If you’re like many women in business, you crave emotional bonds – especially with other women – to ease the feelings of isolation that accompany the entrepreneurial journey. In this enlightening episode, I sit down with JF Benoist, bestselling author and pioneer in mental health, to explore why authentic relationships seem more elusive than ever in our digital age.
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Show Notes | Transcript“Authentic connection comes from being in relationship with our emotional body. And what that really means is that, you know, we are feeling creatures and we’re having experiences all day long.” – JF Benoist
As we navigate the complexities of modern connection, JF shares profound insights on how tapping into genuine relationships could be the missing piece that transforms not just your business, but your entire sense of belonging.
Discover how to:
- Recognize and overcome the “correction mindset” that hinders authentic connection
- Cultivate a deeper relationship with your emotional body for more meaningful interactions
- Implement a simple 5-minute check-in practice to foster genuine connections with team members
- Shift from performance-based thinking to a more balanced approach in business and life
Key insights include:
- The surprising impact of our upbringing on our ability to form authentic connections
- Why prioritizing emotional experiences leads to more fulfilling relationships and business success
- How to break free from the cycle of seeking external validation through achievements
- The three essential elements for true fulfillment, according to philosopher Alfred Adler
JF also introduces his new book, “Aviv La Vie: An Adventure in Belonging,” which offers a novel approach to understanding and cultivating authentic connections in all areas of life. I highly recommend this book because JF expertly crafts storytelling with lessons to create a book that educates and entertains.
Whether you’re a seasoned entrepreneur feeling disconnected or a business owner looking to foster deeper relationships within your team, this conversation offers practical strategies and profound insights to help you create a more connected, fulfilling life and business. Tune in to start your journey towards authentic belonging and watch your world transform!
Connect with JF Benoist
Website: avivelavie.com
YouTube: @avivelavie
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TRANSCRIPT
Gloria Grace Rand
Namaste. Have you ever felt like despite the number of Facebook friends or LinkedIn connections you have, that you still feel totally alone in your entrepreneurial journey? Well, get ready for my enlightening conversation with today’s guest as we’re going to delve into why true connection seems harder to find than ever. And discover how tapping into authentic relationships could be the missing piece that transforms not just your business, but your whole sense of belonging in this fast paced digital world. But first, I do want to welcome you to Live Love Engage, especially if this is your first time tuning in. I am Gloria Grace, founder of Align to Shine Academy and I work with spiritually minded women entrepreneurs to break free from self doubt and step into their highest potential. And joining us in just a moment is JF Benoit, who is the best selling author of Addicted to the Monkey Mind and his newest book, Aviv La Vie An Adventure in Belonging. And he’s a pioneer in mental health and emotional well being with decades of experience transforming how we understand connection and self worth. And I’m really glad to have him here today because I, I’ve just come to the realization that my word for 2025 is connection. So this is per. So I’m going to bring him on right now and welcome you officially to Live Love Engage.
JF Benoist
JF thanks for having me, Gloria.
Gloria Grace Rand
Well, I want to just dive right in to this subject and talk about why does belonging feel so elusive?
JF Benoist
Well, I think for most of us we take for granted in a way the way we were raised. So not a lot of us take time to really reflect on the fact that there is a particular way that we’re raised, which I basically talk about in the book of IV La Vie. But really more mostly demonstrate that we live in a world of correction. And what that really means is that if you think of it, when we first were beginning to be part of the world, our parents wanted us to be safe, right? So it was like we were told things like don’t put your finger in the electrical outlet and don’t put your hand on the hot stove and all these different ways in which we had to learn to belong in a safe way in society. But then slowly these correction started to steering away from our sense of survival, our sense of well being and it became about our character in a way. So you know, the comments could have been, hey, you’re not going to wear that to school or why can’t you be more like your brother? You know, he, he doesn’t cry like you or you know, so a lot of that started to shape our sense of who we should be in the world. And I don’t think a lot of us are fully conscious of how much we operate from a mindset today that keeps doing that to our own selves. Right. So the, the majority of the thoughts that we’re having can be performance based in all sorts of different ways. And that affects our sense of connection to ourselves and connection with other people.
