Hi everyone and welcome to Open Infra Live. This is the weekly show hosted by the Open Infra Foundation to talk about all things open infrastructure. We have production use cases, open source demos, industry conversations and more. So every week you can tune in on Thursdays at 1500 UTC to stream on YouTube, LinkedIn or Facebook. Please note if you are following the UTC time we did have a change starting this week. So 1500 UTC is when you can continue to watch Open Infra Live with the rest of the global community. My name is Allison Price and I'm really excited to be your host today. Like I mentioned, we are streaming live so if you have questions throughout the show please feel free to drop them into the chat wherever you're streaming and we'll pass those to the panelists throughout the show and also answer some questions at the end. Today I am really excited about this episode because there's two things that I love, data and production open source users and right now we have both. And we have something that is also really cool about the Open Infra community, a global representation of users. So we have five users that we're gonna be talking to today and they're coming to us from four different countries which is really cool and shows the power of open infrastructure all around the world. So I'm really excited. Like I said, we have Kakao from Korea, Line from Japan, Shorts from Germany, the Australian Research Data Commons from Australia and T-Systems from Germany as well. So to kick things off, I'm gonna bring on Andrew Kong from Kakao and he's gonna talk about what Kakao is, what they do as an organization but also how they're deploying open infrastructure and production. Welcome Andrew. Hello everyone. Hello Allison. Yeah, I'm Andrew Kong from Kakao and Kakao is a number one mobile platform in Korea. Kakao is very popular for its messenger service. The name is KakaoTone. It has 11 billion messages per month around the world and there's a lot of applications we develop in a company level. It has games and pay and bank and mobile which we call the taxi support. Your convenience, yeah. So basically we try to collect everything and every application with our product. Yeah, next slide, thank you. Yeah, we develop a Kakao Cloud platform based on the opening product which is the open stack like this. Yeah, we define the Kakao Cloud platform which is the keystone tokens and the opening product APIs. This is necessary for the Kakao Cloud platform and based on the open stack in product APIs we develop a lot of service like Kubernetes service and container registry and add launchers and deployment as your service, things like that. Yeah, this service is based on the open stack and using the keystone for the token providers. Yeah, next slide, thank you. Yeah, this is the crane which is the basic infrastructure as a service for our company. Yeah, it has typical deployment like it had to share the regions like we share the keystone over the regions and we have a separate NQ and database and message queue for the shared region and we have both separate regions right now and it has a controller and it has two controls for each region for HA purpose. The controller has the API for the APIs like Nova and Neutron and Octavia and things like that and it has a separate levitating queue, MySQL and levitating queue too. The thing is that we don't actually had a separate network nodes because we developed the special network model for our open stack service. So the compute node itself has an L2 agent and L3 agent at the same time. So we actually using the router at the compute node levels so we try to steering the package in a compute node level. Yeah, so we make the SDN over the compute node itself. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, the transformation, we try to transform our infrastructure to the open state-based cloud that is a result. At the start of year, like 2020, we occupied 30% of product is based on the cloud, which means it's using the claim and the content orchestrator. Now it covers more than 71% in a product level. When you think about the server count, it was 25%. Now it's 56%. During the one years, it increased more than 50,000 in a server count level. And then we developed the data sets over our infrastructures, meaning of a cloud. It indexes logging data, like 53 terabytes per day. And when it comes to the, we actually had a central messaging connector for our service and the logins and the telemetry. We had more than 360,000 messages per second. Yeah, that was maybe twice larger than last year. Yeah, and we expecting this number to grow faster, I mean, next year. Thank you. Awesome, it's really interesting to see like that last slide in particular, how you're moving more and more workloads to the cloud because you're having more and more messages go through the platform. So currently, what is the scale of your open stack environment in production today? Yeah, we had a more than 10,000 COVID node and we actually never counting the VM numbers right now. But when I'm checking this morning, it's 150,000 VMs in our platform. Wow, that is incredible. And it's cool to see that kind of growth. Just even like you said, from 2020 to 2021 to go from 30% of certain workloads in the cloud to 70%, that is what I like to call explosive growth, which is what the focus is in this episode. So you see that continuing to grow over the next coming years with your open stack environment specifically. Yeah, yeah, because we had a new data center, I mean, next year, so we're trying to move every hour VMs and the hypervisors to that data center. So yeah, at that time, maybe actually, our every resource will be covered by open stack and this API, that's why I'm just right now. Wow, no, that's incredible. I know you mentioned Kubernetes briefly on your second slide. What other open source technologies are you deploying with open stack and production? Actually, we utilize every open source, I guess. So what these days are we trying to focus on the open telemetry because it's trying to define the standards over the telemetry cell. And we are focusing on the open policy agents right now because we're trying to build up the standardized the access control and the authorized control for our cloud platform. I think the OPA is the best candidate for that. Awesome, well, thank you, Andrew. And I think we're gonna probably bring you back at the very end for questions, audience, but I appreciate your presentation a lot. Thank you. So one of the things that I'm really excited about and I think Andrew's presentation totally set us on the right foot is that this year, even compared to last year, we've seen explosive growth among open stack deployments and production. Last November, when we held the virtual Open Infra Summit, we had 15 million cores in production, which was really exciting to celebrate with the community. But just this year, this November, one year later, we're at 25 million cores in production. So 66% more cores than we knew about last year, which is just incredible. And this is why I'm so excited to be here with these users who are seeing such incredible growth year over year and planning to see even more growth in the future. So one of