Compassionate Las Vegas - The Podcast with Kathryn Goetzke
2024-03-31
Transcript
0:00:02 Will Rucker: Welcome to Compassionate Las Vegas, the podcast. I?m your host, and I am so excited for today?s program. There are so many reasons why you need to tell everyone you know right now to tune into compassionate Las Vegas, because they are going to be inspired, they are going to be motivated, and they are going to be filled with hope. Yes. That?s my super cheesy segue to introduce our very special guest, Katherine Getsy. Welcome to the podcast.
0:00:31 Kathryn Goetzke: Oh, thank you so much, Will. It?s so great to be here and so good to see you.
0:00:36 Will Rucker: Likewise. I am so glad you had time to fit us in, because you are super busy. You are doing some amazing things in this world, and I just can?t wait to dive into it.
0:00:49 Kathryn Goetzke: Oh, thanks a lot. Thanks for having me. I know. I?m excited to be here. And it was part of compassionate Las Vegas, and it was a really meaningful part of my time in Nevada and my work that I?m doing, and it?s so important for my work. So it?s really great to be here talking with you more.
0:01:06 Will Rucker: You are a fellow. What year were you part of the program?
0:01:11 Kathryn Goetzke: It was during COVID 20. Yes, 22, I?m pretty sure. Yeah, I know.
0:01:20 Will Rucker: That?s interesting time frame in life, right?
0:01:22 Kathryn Goetzke: I know. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
0:01:26 Will Rucker: But with that in mind, I just want to set a foundation for our conversation today. And I do this with. With every guest, and it?s asking about the subject of compassion. I want to hear from you what compassion means to you and really how you came about that understanding.
0:01:43 Kathryn Goetzke: Yeah, compassion. What does compassion mean to me? It means kind of a proactive kindness towards self and towards other people. It?s empathy in action, I would kind of say. And, you know, I?ve learned so much from guard Jameson, really, about compassion, and it?s in the work that we do around hope and, you know, some of what we teach in hope. And I also know Jindote, who is at Stanford, who does a lot of work and compassion. So compassion, to me, is really about kindness in action.
0:02:20 Kathryn Goetzke: And, you know, I think embraced with empathy, so having empathy and then acting on it.
0:02:32 Will Rucker: Yeah, yeah. I love all of that. Especially what you started with as proactive kindness. That?s the first time I?ve heard that particular phrasing, and I really, really like that.
0:02:44 Kathryn Goetzke: Thank you. Yeah. Compassion has been a big part of my life. And self compassion, too. We often think about compassion for others and with others, and we forget about ourselves. And yet it?s so important to be compassionate with ourselves as we go through this kind of human journey that we?re on.
0:03:05 Will Rucker: Absolutely. And your journey has truly been a journey. It?s been some very high highs and some very low lows, which just kind of from the outside looking in is why I think hope has become your signature trademark here. So share just, you know, high level of your background and what brought you to hope.
0:03:29 Kathryn Goetzke: Yeah, sure. Absolutely. Thanks for the question. So high highs and low lows for sure. But I think we don?t learn unless we have those contrasting experiences, really. So it?s been an important part of my journey. And so I grew up in Chicago, and when I was 18, I lost my dad to suicide. I was super close with my dad and he was a banker and businessman, and I learned so much from him and I really thought he was always going to be a part of my life. And so when I lost him as a freshman in college, it was super devastating and really hard on me and, you know, led me down my own spiral. And I had my own suicide attempt in my twenties.
0:04:15 Kathryn Goetzke: Didn?t tell another soul for maybe ten years because of the shame I had around it. And I had never thought that I would attempt to take my own life because of my experience with losing my dad and knowing how that affected other people. So it gave me a really deep insight into suicide and a strong desire to do something, to really understand, to figure out the root cause of suicide, because I knew that if I wanted to save my own life, I had to understand what caused it and how I was going to create something different for myself and not follow in my dad?s footsteps. So I worked for a number of companies and businesses and had experience in marketing and research and branding and new products and sales.