Gloria Grace Rand
Yeah, I never thought of it that way of describing as this correction phase. But, but you’re right, we, we do have that and that. And we do often then become our own worst enemies sometimes about correcting ourselves. We can be very judgmental at times. And so, yeah, it does make it hard then to be able to have those authentic connections. And that’s actually where I want to go to next is I’d love to know, how do you define authentic connection? What does that really mean to you?
JF Benoist
Yeah, it’s a beautiful question because I, I think this is something that’s a missing link in the way that we experience ourselves. So authentic connection comes from being in relationship with our emotional body. And what that really means is that, you know, we are feeling creatures and we’re having experiences all day long. And if you think of it, a lot of times when we’re getting triggered, our mind is busy sort of looking for the source of why we’re irritated or it’s thinking maybe it’s the other person and what they’re doing, or it’s the situation or the event. And so we’re sort of operating out of a narrative that in a way is disregarded the emotional experience we’re having in the body. So we’re disconnected from our own experience. And that happens for most people, I would say, probably a few times on a daily basis. And so as long as we keep following this narrative that is correction based, that is trying to find sort of like thinking that the problem is out there somewhere, that it’s, you know, with someone else or it’s not really conducive to connecting to our experience. So it makes it very challenging. So the first connection is really with ourselves, with our own emotional body. And, and the second connection is, is with others, meaning being able to communicate in an honest, open way the experiences that we’re having. And that’s when we have true belonging. That’s when we have true connections.
Gloria Grace Rand
Yeah, that makes so much sense. And I know that it’s something I, I talk about as well is because it really comes down to self love and, and being able to truly, you know, appreciate yourself And. And get in touch with yourself. So how do you go about helping, like, your clients? What. How do you, you know, if someone is feeling like, you know, they’re not. They don’t belong, but it’s really because they’re not connected to themselves, how do you help them in that way?
JF Benoist
Well, I think that the first and most important aspect of being able to create this connection with the emotional body is to become aware that we’re following a narrative. So let’s take a simple example. Like, I think most couple could relate. Let’s say you come home, you’re tired after a long day, and then your partner says something as simple as you. You know, you told me that you cleaned the kitchen this morning, and it’s still dirty today. And so then there’s like, this sort of irritation that would, you know, for the most people would feel, and they would have this sense of like, hey, I work hard all day. So now the narrative that we’re following is a defensive narrative. Right. But there’s no attention really to the experience itself. It’s more like following the thoughts that are saying, hey, you seem to be nagging me right now, or whatever thoughts that we’re having about what is being said. And now we got to fix this problem by justifying the fact that, oh, we work hard all day. And. But what actually happens to the connection to ourselves and with our partner, when we react by saying, I worked hard all day, well, most likely the other partner will say, well, I work hard too, you know, and it’s just like, right. And so then there’s a. We follow a narrative that leads us to experience ourselves as disconnected from ourselves and from other people. So this initial reaction, okay, the thoughts that we’re having are creating a first layer of emotions that are reactive emotion. But in the emotional body, there is a. An anxiety that exists. And that anxiety is because in those moments that were triggered, our sense of love and our sense of value is actually appears to be put in question. And we’re the ones who are doing that because of the way we’ve been conditioned. But we don’t give that much attention because that’s a very vulnerable place to go. You know, like, to give you an example, for me, the practice now is when I get triggered, I’ll pause, and then I’ll take a breath, and I’ll say, can you give me 30 seconds? And I start breathing. And I know immediately, like I tell myself, I know there’s anxiety underneath all of this noise of this narrative, and then I touch it and I go, huh, interesting. Like, now it’s like I can feel this anxiety that then, as it is allowed to be. Right. That we are strong, resilient people that can actually have a relationship with this anxiety. On. Unlike our narrative is telling us that we need to avoid this experience because it’s uncomfortable. But the truth is that if we allow the experience and we just sit with it for a little bit, what we can know is that underneath that will come a lot of information. And the information that comes in is simple. It’s like, oh, you’re feeling kind of like you’re not enough in this moment, JF like, you’re thinking that she’s telling you you’re not enough because you did commit to cleaning the kitchen, and you didn’t. And. And so now it’s like, oh, now that’s really vulnerable. Right. But it’s real. The connection becomes real in that moment. There’s no longer following a narrative and being defensive. And when I reach that place now, I simply communicate that with my partner and I’ll say, huh, fascinating. You said that to me. And now I’m noticing. I was so scared, and I was thinking that I’m not enough. Like, I’m running with that story. But then in that moment, what happens is there’s a connection. There’s a beautiful connection. And the connection is first with myself. Right. Being in this authentic moment of attending to and attuning to my own emotional experience.
