Episode 4: Creating Real Change in Myself | With Zizi Kugelman, personal coach and group facilitator

00:00 Speaker 1 The foundational book of Chassidus, the Tanya, contains the answers to every question. Come hear practical tips from it that will help you wake up tomorrow to a day of real change. Welcome to a conversation with coach Zizi Kojman. How can we turn our lives into lives of shlichus, full of meaning? I’m Chani Moskowitz, a shlucha in Kharkiv, Ukraine. In this podcast, we’ll meet different women who bring their sense of shlichus to a variety of fields. Through them, each of us can find and refine our own shlichus in the world. Because living the life we were created to live is as good as it gets. Shlichus as a way of life. Let’s begin. Hello, Zizi Kojman.

00:48 Speaker 2 Right? Good.

00:50 Speaker 1 Good.

00:50 Speaker 2 People tend to call me Coachman because I’m a coach. It’s like, Coachman.

00:54 Speaker 1 It fits.

00:55 Speaker 2 But no, we’re Kojman.

00:56 Speaker 1 Okay, so first, introduce yourself. What do you do? How did you get into it? Why did you get into it? I know you have a lot to tell us, but...

01:07 Speaker 2 Keep it focused.

01:08 Speaker 1 Go ahead.

01:09 Speaker 2 Okay. So my name is Zizi. I’m about to turn forty-seven. Yes, that’s the kind of thing you’re supposedly not meant to say, but I always count the years with excitement.

01:18 Speaker 1 That’s surprising.

01:19 Speaker 2 Yes. Oh, really? Great. See?

01:21 Speaker 1 I would have believed thirty-seven.

01:23 Speaker 2 No, no, no. So I’ve got another ten years, apparently.

01:25 Speaker 1 Wow.

01:26 Speaker 2 Yes. I’m a mother of three, and I’ve been married to Avraham for almost eleven years now. If you’re doing the math, I got married at thirty-six, after going through a process of becoming observant. And I’m a coach. Today my coaching is based on Chassidus, though I started before that. In other words, I learned the method first, and then, when I began learning Chassidus, I connected to it through coaching. I heard the coaching in Chassidus, and I was captivated. Suddenly I discovered an entire world rooted in something eternal. I always say it turned slogans into formulas. There were slogans like “Think good and it will be good.” Why? We didn’t know, but that was the saying. An abundance mindset. Why? We didn’t know, but that was the saying. Manifest it. Why? Suddenly these became formulas of creation. Why? Because Chassidus provides endlessly deep explanations: this is how Hashem wants it, for form to prevail over matter. Chassidus opened the doors to infinity for me, and that’s what I do. I coach women, including young women, to let the mind rule the heart—to manage their emotions effectively and in the right way, so their lives move upward, with their minds leading and their hearts joining in. I do that one-on-one and in workshops: workshops in people’s homes, on Zoom, and in lectures. Take it wherever you want. I wear all kinds of hats; I’m also a parenting instructor.

03:22 Speaker 1 Wow.

03:23 Speaker 2 Yes, but really, all of it is—

03:25 Speaker 1 Shlichus.

03:26 Speaker 2 Yes. It’s about using reality to train ourselves. That’s what all my hats have in common. How do I engage with what happens around me so that I understand it’s helping me look inward and make changes—and do it from a place of kindness, not self-reproach? That’s an important distinction.

03:46 Speaker 1 Wow. But wait, let’s go back to the beginning. You said you were coaching before you came to Chassidus.

03:51 Speaker 2 Yes.

03:51 Speaker 1 How did you get there? How did you land in that field?

03:53 Speaker 2 Oh, okay. I went through a bit of a journey in academia. I moved between faculties, looking for myself, trying to figure out what to study and what suited me. I ended up in psychology after leaving occupational therapy, because I didn’t want to study medicine. That was the route I took. At Tel Aviv University’s psychology department, the main thing I learned was that I didn’t want to be a psychologist—

04:24 Speaker 1 Okay.

04:24 Speaker 2 But the human mind fascinated me. I finished the degree, got my BA, and started studying coaching at the same time. It wasn’t my day job. I worked in management, managing call centers and other kinds of centers. I moved up into fairly senior management, but I began immersing myself in coaching and personal development studies. I just loved it, and I did it as a kind of extra hobby—a hobby I worked at, you could say. That’s how I got into it: by accident. Well, there are no accidents, but by accident. I wanted to work with the inner life, but not through psychology. And ever since, I’ve just wanted to learn as much as I can. Really.

05:14 Speaker 1 Wow. Would you tell us a little about becoming observant? Just briefly?

05:19 Speaker 2 Yes. At thirty-four, after a relationship ended, I moved in with a friend while I looked for a home. Literally, a physical home. I left one home, was looking for another, and moved in with a friend. I was extremely opposed to religion—really opposed. For years I stood at demonstrations shouting, “We’ve had enough of you, charedim,” and so on. I thought, what could they possibly have to offer me? If anything, I had something to offer them: I could bring them out of their dark caves and pull them toward progress and the light. Some friends of mine started going to a weekly Chassidus class at someone’s home. They invited me: “Come along.” I absolutely refused. So the Rebbe said, “Okay, then I’ll come to you.” And the friend’s home where I was staying temporarily ended up hosting the class. It happened that the Chabad woman who usually hosted it in Ramat Aviv, dear Paz, was traveling to the Rebbe. It was Yud-Beis Tammuz, and she had gone. The plan was to cancel the class while she was away, but as soon as she landed there, she felt, “No, no, no. We’re not canceling. We mustn’t cancel.” She started pressing everyone from New York to hold it back home. Eventually they said okay, and the friend I was staying with said, “Fine, we’ll have the class at my place.” I had planned to go out. I definitely had not planned to be there. But Hashem willed it otherwise: my backup plan—the person who was supposed to pick me up—didn’t come, and I heard a Chassidus class by accident, against my will.

