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EPIC Energy: Letting Go, Moving Forward With Katharine Giovanni
Introduction To Katharine Giovanni’s Journey
Hello, epic people. Welcome back to another exciting episode of Epic Begins With 1 Step Forward. I’m your host Zander Sprague. In this episode, I am honored to be joined by Katharine Giovanni. Katharine tell us who you are and what you do.
First, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. I have written twelve books and won a few awards for them. I’m one of the original founders of the independent concierge industry. There’s a story for you. I retired from that industry in 2020 and now I’m focused on a brand new way of forgiveness. I’m teaching people how to forgive. That’s another interesting story.
That is an interesting story and one that I would love for us to explore a little bit here. You piqued my curiosity. Tell me briefly what the concierge was all about.
Everybody is used to the hotel concierge. It’s been around for decades and decades. About 25 years ago, this is how old I am, a group of hotel concierge thought, “ If I can do this in a hotel world, I bet I can bring it to mainstream America, so they did. Back in 1998, there might have been twenty of them around the world, and all of them were in the United States. My husband and I had a meeting and event planning firm at the time.
We read an article in Entrepreneur Magazine, we were in floppy disks and dial-up modems, about the independent concierge industry, this brand new industry. We thought we were doing more of that than anything else, so we gave it a go. Within six months, we got a website up and running, which I did myself by reading the Microsoft Word help file. Don’t ask me to repeat that. I probably could never do it again. I won a Webby Award. Please don’t be impressed because it was the first year they were giving them out. They were giving them away at that point.
The phone started to ring from people saying, “What do you charge? Could you help me out?” My husband came into my office and said, “What are you doing?” I said, “I’m helping them out.” He said the million-dollar question, “Why are you doing it for free?” It was a good question. That was the start. I wrote The Concierge Manual. We’re now in the sixth and final edition because I retired from the industry in 2020. I went from our company then I started a concierge association because there was still no association for these people. Now the concierge industry is worldwide. It’s almost in every city and country around the world.
Interestingly, my first job out of college was at the front desk of a hotel in San Francisco. I got some concierge training because the concierge was on all the time, which I guess I’m personable. I got to learn some of the things and ways to concierge. It was very interesting indeed. I was laughing when you talked about building the website page. I heard this interesting story at a conference about Google. We all know that Google says, “Google in the search bar.” Do you know the story behind that?
The Concierge Manual
No. I know it started in somebody’s garage, but I could be wrong.
They did. They were at Stanford. They had this great idea about the search engine but also they had to put it out there. Sergey Brin didn’t know a lot of HTML. He’s like, “I got to have some way for people to interact with our search engine.” He put up Google and put up the search bar because that’s all he could do. When he put it up there, everyone’s like, “Look at that.”
You might remember that web pages have gone through a lot. When they first came out, there was a bazillion all of a sudden. There was so much information that you’re like, “That’s too much.” I always found that story to be interesting, that the biggest search engine in the world was started by someone who’s like, “I can program a search engine, but I don’t know HTML.”
Most people didn’t and you didn’t have two dimes to scrape together. You’re just thinking, “How do I do this?” There was no Google and there were no classes, no books, no nothing.”
There are no WYSIWYGs, what you see is what you get. You write code. I get it. You have written quite a few books. You came up with this idea of forgiveness, which I think is important in this day and age.
Everybody will tell you to forgive. Your pastor will tell you, your parents, and your teachers. Nobody teaches you how. What if I don’t want to, then what do you do? They then go on and say this idiotic thing, “You need to forgive and forget” There might be some unicorn human being somewhere on the planet that is completely capable of forgetting. I’m not your girl and I wrote a book on it. In my method and the system that I have, there are worksheets and all that stuff in the book, it’s going to take the emotional charge out of the memory or the person.
Everybody is scared of forgiveness because on a 1 to 10 scale, with 10 being an unforgivable dumpster fire and 1 being the easiest person in the world to forgive, you’re thinking you’re number 10. Ten out of ten people listening to this are all thinking that they are number 10, and they probably don’t want to forgive that person because it was horrific and that’s fair. I’m going to tell you something nobody else will. You don’t have to forgive them. Why? Because there are other people, places, and things that you can forgive before you even get to that dumpster fire.
