Glaze and Grit
Glaze and Grit
Brittany Schank: Air National Guard Servicemember, Owner of Solace Counseling (Episode 04)
Brittany Schank is a licensed clinical social worker and owner of Solace Counseling in Fargo, N.D. Brittany is an encourager for those who have lost part of themselves, a listening ear, a hope finder, and a space holder for healing. She believes we need less fixing and more loving, less perfection and more appreciation for who we are, and less criticism and more encouragement around us.
Brittany is also a guard member with the North Dakota Air National Guard. With over 14 years of military service, Brittany has achieved the rank of Master Sergeant and serves as the Education and Training Manager. She is with the 119th Wing based out of Fargo, N.D.
I am so encouraged to share Brittany’s story with you. You won’t want to miss hearing how she overcame adversity as a young child to be able to inspire and support others in their journey.
When we are able to speak that truth, we connect so much deeper and we feel like neighbors and we feel like a community. And the truth is that most of us have some of those things at some point in life where we're like, that was tough. That about ruined me. That really kind of left a piece of a piece of scar on my heart. And it's something that I constantly have to work through and get through, and also recognize like that scar changed the way that I view things. And perhaps got me to where I am today.
Speaker 2:Glazing grid podcast was founded on the idea of shattering success, perceptions, and showcasing authenticity at its core. I wanted to learn more about the real story behind people's journeys with the focus starting in my own community of Fargo, North Dakota. What emerges through these candid conversations is honesty, strength, and courage with the ripple effect of connection and community. It all starts with the conversation and on this one, I'm Jessie winter, Robin, and this is glazing grid On today's episode. I am so encouraged for you to hear more about Brittany shank. Brittany is a licensed clinical social worker and the owner of solos counseling and Fargo. Brittany believes we need less perfection and more appreciation for who we are. And I couldn't agree more. She's also a master Sergeant with over 14 years of military service with a one 19th wing here in Fargo. Here's Brittany, Brittany, thank you so much for joining me and being on the show. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Thanks for asking me to be on here.
Speaker 2:Give our listeners just a high level overview. You and I met years ago when I was serving with a one 19th wing as well. I believe we were both on the junior enlisted council. I was on there for like a hot minute before I got out of the military. But as I was thinking about our conversation, I don't think I know why you decided to enlist in the guard.
Speaker 1:You know, quite honestly, I didn't really know why I chose to enlist in the guard when it happened. So I was in high school and one of my close friends, her dad knew somebody in the military. And so my friend, I think she felt kind of forced like, Oh, my dad's friend has been talking to my dad and now I need to go through a recruiter. And she had asked me in gym class if I wanted to come with, when she talked to a recruiter like for support. And I didn't really know a whole lot about the military, I for sure did not even understand all of the branches of the military at that point. So I went with her and when we were there and I heard about all the benefits I heard about what the jobs look like, I assumed all jobs meant you had to carry a gun around and you had to shoot at things. And that was not who I was or what I wanted to do. And when I got there and realized there were administrative jobs and jobs that kind of spoke more to who I was, I started to become interested in curly. It was that day that I knew that I wanted to join. I just didn't quite know exactly what I wanted to do or what, what job would have been the best fit for me? How old
Speaker 2:Are you Brittany at that time? 17.
Speaker 1:Yep. I was 17. I enlisted when I was 18, so I didn't need my parents consent or anything. And they were all forward at that time. I don't know that I had any idea, honestly, what the military was going to do for me, the feeling I would get from being able to serve the benefits that it provided. So looking back now, I'm, I'm so grateful. I'm still in the military and I'm grateful I did it, but at the time I don't quite know that I knew why either it just sounded like a good thing to do.
Speaker 2:I can definitely relate to that as well. I enlisted when I was 17, so I had my parents consent, but it was a lot of the same situation a girlfriend had, you know, was in the military. And I was like, Oh, it sounds interesting. And then you check it out and you're like, Oh, this is actually really cool.