07:13 Speaker 1 Wow. And from there?

07:15 Speaker 2 From there—listen, I was raised to value truth. If you say something, stand behind it with all your strength, but speak your truth. When I protested against religion, I was sure the truth was on my side. And suddenly that class opened a little crack. It was like, “Wow, wait, what am I hearing? Hold on, what do I actually want?” I was sure I’d look into it a bit, scratch the surface, discover they were backward, crude and chauvinistic, and so on, tick the box, and go back to where I was. But as you can see—and everyone can hear—that didn’t happen.

07:51 Speaker 1 You took a peek and it got to you.

07:52 Speaker 2 Wow, wow, wow. I took a peek and I grew. That’s...

07:56 Speaker 1 Yes.

07:56 Speaker 2 Yes. I grew, and I healed.

07:59 Speaker 1 Tell me, you’re saying that Chassidus—one Chassidus class—was what... Someone who doesn’t know what Chassidus is could be listening to us right now with no idea what you’re talking about. In a couple of words, what is Chassidus? How does it change lives in practical terms? Not becoming observant. Say a woman already keeps Torah and mitzvos and lives her life. What is she missing?

08:21 Speaker 2 Wow, that question always stops me, because it’s as though you’re trying to fit every word in the world into your mouth, into this little vessel called a letter or a word. But I’ll tell you. There’s Hayom Yom, the calendar the Rebbe compiled at the direction of the Frierdiker Rebbe, his father-in-law. And it’s all there.

08:49 Speaker 1 Yes.

08:50 Speaker 2 I’ll quote the entry for 19 Iyar, and then I’ll expand on it in my own words: “Chassidus is Divine understanding, an understanding that shows a person how small he is and to what greatness he can elevate himself.” That’s Chassidus. Technically, if you look it up on Google, Chassidus is an interpretation of Kabbalah—an explanation of the teachings of Rabbi Shimon and the other Kabbalists. But let’s come back to our question: how is Chassidus relevant to me? Chassidus is Divine understanding. First of all, you’re learning Divine wisdom, not science. It’s not some theory where a person says one thing today, another tomorrow, and something else next year. It’s Divine wisdom, Divine understanding, and it works in two directions. On the one hand, it shows us how small we are, because we need to make less of ourselves, right? We have a tendency to take up a great deal of space spiritually and focus on ourselves—our needs, our desires, what we want, what we feel. Chassidus puts you back in your place, in the best possible way. And from there, it teaches you to grow to your true, greatest heights. Now that sounds like a slogan too.

10:15 Speaker 1 Everything sounds like a slogan.

10:16 Speaker 2 So let’s take that. Let’s say I’m coaching someone. My goal is to make this accessible. Say a woman learns, through study and contemplation, that there is Someone running the world, and it isn’t her. Come on, we get confused about that a lot. And she learns to trust Him, too. That takes work; it doesn’t come easily. She learns to have faith in Him, to rely on Him, and to know that He runs the world. He created the world, and He does everything with precision. So she can have a conversation with that inner voice that thinks things have to be a certain way, and if they aren’t, that’s bad. Okay? She can speak to it from a higher place, because she has learned, because she trusts, because she sees. Then I can calm myself for a moment. I can turn down the flame of that panic, right? That feeling of, “Oh no, I planned to... I planned to earn this much, and I earned that much; to live in one place, and I’m going to live somewhere else.” That whole experience of things not happening as we planned. And doing this brings back—it gives you peace of mind to know that Someone is running the world, and to know there’s good here that I can’t see yet, but I’m waiting for it.

11:32 Speaker 1 Absolutely.

11:33 Speaker 2 And from that place, I can grow into action. Right? Because what does that movement of the “other side,” the side opposed to holiness, do?

11:46 Speaker 1 It limits action.

11:47 Speaker 2 It limits us altogether. It reduces us to an unhealthy state of frustration and despair and... right? But here, making ourselves smaller leads to action that brings us out of that place. Then creativity comes, and perseverance comes, and teshuvah comes. So many, many things come. That’s Chassidus.

12:08 Speaker 1 Beautiful.

12:08 Speaker 2 Yes. When we take the source and speak about it in our own words, that’s the point.

12:17 Speaker 1 Wow. So Chassidus really has so much—wow. I don’t know whether to call them key phrases, but “the mind rules over the heart” and “no evil descends from Above”... I can say I grew up with these ideas. And even if you didn’t grow up with them, you learn them. It can seem a little like a cliché, a mantra: you hear a class, you feel inspired, and then you get up the next morning and...? I mean, how can I actually live this way? Really live it, so that life becomes... It’s an upgrade. It’s a way of life, a quality of life. Right?

12:55 Speaker 2 Yes.

12:55 Speaker 1 To live it.

12:56 Speaker 2 Exactly.

12:56 Speaker 1 How do we make that happen? How do we take it from a cliché and make it part of my habits, part of my life—something I talk about and mean?

13:06 Speaker 2 Wow, those are excellent questions, Chani. Look, first of all, we need to know that it isn’t natural. We have a natural soul, our animal soul, and it’s like an animal—no offense to it. That’s its nature. Think for a moment about a cow or a sheep, okay? It just acts according to the nature Hashem gave it. It doesn’t have a mission to change its nature, right? You won’t see a cow saying, “Wow, I really need to work on myself to be a bit more generous toward...” That’s it. That’s who it is, that’s what it eats, that’s what it does. That’s our natural soul; that’s its nature, okay? And it pulls us away from the work, the change, and the effort. When you talk about all these Chassidic slogans, there’s a reason I said earlier that slogans can become formulas.