these users that has really accelerated theirs and has actually crossed the one million core threshold this year is LINE. So to learn more about their organization, how they're using Open Infrastructure and Production, I'd like to welcome Yushiro Furukawa and Radip, welcome to the show. Hi. Hi. So yeah, so let us begin with LINE. So LINE is what it was like introduced and we introduced OpenStack when LINE in 2016. And LINE is not just a messaging app, it's actually a complete level of communication and infrastructure. And we actually have around 189 million total users with LINE and the total number of daily messages around five billion. And we have around 89 million active users in Japan itself. LINE's workloads include not only LINE messenger, LINE payments, games, music, live streaming and other services, but it also includes several ways of how we can actually deal with the Open Infrastructure. And it includes, we actually have like a Kubernetes workloads as well running online. And for the scale, I would like Yushiro-san to talk about in the next slide. Yes. Actually, we have about more than 40,000 hyperviruses. Oh, sorry, this is the data from the June, July, so actually more than 50,000 hyperviruses and more than 74,000 virtual machine and more than over 30,000 physical servers running in our private cloud called Veruda. I would just like to add like from the LINE's perspective, we also have initiated for the upstream. We introduced the Ostrometrics recently, which was led by Jean-San for the upstream part. And we are also trying to contribute as much as we can on that level. Wow, I can't like seeing the million and billions on the slides and then seeing that since July, you've added so many more hypervisors just to accommodate this traffic that y'all have. So what is driving this growth beyond or behind y'all's open infrastructure scale? Yeah, so LINE services, for example, banking, delivery, digital comics and a bunch of services running and our end user account are growing day by day. We are supporting the company growth from the infrastructure layer. And so what do you think is next for your open stack deployment? As you see the LINE customer base continue to grow, what additional workloads do you foresee being run on your open stack cloud environment? Yeah, next few years, we will expand some availability zones and other new region in order to support LINE's workload growth. This will significantly increase the size of our open stack deployment in the next few years. Awesome, and I know I asked this of Andrew as well, but one of the things that I find really interesting is in addition to open stack, there's a lot of open infrastructure projects that add different capabilities that integrate really well with open stack. So what other open source technologies are y'all integrating into your open stack production environment? Read it some. From the open stack production environment, except this, we actually include the Kubernetes complete cluster. So we also are using a rancher from our department and other work. Not only oslo metrics, which we are currently using, but also from the monitoring side, which we recently, me and Yusha-san recently presented in the virtual summit, we are using Prometheus Grafana and everything else to actually monitor how our clusters are actually performing, identifying SLOs and everything else. Awesome, well, it's definitely great to see all of the data and all of the growth behind lines production deployment. I'm sure we'll have more questions at the end of the episode, but thank you for that presentation and we look forward to hearing more from you in a bit. Thank you. Thank you. So like I mentioned earlier in the episode, these users are coming from all over the world. I know the line and Kakao teams, it's very late in the evening, but last week I was able to sit down with the Australia Research Data Commons team who's behind the Nectar Cloud. And because it's in the very early morning or early morning hours right now, we actually pre-recorded a segment where I asked them these same questions, learned how they're using OpenStack and what's driving the growth behind their OpenStack production deployment. So now we're gonna go back to last week and hear what they have to say and what's driving the growth in Australia. Excited to be sitting down today with Carmel Wash and Paul Cottington to talk about the growth that they're seeing with their OpenStack deployment at ARDC Nectar. Before we kick off, I wanna first walk you to open them for live. I wanna see if y'all can give us a little bit of background of what ARDC Nectar is and what kind of background do you have about the organization for our audience? So the ARDC is the Australian Research Data Commons. It was established back in 2018 and it's part of the national collaborative research infrastructure services that are supported by the federal government. The ARDC is made up of three heritage organizations. One of those was the Nectar Research Cloud. We also had research data storage and we also had ANZ, which is looking at research data management. So in relation to the Nectar Research Cloud, that actually started back in 2012 and it's a federation. So we run it across our node partners across Australia and New Zealand and our node partners are Monash University, University of Melbourne, University of Tasmania, CUSIVE, Intersect. And we also have partners in Swinburne University and University of Auckland. Awesome, so you mentioned the Nectar Cloud has been around since 2012 and I believe that's when you started with OpenStack. So how has OpenStack transformed your organization since then? The Nectar Research Cloud was set up to encourage cross collaboration across research institutions in Australia. So similar to America, Australia has states and state governments and federal governments and the laws in relation to data transfer can be a little bit different in those states. So we were keen to set up a research cloud that would encourage and allow that cross collaboration between different institutions because people access their data and their data collections at the institution or at the node.  