DailyJim: Asynchronous love: Helping people emotionally even when I am not interacting with them directly

Hello everyone, welcome to another DailyJim. Today is Tuesday, July 1st, 2025, and today I want to talk about helping people emotionally even when I am not interacting with them directly.

So what do I mean by this? There are many people I have met in my life who, yes, help me emotionally, but I think I also can help them emotionally through one-on-one conversations, whether that's through chatting or whether that's through in-person having a lunch or a dinner or just a beer and talking about things going on in their lives. That could be at the bar, it could be a friend, it could be a stranger, it could be somebody on the airplane that I just met. Often I'm interacting with these people and it seems that the way I talk with them, it seems the way that I listen to them, maybe some of the perspective I provide for them helps them. Maybe it helps you as well. Maybe that's why you're listening to the podcast.

Other ways that I help people directly interacting with them is running classes. So I could run a class and I could put you through different exercises and that could really help you. I could be on a workshop in a conference where I'm kind of facilitating and managing different groups and people and having, again, those one-on-one conversations. So often it's the one-on-one conversations or it's facilitating a class where people are going through exercises and they learn different things about themselves, about how they communicate, about how they deal with conflict or don't deal with it, etc. etc.

And one of the things I've struggled with over the years is that I meet with people and then I go because I can't, there's only so many people I can interact with directly. So many people I can give my attention to in person, but even online, only so many people I can chat with, only so many people I can have a Zoom call, like a video call with, phone call. I can only give so much attention, even if I'm running a class. Maybe the class can only be 10, 15, 20 people. Even if it's 500 people, it's still a limited amount of time. What happens when I'm not there? And you can say there's plenty of other options for people to learn about these things. They could read books. They could have one-on-ones with therapists. They can have one-on-ones with other friends. Yes. And I actually hope that people do. But I also recognize that sometimes I go or take people to a deeper emotional place than they normally go with their friends, their family, sometimes even therapists and some of their coworkers and so. And it can help them open up. But if I just leave, it can make it harder on them because now they're used to, for example, being okay crying and surrounded by tons of people who say it's not okay to cry. And that can be really hard on a person if that support system is no longer there.

And so what I've tried so hard over the last couple of years is how do I scale this? And not even scaling in so much like I want to reach tons of new people. Yes, part of it is that. But a lot of it is how do I just maintain the emotional help that I'm giving to people when I'm not physically there? You could even argue that this could help when I'm not physically alive anymore. Is there any way that I could do something that will help people emotionally when I'm not here anymore? Because a lot of times when I leave the country, I go somewhere else, I'm physically not there. And maybe the time zones are off and it's very hard for me to have conversations with others because I tend to be present where I am. And so I'm not on my phone all the time. And even when I'm with somebody present, I'm not with other people. So it's just, how can I make the emotional help that I give almost asynchronous? Maybe that's the best way to put it. been trying to figure out how to do asynchronous emotional help. And a lot of the emotional help, a lot of the therapy, whether that's individual or group therapy is synchronous. It's one-on-one conversations. It's group conversations. It happens when you're there, when you're gone, it doesn't happen. There are a lot of people who've tried to come up with different apps for cognitive behavioral therapy, and it's great. I actually, I'm grateful for these different asynchronous solutions. I've also wanted to come up with some. And so the ones that seem to resonate right now, in the past, I did iFeelio. iFeelio was a journal for people to write how they were feeling, whether I was there or not. They didn't have to tell me, they could just write to themselves. So they could use it 24-7.

I maybe would like to get that going again in the future, but right now that's not the main focus. The main focus is two main areas. One is podcasting, podcasting and videos. Why? Because that allows me to communicate my words and my voice, because it's not just the words, it's also the emotion, it's also the presence, it's also the sensations through the voice. And people can hear that. They can hear me talking and reflecting on the DailyJim. They can hear me answering questions. They can ask me questions on Ask Jim Anything. And then they can also hear me have conversations with different people in my life, people that I've known for a long time, new people, I'm not sure if that's going to be just the Jim Kleiber show or if that's going to be the Jim and Friends segment. People can hear and see me in conversation and maybe learn from the way that I communicate, maybe pick up different perspectives from me, someone who's focused on emotions and conflict and communication for at least the last 12, 13 years.