Zander’s Personal Story Of Loss
I’ll share a personal story related to that. Twenty-seven years ago, my older sister was murdered.
I’m sorry.
The man who killed her ended up hanging himself ten days later in the Cook County prison, which I guess in my own opinion isn’t the worst thing because then my family didn’t have to go through what would have been a very public trial. At the time, my dad was a sitting district court judge in Massachusetts, so I was aware of the vagaries of the judicial system. I believe in it but I also know that stuff doesn’t always go the way you hope or wish.
Getting back to forgiveness, I was struggling so hard with “Why did this happen?” and “This wasn’t fair.” Both of those things are true and they’re still true today. I remember exactly where I was. I was living in Boston at the time. I was on the Massachusetts, Turnpike and Brighton Mass. I remember that moment when I had to let go of “Why did this happen?” because I will never know while I’m here in this body. If I let go of that, I free myself up. I’m not like the dog chasing its tail.
I think that relates to that forgiveness of I forgave that she was gone, the anger that I had lost her. I certainly have never forgotten about it. It makes up for some of the work that I do. I wrote two books about sibling loss because I lost my sister. I sit on the board of Compassionate Friends, which is an organization for my audience that if you’ve lost a child, a sibling, or a grandchild, we’re here to support you. It’s a great organization. I think it’s important. We get stuck as you said on your number 10. There are other things that we need to forget. There are people close to us who hurt us badly.
In the system that I designed, I want you to do the ten last. I’m going to have you sit down and write down all the people you think you need to forgive, and then I’m going to have you rate them between 1 and 10. You could have nineteen number 5 for all I care. I don’t care. You could skip a number. It doesn’t bother me.
I want you to start with the number 1s. The person who tripped you in high school, the person who stole your lunch out of the company refrigerator last week, how about the guy who was in the fast lane on I-95 South and wouldn’t get out of it? These are easy people that you can forgive. How about the person who cut you off at the grocery store yesterday? You can forgive these people. As you forgive these people, you’re going to start to feel better. Eventually, you can get to the dumpster fire.
Everybody thinks that when you get angry, it leaves your mouth and it dissipates into the world. It does not. It hangs in your energy field. Einstein proved that energy is neither created nor destroyed. It transforms from one thing to another, so it’s going to hang. If you’re tuning in to this episode, I’m about to hold an opaque tea cup in front of my face. This purple cup can represent bitterness, anger, or anything you want.
When I first get angry, I can keep it off to the side. It’s easy. You and I could still have a conversation. I can go to work. I can go eat. The longer I hold on to it, the more it’s going to hurt. Now it takes two hands. Now my body language is both hands are holding up the cup. I still live my life but it’s starting to go into my conversations in my head. If I continue to hold on to it. Now I’m holding the cup in front of my face. My life has stopped. I’m talking about it. I’m spinning the story for me but I’m still talking about it. It’s in all my conversations. I’m being negative. I’m getting sick and I’m getting the flu.
The trick becomes to forgive people so you can start living your life again because once the cup is down, now I can pay attention again. I’m not focused on the anger. I can see the next money-making opportunity. I can see my dream significant other. I can find that dream house because I’m not so focused on anger. Anger simply means, “I want you out of my head.” That’s what it means. “I don’t want to think about you,” because a person you’re mad at is not thinking about you virtually at all, not even a little bit.
Letting Go: Every time you hold onto anger, it becomes a weight. Forgiving isn’t letting someone off the hook—it’s letting yourself off.
The secret sauce to the whole method is energy. Einstein also proved that everything, including this microphone, has energy around it. When you forgive somebody and they don’t stay forgiven, you don’t forgive the energy around the person. There’s a little mantra in the book and it’s, “I forgive this person, the energy around the person. I forgive myself, the energy around me, and the energy around the whole thing.” Forgiving, the energy is the special sauce of the whole method.