14:06 Speaker 1 Yes.

14:06 Speaker 2 We’ll get to when that happens in a moment. If I leave them hanging on the wall—or, as they say in Chassidus, “a donkey carrying books”—

14:17 Speaker 1 Yes.

14:17 Speaker 2 Right? If you keep learning and learning and learning, but leave the book sitting on you instead of making it part of your flesh, then you’re like a donkey, an animal carrying books. The goal is to practice it. We really have to put our very flesh to work at it. Really. It’s all written in Tanya. The Alter Rebbe says in the introduction, and not for nothing, that in this book you can find answers to every question about serving Hashem.

14:44 Speaker 1 That’s amazing.

14:44 Speaker 2 And it’s true. I mean—

14:45 Speaker 1 Until you open it, you don’t—you don’t grasp that.

14:48 Speaker 2 Every question about serving Hashem. And this is the Alter Rebbe speaking. He’s not some pretentious person making empty marketing promises. He knows what he’s saying, and it’s all in Tanya. And the Alter Rebbe writes in Tanya that emunah, faith, is related to imun, training, like a craftsman training his hands. I mean, think of a violinist. Or let’s take the most obvious examples: an athlete, a violinist, or a painter. Whatever kind of artist it is, they know, it’s obvious to them, that if they don’t practice and put effort into practicing—and the better they are, the more they need to practice—they’ll go backward. A person can’t become a violinist by telling himself that good violinists, uh, wear... He has to work his fingers, his ears, his... And it’s the same with us. We need to practice Chassidus. Really. If you learn that the mind rules over the heart, and you’ve learned a sicha that blew your mind, now you need to know that you have to connect that soaring mind to the heart that pulls it down. That’s the practical work of refining our middos. The Alter Rebbe writes about that in Tanya, too. How do we do it? People always ask me, “Wow, what’s your method? You have to teach your method.” And I’m like, no, it isn’t my method. Perhaps Hashem gave me the ability to distill a sentence here and a sentence there and connect them in a way that’s my own tool. But the Alter Rebbe writes how to do it. Should I go into it now, or should we talk about it later? It’s all written there. We have where to do the work, how much to work, and how to work. It’s all written.

16:32 Speaker 3 There are no secrets. Nobody succeeds because they discovered some secret. It’s...

16:37 Speaker 2 I’ve been obsessed with podcasts, TED Talks, and inspirational videos since I was very young. Go listen to people who are enormously inspiring. They’re people who overcame themselves.

16:50 Speaker 3 Right.

16:51 Speaker 2 That’s my—that’s the point. Who inspires us most in life? What kind of people inspire us? It doesn’t matter what they look like, how much they earn, or what they succeeded at. It’s someone who overcame themselves and didn’t give in to their natural tendencies. That’s inspiring. Those are the people who inspire us.

17:12 Speaker 3 Right.

17:12 Speaker 2 And that’s what Chassidus teaches us to do in a very, very structured way. It doesn’t stop there. Chassidus really teaches us how. It teaches us what to do, but it also teaches us how, down to the tiniest details of everyday life: the laundry on the sofa, the child who’s screaming right now about the—the cake that makes you want to take a bite. And it isn’t only iskafya, self-restraint. I’ll just pause here for a moment—there are so many approaches and methods.

17:42 Speaker 3 Yes.

17:42 Speaker 2 But Chassidus goes with us all the way down to the tiniest, tiniest details. I find that beautiful. Beautiful.

17:52 Speaker 3 So if we’re talking about one person succeeding as a doctor and another succeeding as an athlete, training in the way of Chassidus means, first and foremost, becoming the best version of yourself.

18:02 Speaker 2 Exactly.

18:03 Speaker 3 Not “I want to be this person, I want to be that person.” I want to be me at my very best.

18:07 Speaker 2 Think how much humility it takes to agree to be what the Creator made you. Think how much humility it takes to agree to be what you were created to be. Now look at what self-importance is. Look at that ego that says, “No, I want to be her. I want to be...” As one of the sweetest women I’ve coached once told me, “Ugh, why do I have a talent for this? I wanted a talent for something else.” And first of all, I completely understand her. I think the first thing a coach needs is compassion and humility, and to see themselves in the people they coach, so they don’t, G-d forbid, think they’re free of that struggle. But agreeing to make use of this talent of mine—and to develop other talents too—that’s humility. Of course, one doesn’t rule out the other. But it means being a vessel for Hashem, and with that vessel, as we said at the beginning, returning to a sense of smallness that helps me grow to my greatest potential.

19:06 Speaker 3 Exactly, yes.

19:08 Speaker 2 Yes, it takes a lot of humility to agree to be there.

19:10 Speaker 3 Yes, and everything else basically keeps us stuck. It’s...

19:13 Speaker 2 That’s its job. We’re speaking quite a lot against the yetzer hara.

19:17 Speaker 3 Yes.

19:17 Speaker 2 And there’s plenty to say against it, but we have to remember that this is its job. It’s a weight that strengthens a muscle. Strength reveals itself through resistance; that’s a law of physics. “From my flesh I behold G-d.” Everything physical derives from the spiritual. It all has the same structure, the same format. We can’t even discover the power of, say, a tractor, okay? I can’t measure its strength unless I apply resistance. And it’s the same in the spiritual realm. The job of the yetzer hara, of the opposing side, is to reveal. And by the way, I have to open a parenthesis here before I even finish that sentence.

20:04 Speaker 3 Okay.

20:04 Speaker 2 The Rebbe teaches us that this doesn’t, G-d forbid, have to happen through bad things. Okay? It’s amazing. The Rebbe says we can challenge ourselves and learn to go from strength to strength, from good to better. Look how sweet that is.

20:21 Speaker 3 Wow.