Gloria Grace Rand
Yeah. And I think it’s very important then to probably get the other person to buy into that, to say, can you give me a second? Because I know I’ve. I’ve experienced this. I mean, I’ve been in relationships before where someone would say something, and it really did. I could. It’s like even. Even just listening to you describe it, it’s like, yeah, I can feel that. Yeah. Like, the defensiveness. I still have that memory of it and feeling like, you know, what are you talking about? You know. Yeah. Or the same thing. It’s like, yes, I actually was working all day today as well. You know, my. Mine is just as valuable as yours. And so. So that’s. It’s naturally comes up. But I love that you described that. Yeah. Just that ability to be able to just take a breath for a moment and just kind of calm down. Because I know our brain loves to go, like, you know, crazy on us. And it’s like, if we can just calm down and touch, Connect back to our body, then we can think more logically. And so I love that. How can we you know, how can. How can, like, a business owner maybe apply this in, in their, you know, life, maybe in dealing with. With clients and things like that, or, or even, you know, employees or team members? You have any advice for, you know, in that respect of how to be able to foster that connection with ourselves first, obviously, and then with others?
JF Benoist
Yeah, well, I’ve worked a lot with business owners and CEOs, and one of the things that I think is it gets in the way of being as productive as we think that we need to be is that think of the mindset of a visionary or a business owner or someone that’s running a company, that their mindset is, how can we get things done? How can we move through this? How can we solve this problem we need to fix? How can we get it done? Okay, so that’s a very important aspect of being a leader because you have to have this sense of responsibility and what you’re trying to achieve, and you want to get results. The missing link most often is that the people who are working for you are having an experience, and that experience will completely change their level of delivery. And so most people and leaders function from. It’s the same exact dynamic in which we were raised. So, meaning, imagine you come home and you had bad grades. You were doing fine at school, but now you have bad grades. So your leader of your world or your parents, and they say to you, I, you know, like, I noticed that now there’s season Ds on your report card. We’re going to have to straighten this out. And so the focus goes on the grades. The focus goes. It’s like, hey. And it’s like, driven from a good intention. I want you to be a good, you know, I want you to succeed in life. Great. But here’s what’s missing is that the child is having an experience, and that experience is not being attuned to or attended to. And so what happens is truly the kid becomes conditioned to think, oh, I’m only lovable or valuable if I have good grades. And it’s unconscious and it starts building. Right? So imagine running a company is exactly the same way, meaning that if the only thing that the leader does, which the majority of leaders, that’s how they operate, is they focus on the bottom line. They focus on what you’re supposed to do and your job and all of that. And they’re not realizing that the person might have all kinds of anxiety. They might have all kinds of things that are going on that are affecting their level of being able to be super proficient at what they’re doing. And it’s like, it’s perceived for most leaders, they perceive taking the time as connecting with the person either as. Oh yeah, that’s just something you do a little bit of. To make sure that things are going okay. Or, or it’s a. It’s sad to say, but it’s kind of like. It appears like it’s a waste of time that these relationship are transactional. They’re about the bottom line. So I’ve seen and I’ve helped leaders radically change that mindset. And the results that they are experiencing with their employees and with the people who work for them is phenomenal. Right. But it has to be genuine. You have to realize that this is a real person that’s there with you. There’s a way to connect with that person where. And it doesn’t mean like a lot of people think that if you create real connection, that that means that you’ll spend hours and there you’ll listen to their dirty laundry and, and you’ll become their therapist or whatever. Right. But that’s not real. That’s not, that’s not it. There’s ways to be authentic with people and say, I care about you, I care about your experience. Right. And you can still have strong boundaries, you can still have strong ways in which you communicate. So there are ways to establish this relationship with your employees that is a healthy, emotionally based connection, but that doesn’t negate the work that you’re doing with them.