As a licensed professional counselor and mental health person, I talk to my clients all the time about the idea of Gestalt theory of closure theory. Gestalt drew ten circles and asked people, “How many whole circles are there? There’s only 1 in the 10, but there are a lot that are very close to being closed. It is our human nature to go, “I want closure,” so we see them as being closed.
When we have an issue like we’re mad at someone, that’s an open circle. We tend to close it. As you said, with the cup in front of your face, you’re stuck. You’re stuck there. I like to think part of my job when I do counseling, is people get stuck. I’m here to help you get unstuck. When we’re mad at someone in the express lane doing 45 miles an hour, we make up stories about why they’re doing it. We make it personal, “They’re doing it to slow me down.”
I try and remind myself in those moments. I don’t know what their story is. I don’t know what’s going on in their day. It has nothing to do with me because they don’t know me. How powerful am I that the rest of the universe is thinking about me? There’s that energy thing of “Everyone’s energy is focused towards me.” No, it’s not.
You can forgive that energy when you’re dealing with an unforgivable dumpster fire. The reason I call it a dumpster fire is because if you can’t forgive the person, that’s fair. It might be unforgivable. That’s completely fair, but there are other things in the dumpster that you can forgive and the energy around the other things. You can forgive the bed, table, chair, park, and bench. You could forgive the date and you can forgive the building. You can forgive the energy around these things. Pick out other pieces of the memory. It’s like going up to a brick wall. Take out a few bricks, walk around the dump thing, and keep on going.
You don’t have to forgive the unforgivable all at once—start with the small slights and work your way up.
I will give you an example. Let’s say you’re driving down the street and you come to a red light. You’re driving to work every day and you turn your head to the right, and there’s the school where you went to school and you were bullied. In a split second, the memory comes into your head. You get a little growly and grumbly because it was awful. By the time you get to work, you’re in a bad mood. You start chopping people’s heads off, but it’s not their fault.
How do you get rid of that memory? How do you put that memory to bed so you don’t have to think about it anymore? It’s the energy. If you can’t forgive the bully, forgive the school building and the energy around the building. Forgive your childhood home and the energy around your childhood home. Forgive the playground and the energy around your playground.
I forgave 1974 and the energy around 1974. Why did I forgive 1974? It was a horrible year. I was getting bullied in the 8th grade. My parents were both alcoholics, so they were getting a very messy divorce. Because of all these things, I tried to commit suicide. I did pick out all the pieces and forgave them and the energy around it, then for closure, I forgave the whole year and the energy around it. The method is I want you to start with the easy ones, and then work your way up to the hard ones. If you can’t do the hard ones, pick out pieces of the memory and forgive the pieces.
Knowing You’ve Forgiven
How do I know that I’ve forgiven the energy?
That’s a great question. First of all, just because I forgive you doesn’t mean I want a relationship with you. I probably don’t. Just because I forgive you doesn’t mean I’m giving you a pass. You’re still wrong and you’re still a dumpster fire. It just means I want to be free. I’ve been sober for 34 years. When you first go into recovery, you’re supposed to make amends and you’re supposed to reach out to people.
Forgiving others doesn’t mean giving them a pass. It means choosing freedom for yourself.
I am an extroverted introvert now that I’m older, but as a kid, I was painfully shy. There is no reaching out to people. It left me cold. In my method, forgiveness is selfish. You do it for you. You don’t have to tell anybody you’ve done it. You can do it in the privacy of your own home. You could forgive dead people because it doesn’t matter where they are or where they’re not. They’re in your head alive and well, living in your head.
You can forgive these people. It doesn’t matter where they are. How do you know you forgive them? You can go on Facebook or social media or go to Thanksgiving with your relatives. If you can look at that person’s name or look at that person and you have zero reaction, that’s when you know you forgive them. I can look at their name on Facebook and it doesn’t cause any emotional reaction in me. I don’t care. I’m not thinking good. I’m not thinking bad. I just don’t care.
I’m looking for reality. That’s exactly what I’m looking for. Now, I can look back at my childhood and I can regurgitate all the crap if you want me to. Now I see the love that’s there. I see the pockets of love. I see people in a different light. Have I changed my childhood? Yeah, I have because now I can look back at love instead of hate and anger.