20:21 Speaker 2 I mean, if you look around—online, at inspirational stories and things like that—someone usually tells you about something terrible or difficult that they grew from, came through, or that helped them discover hidden strengths. The Rebbe says that if you learn to draw on that well of hidden strengths yourself, to challenge yourself, then, with Hashem’s help—right?—we always pray that it will be a journey from good to better. And that’s beautiful.

20:49 Speaker 3 Wow.

20:50 Speaker 2 Yes.

20:50 Speaker 3 From strength to strength. Exactly.

20:51 Speaker 2 Exactly.

20:52 Speaker 3 Okay. Wow. So let’s continue with the lovely iskafya we love. It’s... what? First of all, iskafya isn’t a Hebrew word.

21:02 Speaker 2 Right.

21:03 Speaker 3 It means something like bending.

21:06 Speaker 2 Bending. That’s exactly it.

21:07 Speaker 3 Yes.

21:07 Speaker 2 Yes.

21:07 Speaker 3 So what are we actually bending? And my question is this: it comes up in every area of our lives, in the areas that are most sensitive for us. To my mind, it’s one of the most powerful tools, one of the secrets to a person’s success with themselves—or, more precisely, with their animal soul. And the question is whether I can see iskafya—the idea that I bend my will before Hashem’s will, before the ideal—

21:36 Speaker 2 Mm-hmm.

21:38 Speaker 3 —as a way of life in serving Hashem. Say I held back and didn’t eat something, some tempting pastry. Did I do Hashem’s will there? Or did the Alter Rebbe mean it only when, for example, I overcame my desire not to daven and davened? In other words, if I live a life of overcoming impulses—say, financially, I held back, didn’t buy something, didn’t spend the money—help us put it all together.

22:09 Speaker 2 Well, as usual, an excellent question. You keep—

22:12 Speaker 3 And time management, by the way.

22:13 Speaker 2 And time management.

22:13 Speaker 3 Time management too, yes. I put my phone down, set it aside, and went to make a meal for my children. Is that serving Hashem, or did I just take the Tanya and claim it for myself so I could feel good?

22:24 Speaker 2 First of all, claim the Tanya for every area of life. We’re Jews. A Jew gets up in the morning with Hashem, goes to sleep with Him, and dreams about Him in between. There’s no area of life we set aside as merely mundane. Right? That’s our job. So first of all, it’s all serving Hashem. But hold on—I want to sort through the things you brought up and give iskafya a little more credit. It gets a bit of a bad name, but I want to put it in its proper place. As I was saying, I really love using this in coaching too. In the process itself, when I work with women, I use a lot of examples from the physical world, because the spiritual is abstract and hard for us to grasp. There’s a reason we’re taught, “From my flesh I behold G-d.” You want to see G-dliness? Look at the body, at the physical world, at tangible things. So we’ll work with that here. Okay? But first, let’s understand what iskafya is. Iskafya is really about becoming flexible, okay? It’s bending something—

23:30 Speaker 3 Mm-hmm.

23:31 Speaker 2 —for the sake of something else. I hold myself back; I bend one desire for the sake of a greater desire. But the result is flexibility. Okay? I’m expanding my range, so to speak.

23:45 Speaker 3 Mm-hmm.

23:46 Speaker 2 Now, the first question is: why do it? Why do it at all?

23:51 Speaker 3 Though when you do it, you don’t need to ask anything anymore, but...

23:54 Speaker 2 Right. But let’s ask the question.

23:55 Speaker 3 Right. Why? I want to. Why not?

23:58 Speaker 2 Because true freedom is freedom within boundaries. When I can do whatever I want, as much as I want, however I want, whenever I feel like it, something in the soul develops into chaos. It’s like having nothing. You probably know this from coaching: it’s a well-known saying that “everything” is nothing and “always” is never. Why? Because it isn’t defined. There’s nothing to hold on to. Take a child you let do anything, all the time. He has no boundaries. You don’t set any for him; you trust him to find his own. That child grows up spoiled, struggling, anxious. Yes, it affects everyone differently, but he’s miserable. Why? Because he needs education. He needs someone to teach him how to function in society, how to deal with all his wants and desires. When do you do something? How much of it do you do? In other words, education—or bending, or understanding that we need to stay within certain bounds—runs against today’s message of “Do whatever you feel like; follow your desires.” You know, there’s this whole—

25:22 Speaker 4 Yes.

25:23 Speaker 2 —conversation. I blame Freud for it, and everything that followed from him. But fine—everything is by Divine Providence, and everything is there to be corrected. Still, it isn’t right. It’s a confused world, a world that uses far more anti-anxiety medication, antidepressants, and all the rest. So first of all, do we understand why we need this? Because boundaries give something a form. It’s like water needing a cup so it can have a shape, something to hold it. Our soul needs boundaries so it can express itself within them, so it can receive—

26:00 Speaker 4 Raw material.

26:00 Speaker 2 Exactly. So it can take shape. That’s one thing. Now the question is: how much? How much iskafya? And here I want to say: it depends. I know that sounds inconclusive, but Chani might be more of a gevurah type, and it might be easier for her to live a life of iskafya. She feels satisfaction and a sense of victory in it, and that’s wonderful. Go for it. Zizi might be more of a free spirit, more open and easygoing, and it’s hard for her. So even the tiniest act of iskafya is like—

26:38 Speaker 4 The splitting of the sea.

26:39 Speaker 2 —a hundred—

26:39 Speaker 4 Yes.