Gloria Grace Rand
Yeah, yeah. And well, let me follow up with that. So let’s say someone is, wants to be able to do that, what would be, what’s like the first thing that they should consider to do to be able to start that relationship? If you had to pick one thing that they could start with today?
JF Benoist
Yeah, it’s a beautiful question. You know, as simple as this is, imagine going to. I would start with the employee. Maybe like, I would start with like a manager or some. Someone that’s kind of like close to you, that you interact with. And I would start by saying, look, we’re both really busy, but here’s what I’d like to do because I just feel like the more I feel connected with you, that, that, that’s gonna like change the way, you know, we feel about each other. So if it’s okay with you, I’d like to do a check in for five minutes and we’ll even be put a timer on. Right. And this is just five minutes where we put all business aside and I just get to Hear your world for five minutes. And I’m not there to fix anything. I’m not there to change your world or whatever. I’m not there to even trying to make things better for you. That’s not it. But I am there to get to know what is actually happening in your life so that I can feel closer to you, just because I know. Right. And then I can do the same. I’ll give you five minutes and I’ll share, you know, what’s happening for me, and then that’s it. And then after those five minutes are done, and it’s really important to use a timer. It’s really important to let your employee know that, you know, this is just an interaction. I want to try this on for a while. Now, after you do this for several weeks, you will see a transformation that happens naturally, because now there’s a connection. There’s a. Oh, wow. Like, I really, genuinely want to know, right. Where are you today? Like, what is happening for you? And what we don’t realize is that when somebody gets to be seen emotionally, when they get to express how they feel and what’s happening in itself now something is resolved. Like, where they feel like they’re not just a performance to you anymore. Like, they just. They. They go, oh, well, I feel seen. Yeah, he really saw me. He really heard what I said. And there’s a depth of connection that starts to happen. And then the beautiful thing that comes from that is how the more people feel secure emotionally, oh, my gosh, they. They become the way. They become loyal to your project, to write the way they really want to be there for your company now, it’s exponentially the way. It just goes way up.
Gloria Grace Rand
Oh, yeah, I can definitely understand that because we are as. As human beings, we all have this desire to be seen, to be heard. And when you can do that, it. Yeah, it just opens up wonderful possibilities because, yeah, you. You feel. You feel safe, I think, in the relationship, then, you know what, Whatever relationship, whether it’s personal, whether it is business, because you. There’s. You’ve established this level of trust between the two of you. So I love that. One of the things. And I was going over, you know, reading up about you and learning about you, and I noticed that one of the things you do is something called you engage in experiential engagement therapy. And I was curious to know a little bit about that and how does it work, because I love experiential stuff anyway, so I was really curious about that.
JF Benoist
Well, the foundation is related to what we’ve been talking about. It’s about learning to prioritize the experience and understanding that we’re not just thinking machines, we are feeling creatures, we are having an experience. And when we are able to establish a relationship with this emotional body. And most of us have a tremendous fear of that because we’re afraid to be rejected. We’re afraid that oftentimes we’re not enough. We’re calculating our performance. We’re calculating what we’re going to say to other people. There’s, you know, in the book Aviv la Vie, this adventure in belonging, I illustrate where the main character of the book is raised in connection. So his mother really raised him this way. She prioritized correction before she would ever make any correction. And later on he has a love for cooking and he opens a restaurant and he meets these six characters and each of them suffer from what I called our false belonging habits. And these habits are ingrained in the fabric of society. Okay. So these are the ways that we operate on a daily basis that for most people are unconscious. And these ways of operating negate our experience over and over and over again. And so we repeat this cycle, right? Of it’s like attempting to belong, attempting to be in connection, but never quite reaching an experience where we’re secure, peaceful. Right. And so when, as long as we’re stuck in those false belonging habit, we don’t really have like a sense of our own resilience and courage that is really real about us. Right. It’s something when, when I work with people in experiential work is to help them realize that resiliency and courage and love and value are innate qualities that exist in us. It’s not something we need to seek outside of ourselves. But because we’re raised in this way, where we follow this path that we need to be different than we are in order to be part of society and belong. Right? So these false belonging habits are. They’re very crippling. And for most people, it’s enlightening when they become aware of them. They, because this is part of the experiential work is first you have to know. You know, usually what I discovered in the last 20 years is that most people will have one or two that are their primary false belonging habits. And they do it mostly on a daily basis. And they. And when it’s unconscious, it’s hard to even live differently because you don’t even know, you know, what you’re operating from. But once you get to know them, those false belonging habit, and then you can learn to shift that, that’s really the basis of this expansion work is to establish a strong connection that is no longer following these false habits of, you know, desire to belong.