Thanks, Kamal. So back in, actually it was 2011 that we started thinking about the Nectar Cloud and we wanted to put up a research cloud at that point, specifically targeted at researchers. And at that time there were sort of several different types of cloud infrastructure or cloud software that could be used. It wasn't entirely clear which one we should go with. We went with OpenStack and it seemed to be a very good choice and we haven't looked back. So yeah, so we started on the cactus release of OpenStack, so we've been doing this for a long time. Yeah, nine years. I mean, it feels like so long ago and now we're at Xena and almost at the end of the alphabet. So you started at the beginning and then here we are. So what workloads are you actually running on your OpenStack cloud? So we support, as I said, research with the research clouds. So we run essentially, we have about 1800 different projects, research projects. So it really covers the whole gamut of different researchers. We in Australia, we categorize the federal government has categories of research, there's 22 top level categories of research and we cover all of them. So it really is a broad spectrum of all sorts of research. And in terms of the type of things people do, it's everything from really just using the cloud as a compute resource. You know, I have my sort of grumpy personal computer almost that I can go and run or my research group can have several large virtual machines running that I'm doing simulation modeling, data analysis or whatever. Or I'm hosting databases, datasets that I can share with my colleagues or I'm hosting research support services. So one of the main things we support is what we call research platforms or sometimes known as virtual research environments. So online systems, portals that are sort of targeted towards specific research use cases. So we have things like ones that are supporting genomics research. We run the Galaxy platform, it's a common platform for genomics analysis. Ecological studies, there's a biodiversity and climate change virtual laboratory that looks at the impacts of different climate change scenarios on the distribution of different species across the country. We're also got a machine learning platform, one that supports drones and analysis of drone data and one for analysis of what we call characterization data, data from microscopes or that sort of imaging data that involves significant processing. So there are a lot of these sort of customized platforms that people use for different research fields that run on the Nectar cloud as well. And that's where we've seen large growth in the last couple of years. So the Australian Research Data Commons mission is to provide the Australian researchers with competitive advantage through data. So what we did a couple of years ago with my colleague is they launched the ARDC platforms program. So we have about 27 platforms being developed. And previously on Nectar, I think we developed over those five to six years. I think there was about 10, 10 or 16, sorry, 16, I think it was virtual labs. So it's quite a large amount of growth. And to enable that growth, what we have been doing is investing in leading edge infrastructure. So we've been investing in GPUs at scale, large memory machines at scale. And we're also looking at how we deal with allocation of those resources. So looking at having GPU services and stuff like that. So it's giving us that opportunity to invest more, but also to scale these services for our national research advantage. Well, Carmel, I'm glad you brought up that growth and how you're having to increase your scale because all of those different activities that y'all both just went over must require a massive cloud. So one of the reasons this episode, we're talking about explosive growth with open stack deployments is y'alls open stack deployment just compared to last year. So you've been in production for nine years. And just in the last year, it's grown 146%, which is incredible. We have several organizations that are investing more about this amount of scale increase is really incredible. So where are you in terms of scale and what's actually causing this growth among your organization besides kind of the workflows that you've just described? Well, we've invested in doing a refresh of our core infrastructure over the last couple of years. And basically that has led to us to be able to more than double our national capacity. So I'm just looking at the stats here. So remember them all. So in essence, what we have is 150,000 plus virtual CPUs now, 8,000 virtual machines, two petabytes of object storage and five petabytes of file storage. And by investing in that new infrastructure and refreshing, it's allowed us to do a lot more, I suppose. So the refresh was one element and that finished in July this year and we worked with our node partners on that. But as I said, they had a large element was with the platform. So understanding what kind of technology they needed and what technology they needed at scale. So Paul mentioned some of the platforms there. But another large element of it as well was being able to be agile and grow with the changing needs of research. So another platform that we're working on at the moment is called the Sensitive Research Platform. So it's called SERP. It's a product that was developed in Wales and the UK. And it has been running on our Monash node for some time but we're looking to expand it to be a national service. So to be able to expand it, we've had to invest significantly to be able to do that. And we've had to change our architecture a little bit in our open stack cloud. So I'll hand over to Paul just to give a quick summary of what we're doing there. Yeah, so for there, because it's sensitive data we need to have it essentially separate from the rest of the cloud infrastructure and users. So essentially we're setting up a separate open stack region in the particular nodes that are running that. So new control plane, new separate infrastructure and networking and so on. So as Carmel said, we're just expanding that now and we're looking at procuring additional infrastructure for that at the moment. That's incredible. I mean, the amount of different workloads you're running and the investment that you're making in open infrastructure is something I'm really happy to be talking to y'all about today. And in addition to these kind of growth opportunities in the future with the new regions, are there any other growth plans for the Nectar cloud or what you're doing with open infrastructure? And we're also looking at where we can use Nectar as an innovation platform and innovation at scale. So we, as I said, we talked about the GPU things but we're also looking at GPUs. And we're working with one of our node partners at Monash University, but in video as well to see how we could use GPUs for micro segmentation of security, cyber security. So actually customizing the cyber security per environment and per workload. So that's quite a bit of work that we're doing at the moment as well. We also have been looking at, oh God, I can't remember that but we've been looking more broadly because we are a national research cloud. We have been looking more broadly at how we can leverage on a national level commercial cloud for national research and how that would work with OpenStack and another area. That's an area that we've been looking at is kind of defining the workflows and understanding where you can get optimum compute. Anything else? I know I'm missing something Paul. Yeah, I think, well, the other thing is more around the higher level services that we support. There's a huge use in research of Jupyter Notebooks. So we wanna be able to support those kinds of things, make it easier for people to use the cloud using a virtual desktop sort of interface and so on. So we're building those sorts of services to make it easier for people to use the cloud to do their research when they may not be very, have much IT expertise, for example. Well, and research is an area within the global community that there's been a lot of momentum around OpenStack. So I know we're gonna be tuning into an Open Infra-Live episode in the coming days. Where can people actually learn how to collaborate