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S1E3. A lifetime of bullying

Reinvented | Season 1 | Scott Simon | A lifetime of bullying

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Overview

As a child, Scott Simon was severely bullied. In his own words, he felt small, insignificant, and afraid.

Years later, during his senior year in college, a small door opened for Scott, and his life began to change.

This episode is about saying “yes” to the things that scare you. This episode is about using your fear to create a lifetime of joy, happiness, and wellbeing.

Highlights

2:45 – “My main emotion when looking back on my childhood is one of fear.”

3:20 – “[Being bullied] made me feel like, the more visible I was, the greater risk I was in… I literally felt and wanted to feel invisible for most of my childhood. And that’s an awful feeling to have.”

5:25 – “We always have those moments in life where somebody opens a door for us. We’ve given the opportunity to take on something that we don’t think we can do. If we, in that moment, can just say yes, as opposed to no, you never know what happens.”

7:05 – “It isn’t really about the skydiving moments in life. It’s about the small steps forward that build one on another.”

9:50 – “Once you can get past that first 15-20 seconds of terror, or more if you ruminate on it beforehand, most of the time you realize you actually love what you’re doing. When you’re in that moment and you’re doing the thing that you were so terrified about doing, you have this tremendous sense of joy.”

10:20 – “It’s like anything else in life. When we put the effort into something that is hard, the feeling that we have afterward is this tremendous feeling of freedom and joy and release.”

16:50 – “Every chance that I had to make a decision about pushing myself in some new way, I took it on. That year absolutely transformed me.”

17:35 – “I re-did my childhood in a year.”

21:05 – “It’s such an underrated concept to sit there with a blank page in front of us and begin to dream about what life looks like.”

24:35 – “We all run the risk of having deep, immersive, even epiphany-type experiences, knowing that a shift has to occur, and then getting re-immersed in life and getting back into the comfort zones that have guided our life previously.”

26:05 – “What we want to do is protect ourselves from pain, anxiety… we have to push ourselves through that comfort barrier. That was the piece that stuck with me.”

29:35 – “I am a glutton for action.”

41:35 – “More often than not, most of us have a tough conversation that we need to have with somebody…. and we’re avoiding it.”

48:35 – “I have chosen to role model vs. mandate. My children revel in what I do and how much I care about it but don’t feel any pressure to follow my path. That is the beauty and challenge in parenting. To honor who our kids truly are and to allow them to find their path.”

52:05 – “As parents, if we can embrace this sense of allowing our kids to say yes to their own journey – and that takes faith and it takes courage – at the end of the day, we end up with kids who feel empowered and like their life is an adventure.”

54:35 – “Allow yourself the permission to be human. The permission to feel the fear, the anxiety, the chaos that surrounds us… to not stifle it, numb it, or pretend that it doesn’t exist… once we honor them, we can start to figure out those ways to take small actions in our lives that are going to allow us a sense of control, a sense of freedom.”

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