Gloria Grace Rand
Well, can you give us an example what would be, what’s like maybe either, maybe one of the most common ones or ones maybe that you see often.
JF Benoist
Well, the first one is, is performance. And so performance is, I think especially in the business world we can relate to where it’s a sense that I want to achieve badly. Like I have this sense that hey, I have these goals, I want to reach them. For some people it’s climbing the corporate ladder. For some people it’s making sure their business is going to succeed or their career. And so the tendency is that we function in a way that the priority is our goals. Okay. And so what actually happens in that process is a person might be sitting at dinner with their family, but they’re not hearing anything that’s being said. And the reason they’re not is because they’re still in their mind thinking about their job, their business, their work, what they’re supposed to do. And the brain is following this train of thought that says you have to succeed at all costs. You have, that’s your job, you need to perform, you need to be the best, you need to. And but what actually happens is that inside the nervous system there’s no sense of true confidence because the confidence comes from achievements. But then, you know, and there’s a cycle for most people around this, which is a cycle will be that if they succeed at something, they’ll feel good temporarily, but then it’s like the next goal gets, gets put in place, right? And so it’s a cycle, it doesn’t really last. And if you fail at something, what starts happening for most of these high achiever and this performance basis, they might feel depressed for a moment, right? They might have like this sense of like. And it’s not a good feeling. It’s really, it’s. It’s intense to feel. But then the next day they’re back at it again. So they don’t, they don’t even let this feeling sort of have its moment either, right? Which is underneath all this is that there’s a different way to be. Meaning that I can actually be in connection with myself and know that my value is not dependent on my performance, but in order to experience that, I have to touch the pain and the hurt that exists in me. That I was conditioned to believe that it is.
Gloria Grace Rand
Wow.
JF Benoist
Right.
Gloria Grace Rand
Yeah, I understand that it’s. Yeah, it’s It’s a challenging way of life to be able to. To do that, because it seems like we’re. We’re not really raised that way. I mean, or especially, I would say, let’s say Western culture in particular. It’s like we’re just. Yeah. You know, it’s like, go, go, go. Drive, drive, drive. You know, and I’m glad that you pointed that one out, this performance one, because, yeah, we get so caught up in that. But. But I do love the. The idea of. Because when you were. When you were talking about, you know, you know, failing at something, it’s like, yeah, you need to still even give yourself a little time to grieve that it didn’t, you know, something didn’t work out the way that you had hoped. But to just, you know, again, it’s like, you know, oh, well, you got to get back. Get right back up on that horse again, you know, and get going. But if you don’t give your time, I think it. It starts being harder and harder. I. I imagine anyway, that. That when you have continued setbacks, it’s like at some point you’re gonna. You’re gonna have a real breakdown, I think.