So that's a way for people to learn from the conversations they would have with me without directly being in the conversation with me. So again maybe that's one of the reasons you listen to this podcast because you get to hear what's on my mind what I'm thinking about and maybe it provides you a different perspective in life maybe you just like my voice maybe it calms you down maybe it's who knows what it does for you I don't know what else how else it might make you feel um maybe you like my laugh who knows um so that's one main approach and the other one is more about when I was the teacher facilitator trainer. It's the classes that I was running. It was the drills and exercises that I was doing for others, but also doing for myself and trying to figure out, well, how do I do those when I'm not there so that people can still practice and still train in these exercises and gain these skills in a more direct way when I'm not there with them holding their hand or like helping them one-on-one or like I said, in a small group setting. So that's so much of what I've been trying to do. And yes, there are ways that maybe I could put, um, Oh, sorry. Let me say more about that. So it's right now there's different audio drills that are up on my website. I've now consolidated into my personal website. So it's jimcliver. com slash emoco slash drills. Um, the URL might change, But regardless, they're right now on my website. So it's all in one spot. And these are, I think, like one and a half to 10 minute audio drills that really just ask you questions. For example, there's one segment, there's one, yeah, format called Another Thing, where I ask, what's one thing that currently makes you feel blank? What's another thing that currently makes you feel that way? What's another thing that currently makes you feel that way? So for example, what's one thing that currently makes you feel afraid? What's another thing that currently makes you feel afraid? What's another thing that currently makes you feel afraid? And I even did this exercise for myself this morning because I realized I was stuck in so much fear, but I didn't know where the fear was coming from. And as I did it, I realized, oh, there's like five, 10 things that are making me feel afraid right now, which helped me break out of thinking that the fear was just coming from the one element, the lack of money, for example. The fear was coming from some physical ailments of mine. The fear was coming from a relative of my girlfriend who was feeling sick. Fear was coming from multiple things. So that's just one example of these drills and training that I'm trying to make asynchronous as well. And yeah, there are ways for me to maybe monetize it and try to like put up paywalls and say, well, you can only do these drills and exercises if you give me money. But there are so many people in this world, so many people that I know who might need these exercises, who don't necessarily have the money or want to pay for it. Just because somebody doesn't want to pay for something doesn't mean that they don't value it. Sometimes when we pay for things, it cheapens it actually. It's the argument I've made many times. If you go to a holiday dinner and after your family member serves you and says that will be 10 for the meal, you go, huh? What? Or you go to your friend's house and they give you a beer and then after they give the beer they say, oh, that'll be 10 for the beer. You offered me a beer in your house. Now you're going to pay for it. It makes the beer feel worse. So sometimes we don't want to pay for things because it cheapens it. Actually, we value it less when we pay for it. So that's a whole other conversation. But what I'm trying to talk about here is I have been trying to make this emotional help asynchronous. The help that I give kind of through my presence and through my conversations with people and the help that I give through some of the drills and trainings that I've run. And I think both of those things are tremendously important in this world, especially as we move more towards an asynchronous, multiple time zones, more of a global perspective on the world. And many of us are so busy with so many things.

I think if we can have this ways to have asynchronous help in dealing with this stuff, getting these skills better, I think the more the merrier, quite literally. And so that's my approach. And I'm asking for people for money to donate, to contribute to this mission, because I believe...And worldwide, we are struggling with emotional conflicts. We are feeling overwhelmed and giving up in a lot of ways or lashing out with anger. We're either lashing out with hatred or we're succumbing to indifference. And I think it's really important that we learn how to fight hard so that we maintain that love. So we can deepen that love, not only for ourselves, not only for our family, but for the friends and for the strangers, for the enemies that we have. Because if we can do this, what kind of world would we have? How much better would our tools and technology and our life be if we collaborated more instead of like antagonistically competed against each other or just gave up on each other and stopped interacting with each other? Estrangement will pull our societies apart. It's because I think we just don't know how to deal with the conflicts. We get overwhelmed. We either lash out. We tend to lash out and run away. We tend to punch and run, hit and run. So if we can learn how to deal with these fights better, if we can learn how to resolve these conflicts, and if I can do something to help people do that through asynchronous emotional help, through asynchronous tools, man, if I could help people when I'm not in their physical presence or if I'm not giving them my direct attention, then some of these things can scale. And maybe this inspires other people to do other asynchronous ways of helping people. Yes, books can be one. Books are great. Videos are great too, you know? And so just trying to help people figure out how do we take some of the ways that we help build these skills and make them more asynchronous.

So hope you enjoyed this episode and I'll talk to you all tomorrow. Bye. .