Speaker 1:Brittany, you
Speaker 2:Were born and raised in Fargo Morehead. You graduated from West Fargo high school and attended North Dakota state university might not state university and university of North Dakota. What was your favorite university?
Speaker 1:Oh, for sure. My favorite years were my graduate school years, but I don't know that it had anything to do with the school necessarily. It was just that the work that I did in my graduate program was fantastic and was like really spoke to who I was. I don't think I'm going to pick a favorite school and make anything, but I will say my graduate program was by far my favorite and that program that just happened to be at UNB.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Those are all three really great schools. So that's very neat. Bernie, one of the things I find so impressive about you is not only did you earn your master's degree serve in the military, you're a mom to Peyton bear, but you were also the business owner of solace counseling here in Fargo, by the way, congratulations on your one year anniversary of seeing clients full time, July 8th. That's awesome. Congratulations. My question for you is, was it daunting opening up your own business or did you always have the strive to know that's what you wanted to do? And if so, it was never an option to move forward.
Speaker 1:So it was not daunting to open up my own business. There were a lot of hurdles in doing it, but I have always been more of a business minded person. I think it just took me a long time to figure it out. That that's what it was. My husband also owns his own business in Argo. He owns it's called diamond cut lawn installed. My husband was in a job where he was working really, really hard to get into an upper management position. And by the time he got an upper management position, he was sober jolt. It was literally at the moment that he had chosen to open his own business, that he was offered the position that he had been dreaming of. And when I say years, I mean years, and he made a really brave choice to open his own business and decline that position. And that moment in our life when I watched do that, I think gave me the courage to, and I didn't know at that time, but gave me the courage when it was time for me to open up my own business, to know we can do it. And if I fail at it, then I know that he can succeed at it. So you can help me along the way and to see what he gave up essentially for a dream was huge in my mind. And so when it came time for me to do it, it was far easier. I think because I had him to have seen prior to me doing it, it was not daunting, but it was literally like one step in front of the other. I was just talking to a friend recently and I had said, you know what? It always feels like the next task is the one that's impossible until we get through it. And then we're like, okay, so that one was doable. We're good there. But now this next one feels impossible. I tell myself history has proven itself that we just put one step, one foot in front of the other. We do one at a time and we always get there. So I did not always know I was going to own a business. It wasn't that long ago that I remember my husband and I were getting ready to go to sleep. And I said to him someday, I'm going to own my own private practice. And I didn't believe it. There was not a single ounce of me. I don't think that actually believed it. I think that statement was a hundred percent to see if he believed it. And if he would believe in me and his response as always, my husband is one of the most supportive people I've ever met was like, yeah, if you want to, you will. And just an encouragement response. And I think that right there was like the ounce of hope that got inside of me that had the ability to kind of grow one foot in front of the other one step at a time we got here,
Speaker 2:You'll get through it. You just need to go through it.
Speaker 1:Yes, absolutely. And another thing that I feel like I was really grateful for is just the people that were around me. I had close friends that were therapists and counselors. I had people that were close to me that weren't not therapists and counselors and people that were really good encouragers. And so I think if we make sure that we surround ourselves by people who are real with us, but who are also not going to try and pull us down for their own reasons, their own purposes or whatever that kind of looks like. I think it's really important to have those people in our corner and the people who struggle to see that vision or struggle to support us, um, that we do our best to just kind of put them on the sidelines during that journey and then pick them back up when we're in a position where we're able to hear that, and it's not going to send our growth.
Speaker 2:Brittany, you shared with me, you grew up in what you would call a chaotic childhood, which left you feeling not very confident for a large portion of your life. Can you share more about your life journey and why it left you with a lack of confidence?