JF Benoist
Well, yeah, because there’s a sense of emptiness, right. There’s a sense of what’s really driving the buses. I’m never enough. You know, like in. In a perfect example of that, you know, in. In the. In the book of Good to Great. Right. I think that’s the title. And he explained, right. He did so much research about leader, and, and he wanted to know what was the difference between a good leader and a great leader, right? And one of the things that he discover is that the good leader, when they’re faced with a major issue, our major problem that maybe could crash their project or even the company or whatever, they’re busy trying to get rid of their anxiety. They want to manage the problem as. As. As a means to an end to no longer feel this anxiety. And they’re not really conscious that they’re operating that way. So that’s the majority of the way we’ve been conditioned in a society. But then he said, there’s something completely different from the great leader, which are not as common, right? But the great leader is actually excited to get engaged. And their mindset is, I’m going all in, and if we crash, it’ll be the greatest crashing thing ever, you know, and for them, the difference between those two is that this. This person doesn’t base their value on what happens, right? And that’s the difference Right. And this is, this is the, The. The connection that we can have to ourselves is that when we. When we have learned to fail in life and come out with an experience of, I’m still me. I’m still the same visionary. If I fail at this project, right. The great leader is thinking, tomorrow, you know what? I’ll start something again because I’m still this me, who’s this great, resilient, courageous, visionary guy. That doesn’t change whether I fail or not. Right, Right. And it’s. It’s. To me, I think it’s. It’s. It’s a bit challenging to come to face as a leader. It takes a lot of courage to face ourselves and to be honest and go, yeah, I have a tendency to do that. I have a tendency to base my value on what happens or doesn’t happen. And I’m seeking sort of like this reward that is an illusion, really, and it’s very painful to live that way. And what most of us don’t know is the antidote to this is to actually attend and attune to this experience, to actually be. To actually, like, these great leaders got there by being able to crash and feel their pain. Like, like you said, like, take the moment to grieve that, to sit in it and to, like, experience how it hurts. It hurts to fail. It really does. And. But when we actually live and allow this experience, what. What shines through is who we are really, truly underneath the noise that says, oh, somehow you’re not enough because you failed at this, you know?
Gloria Grace Rand
Yeah, absolutely. Oh, goodness. Oh, excuse me one quick second. I need to. No. Okay. Thought I was going to cough, but I think I’ve calmed it down. It’s like, I don’t want. I don’t want to do that to our podcast listeners and have them hear that I’m. I’m going to change gears slightly here because I’d love to ask guests this. What are you curious about right now?
JF Benoist
Oh, it’s a great question. I think curiosity is. Is kind of like what makes us thrive in life anyway, for me? And what. What. Every day I have this sense that I’m just beginning this journey of understanding the importance of connection and that I’m having an experience. You’re having an experience, and that. What happens to me when I understand that that’s the most important thing, that it really isn’t. Everything else that I want to do with my life is great. That’s fantastic. But it’s the difference between thinking that life is a destination versus thinking that it’s like who I am in the process of getting to that destination, right? Is. It’s like, who am I in the face of this? And it’s like, that’s a choice, right? And it’s like. It’s like I’m really curious and want to be more curious about myself. Like, who do I choose to be in the face of this? And especially our world right now is so chaotic, right? And we have this tendency to believe that. So all these things and the world is all crazy and it’s going whatever in all these directions. And we don’t realize the importance of being curious about, well, how do I choose to be? Because that’s my choice, right. And how I respond is ultimately the greatest power we have, right?
Gloria Grace Rand
Yeah.
JF Benoist
So I’m curious to be aware of my responses every day and making sure that I come back to this feeling experience. You know, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the work of Adler. Adler was, you know, a philosopher, and. And he existed at the same time as Freud. And it’s always amazing to me how so many people don’t know about this work, which to me is, you know, Freud gave us the illusion that. That life is cause and effect. And that’s what creates so much of our conditioning because we’re raised in that way. So we buy into this idea. But Adler said something radically different. He said that life is not cause and effect and that we are at choice in the experiences that we’re having. But in order to be a really sort of truly fulfilled human being, there are three things that we. That allows this process to happen. And the first thing is self acceptance. So it’s mastering, right, this. This ability to not judge ourselves, to actually be in relationship with our experiences. The second thing he says is to have confidence in others, which is incredible to be curious about because what it means is it means that we’re not busy judging people either. We’re actually connecting with who they really are. And we realize that they have the same anxieties we do. They have the same fear, the same emotions, and they’re having experiences. And so of course, we can have confidence that they’re just like us. They’re having all these experiences. And then the last one is, he says that it’s contribute, you know, con. Contribution to other people is what brings ultimate fulfillment. But these three have to live in alignment and together. And he talks about how this creates a community feeling, meaning a true experience of belonging, you know.
Gloria Grace Rand
Oh, I love that. Thank you for sharing that. I’m going to have to do some research and learning more about him, because I do. I always say as well, is that, you know, we get to. Every day that we are alive, we get to create our own reality and we get to choose. We have that power of how we want to react in every moment. And so you’ve given us some wonderful examples of this today. And I want to ask you, before we kind of wrap it up here, is there anything else that I should have asked you about this that I didn’t? Any other last point you want to leave or our listeners and viewers today?