26:40 Speaker 2 —acts of iskafya for you. Let’s say. Okay, I’m just giving an example. We’re not really quantifying it. But the Alter Rebbe—and we always come back to the Tanya—points us to the precise distinction. He speaks of “one who reviews his chapter a hundred times and one more.” One more. Beyond what he’s used to. He brings an example from the Gemara: in those days, the great scholars were accustomed to reviewing the same chapter a hundred times each day. That sounds unimaginable to us, but for them it was routine. And the Alter Rebbe asks: why is the person who reviews his chapter 101 times called “one who serves Hashem”? Is someone who reviews the same chapter a hundred times not serving Hashem? What does that mean? The answer is that he does it because he’s used to it. Even though it sounds incredible, a hundred times is already his normal routine. He shows up, switches on autopilot, and off he goes. “There you go, Hashem, I’m done.” Okay? The person who does it 101 times says, “Wait—where can I give a little extra? Where can I go above and beyond?” And he says, “I’m going to push myself. I’m doing this for Hashem. I’m going to add that tiny bit—one more review.” Now, for each of us, that one extra review is whatever she knows it is. We know.

28:05 Speaker 4 Yes.

28:06 Speaker 2 Okay, first of all, it’s about noticing that one thing and not making light of it. It can mean looking at it and telling myself, “Wow, Chani, you gave Hashem one more.” That could be a cake, or it could be not shouting at your child, or another twenty minutes with your child. It could be either turning away from bad or doing good. Okay? Those are the two directions. It could mean not doing something that goes against His will—anger, for example, or sadness. Okay? Or it could mean doing something that goes against my will but is His will, like generosity, like... But just a little. We don’t need to break ourselves. This is the beautiful approach of Chassidus. Think of it in terms of flexibility. I’ve given you lots of examples from the body. If I want to become more flexible now, physically, and I force my two legs apart, right? Come on, just the image makes us shudder. But if every day I stretch a muscle to the point where I can feel the stretch, I promise you that within a month your flexibility will improve enormously. It’s the same with our spiritual muscles.

29:15 Speaker 4 Practice.

29:16 Speaker 2 Practice. In the end we always come back to practice. See why I’m a coach? We always come back to that. So what am I saying? First of all, it’s that one more. Be willing to be there with one more, take joy in it, and practice it. Patience.

29:32 Speaker 4 Yes. It’s a process.

29:33 Speaker 2 It’s a process. Patience. And the third point is: don’t compare yourself to other women. Focus on your own path. This is a very, very important point, because if there’s a mother whose patience—let’s say we had some kind of absolute scale—and she was born with patience at a four. Let’s call her Zizi, just a name, not someone we know.

29:54 Speaker 4 It’s just an example.

29:55 Speaker 2 Just an example. A random name. She was born with patience at a four, and someone else was born with patience at an eight. That’s how they were born. It isn’t their doing; Hashem gave it to them. And Zizi worked very, very hard and managed to get to four and a half. Hashem and the whole Heavenly entourage come down with pom-poms and cheer, “Zizi!” Because she’s working. She’s working. And the woman at an eight is happy and doing fine, and she stays at an eight. So when it comes specifically to patience, the woman at an eight has a different kind of work to do. Don’t worry.

30:26 Speaker 4 Yes.

30:27 Speaker 2 But what happens? Zizi looks at her four and her neighbor’s eight, and she says, “That’s it, I’ll never amount to anything. No matter how hard I work, I’ll never be like her.” Don’t be like her. Be yourself, only better. That’s the point.

30:40 Speaker 4 Right. Wow. You know what’s amazing about knowing these formulas? What did you call them?

30:45 Speaker 2 Yes.

30:46 Speaker 4 You can actually assess yourself and give yourself a pat on the back, and that helps you move forward. Because someone who hasn’t studied Chassidus might still work on herself and overcome things. One day she’s more patient with the children, and another day less so. But when you don’t see yourself within a framework, on a path, you don’t really understand what you did or know what to call it. So it’s just this kind of endless struggle. It’s an endless struggle either way, but when you give it a name, you say, “Wow, today I practiced iskafya. Today I overcame something. Today”—how did you put it?—“I went from four to four and a half.” That’s how you move forward.

31:20 Speaker 2 Right. I—

31:21 Speaker 4 Charts.

31:22 Speaker 2 It’s, it’s—

31:23 Speaker 4 Yes.

31:24 Speaker 2 I always say, you can wave your hands around, or you can clap them. Right?

31:28 Speaker 4 Yes.

31:28 Speaker 2 Um, I think that what I really do is—first of all, with myself. I always say that I’m the number-one person being coached in my coaching space. I have to be, because you have to walk the talk, as they say. You sort of... But these things make sense. It’s not for nothing that the mind rules the heart. It makes sense. It isn’t some disconnected idea of positive thinking. Okay, fine, but what happens when that falls apart? What happens when the thing I believed in and held on to doesn’t happen? And what happens... It’s that balancing place: how small you are and how great you are. In other words, you work in relation to the One who created you, and then come back to creating your reality. There’s a whole circle here. It’s a beautiful, complete picture that keeps bringing me back onto the path. Because we stray from the path and have to bring ourselves back, and stray from the path and have to bring ourselves back. That’s our daily work, and Chassidus keeps laying a path beneath our feet. It’s amazing. It’s amazing.

32:41 Speaker 5 Amazing. It’s like going around the world without a map, or with one.

32:43 Speaker 2 Exactly! Wow, exactly.

32:45 Speaker 5 You’re on a path. It’s... It’s a quality of life.

32:48 Speaker 2 Because when you have a map, even if you get lost, you know how to get back. Even if you end up in another city... When you have a map—Chassidus really gives us a map. What a kindness from Hakadosh Boruch Hu that He, in a sense, said to us, “Come behind the scenes for a moment. I want you to see how I... the Divine perspective.” What did we start with? We said Divine wisdom. In a sense, He said, “Come and see through My eyes, so to speak: how I see you, what I want from you, how you...” And then you can adopt that perspective. It takes constant practice. But practicing that perspective in the way you speak with your children, with your neighbor, during an hour in the car—that’s everything. And then you see more hashgachah pratis, you see more kindness, you see more. It’s incredible.