When I talk to sibling survivors or parents or something, I can tell you that. I have no idea what my parents have gone through in losing a child, but I can tell you that as a sibling, it’s incredibly hard. It’s equally as devastating.
It’s horrific.
My sister was 30 years old and I was 28. I chose every day to celebrate the rainbow that was her life, and not just focus on the data at the end. Much the same way that you look back at your childhood. We all have a choice and choice is so powerful here because when we employ choice, we define whatever is going on. It doesn’t define us, so 1974 does not define you.
Not even a little bit. If you ask me what the flashpoint of my life was or the time that was an epic beginning for me, because I’ve been sitting here thinking about it before the show, my mother fell down a flight of stairs, broke her hip, and ended up in Lenox Hill Hospital. Even my loving mother couldn’t get a gin and tonic in Lenox Hill Hospital so she tried out and we started rehab.
I spent three beautiful years with her. We became close as sisters. We forgave each other. We were tight and then she died of breast cancer and that was the flashpoint. That was my beginning because I realized that if I didn’t change my life, I was going to die like she did. I changed on a dime. I quit drinking. That was the flashpoint.
Would you and I be talking if she hadn’t died? Probably not. It was like ripping a Band-Aid off almost. You understand the loss. It’s jarring to lose somebody that close. I went into mourning for a year, but that was the beginning. That was the epic beginning because I knew that there was something more for me out there. It was a matter of finding it.
Don’t Die Until You’re Dead
My mantra besides “Leave people better than I find them” is “Don’t die until you’re dead, people.” It’s never too late. You’re never too old. I am a stage three breast cancer survivor. Don’t die until you’re dead. When you have dinner with the Grim Reaper and you don’t go home with the guy, it changes you somehow. Don’t until you’re dead, people.
Choose to celebrate the rainbow, not just focus on the storms. It’s your choice that defines the impact of the past on you.
I believe that you’re not too old to do anything. I went back to school at 45. Why? Because I needed to do it to be able to do the work that I wanted to do.
Did you wake up this morning? Are you breathing? There’s still time, go do it.
That goes to what I call my 97/3 rule, which is 97% of your day is good and up to 3% isn’t so good. Granted there are the days where it may be higher, but those aren’t that bad. Yet somehow, our human conditioning is to focus on the 3% that didn’t go right today and completely ignore the 97%. I’m like, “Why?” I woke up this morning and it’s great that I get to do this podcast with you.
We’re only human. Human beings irritate other human beings. People ask me all the time, “When am I going to be done with forgiveness?” Never. You are going to be doing this for a while. A little PSA for people, if you don’t buy the book or the audiobook, let me give you a little PSA. Write down your list. Say the mantra. It is very simple. You don’t have to hold crystals or jump up and down or sing anything. I’m a very simple soul. I want you to do it before bed and I want you to only do ten at a time. Here’s why.
The energy is powerful. There was a study done and I’m going to say it fast and quick. It was a Japanese water study and you can Google it online. It was done by a guy named Masaru Emoto, and this tells you why anger is toxic. He took several containers of water. One container, he spoke loving words to, beautiful words. In the other one, he said horrible horrific words. He put it under a microscope. The words that he said nasty things had black and brown nasty formations. The word he spoke love to, beautiful formations.
Why am I telling you this? Your body is almost 98% water. If you have negative self-talk and you’re angry and bitter, what do you think the water cells are doing to your body? That’s why anger is toxic and that’s why forgiveness is so critical. I got my list together. I must have had 50 people. I sat there and I was like a woman possessed. I’m a little bit of an overachiever.
I did it before bed because your body heals itself when it sleeps. I thought, “This is going to be great. I’m going to be like a phoenix rising from the ashes. I’m going to be like a butterfly coming out. I’m going to forgive all these people. Tomorrow morning, it’s going to be great. I’m going to feel fantastic.” It didn’t end up that way.
Really?