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. So I, I have an older brother who's two years older than me and my mom was 16 when she had him at 18 when she had me, which meant that my mom was a teenage mom time to, uh, as we were growing up, that in itself brings a different perspective. My mom did the best. She could man, a teenage mom of two kids to be able to raise them and us not have some pretty significant negative things happen. Us, I think is a miracle. And it's a Testament to the amount of work that she put in to doing the best she could to raise us. But obviously also being raised by a teenage mom, times two, has it struggled as well. And so even though I fully believe my mom and my dad both put in a hundred percent of what they could naturally there, there's some, some devastation that comes with that. And so growing up, we were pretty low income and there was always food in the cupboards. I remember that like there was always when the company, but I remember when we got caller ID that the first number we learned was unavailable because unavailable meant it was a bill collector and don't answer it. Life was simple because we didn't have a whole lot of money. And so that was kind of one phase of it, of having as a business owner to change my thoughts on money and what money means, uh, what success looks like for me and what's okay. Success for me. But some of the other things we grew up where perhaps child care or caregivers for us, we're the most skilled or advanced, you know, getting into things that we probably shouldn't have gotten into. One of the things that I, a way that I like to characterize it is a lot of truth and dare has gone wrong. And just really being inundated and seeing inappropriate things growing up. My older brother was he struggled with mental health a lot. He was 18. So I was 16 at the time, he committed a pretty heinous crime and ended up going to prison for it for many, many years. And so at that time I was in high school and it was in the Fargo form, the crime he had committed. And I remember walking into the library and my best friend was by my side and we sat down and one of my class clowns came in and just yelled in the library, something about how my brother had committed this crime. And, and to be really clear, his crime was attempted murder. So it was a pretty scary time in my life and a time where I already lacked confidence. And so to feel like I was put on the spotlight for something that I, I didn't have involvement in, but I could very well be judged for was really scary to me. There was a school piece of it, of what happened with my friends and my friends is families are likely going to find out and am I still going to be allowed to hang out with them? So there was the school side of it of trying to like decipher all of that. And then there was the home side of it does knowing that we were pretty low income and my, my brother likely needed an attorney. And how are my parents going to help him get an attorney and what was true and what was not true about the crime. And, um, there was a lot, it was, there was a lot going on in that moment. And for a long time after that throughout life, I do, I call it a chaotic childhood. I always say I'm a survivor of a chaotic childhood because it, it felt like there were consistently hurdles that we had to overcome felt like days were really slow and it felt like time took a long time. I remember wishing time away a lot. If I could just get to 18, then life could be better than I could take control of my life in a different way. Life was chaotic and I survived it. And luckily we had people surrounding us that were supportive. I remember one of my biggest fears. I remember just staying up at night, crying about it and worried about it was that my best friend who was somebody I would go to her house constantly. I mean, her house was my second home and her lifestyle was very different than mine. She lived in a really slow paced lifestyle. Her parents were quite a bit older than my parents. I never had ever heard them talk about money there. And my biggest fear after my brother's crime was that I wasn't going to be able to hang out with her anymore or that her parents were never going to allow her at my house. Again, they were part of my life support at that time. And so I remember being really sad and really scared that that lifeline was going to be pulled from me. I remember feeling so grateful that her parents, they never talked about it to me. They never brought it up. It felt like nothing had changed. That that in a sense was the only thing that stayed stable after my brother's crime. It continued to kind of be a safe Haven for me. And so I think with pieces like that involved in my life, it helped me to be able to move forward in a way that perhaps other people aren't quite as able to move forward and, or they might feel stuck in. But I feel like I just had like these safety nets that were put in my life to allow me to continue to move forward, even when childhood was chaotic. Thank you for sharing. Yeah, absolutely
Speaker 2:Powerful. I can relate so much to the feelings of the chaotic childhood as well in a different form because my dad struggled with alcoholism. As you mentioned, there was so much love. There's still the struggle. That's part of my journey as well. And recognizing that, yes, I can say that I had so many wonderful moments in my childhood, but it all is also mirrored with struggle and chaos at times, and uncertainty and wishing those seasons and moments potentially years away.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. You know, I'm a firm believer too, that one of the things about life now is I like to consistently feel like I'm growing and doing something more. So one of the things I struggle with is that once I feel like I've hit a moment where I become like an expert on something or something has become too easy, my natural response is to create something new or to do something more, to put myself back in a position where I don't feel like it's easy anymore. I used to look at that as a really bad thing. Like, Oh, you're just repeating the patterns of childhood. That's what it looked like in childhood that nothing was ever easy. And there's beauty and recognizing that that can be really destructive for me and making sure I'm balancing that I'm not creating destruction with it. And then I think there's some beauty in us being able to own and hear that hurt that comes along with learning that pattern and knowing too, that there's a way we can turn it into benefit and goodness, being able to dig deep inside ourselves and realize at what point am I destructing and continuing that pattern behind me. And at what point am I using that pattern behind me to create good and to create something and pride to me that feels right. And so I think it's beautiful when we get to know that there's lots of people who have gone through chaos and have somehow been able to pull beauty out of the other side of it.