33:41 Speaker 5 Amazing. You see the world through different eyes.

33:42 Speaker 2 Completely. Divine eyes.

33:44 Speaker 5 Yes. It’s amazing to think that it was made, as they say, custom-made for us, for our generation. Because sometimes I find myself thinking, how did people manage without it in the past? Like you said, apparently they didn’t need it.

33:55 Speaker 2 They didn’t need it. Sometimes I get these flashes of insight. I suddenly think about the leader of the generation, how each leader of a generation is like, um, a new generation of phone. Right? It’s like a technological update in the world.

34:15 Speaker 5 A software update.

34:16 Speaker 2 Exactly. Every Rebbe, every tzaddik—however you call it—updates the world. We’re like the devices and he’s the antenna. It fits, you understand? And it really is like that. Hakadosh Boruch Hu updates the world. They didn’t need it, or they needed it less. We can’t manage without it. We can’t breathe. You don’t breathe; you feel stifled all day. I also find that very frightening. I try to look at reality. I don’t know how people manage today, thank G-d, but it can be very frightening.

34:49 Speaker 5 It’s very frightening.

34:49 Speaker 2 That everything is random and you don’t know where things are going.

34:52 Speaker 5 It’s... wow. You know, when we were recently in the war, under the bombardments, there was one particularly crazy night. We went to sleep before the trip. We didn’t know whether the driver would come in the morning or not. And the thought went through my head: I don’t understand how people in the buildings around me manage without what I have. I’m Jewish, I’m a chossid, I know—I can go to sleep. How do they fall asleep? Something could hit them any moment. What do you do? Go downstairs? Do you realize what you have? It’s incredible.

35:21 Speaker 2 Yes.

35:22 Speaker 5 Really, how can you live without it?

35:23 Speaker 2 First of all, I want to say two things. There are people who live as though they don’t have it, but give it other names. Okay?

35:30 Speaker 5 Yes. The universe.

35:31 Speaker 2 The universe, an abundance mindset. And that’s fine; it’s great. Great. You’re connecting, in another way, to the idea that Someone runs the world and that I’m working on trusting Him, which is beautiful. The quality of trust is the highest quality. There’s even a source—I don’t know who said it—but it says explicitly that even if you trust in Hashem without calling Him Hashem, you receive what you trust in. In other words, it’s an absolute truth. They connect to that truth by a roundabout route, as it were. And I’ll say it from the other side too: there are people who study Chassidus, and they know it, but they don’t feel it.

36:10 Speaker 5 Mm.

36:11 Speaker 2 In other words, that’s the difference between faith and trust. Trust isn’t something it’s enough just to know about; you have to practice it and feel it. You have to put it into action. There’s a video where you see the Rebbe give someone a dollar and ask him, “Do you know what it says here?” The man sort of stammers and says something. So the Rebbe tells him, “It says, ‘In G-d We Trust.’ We trust in Hashem.” Then, as the man is sort of halfway out, the Rebbe says to him, “It doesn’t say, ‘We believe.’ It doesn’t say we have faith. We trust.” And then the Rebbe—I don’t remember whether he goes on to ask him or to say it—explains the difference between trust and faith: one is passive and the other is active. In other words, I have to exercise trust when I’m faced with a lack. Reality shows me something that undermines my confidence, and I have to rise above it and trust in Hashem. Think about that for a moment. It’s wild. Think of a cow in a meadow. She isn’t commanded to do this work.

37:07 Speaker 5 Right.

37:08 Speaker 2 She... It’s only we who have this work of going against our nature, of reaching for the supernatural. A Jew is, on the face of it, a natural creature, but really has to keep connecting to the source, which is beyond nature. And that’s the work. That’s what it means to keep overcoming.

37:25 Speaker 5 Okay.

37:26 Speaker 2 Yes. So you can connect from a Jewish place, or you can connect from a place that people will call all sorts of other names. But either way, you’re connecting—

37:34 Speaker 5 You hear it from here and there these days.

37:36 Speaker 2 The world is speaking—

37:36 Speaker 5 “Are you crazy? Wow, give it a name. It’s...”

37:39 Speaker 2 The world is speaking Chassidus. Everything—the gates, the gates of knowledge are opening.

37:44 Speaker 5 Yes.

37:44 Speaker 2 But the world is speaking Chassidus today. Someone who merits it knows that “Hashem is One and His Name is One,” and speaks in Hashem’s name.

37:52 Speaker 5 Yes.

37:53 Speaker 2 But it’s the same language. My husband once said to me—I was getting worked up about it too, saying, “Wow, but...” He said, “Zizi, truth has one root. When something is true, it draws from that same root. There’s no...”

38:04 Speaker 5 Wow.

38:04 Speaker 2 Yes.

38:06 Speaker 5 Okay, we’re talking about shlichus. That’s really the guiding thread of this whole... And I’m genuinely interested to hear from you. You know, girls have often written to me, “Wow, you’re so lucky to be a shlucha. I’d love to live somewhere like Ukraine too.” Now, of course, of course being a shlucha is a mindset; it applies everywhere. But in practice, a woman gets up in the morning, gets the kids out the door, runs herself ragged, comes home, does laundry, this and that, and before she knows it, the week is over, the month is over, the year is over. How can she feel it? She may be doing a lot of shlichus, which might already be half the answer, but how can she feel, “I’m a shlucha. I’m doing something. I’m changing the world. After all, why did we come down here? Not just to make it through the month and start all over again.” To really live with that good feeling, because you wake up in the morning and the world needs you. To live with that joy, that satisfaction. I keep coming back to this and calling it quality of life, because in the end it’s all connected. But—

39:07 Speaker 2 Right.

