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Welcome to episode #35 of the Morning Upgrade Podcast. In this episode, I spoke with Arianna Zabriskie, an associate marriage and family therapist and a clinical psychology doctoral candidate. In her free time she likes painting, cooking, and spending time with her daughter.

Top Talking Points

  • Making sure you have outlets for personal development and reflection.
  • The positive aspects of single motherhood.
  • Happiness is being your most authentic self.

Resources & Links

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Connect With Arianna at ariannazabriskie.com or Linkedin

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Episode Transcript

Ryan 

Hey guys, it’s Ryan real quick. So my mission with the morning upgrade blog and podcast is to raise the awareness of morning routines and personal development. And I now have two products that are also helped me with this mission. The first product helps you start a 20 minute morning routine. And the second product is a book that outlines how to use personal development to upgrade your life and business. You can get full details on both products over at morning upgrade.com. Thanks for letting me share and now on to the show.

Announcer  

Welcome to the Morning upgrade podcast with Ryan cote where we feature casual conversations with entrepreneurs about personal development and growth.

Ryan  

Hey, everyone, this is Ryan Cote with the morning upgrade podcast and today I’m having a conversation with Arianna Zipursky. Hey, Ariana, how are you? Oh,

Arianna 

Good. How are you? Doing good?

Ryan  

Why don’t we start off by you telling everyone you know what you do? And then what your interests are?

Ariann  

Yeah, absolutely. So I’m an associate marriage family therapist. And I’m also working on my doctorate in clinical psychology. Now I’m just as a couple weeks ago, and officially doctoral candidate, pretty exciting moment. My specialization in the therapy world is addiction. I work at an addiction rehabilitation center downtown as a clinical therapist. And I also do forgiveness coaching on the side. And this year 2020, I created my own business, which is a group training program for life coaches, and it’s called unfuck, with double coaches. And it’s essentially coaching from a therapist perspective. So I trained coaches, about being mental health and trauma informed.

Ryan  

And once you’re playing with it with the coaching business, you’re going to intertwine it with your practice, or is it going to be two? I guess standalone businesses?

Arianna  

Right? Yeah, there’s separate Yeah. So I do, I do the individual work with my own clients. And I do that in the therapy world that’s under the umbrella of addiction. And then I do my private coaching claims, which is with the emphasis on forgiveness. So forgiveness coach, and that entails all sorts of different things that will be coming up in people’s lives that I help people work through. With then the coaching program is more of a niche area that I saw that there was a lot of coaches wanting more information on how to differentiate therapy from coaching, and also how to recognize when a client might need therapy versus coaching and how to collaborate with a mental health professional while working with a client. So that’s kind of a new topic that I’ve been talking about and advocating for is a collaboration between the two fields to finally bridge the gap between coaching and therapy.

Ryan 

Sounds like you get your hands full, but sounds like it’s very fulfilling work, I’d imagine.

Arianna 

Yes, it’s very exciting. And it was born out of 2020 Evolution right during the pandemic. Not only did I have my baby as a single mother, but I felt that I needed to explore ways to launch my business that would allow me more time with my daughter. So group programs are a great way to do that. But then there was this great need. There continues to be this great need for a bridge between the two fields. And that’s exactly how I see myself right now is working on advocation for the bridge.

Ryan  

Excellent. What an awesome mission. What do you do for fun?

Arianna 

For fun, I love to paint. My kitchen right now is completely overwhelmed with all my art. I have an idea. This is usually going to be the future but I have an idea to do like art for empowerment where people can buy my art and it is with an emphasis on a certain emotion. So art for peace or art for happiness. There are for joy art for surrender, things like that. But I love to paint do that for fun. And I love to cook and bake. I love to bake especially. And that is probably my like, definitely my relax, reset time. And then I also love to go to the beach. I live in San Diego. I think my six-month-old daughter put her in the front pack. And we go there’s this great hike that we go to every Saturday where we hiked down to the beach, spend some time by the water, get our toes wet and then hike back up and great.

Ryan 

The sun? Nice. That’s a great transition into your morning routine. Before we hit record you were starting to talk about your morning routine. In this podcast. We talked about morning routines we talked about personal development, a little bit of entrepreneurship. So why don’t you talk money? Tell everyone what your morning routine looks like.

Arianna  

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So as I mentioned, you know, a single mother to my six-month-old. So I was determined on figuring out how I could integrate the version of my pretty child to the new version of me, where my life is completely revolving around her needs, and my baby, what she is leaving at that moment. So that’s been a bit of exploration. But what I’ve found is that I think, going out and being outside first thing in the morning is helpful for both of us. So actually, I got a pet bunny, because why not? She’s like, the cutest thing. So part of our morning routine is we get up we open all the blinds, and kind of like I carry her around, and we look at the pictures and we, I talk about all this as I place this is our house, that’s our button. And then we open up all the blinds, please let the bunny out of the cage to play with the button. And then we get ready and we’d go to our hike or morning walk. And I have a theory about exposure to sunlight in the morning. It not only helps us set adult sleep cycles, and that part is proven. It’s not a theory of mine. That’s proven by research. But actually, my theory is that I think it also helps reset the sleep cycles of babies too. So I think that just as important as it is for adults to have exposure to morning light for healthy sleepers. And I think the thing is for babies, so she sleeps better. I feel better. That’s our morning routine as we get outside.

Ryan  

Yeah, sounds nice. You bring me back to when we had our first child, my wife used to do that. She takes her for walks. And, you know, fast forward to today with three kids the mornings is like every man for themself, you know, but no more walks up. I mean, not exactly. But you know, it’s peaceful. That sounds nice. So, in terms of personal development, and your different businesses, what habits do you have that, that you can share that help with your businesses and help with being a mother and just life in general? What habits do you have?

Arianna  

Yeah, absolutely. I think my biggest habit is making sure that I always have an outlet for personal growth, continual personal growth for myself, in the form of either having my therapist, I have the various healers that I work with. And that’s, that’s my new time, you know. So as just as much as I’m doing healing work for others, making sure that I always have a space to do feeling work for myself. And then also having an outlet to reflect when things get stressful when things feel overwhelming because there are those moments. Having a grid structure, mine is journaling. So whenever I feel overwhelmed in my business, or, you know, just wanting to get more clear, I like to traditionally journal, but then I also have another journal, it’s a notebook. And it’s aligned free. So it’s just, it’s an enormous notebook. And I like to call it my mind mapping book. And that’s where I do my brain dump for all my business ideas. So sometimes when I am getting a lot of different ideas at the same time, and I’m like, Oh my gosh, okay, I need to funnel this into one. But I pull out my mind mapping book. And I’ll start doodling and drawing, okay, how does this connect to this? And how do you know and I quite literally start to withdraw like bubbles of how, okay, this idea could influence this and work together this way. So it’s helped me visualize it all. And then I would say the last part that I would recommend too, is making sure you have a support system. So for me, I lean on my support system a lot with my friends and my family, and just talking about different ideas, but also talking about different stresses and you know, being honest, like when things feel like they’re not working or think even being honest about when things are working. I think honesty is key because they have a greater level of intimacy and relationships. And I think that that directly translates into business as well as having transparency around what’s working and what’s not. And it helps you have greater stamina to stay on your path or it also helps you understand when you’re ready to pivot and try something different.

Ryan  

Yeah, as you mentioned, journaling, I call it a brain dump to like in the morning is part of my morning routine. It’s only a few minutes, but whatever’s on my mind in the morning, I get it out and call it a brain dump to kind of empty out my mind. I feel like journaling is one of the more underutilized techniques because I think it’s it seems so simple that you think like why should I do it, but it’s so powerful.

Arianna  

So powerful. I have a journal that I write for my daughter as well. So, you know, just talking about this whole journey of solo motherhood and launching my business and navigating all the ins and outs of moving into our apartment together and just learning so much in this journey, I write letters to her imagining that it’s her as an adult reading them, you know, and that, that I think, brings so much comfort to I feel like I’d benefit from that.

Ryan 

What a cool idea, I registered my daughter’s names as their domain names now in case they want it and registered them for 10 years, that would be great to play with the journal, they can read it, keep it private to yourself. You know, nobody can use it.

Arianna  

Oh, that’s cool.

Ryan  

Because of your business, it sounds like you’re plugged into your emotion. So I’m just curious to see what you think about this, what your, what your definition and approach to happiness are. What does happiness mean to you? 

Arianna

That’s a really good question. Are we all on that exploration? You know, I think from my very humble opinion, I could say, happiness is vulnerability. Happiness is not having to hide anything. Happiness is being aligned with your actions and your words. Happiness is being your most authentic self, and that aligns with your highest version of yourself. 

Ryan

What do you do when you don’t feel happy? You personally.

Arianna 

More in those moments, that’s when I turn to journal and explore what the block is, where the mismatches happening, where the feelings of doubt are coming from exploring if it’s outside feelings, or if it’s my feeling. And also meaning on that support network is huge, you know, sharing with them vulnerably. And shamelessly, I think, the most important thing you can do, and when you share, truthfully, like, okay, you know, free training my daughter right now, right, which is challenging. At least I’m finding it so challenging and sharing with my friends. Oh, my gosh, this is just so hard. And hearing other friends of mine who have children say, I know, I know, it’s so hard. And just hearing that alone, like, permit other people to be truthful as well. And I think that helps us not feel so alone in the experience. We all have things that we’re going through. I think that’s before you mentioned the support group too, as well. I’m a huge believer in masterminds and support groups and basic peer groups, getting together with like-minded people that you can share with. 

Ryan

Yeah, absolutely. I’ve got one more question for you, Ariana, and then we’ll wrap up with you telling everyone how they can learn more about you. So if you can give one piece of personal development advice to someone, what would that piece of advice be?

Arianna 

Yeah, I would say personal development is not a one-time thing. It’s a journey. And it’s a lifelong journey. It never stops. If you get something that one must always explore, and be always on the journey to discover. And also, I think, looking at how you can transmute right alchemize your most challenging struggle into the concept of what is my soul? What is my subconscious meant to learn from this experience? You know, one of my words, how can I translate this experience into it being formed, rather than happening to me, and I think that I use that a lot. Through my journey of becoming a single mom. And before my baby was even born, it was easy at times to fall into feeling like a victim. And then I found a lot of drinks when I realized that it was happening completely for me and continued to do so.

Ryan  

Oh, yeah. Now you have this beautiful girl that you’ve spent your mornings with. And sure there are a lot more memories to come. So yeah, I enjoyed this Ariana, what’s the best way that people can learn more about you if they want to connect with you?

Arianna 

Yeah, they can connect with me on social media, Arianna Zabriskie. Or also you can visit my website, Ariannazabriskie.com. I just said I’d love to connect with anyone.

Ryan  

Awesome. Yeah. Well, we’ll link up all your links on the show notes page. Thank you. Thanks for being on. Thanks, everyone, for listening.

Arianna 

Thank you so much.

Ryan  

Thanks for listening to the Morning Upgrade podcast please subscribe and review and don’t forget to visit us at morningupgrade.com for more content.

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