0:05:09 Kathryn Goetzke: And I eventually launched my own brand about 20 years ago, which is hard to even the mood light that we mentioned. And I wanted to do a cosmarketing campaign for mental health at the time. And I found the branding around mental health to be super depressing. And so I ended up starting my own brand and nonprofit at that time, and was focused initially on teaching other nonprofits how to talk about mental health in a positive way, how to change stigma through more positive imagery, getting leaders and celebrities talking about their mental health, talking about solutions as opposed to problems.
0:05:51 Kathryn Goetzke: And at the time, less than 25% of people with depression and anxiety globally were getting treatments, and it?s very treatable. So again, I saw it was really a negative brand. And then it was about ten years ago that I was in a suicide prevention talk, and they were talking about prevention in terms of restricting access to mains. So methods to lock up guns and pesticides. Pesticides are a big problem in a lot of countries in the farming community.
0:06:23 Kathryn Goetzke: And then 800 numbers, which are very important when you?re in a crisis, you need. It?s important to have to do those things. And yet I knew for myself and I knew for my dad that that would never prevented my suicide, wouldn?t have prevented his. And so really figuring out what causes it, you know, and getting to that root cause. And across all of the literature, you know, I?m grateful. I?ve learned from the most brilliant minds in the world. But across all the literature, hopelessness is the single consistent predictor of suicide.
0:06:59 Kathryn Goetzke: And I thought I was going to have a big problem because it was going to be so many things and it was going to be very complicated. So the solution was complicated. But to me, that hopelessness was the consistent thing across all of the studies. I thought, well, if I can figure out what hopelessness is, deconstruct hopelessness, and then figure out how to get to hope, like, I can save myself and I can teach other people how to prevent their own suicide and that I set out on a mission to kind of figure out how to do that.
0:07:35 Will Rucker: Wow. I mean, so much to unpack there. The pesticide piece, I really hadn?t considered. So that?s something. I?m also not in farming, so not terribly, you know, close. And that?s something really to think about. There are so many different ways. Also, the idea of mental health, I want to talk a little bit about stigma, but when we talk about mental health, it?s, to me, code for mental illness. We never say, oh, physical health, someone has a physical health issue happening. I know.
0:08:09 Will Rucker: So just kind of curious your thoughts on that. But even before we get into any of that, hope, it seems like a word we probably all have a definition for. But I?m. I wanna make sure we not understand what you mean by hope.
0:08:22 Kathryn Goetzke: Yes, great question, because that is one of the most misused words in the human language, I would say. But I come at it from a scientific standpoint. And so. And my definition arose from what hopelessness is. So when I looked at hopelessness, it?s both emotional despair to feel horrible, and then it?s motivational helplessness. So there?s a sense of powerlessness that I can do anything about that, and it makes sense. So we know hopelessness predicts not just suicide, but also violence.
0:08:56 Kathryn Goetzke: So when we feel horrible and powerless, that?s what that leads to, which, again, it makes sense. So for me, hope is about how do we get, you know, it?s a vision for something in our future, so it?s future orientation, and then how do we fuel it with positive feelings and inspired actions. So, and a lot of the hope researchers, it?s all about self efficacy. So it?s not just a wish, which is often how we use the word hope, but it?s action, so it?s what we want.
0:09:29 Kathryn Goetzke: And knowing how to get there, taking action to get there. So, yeah, it?s a super powerful word when it?s used in that way. And if you hope for something, you can?t just wish for it. You have to learn how to take action towards it. And so that?s really, in essence, what we teach with hope. How do you get from despair to positive feelings, and how do you get from helplessness to inspired action?
0:09:53 Will Rucker: Absolutely. Because I think some of the question I know when I?m even thinking about how to frame this episode, it?s going to be, well, how do you teach hope? But I love that you say hope, not a wish. There?s some action. There?s some science behind that. So thank you so much for sharing that. And with that in mind, Las Vegas is becoming hopeful. Las Vegas. So talk to us about that. I?m so excited. I cannot wait.
0:10:23 Kathryn Goetzke: I know. I?m so excited, too. And thanks to Kar Jameson and the city of Nevada Councilman Bryan, I mean, Knudsen, it?s been just such a pleasure to work with everyone there. So, yeah, so we have all these programs. I?ve been studying hope around the world, and ten years ago, I said, can you teach hope? They were measuring hope. So there?s a hope scale to eight questions, everyone, and the children?s one to six questions. I believe everyone should take the scale. I mean, it will tell you they?ve done all these studies on outcomes, so how long you live, how quickly recover from disease, how well you do in sports, more so than your abilities, all of these great things if you graduate from school, if you stay in your job.
0:11:05 Kathryn Goetzke: So they?ve measured hope. So I?ve been able to show that you can actually teach hope. And as we increase someone?s hope, anxiety and depression decrease. So I?ve created programming and studied it around the world. We have a hopeful minds overview, which is three lessons, kind of the what, why, and how skills that educators, police are teaching these and after school programs. You know, places of worship can bring it to their places of worship. You can use these programs anywhere that go through the what, why, and how of hope. With workbooks for kids.
0:11:39 Kathryn Goetzke: We also have a parents guide for how do you start using hope language at home? We have a new teen guide, so. And we?re working with hope means Nevada on it. Gotta give a shout out to the amazing hope main savannah that does such great work with teens, but teaching these skills, empowering youth and really all of us with skills for how to activate hope in our life. I see you have the shine Hope company because I created a mnemonic to help us remember the five keys to hope. The five things we must be practicing if we want to be hopeful.
0:12:17 Kathryn Goetzke: The first one is stress skills. So that?s the age. So it?s how to identify and manage our stress response so that we?re not reacting to everything that happens to us, but we?re being really proactive about our stress response. If you can take away one thing from this conversation, we have a 92nd physiological response when we?re triggered by something in our environment. So someone says something to us that hurts us or makes us angry, or we have these flooding of chemicals in our body, these norbinephrine and adrenaline and cortisol, and we lose our ability to think, think clearly, and to problem solve and collaborate. So we?re in our fight or flight response, and it takes 90 seconds for those hormones to cycle through our body before we get back to a place of kind of equilibrium. And that is why we make so many horrible decisions in that 90 seconds. So if we can learn how to control that stress response and we use stress skills to do that, you know, that is critical to our ability to hope. That?s why, you know, you can see hopelessness leads to addiction, violence.
0:13:30 Kathryn Goetzke: You know, those things are all. You know, those decisions are all made in less than 30 seconds. That?s why learning how to control that stress response is so critical to our ability to hope.
0:13:40 Will Rucker: Yeah, that?s powerful. Right there it.
0:13:43 Kathryn Goetzke: I mean. I mean, I. Every kid, like, if we could just teach, and especially kids, like kids, when they learn this, and then they start, you know, we teach the kids our downstairs brain and our upstairs brain, right? And if your brothers. If your brother?s in your downstairs brain, like, give him space, back off. Don?t further engage with him, because we can often, like, just escalate that downstairs brain. And that?s why things can escalate so quickly. And that?s why during COVID when all of our stress hormones were elevated, because there was so much uncertainty, we were all so much more reactive, so much more quickly.
0:14:19 Kathryn Goetzke: And so learning about the stress response, and to me, the biology of the stress response when you?re in despair, violence can feel good because you get endorphins when you?re violent. So for our kids, it?s a smart decision to feel better, but it?s not a healthy decision. It?s not going to be healthy for you in the long term. It?s not going to be feel good in the long term. And it, you know, can land you in jail and all of these things. But teaching these kids these concepts is so important because we often shame and blame right now.
0:14:53 Kathryn Goetzke: And what we want to be doing is empowering those kids with information and giving them tools to start to make better decisions and choices for themselves, you know?
0:15:05 Will Rucker: So I want to get to the H I N and E. I know, and I want to talk about that for just a second when you just mentioned the consequences, because we do a lot of work promoting restorative practices. And some of the pushback is, well, people have to be held accountable. And there?s this idea that if you just let someone off the hook, if there?s no punishment, no punitive result, then the behavior continues. And even what I?m hearing in your s, the stress response is that that?s just not scientifically sound.
0:15:39 Kathryn Goetzke: Yeah. Yeah. And I feel like we?re all guilty until we start teaching these kids these skills. I mean, we?re not going to have a better society until we were educated on this. You know, my dad didn?t know how to manage a stress response. Anger was an outcome of that. I don?t blame my dad. I blame our society for not learning how to teach each other about this and start practicing these skills in a way that?s not stigmatizing and shaming, but in a way that?s supporting and helpful.