Speaker 2:You call yourself and encourage her for those who have lost part of themselves in your practice, how do you work with your clients to help them know they are encouraged and feel believed in
Speaker 1:One of the things that I tell lots of people about therapy is every therapist has a different standpoint and a different viewpoint and a different way that they work with clients. But I'm a firm believer that people come to therapy, not to fix things about themselves or change things about themselves. People come to therapy to learn, to love themselves. And so there are things and beliefs and traits. The bonus that I am a believer that are not able to be changed and should not be changed. And so, for example, I'll put myself on the spot. I think that I was born with a fire inside of me and I use fire just as something for us to visualize. But what I mean by that is I was born with some sort of drive because by the time I was very, very young, I was already kind of like telling people what to do. Setting schedules, like the amount of times I would say to my mom, mom, it's time to go do this. It's time to go to that. Mom. It's time to go to church. My family was not super religious. I would go to church on Wednesdays all by myself. It was not that it was a family thing, right. I was literally telling my mom, this is what you need to do for me. It's time to go to Walmart. I need to get this. And it drove my mom nuts to this day. It drives my mom nuts if I'm like, so what time is it that we're going to the store? She's like pushed up, but it's something that I was born with. Right? And so in therapy, I'm a firm believer that our goal in therapy is for us to figure out who you are and help you love that person, that you are not change who you are. Hopefully that is a way, and we've seen it time and time again for us to be able to encourage people, to love yourself, to be yourself, to continue life as yourself. But it's a shift in us viewing ourselves as right. And correct. And well, so often we take pieces of ourselves in some it's not well when in fact it is well and let's figure out how that has been well for us.
Speaker 2:I love how you share the experiences that you carry. You know, keep you humble and remind you that we were all very similar and we can learn from one another's experiences. It's beautiful. It's honest, it's real. And with that humility and experience, you've always been born with this drive. What is your future motivating factor?
Speaker 1:So I want to do really, really well by my kids and my family. And so when I ask myself, like, why am I doing what I'm doing today? 100% is for my family and my kids. And I also have to say for like humanity as a whole, because I think that with my kids, I want them to know that it does not matter what happens to us in life. We can accomplish the things that we dream, as long as we put the dream out there and are willing to do the work for it for my kids. I want them to know that, and I want them to live that. I want them to see mommy doing that. And I also want them to know that we don't have to do life in a way that society says we have to do life. And what I mean by that is we were talking right before we got on here about schedules and like, where do my kids go for daycare and things like that. And one of my biggest goals going into business was I really wanted to find a balance between family and work. And so I vowed to myself that I would not work more than four days a week. And if it was ever possible, I would love to work three days a week. Also knowing that that oftentimes comes along with some financial pieces to it. And how can we balance all of that family work, finances, everything. Since I started fellas counseling, it has been true. I have, I have not worked more than four days a week, um, which allows me to stay home with my kids an extra day, a week to be able to feel fulfilled as a mom. That's what feels right to me. And I want my kids to know, and for them to grow up and seeing that whatever feels right for them is right in a work-life balance. If being a stay-at-home mom feels right, have that, or stay at home, dad have at it. If working part-time have at it, if working 70 hours a week feels right, you can do that. And I just hope to be a good role model for my kids in them, knowing that we can create and work hard at getting what it is that we want and desire. So often we have to use our voices to get there and our hard work to get there, but also humanity as a whole, and us being able to recognize that our past, whether it was full of sunshine, most of the time or full of dark cloud was most of the time. Um, it doesn't have to define where we are today. Being somebody who comes from a lower income home and a home where there was lots of chaos and crime and really inappropriate lifestyles at some point that it doesn't mean that we can't do great things in life, and we can use that to propel us. And I think it's so easy for us to not want to be in the spotlight when we come from that because of our lack of confidence or what if people do know that I come from a home where I have a brother who went to prison for attempted murder or something like that, and fear kind of that judgment. And so I hope for humanity as a whole, for us to know that we can embrace our story and we can forward and kind of be catapulted from our story, fulfilling who we are as people.
