeah, do you like Regina Spektor?JACK: I don't think I've listened to any album all the way through of hers. Why?ZAK: You just reminded me of this great lyric of hers that I love where she says, "People are just people. They shouldn't make you nervous."JACK: Hahaha. That's great. ZAK: Jack Cheng's most recent novel is See You in the Cosmos. ZAK: I think this is a good time to tell you about a new project my colleagues at Graham Media are working on. It's called Something Good. It's a series highlighting the best in humanity. And we want to hear about the good that you're bringing into this world. If you go to SomethingGood.Show and then click that link at the top that says "Share your good news" it will take you down into a portal where we get to hear about what you've been up to. We can't wait to hear from you. Thanks so much. I'll talk to you soon. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow---Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST---Share this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow

Susannah Goodman is an artist, potter and community organizer in Detroit. I want to start collecting your grandparents best advice. What did they tell you that sticks with you? Let me know by calling the hotline, 844-935-BEST. Talk to you soon. TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: Did you make an entire Thanksgiving dinner for a bunch of people this year, even though there were just a few of you eating it? Well, today's advice is for you. It comes from Susannah Goodman. SUSANNAH: I'm an artist and potter and community organizer in Detroit. ZAK: Oh, and you may have noticed the new intro music. Friend of the show, Artemus Samual, suggested we pick out some specific Food Friday theme music. That's what this is. Ok, on to Susannah's advice.SUSANNAH: When you make enough food to freeze some of it, which you should. Whenever you're cooking something that you're really excited about, especially in COVID times, you should make enough to freeze it cause you're gonna get tired of cooking. You're probably already tired of cooking. But if you make enough to freeze it, make sure that when you put it in the freezer you label it. But not just label it. Label it with, like, gusto and flare because so often when you're hungry and you don't feel like cooking and you, like, open your fridge or you open your freezer, you're like, ugh this frozen thing. It doesn't look good and it doesn't inspire you to want to defrost it but if you write more on the label, like, 'zesty, coriander, chutney' or 'That one time you made gravy with Grandpa!' You know, if you attach both a story or some descriptive words to it, it makes the whole act of defrosting an exciting thing cause you kind of get to relive that moment.ZAK: And it gets you past that hump of, 'uhhhh this is boring leftovers' to 'Ohhhh! I remember this was great!"SUSANNAH: Totally and then you can even build it into your meal planning too. Like, "Oh, this week I get to defrost this thing that I remember from so many months ago."ZAK: I love that. How did you figure this one out?SUSANNAH: I actually figured it out when my grandparents stopped being able to really cook for themselves super regularly. So when've I would visit them I'd make these big feasts and like, freeze in good 2-person portions all the different elements of the meal and to motivate them to defrost it I would just like put the date and a little note for them on it. And then they could just...I just imagined them navigating their freezer feeling less disabled and more enabled to relive the family meals that we've had together. But it's also been really helpful in COVID.ZAK: That's a really nice granddaughter thing to do. Thank you, Susannah Goodman. And this reminds me. I want to start collecting your grandparents best advice. What did they tell you that sticks with you? Let me know by calling the hotline, 844-935-BEST. Talk to you soon. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow---Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST---Share this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow

Nikki Sanchez is a frontline activist, academic, media-maker and a decolonial and anti-racist educator. Watch Nikki's TEDx talk “Decolonization is for Everyone” - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QP9x1NnCWNY&feature=youtu.beHow to Do Thanksgiving with Less Waste - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/16/dining/thanksgiving-food-waste.htmlTRANSCRIPT: NIKKI: Pialli Cualli Tlaneci. Ni itoca Nicola Sanchez-Hood. Ni Cuscatleta, ni Maya Pipil den Cuscatlán. My name is Nikki Sanchez. I am a front-line activist, an academic, a media-maker and a decolonial and anti-racist educator.ZAK: It's American Thanksgiving and Nikki is here to remind us that this holiday isn't just about jubilation. To a lot of people, Thanksgiving is...NIKKI: ...the basis of genocide of Native American people in what's known as North America now and so the harms that it causes to celebrate that as a jubilant day when for so many people it is very intimately still linked to the trauma that they live in their lives and their communities. But additionally to that, Thanksgiving as a holiday has been borrowed and manipulated into American culture from many, many diverse and very old traditions around the world that our celebrating harvest and showing gratitude and reaffirming commitment to reciprocal relationships with land and with one another and other co-habitants of your landscape and so I think rather then needing to throw away this holiday we could reclaim it and repurpose it back into its truest origins. For most people if they did their own genealogies, they could find significant holidays that were similar that are really around gratitude and wellness and that's an opportunity to really connect with who you are and what your gifts are and what your lineage is as well things that bring you joy and comfort.ZAK: And so, before calling blasphemy on the idea of maybe not eating turkey today, Nikki suggests we create menus inspired by our own heritage and backgrounds.NIKKI: And that not only really affirms our connection to our own ancestors and our own identifies but also it's probably much better for our individual bodies because we've evolved, adapting to those specific foods and it's definitely better for out global health because we're not over-sourcing and overproducing a single mono-crop just for one day of the year.ZAK: I wonder what you think a question that people can ask themselves on Thanksgiving might be to help them reframe what the holiday can mean for them.NIKKI: Yeah, I think a really important question is what am I truly grateful for. The pandemic, I think for many people has helped reveal the things that we most value and the second questions is how can I take time to actually dwell in my gratitude. So rather than just having the thought, I'm grateful for my wife, I'm grateful for my children or I'm grateful for this river that provides me fish...what does it actually feel like to enact or demonstrate and embody gratitude in a way that feels most authentic to you, not necessarily how it's externally prescribed or marketed but in a way that really feels authentic is a healthy practice.ZAK: I hope your holiday is full of meaning and embodied gratitude. I want to thank Priya Krishna for her piece in the New York Times. It led me to Nikki Sanchez and inspired today's episode. It's called, How to Do Thanksgiving with Less Waste. I linked to it in our show notes. You've been listening to The Best Advice Show. If you have some advice to offer, I would love to hear it. The hotline is always open. 844-935-BEST. THANK YOU. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow---Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST---Share this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow

Chelsea Devantez (chelseadevantez) is a comedian, TV writer, filmmaker host of podcast, Celebrity Book Club. To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BESTTRANSCRIPT: ZAK: Chelsea Devantez is a very busy creative person.CHELSEA: I am a comedian, TV writer and filmmaker and I also have a podcast called, Celebrity Book Club where I recap and celebrate really great female, celebrity memoirs with a new guest every week.ZAK: A while ago, Chelsea figured out a way to temper her disappointment. It might work for you too.CHELSEA: In order to do something creatively and do it really well you have to put your heart and soul and everything into it, but then, you know, at lease when you're in my line of it, the entertainment line, it means when it doesn't go well, it's absolutely devastating and then it's hard to get back up again because you put everything into it. So the piece of advice that me and my friend, Ashley Nicole Black, I can't remember who came up with it, if it was me or her, but we gave it to each other which is to line up another project when you're midway through your current project. So if you get your dream show and you're gonna pitch it, now line up your dream feature and before you can hear the answer to one of them, you've already put so much momentum into the second one that you can never hit the ground completely because momentum of the next project is already holding you up.ZAK: Yeah, so you're saving yourself from that awful deflation, devastation moment when they say, we're not picking up your show, and you're nothing because you had all your eggs in that basket, so you're spreading out your eggs!CHELSEA: You're spreading out your eggs and you're also, when you get that devastating news, you have a net which is like, well I'm still working on this other thing. So, I can't fall too hard because I held up some of my emotions with the other projects.ZAK: Can you compare and contrast the way a no felt then to the way a no feels now?CHELSEA: Oh my gosh. Yeah. I would be sobbing with all the lights out for maybe, like, seven hours to the point where my roommate at the time came home and was like, 'Do we need to call somebody!?' So, yeah, I would get knocked down really hard and it would take me a long time to come back and the depression was really intense. So, this really changed things for me when I learned to spread out my passions and not fully give everything until the moment it was truly going so that I always had a creative pursuit I was exciting about and no one could ever take it away from me because I always had something creative I loved going on.ZAK: To practice this advice it seems you've got to work maybe even twice as hard but it really seems like a great way to save yourself from a lot of a heartache. Thank you, Chelsea. Good stuff. If you have some advice I would love to hear it. Give me a call on the hotline at 844-935-BEST. Talk to you soon. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow---Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST---Share this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow

Aaron Handelsman is a leadership coach living in Detroit. To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BESTTRANSCRIPT: AARON: Stop saying yes to what's really a no. Like, you know how somebody might ask you to do something or you'll think about something and be like, I should do that, but your whole body is contracting in on itself and you're like, no, no, no, no, no but your brain is like, I have to. I must. I should. And so you say yes. And then you either avoid it until the very end or your feel a little resentful or whatever...you do it begrudgingly. Stop doing that...for a week! If you're somebody who finds yourself having a hard time saying no, there's this idea that, like, unless you can actually say a pure and authentic no, it's also impossible for you to say a pure and authentic yes, to anything. And so, it can be a pretty transformational process to just practice saying no and noticing what happens in your body and starting to relearn that you're free, actually, in your life. And that your body usually knows the answer to what it really wants you to do and doesn't want you to do. And the simple exercise of seeing how many times you can say no to things that, for no other reason that you don't want to do something. Myself in my own life and so many people I work with, like, really live like we're not allowed to say no. And it creates a lot of pain.ZAK: Because you might come off as selfish, unhelpful...AARON: Totally. Egocentric, absorbed, not good enough.ZAK: And you're not saying don't be helpful. AARON: No! I think most of us feel our best when we know that what we're doing is of service to something bigger than us. But there's a difference between choosing to do something from that place of like, oh, I want to do this. One, because I know it's gonna be beneficial to other people and tow because I want that experience right now. And doing the same activity from a place of obligation, you might have the same action but a wildly different experience and potentially impact. I'm Aaron Handelsman and I am a leadership coach. I work with leaders who are committed to living into the fullest version of their legacy and impact. ZAK: This is Aaron's second piece of advice on this show. His first episode is called, "Sharing Yourself with Aaron Handelsman." I put that in the show notes. Just say no, friends. Just. Say. No. But say yes to rating and reviewing this show on Apple Podcasts. Thanks! Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow---Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST---Share this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow

Maybe I'm more tired than I realized. The episode that was supposed to run today, Grandparent Advice with Sam Greenspan and Renée Wolf McKible, I accidentally launched on Saturday. Whoops! So, what should have been today's episode is already in your feed. Don't miss it! It's part 1 of an ongoing series I'm really excited about featuring your grandparents best advice.But as long as I've got you here, I want to ask, what advice from this show have you actually integrated into your life? We're over 150 episodes in and I want to start reflecting on some of the stickiest advice you've heard on the show. Let me know by calling the hotline at 844-935-BEST or by writing me at Z A K at bestadvice.show. You can also respond to the instagram video I posted in the comment section.I'm so excited to hear what's stuck with you this year. I'm thinking I'll collect your greatest hits into a week or two of shows at the end of the year.Thanks! Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow---Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST---Share this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow

Sam Greenspan is the creator and host of BELLWETHER, a podcast of speculative journalism and TALKGROUP, a radio zine about the lockdown & the uprising.SEND ME YOUR GRANDPARENTS' ADVICE @ 844-935-BEST!TRANSCRIPT:ZAK: I mentioned my late grandpa's disdain for sticky fingers in a recent episode and it got me thinking him and his most reliable piece of advice. It was to - when you're meeting someone - always shake their hand firmly and look them in the eye. The fact that handshakes are now frowned upon would have been really hard for him to take. I want to hear about the advice your grandparents passed on to you and I think it would make for a cool recurring series on the show. Maybe we'll "Grandpar-rants", like rants from your grandparents? Maybe not the best name. I'm open to your ideas, though. Regardless, what advice from your grandparents sticks with you? Lemme know at 844 935 BEST. We're gonna kick off the series today with Sam Greenspan, talking about his grandma. SAM: She was a real badass, feminist, woman. I remember she always had a needle-point pillow on her couch that said, "A woman's place is in the house and the senate." And the only piece of advice I ever heard her give was, be polite and do whatever the hell you want. And that is what's on her gravestone in South Florida. Yeah, Renee Wolf McKible. Be polite and do whatever the hell you want.ZAK: Renne Wold McKible, thank you for that. I love it! Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow---Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST---Share this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow