Episode 100: Life Looks Different When You Learn to Give Grace

We’ve all heard the phrase, “They finally showed their true colors.” Usually, it’s said when someone disappoints us or acts in a way we didn’t expect. In those moments, it is easy to think everything good about them was fake. But what if that is not true?

The truth is, people are not all good or all bad. We each carry both sides: the kind and the harsh, the patient and the frustrated. Which side shows up often depends on the pressure we are under.

In this episode, Avram and Rachel share why it is important to give grace to others, to ourselves, and even to hard situations. By seeing both sides, we can find balance, learn from struggles, and turn challenges in business and life into growth.

Show Notes

Key Highlights from this Episode:

• Avram challenges the idea that people only “show their true colors” when things go wrong
• Rachel shares a breakthrough about finding the good even in past trauma
• How Avram and Rachel reframe tough client experiences into lessons for growth
• Why balance matters when facing struggles in life, business, and relationships
• The power of giving grace to yourself and others in hard moments
• Parenting parallels: Rachel and Avram talk about holding both love and frustration at the same time
• How to spot opportunities hidden inside challenges
• Why Avram and Rachel believe growth comes from seeing both sides of the story
• Practical ways to shift your perspective and move forward with less resentment
• What it means to turn struggles into strengths in business and family life

Mentions & Resources

Genesis X – A multi-week virtual experience designed to help break through limiting beliefs, shift perspectives, and unlock new levels of growth.

Daniel Tiger – A popular children’s show that teaches young kids (and reminds parents) simple strategies for handling big feelings.

Mentioned Episodes

Babies and Business EP 21 – Worst Client Ever

Babies and Business EP 86 –  Lessons from a Business Partnership Gone Wrong

Episode Transcription

Below you will find a transcript of this entire podcast episode. Enjoy!

 Avram: If you’ve ever caught yourself saying, “well, they finally showed me their true colors”. This episode’s for you, because something that we’ve come to terms with recently, it’s been really brought to our attention, is that people are made up of every single personality, character trait is inside of all of us.

Rachel: Absolutely

Avram: Your ability to be caring, compassionate is equal to your ability to be uncaring and ruthless.

Rachel: Sure.

Avram: You know, the thing is, is when you experience another person, what you’re experiencing is them expressing that personality trait in one way or another.

Rachel: Yeah.

Avram: You think about like the mama bear, right? Mama bear, so nurturing to the cub, how can something so nurturing also be so vicious and defensive.

Rachel: Yeah.

Avram: Right? We have all of these traits inside of us and when something bad happens, it’s easy to jump to. I’m making Rachel yawn right now. She’s so bored by introduction. Right?

Rachel: No.

Avram: We had a pretty, pretty brisk workout this morning, so, when something like this happens, it’s very easy to take that relationship and say, you know what?

Screw this guy. Screw this person. Right? They finally show me their true colors, and it’s like everything that happened before that vanishes.

Rachel: We make it mean. We make it mean that this was them all along and now I know what this was, and yada, yada, yada.

Avram: When the reality is, is like they’ve been capable of it the whole entire time. You just saw the full expression of it. And I think if you’re honest with yourself, you can see the same thing in you that most of the time you show up in a certain way, but when you’re pressed, when you’re backed into the corner, that ugliness inside of you comes right out.

Rachel: Sure,

Avram: But the thing about the ugliness is, is it really bad or wrong?

Rachel: Sure.

Avram: You’ve been having some epiphanies lately about good, bad. Right, wrong.

Rachel: Yeah.

Avram: What are you seeing now when we look at, uh, I’m just gonna throw you in the deep end. When you look at some of the traumatic and hard stuff that you went through growing up, if somebody asked you to look at the positive things that came out of it, how did that make you feel?

Rachel: Before Genesis, I just could not go there. For you to tell me that this, I mean, my whole upbringing was traumatic, but this one event that I’m thinking about. If you were to tell me, or even suggest that this terrible thing that happened to me would have a positive side to it, I would be offended and I would not know what to do with that information.