I spent the next three days in bed with what everybody thought was stomach flu. It was not the stomach flu. Remember that water study and the cells I’m talking about you. Your body needed time to heal itself and I did too many at once. My body needed to clear itself in the best way that it knew how. That’s why I want you guys to do as I say, not as I did, and please limit yourself to ten people a night. This is a marathon. It’s not a sprint. A lot of people call this shadow work. I don’t know what they call in the psychiatric world, but a lot of people call this shadow work. It’s going to take a minute, but please leave those 8s, 9s, and 10s. Do the easy ones first.
I’m going to tack on to what I talk about in my book. Don’t be the meanest person in your life because we are. We say the worst possible things.
You might be your own number 10.
Forgive yourself. Understand “Woulda, coulda, shoulda.” There are many things I could have done, I should have done, and I would have done, but I didn’t. I can’t change it and so it’s not worth my energy to be stuck there with that open circle of, “I should have done this and I didn’t.” Maybe I didn’t because I didn’t know, I wasn’t capable, or I wasn’t ready to do that. It doesn’t matter. Most importantly, forgive yourself.
In my internship, I work with middle school and high schoolers. I had to deal with a lot of super negative self-talk and stuff with clients. I asked him, “Think of five things that you’ve thought about yourself today. If your best friend said one of those things to you, how would you feel?” “I’d be so devastated. That would be horrible.” I’m like, “Exactly, so why are you saying it to you? Why do you believe it?” We have two people in our lives, the superhero and the supervillain. Which one do you want to feed? I got to feed the superhero.
Every morning, we wake up and we’re a brand new person. The way I forgave myself and my own personal way I did it is I looked at myself as the twenty-year-old Katharine. I could forgive twenty-year-old Katharine as a separate person because I’m not that person anymore. I’m 63. I looked at twenty-year-old Katharine. She did the best that she could with the tools that she had. There was so much she had learned yet, and she did her best. She became the person she had to become to survive. I can forgive that, and then I forgave the 30-year-old and 40-year-old. Who you were yesterday is not who you are today. You are not that person anymore. You can forgive that person. They did the best they could.
One thing that I love to remind people is not my quote but Audrey Hepburn’s, “Nothing is impossible. The word itself says I am possible.”
That’s right. Don’t die until you’re dead. I wish I could tell you that’s my quote and I made it up. Everybody attributed it to me. It was not me. I heard Valerie Harper say it in an interview on The Today Show. She had stage four cancer and everybody had given her three months to live. She lived for 5, 6, and 7 years. It was stage four. She lived a long time with that disease and she said to everybody, “Don’t die until you’re dead.” She did eventually pass. That’s where it’s from originally.
We’re only as old as we believe that we are. I look at my mom who’s 84 years old.
God bless her.
The mind and the will are strong. The body may not be falling along that much but she’s not letting that slow her down. She did a month-long trip to Africa and went on Safari last year. She’s going to the Amazon. She’s like, “I’m not dead.” I was bombed. Rock on.
I read an article about a 103-year-old woman who recently got her Master’s degree. Why not? Do it.
Live your epic life. No matter how long you wait to live that opportunity, it is never too late.
Forgiving your past is going to allow you to move forward and become the person you came to the planet to be all along. If you stay focused on the anger, you’re not going to be able to be that person you came down here to be. As you forgive, your friend’s circle might change. Jim Rohn said, “You’re the sum of the five people you spend the most time with.” As you become more positive, the negative people might not want you to become positive.” Your circle might change. Allow it to change. This is a good thing.
Katharine. This has been a fascinating conversation. How could people find you and find your book?
They can go to my website at KatharineGiovanni.com. Thanks to my mother, Katharine is spelled a little bit strangely. Thanks, Mom. You could also go to Amazon. I have the audiobook, the ebook, and the paperback available for you on Amazon.
Embracing Epic Choices For An Epic Life
Katharine, I’m going to thank you so much for joining us. This is been an epic conversation and I’ve so enjoyed it. I know my audience has enjoyed it too. I want to remind everyone that when you’re ready to begin your epic Journey, go to EpicBegins.com. As always, epic choices lead to the epic life that you want.