39:08 Speaker 5 To live with a sense of shlichus, but in actual practice, without necessarily having the time for it, the position, the role. You know, without having it written on my name tag, right? “Shlucha in...” How am I a shlucha in everyday life despite all that?

39:25 Speaker 2 You simply practice it. Look, we’re commanded that “they should be in your eyes as new.” Naturally—and again, we’ll keep going back and forth between what’s natural and what’s beyond nature—naturally, renewal comes from something new. Like, my clothes don’t interest me anymore; I’m bored with them. Then I get a new shirt—wow! Right? Whenever we buy a new shirt, I’m not going to just toss it onto the... For a week, two weeks, a month, two months—however long it lasts for each of us—we treat it with respect, and that sense of newness...

39:56 Speaker 5 It has its place of honor. Yes.

39:58 Speaker 2 Yes.

39:58 Speaker 5 Some people don’t take the tag off for days.

40:00 Speaker 2 Exactly. And then a certain amount of time passes, and eventually even that shirt becomes boring.

40:07 Speaker 5 Yes.

40:07 Speaker 2 First of all, we need to learn—the Alter Rebbe teaches us in Tanya to contemplate. Contemplation is where we zoom out from the day-to-day, from our routine, ordinary activities, and look at the same thing from a different perspective. So if I want to bring something fresh into my marriage, yes, I can take a new course with my husband, go to a new workshop, study with him. All of that is good too. But there’s also a way I can renew my own experience of our marriage: suddenly taking a closer look at my husband, appreciating things he does that I’ve come to take for granted. I don’t even notice them anymore because he’s been doing them since we got married. He cooks for Shabbos, and I’m used to it. It doesn’t make me say “wow” anymore. I can rediscover that, suddenly look at it and say, “Wow.” Or see my children in a new light—not constantly focus on what they don’t do, but on what they do. On the fact that they’re healthy, and whatever it is that speaks to each person. To see it afresh. That kind of contemplation. Yes, and the same goes for what you asked about my shlichus. To be willing—and I’m coming back to this again—to humbly be where Hashem has placed me. I want to give an example. My children go to school in a neighborhood outside our own. It’s about a twenty-minute drive. And we had a hard time with school-bus drivers and the way they approached their job. Again, I’m only giving an example. G-d forbid, I’m not speaking badly about school-bus drivers, but that was our experience for an entire year. Really. It was unpleasant. The children suffered—shouting, punishments. Not nice. Okay. Then we met a school-bus driver who sees his job, his role, as a shlichus. Listen, he knows every child by name, smiles at them, and says good morning. And if he sees a young child

42:13 Speaker 2 who needs to cross the street, he stops the bus, gets out, and helps the child across. If a child isn’t there, he calls the mother to ask whether he should wait. Nothing extraordinary. Now let’s think about this for a second. You could look at it from an ordinary, everyday perspective: he’s just a school-bus driver. Who asked him to do all those things? But if I stop for a moment and say, “Hashem put me here. I want to excel as a mother, in my shlichus, as a neighbor, in...” Whatever you do, bring light to it. Now. Not every minute of every day, but little sparks. That’s the work. That’s the practice: to keep moving along that path, to work with my mindset and bring light into it. And there’s something in that—your whole reality changes. Everything changes within the reality you already have.

43:09 Speaker 6 I’m actually discovering that I’m a shlucha.

43:10 Speaker 2 Exactly.

43:11 Speaker 6 I mean, which of us doesn’t do good? Who doesn’t? Notice where you do it in your everyday life, and—wow.

43:19 Speaker 2 If I feel like saying today, “I want to bring light and goodness,” I smile at people as I pass them. I had a day like that. I just looked for people’s eyes and smiled. I said good morning. I wanted to feel renewed. I was bored; I was having a rough time. Listen, seeing people smile back! Suddenly people look at you, unsure whether they know you or not. We’re all so absorbed in our phones now.

43:38 Speaker 6 What a classic example. But who actually does it?

43:41 Speaker 2 Practice it. You want to be a shlucha bringing light? You don’t have to change jobs right now or move to Kharkiv. It’s right here, right here. Nothing is small. In holiness there’s no small or big; it’s all one. Do it. Bring light to your children, to yourself. Take two hours off and say, “I’m going on a little break. I’m driving to...” It doesn’t matter where. It’s that movement. Yes, it’s not so much the action itself as the place the action comes from. That’s a mindset. It isn’t nothing. So yes, there are those who received an official appointment, but all of us received one from the Rebbe—and all of us received an official appointment not only from the Rebbe, but also from the One Who sent him.

44:25 Speaker 6 Yes.

44:25 Speaker 2 Which is the Creator. And we have—

44:27 Speaker 6 We were sent here.

44:28 Speaker 2 So much. Exactly. We were sent here. We have a shlichus, and it’s amazing. I spent a lot of time thinking about my children’s school-bus driver. Look, think how much peace of mind he gives me. How much peace of mind he gives a Jewish mother, instead of worry. I know I can relax. What a shlichus. How amazing.

44:49 Speaker 6 What an impact he has, and how good he must feel. How much better than those other drivers, who...

44:55 Speaker 2 Listen—

44:55 Speaker 6 With them, everything happens amid shouting.

44:56 Speaker 2 The number of mishloach manos he got on Purim, the messages the mothers send him, how much love and gratitude he receives—and he goes the extra mile, as they say.

45:07 Speaker 6 Yes.