with you and more about your use case with OpenStack and other open infrastructure projects? So you can access more information about the Nectar Research Cloud on the ARDC website. So that's ardc.edu.au and under our services tab, there's more information there on the Nectar Research Cloud. You can also ask questions and also see the kind of platforms that we talked about earlier that are running on Nectar and learn a little bit more. One area that we have been looking at quite a lot with new technology is containers and orchestration and how to develop those for research. So Nectar, we are developing those services for our national research loads, but also as ARDC, we are leading the national coordination to develop best practice and policies of how to adapt projects like Kubernetes for research. Awesome, well, that's incredible. Well, thank you both for sitting down with me today. I'm really excited for the global community to learn more about your use case and we hope to have you on a future episode of Open Infra-Live. Brilliant, thank you for the opportunity. Thanks, Alison. Thank you. Awesome, well, it was definitely great to hear how a research organization like the Australia Research Data Commons is using OpenStack to power research for their different workloads. One of the things that I really wanna emphasize to those who are watching and anyone who is running OpenStack in production or even if you're just evaluating it or running a proof of concept, please take the OpenStack user survey. It's openstack.org slash user survey. We have the link here on the screen. It's a great way for the upstream community to understand your technical requirements, but also great for other operators to learn how you're using OpenStack in production and what things they may be able to learn from you around challenges that they may be having themselves. So for our next user, we're gonna travel from Australia to Germany. And I like to welcome Adrienne and Marvin from Schwartz to talk about what they're doing with OpenStack and what their organization is all about. Hi, Alison, thank you. Awesome. Yeah, let's find out what the Schwartz group really is. I'm Marvin, I'm from StackEd, and we're part of the Schwartz IT, which you see in the middle of the screen here. I think most of you know Lidl and Kaufland, mostly the European people. We are there with the two retail brands, Lidl and Kaufland. We have 12,000 stores in 32 countries. Lidl is also in the USA. And we are one of the... We are the Europe largest trading company beside the retail part. We also have recycle labels, which pretty much makes a circle around it.  We also have production facilities to like refilling the soft drinks. We also have bakery goods. We have own ice cream facilities and stuff like this. So, and then StackEd comes in. So it can go to the next slide, where we click again, so we see the rest of it. We saw the need that we need to build something for our own to get the transformation of the Schwartz group more in progress. And therefore we created StackEd as a print within the Schwartz IT to start the transformation of the Schwartz group. Currently we are on the left side and there are some workloads on StackEd, but the target picture is on the right side. We want that 70% of our infrastructure would be moved to StackEd. And then we have like the other 30% which are mixed between multi-cloud environments and the enterprise IT. To give you some examples what is currently running on StackEd. We have a car sharing app called 2Go. We have different parts of the of Lidl for in-store software which runs on StackEd. And we also have a logistic software for pre-zero for, yeah, also on StackEd. And yeah, Adrian will now tell you something about in-depth technology in StackEd. Yeah, hi everyone, I'm Adrian. So to power the growth of StackEd and everything we're doing on it, there's some technical backbone needed and some human backbone. So we're currently having four data centers located in Germany and in Austria. We are already more than 100 colleagues here at StackEd spread over Germany, Bulgaria and Spain. And we're growing even larger every day. To give you a little bit of insights on how large our infrastructure is or how tiny at the moment. We currently have 255 compute nodes running on them 5,600 VMs, have 6,800 mCPUs, 127 terabytes of RAM and two petabytes of storage. And as you can see in the slides, we expanded rapidly since the last September. So I think the numbers speak for themselves. Yeah, next slide, please. So to power this even more or to grow even faster, we partnered up with Cloud and Heat, Cloud on Yauq. Yauq is spoken or is yet another OpenStack on Kubernetes. It's a life cycle management tool for OpenStack. It will or is currently split it in three parts. That's Yauq per metal, which is currently ironic and some image or OS image creation, which helps us a lot. Then we have Yauq Kubernetes, which is sets up for us Kubernetes clusters where the Yauq operators and OpenStack with that will run. Yauq Kubernetes is mostly a collection of Ansible playbooks. Yeah, and after these have been set up, the Yauq operator take over and based on the Yama configuration files, it will set up your OpenStack clusters. It will set up databases, secret or user certificates, load balancers, SSL terminators, everything you need for a large OpenStack environment. So the hope is to even grow faster and more rapid in the future. Yes, to give you maybe some insights what services are currently running on our infrastructure, just a few of them. So some platform as a service are Kubernetes for our users or Cloud Foundry and some other services or smaller services are databases like MySQL, Postgrease, radius databases. We offer open search and other monitoring or backup solutions right now. We are not public yet, but more will come hopefully in the next time. Awesome, well, I like you said, Adrienne, those numbers speak for themselves. I mean, you had over 200% growth in a lot of areas of your infrastructure. And one of the things that I love to learn about and is why, why are you seeing this increased need for more and more infrastructure powered by open source technologies as well as some other technologies like AWS and GCE as well? Maybe I will answer. As you could see, we are a really range of companies in the Schwartz Group and they all have, let's say, different needs. The one of them just need fast acceleration of software productivity. For this, we have had a look on Cloud Foundry. It fits really good needs of a part of our developers. And we also have a Kubernetes runtime which we empower a bit with Gardner underneath. And also in Schwartz Group, we also have OpenShift, which is not yet part of Stack It, but could be also maybe in the future. So there is quite a range. There is, yes. Well, and one of the interesting things was the last slide around, and I'm gonna potentially mispronounce this and I apologize, but Yaouk, I think. Yes. And like Mohammed said in the comments, it seems like integrating OpenStack and Kubernetes together is really the way for open infrastructure deployments moving forward. So is this something that, I know he said and just learned about it today, is there