JF Benoist
Oh, thank you. I think I’m more and more interested in knowing that when, when I prioritize my experience and I share honestly with others and, and the journey of the book that I wrote for me was it took two and a half years. I’ve had four editors help me work with this book. And I was dedicated to live it like it was more important to live it than to write it. And I notice how that completely transformed my relationship with my wife, 31 years of marriage. It transformed my relationship with my colleagues, with the people and how I live on a daily basis. So my hope is that, you know, the vision of Aviv La Vie is a simple understanding that we can actually learn to prioritize connection. And it’s, it’s life transforming to do that. And the first connection is with ourselves. And, and then once we are experiencing all of these experiences that, these emotional experiences that we’re having without editing them, without telling ourself we should be different or not have this one, or then we become honest, open, authentic, right beings, and then we’re genuinely interested in the experiences of other people and, and that the richness that comes from that is just phenomenal. So I want to invite the people to check out my book. It’s available now on Amazon. It’s brand new, just came out, and it’s a beautiful. It’s written as a novel. You follow this character, Rowan, and these six characters who meet him and start changing all these false belonging habits because they simply are introduced into living in connection and, and they have a role model to do that. Right? So it’s a wonderful journey and I think it can help, you know, entrepreneurs, it can help family members, it can help in so many areas of our lives, the connection with our children. So love it.
Gloria Grace Rand
And you know what, one other thing I should ask you to do is because there may be someone listening and I do have listeners and all, all around the world. So what does actually Aviv La Vie stand for? You Know what does that mean in French? So beautiful.
JF Benoist
So the term actually comes from the term. The French term is Vive La vi and Viv la vie means it’s a little bit like a term like carpe diem. Right. Vive La vi means like live life to the fullest, really. Like take the time to celebrate your life to. And, and so, you know, like the cliche is Vive la France, you know, which is like, it’s like really? No, it’s like patriotic. Like know that your country is great, you know. So this term, which is fascinating. The mother in the book who raises Rowan uses that term because when she celebrates something, she says Viv la vie. But the kid at an early age doesn’t know how to say it and he adds an A in front of it and he turns it into Aviv la vie. And because she’s not correction oriented, she, she finds it endearing every time. It’s really great all the way through the book when these members become like a chosen family together, they use that term, Aviv la vie. And it’s an affirming term about living our life, you know, to the fullest. So it’s, it’s a celebration of life really.
Gloria Grace Rand
I love that. Oh, awesome. Well, I encourage everyone out there, go, go get this book and, and I like that you, you made it a novel because you know, I read a lot of personal development books and self help books but it is nice sometimes to be able to get the lessons not so hitting over the head but you know, do it by reading a story because I love, I love a good story.
JF Benoist
I’m glad, yeah, I’m glad you’re saying that because we work so hard at demonstrating. Right. Because that’s really where we learn it. It’s experiential when you demonstrate. Right. Instead of being teachy and being talked at. Right. Oh, we work so hard at that. It can be very challenging to demonstrate something instead of talking to somebody about the recipe, you know.
Gloria Grace Rand
Absolutely. Well, if, if someone wants to be able to, you know, learn more about the work you’re doing, what’s the best place for them to connect with you?
JF Benoist
Our website, avivelavie.com and also I have a YouTube podcast which I have guests that I invite and I walk them through this process of connection. So if people are interested to be a guest on my podcast, they’re welcome. It’s on YouTube and it’s just the at sign Aviv Levy A V I V E L A V I E. That’s the, the, the handle for the YouTube channel at avivelavie or avivelavie.com all right, excellent.
Gloria Grace Rand
Well, I will be sure and have all of that information in the show notes. And yes, I am. I see. I knew this was going to be a wonderful conversation today. And I really do appreciate you spending some time with us this afternoon and and sharing your sharing your wisdom with us, so I know everyone receives some value from it today.
JF Benoist
Thank you so much for having me, Gloria.
Gloria Grace Rand
And I want to also express my gratitude to all of you for watching and for listening, and encourage you if you’re not already signed up or subscribed to the podcast that you do so on your favorite podcast platform. And if you ever want to leave us a review or anything, that’s always wonderful too. And until next time, as always, I encourage you to go out and live fully, love deeply, and engage authentically.