45:08 Speaker 2 But for a shliach, that isn’t going the extra mile. A shliach doesn’t have an extra mile. What do you mean? This is what needs to be done, so this is what I do. And I find that beautiful. We all need to reach that place of going the extra mile. That’s the iskafya of reviewing your chapter a hundred times and then one more time. One more.

45:25 Speaker 6 To exercise for one more minute today—and it goes a little beyond that.

45:29 Speaker 2 Exactly. One more minute, one more time. That’s the point. Nobody expects anything else from you.

45:38 Speaker 6 Wow.

45:38 Speaker 2 And it’s beautiful.

45:39 Speaker 6 You’ve given us so many amazing principles for everyday life. I’m not saying you shouldn’t open the Tanya now and study it properly, but wow, Zizi. How about a few words to close?

45:55 Speaker 2 I want to end with something practical.

45:57 Speaker 6 Yes.

45:58 Speaker 2 First of all, I hope that whoever listened to us came away with a feeling of hope, a sense of possibility. But I want to give that feeling practical form. Okay, these are lights. That feeling is light.

46:09 Speaker 6 Yes. How do I wake up tomorrow to a new and different day?

46:12 Speaker 2 Exactly. That’s what it means to be a chassid. To take the Rebbe’s sicha, or Chani’s podcast, or whatever it may be, and then ask: Okay, but how do I do this? What do I do with it tomorrow morning when I get up, or when I see my child?

46:22 Speaker 6 The Rebbe said, “My chossid is someone who makes sure tomorrow will be better.”

46:26 Speaker 2 Exactly. It’s like, okay, so how? The Rebbe’s sichos always come down to: Well, what do we actually do?

46:32 Speaker 6 Yes.

46:34 Speaker 2 So first of all, there are three areas to work on: thought, speech, and action. You don’t have to do all three. You can choose one or another; it doesn’t matter. And there are two approaches to the work. This is Tanya—

46:48 Speaker 6 Yes.

46:49 Speaker 2 Plain and simple. Two approaches: turn away from bad and do good. Pick one thing you want to improve: patience, generosity, cooking, food, how you dress, your avodas Hashem. The classic things, as they say—take davening, for example, and so on. It’s all avodas Hashem, but let’s say you choose one of the classic areas. Pick one. Choose one area and then keep narrowing it down, okay? Pick one point in your day. Say you want to practice patience with your children. Notice what happens, and then say, okay, I’m going to focus just on the morning, and just on... In other words, keep narrowing it down, narrowing it down, narrowing it down, and work with that. Identify your thoughts. And now the work begins: getting to know those thoughts, the ones that hold you back or bring you down.

47:45 Speaker 6 Sometimes that even means digging into depths we’re afraid to enter.

47:48 Speaker 2 Yes, but again, we’re not going to figure out now who did this to me and why it happened to me. Keep it as practical as possible. If I notice that I’m about to wake the children and a recording starts playing in my head: “Ugh, I can’t deal with these little pests now, wandering all over the place,” or “Oh no, how long will it take them to get up?”—stop. Just stopping is enough. You don’t even have to tell yourself it’ll be okay. Just stop that recording. Look at that thought and say, “Sweetheart, you’re not helping me. Go away.” Okay? That changes everything. The same goes for speech. Even if I don’t feel it, I can speak words of light and pay attention to what I say. In other words, take what you’ve heard here and apply it to your thoughts, your words, and your actions. You have two approaches: either stop something that isn’t helping you or moving you toward where you want to go, or add more of what is. And it’s one or the other. It’s like a buffet: each choice is a separate dish. You don’t have to do everything. Nobody’s looking for that. Just start working. Keep what works for you, improve what doesn’t, and keep moving. Be willing to have what I call the mindset of Rabbi Akiva. Be willing to be Hashem’s student. It doesn’t happen in a day, or even two, but you’re facing forward and moving. And as you do that, Hashem works miracles.

49:04 Speaker 7 Consistency. You spoke about consistency a few days ago.

49:06 Speaker 2 Right.

49:07 Speaker 7 Wow, it’s so—

49:08 Speaker 2 Right.

49:08 Speaker 7 Critical.

49:09 Speaker 2 Critical, critical. Now, everything on the opposing side will try to keep us from being consistent, and Chassidus simply takes us and redirects our creativity and our persistence. But we have to keep moving from one side of the field to the other. It’s all okay—just keep at it, do the work, learn. And for everything you did manage to do: pom-poms! I used to imagine—and I still do—that Hakadosh Boruch Hu, and all the tzaddikim... I’m not joking. People laugh at me, but I’m not joking. I simply imagine Him applauding me. He says to me, “Good.”

49:41 Speaker 7 With all the animations and effects available today, that shouldn’t be hard...

49:44 Speaker 2 Someone should make that for me already. But I just imagine it. Listen, it motivates me. After all, I’m just... keeping at it. Let me be a cow; leave me alone. I’m doing this for Him. So I imagine that feedback, and it encourages me and gives me strength. It changes the world, literally. It really does. And it’s a pleasure. Focus on what you did do. Celebrate yourself for what you did do. As for what you didn’t do, learn from it and move on.

50:14 Speaker 7 Wow, Zizi, you were fascinating. Wow.

50:16 Speaker 2 It’s not me; it’s the Tanya.

50:17 Speaker 7 Yes, yes.

50:18 Speaker 2 It’s Chassidus.

50:18 Speaker 7 Tanya through you.

50:19 Speaker 2 Through me, boruch Hashem.

50:20 Speaker 7 There’s a reason we came to you.

50:21 Speaker 2 Boruch Hashem. It’s my privilege.

50:22 Speaker 7 A huge thank-you on behalf of all of us. May we merit to put it into practice.

50:24 Speaker 2 Amen. May we merit to see Moshiach Tzidkeinu.

50:26 Speaker 7 Every day, all day. Thank you.