a place where people can learn more about this, maybe even get involved with what you all are doing with Yaouk? Yaouk is open source. You can go to yaouk.cloud and there you can find all the information you need to contribute, take a look and read more what we had done in the past and currently working on. Awesome. Well, I actually look forward to learning more about that. It's probably one of my new favorite acronyms. It seems like there's more every day, but it is definitely fun to say. But thank you all for that overview and we're gonna bring you all back after our last presentation to answer some more questions. Thank you. Thank you. And don't forget, if you're sitting live in the audience, we will answer those questions live here on air. We have one more user that I'm really excited to introduce. We have Nils from OpenTelecom Cloud powered by T-Systems who is an OpenInfo Foundation Gold member. So he's gonna talk about their OpenStack-powered public cloud and why they're seeing some of the significant growth in OpenStack as well. Welcome Nils. And nice sunglasses. Yeah, well, those sunglasses well, had some use in the past days. Yes. Yeah, thanks for having me. Let me briefly introduce you to the OpenTelecom Cloud. You all probably have heard of Deutsche Telekom, the premier teleco provider here from Germany. But we are present in several other countries as well in the U.S. as a T-Mobile U.S. as an example. And as such, we have also not only telephony services, but also public cloud services. And the public cloud of Deutsche Telecom is the OpenTelecom Cloud. Technically, it is operated by T-Systems. T-Systems is a subsidiary of Deutsche Telecom and takes care of the big installations if it comes to IT setups. Well, by the way, we have grown to one of the largest public clouds in Europe which are actually based on OpenStack and to get an idea on the dimensions. I'd suggest to turn to the next slide, please. And I suggest that we start right on the top. So we've built quite some hardware in the meantime. So something like 18,000 rack assets, including servers, switches, security devices and other stuff as well. So we are almost touching half a million virtual CPUs at the moment. We should be a good bit over three and a half thousand terabytes of RAM in our systems. And well, all the other more or less boring stuff if you are familiar with OpenStack based clouds. But to name a few, well, we run OpenStack. We make a great effort in being and remaining Devcore compliant. We have quite some good connectivity as we are a telco provider anyways. With about 300 gigabits internet uplink. We have the typical infrastructure as well as platform services. And all this is split across two major regions which sounds not so many, but we spend some considerable work in setting up our systems to be able to scale to such a massive scale for our services within a single region. Each region is split then again down to three AZS. And we have two major data center sites. One is in Germany and another bond is in the Netherlands. That is very helpful to be compliant with the European GDPR and which is probably also one of the major drivers of our massive growth over the past couple of years. So one number we are particularly proud of is our storage capacity which must have been by now surpassed 500 petabytes of block and object storage combined. Since for example, just to get you an idea what kind of workloads we are running. We are storing satellite imagery that gets recorded directly from space, sent to the ground stations and then it's stored and also processed in the open telecom cloud. At the moment we are a team of about 350 colleagues out of the, I don't know how many 10,000 of Deutsche Telekom colleagues. And we are distributed at the moment to four major hubs, but a lot distributed. That is Germany as I'm from Berlin. We have a lot of colleagues, especially in operations in Hungary, but as well as in Slovakia and in Russia. Well, as you can see, would I just skip was the servers. So we have lots of different sizes which is important if you are acting as a public cloud provider since we cater so many different needs. And that's why we have a great assortment of very small as well as rather big machines including bare metal and some special stuff like GPUs, FPGAs and upcoming next also some artificial intelligence powering special chips and special CPUs or I think they are called GPUs. Next slide please. But it's not only the massive scale that makes up OpenTelecom Cloud, but it's also our connection to the community. And as an example, I brought you a number of projects that we participate in and contribute to. One is the OpenStack SDK and CLI, the OpenStack client where we are major contributors. We even, one of my colleagues, Atem is the project team lead for this OpenStack project. We also are engaged in Ansible Collections making it easier to manage and maintain your OpenStack workloads directly with Ansible as the same is true for the Terraform providers. We also invest quite some time in to make a great user experience and contribute back to the awesome community. So as you can see here, that was a small example of how you can facilitate the SDK to automate your workloads. That's a very useful thing for our customers, for our users, and we're using the same stuff also for ourselves. Well, as you can see, we are a great and happy team. We are hiring and that's for now back to you, Alison. Niels, I love it. Definitely a lot of great growth and it's really cool to see all of the different things that are happening there. I know you mentioned that, of course, GDPR is definitely a driving force for the public clouds, particularly in Europe. This year we've actually expanded to 175 public cloud data centers and it's still growing. And I know that y'all's team is a big part of that. Do you see that there are other things beyond GDPR that are driving that growth around public cloud? Yeah, it's not only the GDPR, but the greater term of sovereignty. So, sovereignty is something that is heavily discussed in Europe at the moment to became, to stay and become independent, both on a technology as well as on a data level of IT. So that means for our users, it's very important to know that they can put and trust their workloads that they sent to us. But if for whatever reason, I cannot imagine right now, but you never know, there is no Deutsche Telekom anymore. There are several other options as well and you can easily switch over or even combine those services, which is a little bit more probable situation. So, setting up real working and API compliant, multi-cloud scenarios is certainly a big driver as well. Awesome. Well, and I know we only have a few minutes left, so I wanna actually bring back all of our panelists. So, I have one question and of course, if you're in the audience and you'd like to ask anything of any of our panelists here today who are running OpenStack in production, please feel free to drop that into the chat. But for now, let's bring back Shoritz, Kakao and Line. All right. So, one of the things that I find interesting and I'll all really address, OpenStack is really growing at your organizations and you're continuing to invest in