But I had this transformational aha moment where it finally clicked for me that the opposite is true. So, so while it was bad and traumatic, well, what good came of it? What could that be? And I, I felt such freedom in the moment of realization that I will be unstoppable as I go through these things that have happened to me in the past and look at the opposite side of the coin.

While it was bad on the one side, the only side that I’ve ever been willing to look at and is now visible to me that it is good on the other side. Let’s find that good and, and make that drive me towards all the possibilities in my future. That’s where I am.

Avram: I think about some of the other episodes we recorded in the past. We’ll put them in the show notes. If you go to babiesandbiz.com/100, Hey, by the way, yay 100. We thought maybe we would do something special for this episode, but turns out we just wanna record another one. And so here we are. Uh, you can find these past episodes because I think they’re gonna be a good launching point for this conversation.

We have ‘The Worst Client Ever’. We have, we have another one that’s about like, uh, ‘Business Partnerships Gone Bad’, something like that.

Rachel: Yeah.

Avram: And when we were in those moments, that felt like despair, where we were angry or frustrated, all these, you know, quote negative emotions. In the moment, it’s hard to recognize the opposite,

Rachel: Right.

Avram: But you have to recognize how the opposite is true in order to move on.

And what we found from some of these most challenging times, and it’s kind of cliche to say it, there was such a huge opportunity for growth and transformation for us.

Rachel: Yeah.

Avram:
So I think about worst client ever. What we learned from those experiences was, well, there were places where we had started letting the client run the show versus following our lead,

Rachel: Right.

Avram: There were places where we realized we needed to uplevel how we reported the progress and quantified the progress in the advertising campaigns that were running for them. We realized there were opportunities to improve the account management relationship with the client. So many opportunities that came from deep distress, high levels of frustration that were seeping into every area of our life, even beyond the business.

Rachel: Absolutely. Well, and then it’s really awesome to have both you and I and we are looking at these situations and they’re rough for both of us. But then one of us has the, the opposite perspective. One of us poses the opposite perspective as also being a reality and say, well, what if we looked at it this way?

What if we looked at it through this lens and we looked at, how can we turn this towards our advantage? And maybe it helps us shore up things in our systems that are broken. Maybe it helps us in our sales process or in our client management process. Maybe it does something like that. But, uh, having two of us looking at the problem can often have someone looking at the positive side and suggesting that to the other that maybe isn’t, seeing that.

Avram: It creates a balance perspective, and if you want real change in your life, it takes coming to a place of balance because if you don’t, you end up holding onto a lot of resentment and a lot of judgments and things that will end up holding you back in the future. know, we have a bad client experience.

Well if we find ourselves traumatized by it. If we find ourselves not having acknowledged. The the good that came out of it. And if we’re just focused on bad, thinking it’s all bad. The price is, you carry that around for the rest of your life.

Rachel: We get to keep it.

Avram: We get to keep it, right? Because we’re so right about how wrong it was and how bad it was and how hard it was that we don’t get to acknowledge the other side of it.

Rachel: Sure.

Avram: We are out of balance and we don’t have that, you know, I think about, recently we’ve had some tough client stuff Come up and we decided that we were going to face it head on and take a deeper look. And what we found was opportunity.

Rachel: Yeah, massive.

Avram: We had all these assumptions about where the client was coming from and when we addressed it, and we will probably talk about this in the next episode, we were willing to address it, look at it, hit it from a different angle.

So much opportunity came by looking at, well, what if it says not all bad?

Rachel: Right.

Avram: We were like preparing for the worst case scenario.

Rachel: Right.

Avram: And what we found on the other side was actually something even better than we could have imagined.

Rachel: Yes.

Avram: So what if it’s not all bad? And for you visionaries out there, I’ll pose the opposite. What if your next big idea is not all good?

Rachel: Yeah, sure.

Avram: Like

Rachel: Get in there and scrutinize it.

Avram: You need somebody in your corner to tell you all the reasons it’s a bad idea.

Rachel: Sure if it’s gonna take a lot of money and you don’t have much of that put away, well maybe you need a financial advisor to say, Hmm, have you thought about this? What about that?

