Intentionally Building Healthy Foundations with Justin Black

On today's episode of the "Helping Families Be Happy" podcast, host Dr. Carla Marie Manly, a practicing clinical psychologist, wellness advocate, and author based in Sonoma County, California talks to Justin Black who will talk about his book Redefining Normal: How to Foster Kids Beat the Odds and Discovered Healing Happiness, and Love. Among other things. Justin is an author, serial entrepreneur, and husband.

Episode Highlights

• 01.40: As authors of Redefining Normal we talked about how generational trauma has impacted so much of our lives for our grandparents and for our parents and had a large impact on our life, says Justin.
• 03:27: It takes intentionality to combat something that is not beneficial for us mentally, spiritually, or physically when are sad and habits that were passed down to us by parents or who are around us that influence over us.
• 06:31: If you walk into a room and there is like a terrible smell, when you first hit you like, these smells terrible. But if you sit in that room for days or for weeks and you sit for months, you don't even smell anything anymore, says Justin.
• 06:45: As per Justin people have exercised a lot of unhealthy practices and habits from the generation of domestic violence and drug abuse and really relied on unhealthy habits and substances to really heal us or kind of put a band-aid on the things that they dealt with that were hard in our life.
• 08.38: Justin had so many amazing mentors and people who were successful around him. In a group home Justin was able to see other successful black men around him and it really changed his perspective.
• 10:19 Justin talks about his book Redefining Normal: How to Foster Kids Beat the Odds and Discovered Healing Happiness, and Love. 
• 11:05: If a person only sees and experiences so much in their life then a lot of times, they are subjected to living that out, says Justin.
• 12:48: We continue to tell our family stories and our lives as testimonies on how we can be intentional about breaking generational trauma and barriers, says Justin.
• 14:23: One of the things that Justin wanted to build on with his young family is trying to make sure our environment is always fun and engaging, no matter the circumstances or situation. We're always engaging.
• 14:50: Create an environment where we can be open, honest, and loving to each other and have fun. Work on being there for each other as much as we can because you want to be intentional about just nurturing the relationships, creating the atmosphere of playfulness and engagement, says Justin.
• 19:49: As per Justin when it comes to mental and emotional stress, he and his partner try to do less pushing and less approaches of empathy, because these things are so serious. 
• 21:30: Justin wants to just encourage leaders to love and how love and leadership are interconnected, and can't be separated. You can't love without leadership, and you can't be a leader without love.

3 Key Points

1. Justin's foster experiences weren't necessarily always positive and in fact highly destructive in some ways but his support group, including his church, really gave him guideposts to help him change his life.
2. In his book, Justin says that if you are going for foster care or in circumstances in life that you seemingly are out of control, even if it's just the 1% that you can't control, it can make an impact on how can you do the best with that and how that makes a drastic difference in your life and your future outcomes.
3. Love is about service and not just only receiving. Love is about action and not only feeling and being super intentional around the ideas of love and how we can be super intentional about giving and receiving love.

Tweetable Quotes

• "We are super intentional on how we can build a healthy foundation so we can produce healthy food for our children and those around us." - Justin
• "We always have choices in life as we can go down a path of least resistance and being our worst selves or something had happened to us that helps us go down a path where we become our best selves." – Carla
• "Internal locus of control means that wherever I end up in life, the things that I do, I won't blame, or I won't say that my life circumstances will result in other people's actions or won't be other people's fault. It will be on me for my success and my stability." - Justin
• "I don't think we understand how much of our identity come from two people coming together and deciding to have a child." - Justin

Resources Mentioned

• Helping Families be Happy Podcast Apple
• Familius.com
• https://www.re-definingnormal.com/
• Podcast Editing