it. But one of the questions I have and I'll start with you, Andrew from Kakao is how has deploying OpenStack and growing your environment affected or transformed your organization? Oh, yeah. Maybe it's two or three years ago, we had actually 10,000 VMs over our infrastructure. And then we tried to persuade our developers and the people trying to using, not just using VM through the API, just using orchestrator with the VM or infrastructure's API, like the heat and the cloud formation itself. But the thing is it was really difficult, right? So, we tried to using the VM-based orchestrator, we should thinking about the VM image itself and the working code in a VM image. So, it was really hard. So, we devised it. Actually, Alison, you asked me about him, which open source is, are you interested? I skipped the important one. Actually, we are, how I say, we're completing the integration with the Kubernetes with our, the crane, the API. So, after we done that, like one and a half years ago, the developer, they sell by themselves, they are using Kubernetes really easily and simply. So, after that, actually our, the development environment really changes like, so it increased the agility and the efficiency of our infrastructure for the development developers. So, like a couple of weeks ago, we actually had to build the no-show COVID-19, the vaccine reservation system. So, with the, our, the cloud platform, that was done by, done in a 10 days, yeah. Yeah, that was great, yeah. Yeah, no, that's really awesome and it's cool to see that you're deploying OpenStack with Kubernetes. I have one follow-up question at the end that I'll ask everyone, but for now I wanna go to line, how has OpenStack transformed your organization? Oh, yeah, sorry, yeah. So, from our side, so, actually OpenStack has really changed how we are actually working and operating with our organization. So, OpenStack was introduced around five years back, as I said earlier, into Consisting. So, with the introduction of OpenStack, there has been a lot of acceleration and it has actually supported the line service growth a lot. OpenStack has actually helped us to introduce an abstraction layer between the actual data center infrastructure and how the applications have been developed by the developers themselves. So, previously we had the legacy systems, the legacy systems themselves had a lot of work to be handled with, which everybody already knows and that's why we are moving to a cloud-based production system. This abstraction layer, which OpenStack actually introduced. So, it changed how line is actually working. So, earlier it was more like doing something and now it has become more like developing something. So, that difference actually comes into the picture by the virtue that with this, with the introduction of OpenStack, the developers don't have to worry about what's happening underneath or in the infrastructure and they just have to worry about how their applications are working in and how everything is actually operating. So, this culture has actually reduced a lot of extra work and the developers can just focus on the service development right now. That's so massive. Awesome. And what about you, Schwartz? Since we are like the youngest of them all here, let's say it like this, we started our first OpenStack cluster in early 2019. It's not so long ago. And I think OpenStack brings us in the situation that we can use it as a base layer. Or to be honest, we have Yoke, then we have Kubernetes, we have OpenStack, but to be mentioned, yes, it's OpenStack. And therefore, this is the base for all of our product teams to build on. So, beside the infrastructure as a service, we also have Kubernetes, we have Cloud Foundry and all the product teams are currently building on OpenStack their product for like a managed database service and they all use OpenStack for it. And then, therefore, we are working pretty much under the hood to give the product teams the possibility to create products for our end customer, which is mainly the Schwartz group. But we also want to offer this to mostly the European people, which we also have the topic like the GEPR stuff, which Nils told us. And we also want to offer Stackit for the public. There are already some, let's say, friendly customer, which are working on our cloud with us together to make it better and to test it. And we want soon to go to a more public audience and OpenStack helps us with this. Awesome, yeah. And like you said, like you might be younger or your deployment might be younger than some of the other organizations, but it's actually one of the powerful things. I feel like we're seeing more and more organizations come online with OpenStack year over year. So it's interesting to hear your perspective having started in 2019 and hearing how you're integrating OpenStack and Kubernetes together. So it's exciting to hear your perspective on the show today. And Nils, last but not least, how has OpenStack transformed T systems? So when we started a little bit more than five years ago with our OpenStack installation, we decided as a company as whole to undergo a massive transformation to become much more agile, to become much more open, to become much more transparent. And setting up and developing OpenTelecom Cloud and leveraging OpenStack was just the right environment for that to actually implement this path. So ever since then, we more or less nearly doubled all our figures, our revenues and our number of servers and the capacities and so on. So take it or give it a little bit, but depending on how you count. So that was a major growth in scale. And this scale can only be achieved if the people who work around this have the right mindset and the right methodology to leverage these growth. And that was possible by our taking over responsibilities within small teams, moving quickly, trying out things, failing, but if we fail, then fail early. And on the other hand, making sure that our customers get a reliable service. And by that, for example, a lot more than a year we didn't have and didn't account a single major outage as an example. And that's something we are really proud of. So that's how we transformed here. Yes, no, that's fantastic. And it's great to hear not only impact on your revenue, but impact on your end users without having outages and things like that. One commonality, and I know we only have a few minutes left, but I think that is really interesting is not only are you all using OpenStack in production, but you're also using Kubernetes. It's been, you know, one year since OpenStack came around and it's become the standard for open source cloud. And Kubernetes has become the standard for container orchestration. So in a few weeks or not a few weeks next week, we're gonna be talking to more users who are following this open infrastructure standard where they're running OpenStack and Kubernetes and also the de facto standard for operating system, which is Linux. So we're gonna hear from some Linux, OpenStack, Kubernetes infrastructure users, like y'all that are running in production, they're growing and they're seeing how these technologies are impacting their organizations. So I personally wanna say thank you to all