Speaker 2:I think that's so great. I struggle for so long with just the shame of a kid in that environment. And as I was sharing my story on the podcast and talking to my co-founder Janine about it, it was this light bulb of how long am I going to carry this shame with me? And why am I carrying such shame? And so it was that that recognizing, and not letting our past negatively define us, but using those moments to propel us into who we are meant to be.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. And you know, what's really beautiful is oftentimes those stories are what connect us. And they're the pieces of our story that we don't want to say out loud. So often when we hear somebody else like, Oh my goodness, you've had struggles too. Like you've had things in childhood too, or like, yeah, I have. And it begins to connect in a way that when we don't tell those stories, we're not connected. It's far harder to connect out of, out of like, Oh, life is just perfect and great. And then people are like, okay, not for me, but I'm not going to say that are vulnerable. And we are able to speak the truth of what life looks like. It's just what life looks like. Right. When we are able to speak that truth, we connect so much deeper and we feel like neighbors and we feel like our community. And the truth is that most of us have some of those things at some point in life where we're like, that was tough. That boat room means that really kind of left a piece, a piece of scar on my heart. And it's something that I constantly have to work through and get through, and also recognize like that car changed the way that I do things and perhaps gotten to where I am today.
Speaker 2:Britney, what has this season taught you? And what are you looking forward to the coming months and years ahead?
Speaker 1:Yeah. The season of life has taught me that I can do hard things. We all can do hard things and that it really truly is one foot in front of the other. And if we stop and the quick fan we're done, and so just keep going, even when it's hard, even when we're low, even when it's heavy, even when it's raining, you just have to slowly keep going for it. Military members, anybody who's been to like Keesler air force base. When you start with call it the Keesler shuffle, when we were like barely moving, right? Like Keesler shuffle. If you have to, whatever it looks like, just keep moving. And if you can't keep moving, find somebody who can encourage you to keep moving. What we're looking forward to now is we're looking forward to continuing to grow. I'm looking forward to have the solid counseling have two years, three years, five years, 10 years of open practice. I'm looking forward to all of the people in our community that are able to be served and are able to kind of dig through and trench through their stories and be able to come out the other side, feeling stronger and more empowered. I'm looking forward to watching my daughter go to kindergarten this year and start school for the first time. And so I'm at a place in life where I'm looking forward to not fast-forwarding, I'm looking forward to living and seeing every single day and what each day has to bring and to be able for, for my eyes to be open and see life.
Speaker 2:Brittany, we have a fun little lightning round of questions to end this out. Are you ready? I'm ready. Let's do this toilet paper over we're under, over taco bell or McDonald's cookie dough, or could you use some scratch, cookie dough,
Speaker 1:Yoga pants, or jeans, yoga pants all day fireplace or fire pit fire pit Mickey mouse, or Dora the Explorer Mickey mouse. I love it. I felt like I was on a game show. Thank you so much for having me on here. This has been a fantastic podcast and I am loving what you're doing.
Speaker 2:Oh, thank you. If you'd like to learn more about glazing, join the conversation where you listen to your podcasts and please subscribe and fate and share. You can also follow the of grit journey on glazing grid, podcast.com. I'm Jesse[inaudible]. And thank you so much for listening to this episode on glaze and grit. Talk to you soon.