0:16:08 Kathryn Goetzke: And I love restorative justice. I think, you know, it?s such important work.
0:16:14 Will Rucker: And I think even that stress response may, it almost may be like a feedback loop with stigma because people feel as though, oh, my gosh, I made this mistake, so now I don?t even want to talk about dealing with it anymore.
0:16:29 Kathryn Goetzke: Absolutely. And you think of all the shame that piles up on the shame and then, you know, just the punitive approach we take right now is just so, it?s such an unhealthy and unhelpful model in terms of healing us all and healing the underlying and fundamental problem.
0:16:46 Will Rucker: Healing is a great word to get us back on track for h.
0:16:51 Kathryn Goetzke: Healing happiness habit. So when we?re stressed, we often stop doing the things that are healthy for us. And happiness habits release those endorphins and dopamine, you know, smiling can release them. And if you?re going through a tragedy, the last thing you want to really do is smile. And that?s why, like, intentional, intentional kindness, you know, being intentional about our happiness habits, even when we?re going through challenging times, is so important, although quickly, so inspired actions is the I. And that?s really about goal setting. How do we set goals? What are different types of goals to set? You know, stretch goals versus Marf goals, how to overcome obstacles when we need to regole, I mean, what you think about in life, if you have a big challenge, say you want to be a star athlete and you have a major injury and you can?t continue that, of course that?s going to drive up your hopelessness. And how do you manage that in a way that?s healthy? And so recalling is a really important part of that.
0:17:49 Kathryn Goetzke: The n is nourishing networks. So how to cultivate strong networks, bi directional. Who?s in your circle of influence? You know, compassion is a part of this. We talk about things like compassion and kindness and then the science behind these things. There?s so, you know, there?s a lot of science about how compassion helps us live healthier and longer and more engaged and do better in school and things like that. And then eliminating challenges, which are thinking patterns that get in the way of our ability to move towards what we hope for. So if we ruminate a lot, if we worry about the future, if we try to control things outside of our control, if we internalize failure, these are things that we do that will stop our ability to hope.
0:18:34 Kathryn Goetzke: So it?s learning all of these things and teaching them as skills and then practicing together, learning how to incorporate them into our lives so that we can move towards what we hope for in life, have a set of competencies that help us kind of do that.
0:18:52 Will Rucker: Oh, shine hope.
0:18:54 Kathryn Goetzke: Shine hope. That?s right.
0:18:56 Will Rucker: I love it. I just, you know, this is, this is a great way to just, I may watch this episode every day just to feel good because that?s an amazing thing that?s happening. So tell me what a hopeful city looks like. What can people expect now that Las Vegas is becoming a hopeful city?
0:19:15 Kathryn Goetzke: Yes, that?s a great question. So what I do is I provide all of the resources available. So we?re creating a Las Vegas landing page on the hopeful city site. So hopefulcities.org, you can look at Las Vegas and then all of these resources will be available to download. You can download the shine Hope infographic which has hyperlinks out to all of the skills we use and the science behind why each of these are important and how they?ll affect your life and the lives of others.
0:19:45 Kathryn Goetzke: And then we have the parents guide, we have the curriculums. We have the teen Hope guide. So if you have teens at home and you want them to start working on their hope skills, you know, our teen program is peer to peer, but it?s so that anyone can use these programs and start activating hope in their life. I often say, I can teach you how to hope. I can, but I can?t make you hopeful. You know, I think people?s hope is up to them. It?s up to if it?s important to you, if it?s important for those you love, if you struggle with anxiety or depression, hopelessness is going to be your primary symptom of depression, a key symptom of anxiety.
0:20:21 Kathryn Goetzke: So learning how to hope is going to be really important, and yet it?s something that anyone can learn how to do at any age. That?s really what it?s about. We use the sunflower as the global symbol for hope. So we?re encouraging murals, we?re encouraging sunflower gardens, we?re encouraging shine hope signs. We have workplace posters. So you can start talking about hope in the workplace. We have a hope scale, so you can actually go and measure how hopeful you are. But the idea is to start the conversation around hope, and you talked about how hope was part of your campaign, and hope is so misunderstood, and yet it?s so critical for everything in life.