Avram: I find the places that we’ve gotten the most tripped up in our business have been when we were over optimistic about something,

Rachel: Sure. And, really sweeping the red flags under the rug. And not really actually looking at them, not giving them the full weight that they deserve.

Avram: Mm. Mm-hmm. I think one of the best examples that we have of this, you know, in relationships, it becomes very obvious that people have, you know, done us wrong and we write off everything about them. But there’s a reason why they were in your life. There was a whole bunch of stuff that you really liked about them.

You know that a-hole that cuts you off in traffic when they go home, there’s a family that loves them.

Rachel: Yeah.

Avram: It adores them.

Rachel: They have friends that can’t wait to be with them the weekend or whenever they get together.

Avram: Right. It’s not all bad. You just don’t see all of it unless you’re willing to see it.

Rachel: And sometimes, the mindset that we have about ourselves, kind of, um, going back to the mindset of, of where we come from is sometimes we can find ourselves seeing only the bad about ourselves.

And we are not being really optimistic about our capabilities, what we do, what good things we’ve done.

Sometimes we can be so down on ourselves that all we see is where we fail. All of our failings very, very clear and apparent to us, and we don’t really give ourselves the kudos for where we really show up.

Avram: That’s powerful. I think about our kids.

Rachel: Yeah.

Avram: I think this is the easiest place for parents to relate your, your kid does something that you just do not like.

Rachel: Yeah.

Avram: And in that moment, you’re like, I don’t know how I could be more frustrated with something that I love so much. Right. And yet you hold two opposite feelings at the same time.

Right. An immense amount of frustration. Coupled with a deep love and compassion for your child,

Rachel: Right.

Avram: And what if we could take that same ability, that same capacity, and apply it to how we treat ourselves, how we treat others, and show up for them and with them.

Rachel: Absolutely that instead of us going to the place of, oh, they’re all bad. Well, how about we, we look at it like we would with a toddler, a 3-year-old that is just his brother. You know, hitting isn’t very nice, but maybe the toddler doesn’t understand that and he’s trying to express something else. So we get to look at him and, and try to help him find those solutions.

It doesn’t mean that we need to take other people’s abuse of us. That’s not what I’m saying at all. What I’m saying though is that we give people grace, the same grace that we would give to a toddler of like allowing them to be human. That both sides of t
he coin exists in the same person. The good stuff, the bad stuff, the stuff that’s undesirable, the stuff that’s very desirable, it’s all there.

It’s all capable, and we are just getting one tiny little window into their reality and who they are.

Avram: Mm-hmm. The brain just loves to hook, hook into the negative, the dramatic, the traumatic, and it will run like wild with that, based off of your past and your history, it’s gonna try to make meaning out of it. Rachel’s shared this a lot in the last few podcast episodes, and it’s our job to stop slow down, maybe take a deep breath and start to acknowledge the other sides of it as well.

You know, maybe you do need to calm down a little bit. Get all this crap But you will be better by sitting down and looking at, well, how could this be serving me? Is there something here for me to learn? What is that? How could this situation play out better? How could I show up with this person and change the energy?

Rachel: Sure.

Avram: Lots of possibilities,

Rachel: Less anticipation, you know, it could be something like that. be just showing up genuine. All sorts of options.

Avram: I think this is really the key to moving forward in business. You know, a lot of people forget that money comes from other people, and so therefore your relationships and the energy that you share with people is a very important foundation to the growth of the business, and it affects everything.

And so our willingness to work through the frustration and all the quote bad will allow us to find and embrace all the goodness that is coming our way.

Rachel: Yeah. And I, I heard it said one time, you know, if your relationships with each person that you meet are going to last a hundred years, what would you do differently? That really, really impacted me. I think, you know, if these relationships are there and they’re there to stay, giving people grace to show up as genuinely as they are and the good, the bad, the ugly, all the things, and just take a deep breath.

It’s powerful.

Avram: Yeah, I heard that Daniel Tiger song playing in my head. a deep breath and count to four.

Rachel: Yep. My toddler has done that for me.

Avram: 1, 2, 3, and four. We’ll catch you on the next episode.

Rachel: Bye for now.