0:21:05 Kathryn Goetzke: The challenge was hope is, a lot of people think of it as a wish, and it?s not a wish. It?s actually something that?s very, very important for you in life. And really your health care, your health outcomes, all of these are predicted by how hopeful you are. So the idea is to get the Las Vegas community access to all of these programs and skills, and then for you all to start utilizing them, sharing them, practicing together, and all kind of collectively working on your hope.
0:21:37 Will Rucker: Awesome. So I want to play a quick game as we come down to our last couple minutes together, and it?s called build that billboard.
0:21:46 Kathryn Goetzke: Okay.
0:21:47 Will Rucker: All right. So everything has to fit on a billboard. I?m going to give you kind of the topic, and you?re going to tell me what?s on that billboard. So let?s make the first one pretty easy. You get a billboard to talk about hope. What does it say?
0:21:59 Kathryn Goetzke: Okay. Hope is teachable.
0:22:02 Will Rucker: Oh, all right. I like that.
0:22:04 Kathryn Goetzke: Keep shining, keep shining.
0:22:07 Will Rucker: You know, that reminds me of the that?s what friends are for song keep shining.
0:22:13 Kathryn Goetzke: That?s right.
0:22:14 Will Rucker: Always count on me that.
0:22:16 Kathryn Goetzke: Yeah. I love that. I like that. I know. I like it. Yeah.
0:22:21 Will Rucker: All right. What?s your billboard about? Love. Say.
0:22:26 Kathryn Goetzke: Love, forgiveness. Or it just has, like, a heart, you know? I know. I don?t know. I just. Love for me, is such a feeling. It?s hard to, like, put that on a billboard. Be a big heart.
0:22:46 Will Rucker: The headline reads, what the world needs now is. And what are you putting under that?
0:22:55 Kathryn Goetzke: Love, compassion, and hope.
0:23:01 Will Rucker: I?m going to pause again just because I love that you put those three together. I think that compassion is really the link of love and hope. And it?s that trinity that, like they say, the vocal trinity, mariah, Celine, and whitney, that?s kind of the trinity of how the world can just be amazing. Is that love, hope, and compassion. So, all right, this is the last one.
0:23:25 Kathryn Goetzke: Okay.
0:23:27 Will Rucker: Katherine get ski.
0:23:31 Kathryn Goetzke: Chief hope officer.
0:23:36 Will Rucker: Okay. But I?m gonna write it a little different. Who is katharine getsy?
0:23:42 Kathryn Goetzke: I mean, I think I?m a purveyor of hope.
0:23:46 Will Rucker: Perfect. That is absolutely perfect. So tell us again how folks can get in contact with the shine Hope company. How they can get engaged in hopeful Las Vegas, and how they can connect with you if they want more information.
0:24:00 Kathryn Goetzke: Awesome. So you can go to theshinehope company.com if you want to check out our work, but definitely go to the hopeful cities, the Las Vegas page. And please share these resources. Start using these resources in the community. I mean, these skills, these are free skills and tools that you can use to start activating hope in your life today in the lives of others. We have the CDC put out a report. 57% of teen girls identify with persistent hopelessness.
0:24:33 Kathryn Goetzke: You know, I just. I have to repeat that. 57% of our teen girls are identifying with persistent hopelessness. And hopelessness is learned. So we are teaching our children to be hopeless. And I think this is the greatest tragedy of our time. And to me, we have got to empower our youth and teens, if you?re listening, it?s up to you. I mean, empower each other. You know, we?re teaching you this. You have got to. I think we need a teen revolt around hope, because teens have so much to teach us about hope. And so for me, getting these programs into the hands of teens so they can start teaching each other and teaching us, too, how to better live, you know? Please go to hopefulcities.org and check out these resources and use them.
0:25:31 Kathryn Goetzke: Yeah.
0:25:33 Will Rucker: Well, Katherine, thank you so so very much for joining compassionate Las Vegas. This has been compassionate Las Vegas, the podcast. I?m will Rucker, and as I always remind you, you are not just a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop. And what you do matters. So live compassionately and shine. Hope we?ll see you next time.
0:25:59 Kathryn Goetzke: Thank you. Thank you so much.
0:26:02 Will Rucker: My pleasure. Our.