of you. I know we're out of time. I could probably fill another hour with questions that I personally have, but we're gonna be publishing your case studies individually on superuser.openstack.com. So if you wanna learn more about what these organizations are doing, please go and visit and learn more there. Next, I wanna actually thank the open infrastructure found members who funds these of the open nation and make shows like OpenInferLive possible. So thank you to everyone who continues to support the OpenInfer Foundation and makes this show possible. And like I said, I thought it was a few weeks from now, but it's actually next week on Wednesday and Thursday at 1500 UTC, we have the very special OpenInferLive keynotes. This is going to be a two hour, two day event where we are going to have users and developers and all of the open infrastructure experts all in one place to talk about what's going on in the open infrastructure community, but also answer your questions live. So please join us. Registration is free and open right now. And of course, I'd like to thank our sponsors for the OpenInferLive keynotes as well, including our headline sponsors, Red Hat and Wind River. In a few weeks, we're gonna resume our weekly show, OpenInferLive, but don't forget to tune in next week and have a great time with OpenInfer.


This episode was prerecorded as part of a live continuing education webinar. On-demand CEUs are still available for this presentation through all CEUs. Register at allceus.com slash counselor toolbox. Today's presentation is going to be focused on compassion-focused therapy. So over the next hour, we're going to define compassion-focused therapy. We'll explore the underlying theory because CFT, which I'm going to call it from now on because compassion-focused therapy is kind of a big mouthful. This is sort of a new approach for most people. So we're going to look at the theory underlying it and figure out how it might be a nice addition to our toolbox when we're working with clients. Then we'll move on to identifying techniques used in CFT and their rationale. Finally, we'll theorize about how CFT might be helpful to your clients. Again, we want to look at the underlying theory as we go. I want you to think about clients that seem to have not done as well as you would have hoped in counseling, especially if you use a cognitive behavioral approach. Think about whether any of the techniques that we're talking about or any of the theories that we're talking about here might ring true. I've found working with clients over the years, sometimes the same information presented in a slightly different fashion will all of a sudden send off a light bulb. So just because you've talked about being compassionate or being kind to yourself with your clients doesn't mean they necessarily wrap their head around it and doesn't necessarily mean they get it. At the end of the presentation, we're also going to talk about some of the reasons that people might be afraid to be compassionate to themselves or to other people. The healing properties of compassion have been written about for centuries. The Dalai Lama stresses that if you want others to be happy or to be happy yourself, you need to focus on compassion. So this is one of those things that we really want to drive home. When we went into counseling, or at least for most of us, compassion is one of the things that we knew we had. We're like, I'm compassionate. I see suffering. I want people to help people stop their suffering and great. It underpins a lot of the things that we talk about in counseling 101 when you were going through your intro classes about being attentive and focused and non-judgmental and all that other kind of stuff. But what we do in session doesn't necessarily translate to skills that the clients can take and use. So there's some techniques that we can talk about that will help them learn to be more self-compassionate. Compassion can be thought of as a skill that one can train in. Not everybody is super compassionate from the get-go. And some people have had negative experiences growing up. Some people have had harsh upbringings. So they tend to be more not compassionate. We can help people look for the silver lining. We can help people look for the compassionate way of viewing certain things. We want to help people focus on and practice compassion in order to influence their neurophysiological and immune systems.  But basically, if people are compassionate and we've talked about this in other classes, they can trigger certain neurochemicals that can help calm the spite or flight reaction. Likewise, if they are harsh and aggressive and critical of themselves, they can trigger neurophysiological responses that trigger the fight or flight reaction. So we want to help people trigger the calming chemicals. Compassionate mind training refers to specific activities designed to develop compassionate attributes and skills, particularly those that influence affect regulation. Now, if you go in and you read some of the articles that I included in your class, you'll find that there are some names that pop up, specifically Marshall Linehan, when talking about compassion and distress tolerance. So some of the skills that are used in compassion-focused therapy or CFT really build upon a lot of the skills you may already have. So what are some observations? Compassion-focused therapy and compassionate mind training arose from a number of them. First, people with high levels of shame and criticism have enormous difficulty being kind to themselves, feeling warmth, or being self-compassionate. So I want you to think for a minute what are the psychological consequences for someone and maybe think about a client who has difficulty being kind to themselves, feeling warm to themselves, or being compassionate again with themselves. How does that affect their psyche? How does that affect how they approach life and how does that affect their relationship with others? Likewise, how does that affect if you can't ever be kind to yourself if you're always being critical? What are the physiological consequences? Like we talked about a minute ago, there's probably going to be a fair amount of cortisol and a fair amount of fight-or-flight stuff and hypervigilance going on all the time if the internal voices or the internal messages that people are giving themselves are always critical and telling them that they're not good enough. Problems of shame and self-criticism are often rooted in histories of abuse, bullying, high-expressed emotion in the family, neglect, and or lack of affection. So again, imagine growing up in this family. And we've talked about the fact that children, young children, don't have the ability to look at multiple explanations for something.  So growing up in a family where there's abuse, a lot of times kids take it and say, I must have done something. I must be bad. They internalize those messages. As they get older, even if they had a good upbringing growing up, we all remember how difficult middle school and high school can be, where there's a lot of bullying. There's a lot of trying to figure out your place in the world. And if you're not getting a lot of support, there's a lot of uncertainty and lack of affection in a family. So any of these can contribute to someone sort of walling off and trying to protect themselves. And it also contributes to people being somewhat self-critical. If I were only better at or if I could only do this, then maybe I would not be making mom angry. Maybe I would not be causing all the chaos in the family. Maybe I would be worthy of affection. And that's what's going through the kids mind as they're growing up. This kind of gets entrenched. If you tell yourself that for long enough, it's hard to turn that voice off. So thinking about growing up in this family, what do you, the child, want? But you're not getting it. So if you're growing up in a family where there's abuse, high expressed emotion, and there's neglect or lack of affection, describes a lot of the families that I've worked with where there's one or both parents having co-occurring disorders. So what is it that the child wants? What are they looking for? And you can go back and go, well, affection, compassion, and a parent like June Cleaver. They didn't get that. So what does that teach you about the world, about safety, about whether you can trust other people to be there and support you even if you don't do the right thing? And the answer is it teaches you that there's not a lot of people you can count on but yourself, but it also often teaches the child because they experience distress that maybe they aren't even enough and they can't self-soothe. Individuals subjected to early experiences of this type can be highly sensitive to threats of rejection or criticism from the outside world and can quickly become self-attacking like the egocentric child or defensive and aggressive.  Someone who may have experienced this a little later than in life may have been able to sort of throw responsibility onto the other person and become defensive or aggressive. It's been recognized that working with shame and self-criticism requires a therapeutic focus on memories of early experiences. And this is very similar to trauma work. So it's important to look at what happened and the history of what led up to now and why people may be having difficulty being self-compassionate. And the thing that really struck me when I started learning about CFT was the fact that some clients become skilled at generating alternatives for their negative thoughts and beliefs but still do poorly in therapy. So they can be just super high achievers at cognitive behavioral but still be stuck in a depressive state, still have high levels of anxiety, still have high levels of anger. So why is that? And basically the person is saying, I can identify the logical fallacy or the unhelpfulness of my thoughts and even identify helpful alternatives but it still doesn't make me feel any better. The words are hollow. And I think most of us have had clients that were, that kind of fit into this category. Individuals prone to high levels of shame and self-criticism can find it very difficult to generate feelings of contentment, safeness, or warmth in their relationships with others or themselves. So again, think about what are the psychological consequences for someone who can't find the feelings. It's not that they don't want to. It's not that they're rejecting it. They just can't, they don't know how to feel content. They don't even, can't even describe what that's like. They don't know what it's like to feel safe and warmth is just a concept that goes way past them because they've always been in unaffectionate or cold, distant, chaotic relationships and even with their parents and their caregivers. They weren't safe. The psychological consequences you can see can, you know, lead to depression, a sense of hopelessness and helplessness because you're never content and you're never safe. High levels of anxiety. And it can also lead to high levels of anger because, you know, I get frustrated, angry, you know, really angry after a while if I never felt like I could feel safe. What are the physical consequences? Again, probably poor sleep. If you're not feeling safe, if you can never turn off those drives to protect yourself, you're probably going to be in a state of pseudo-hypervigilance or hypervigilance most of the time, waiting for the next shoe to drop. So the physical consequences can lead to, you know, draining of energy just sort of by being awake and being in existence, but also not getting enough sleep and having difficulty forming social relationships which help buffer stress. So that means you're probably carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders by yourself. CFT proposes that there are three basic brain systems and the first one is threatened protection. All living things have evolved with a basic protection or survival mechanism. And we're all going, well, yeah, of course. The behavioral outputs of the protection system include fight, flight, and submission. And we can all think of times where we've done one of those three. The key is that sensitized schemas, so people have this schema that they use kind of too often sometimes because they've become hypersensitive to any inkling that there might be a threat. So they've overgeneralized threats and threats are all around them. Which means life is exhausting and it can create high levels of anxiety. But these sensitized schemas and strategies for threat detection become major influences in the way they perceive and navigate their world. They see the destruction. They see the threats around every corner, but they're not seeing the balances, the checks and balances of the good things that are there too. Yes, there are threats. That's just kind of life. But there are also really good things. And one of the things CFT wants to do is help people balance their perception of threat versus positive things. The clinician will identify, historically plot, and validate the functions and origins of safety strategies, partly to de-shame them. And this is something that I've done in a lot of my classes with clients and in a lot of my individual sessions. We look at their coping behaviors. We look at their self-talk. We look at any of those behaviors that they identify as not helpful. And we say, why did you develop these? Because I believe that people do the best they can with the tools they have at any given time in order to survive. Which kind of takes us back to the beginning.  Helping people understand how their behaviors and their reactions were basically creative survival strategies. Does it mean that they have to continue to use them? No.  In compassion-focused therapy, the focus is on understanding the function of a person's symptoms and difficulties in terms of safety strategies. And, you know, you all know I work a lot with people with addictions and co-occurring disorders. And this comes up a lot with addiction. When people start saying, well, you know, I'm weak, it's a moral issue, I should be able to just quit. We look at the function. What is it that this drug or this addictive behavior is doing for you? It's serving a purpose. We can find other ways to meet that need, hopefully. But, you know, it is serving a purpose right now. So let's look at it in terms of you are doing the best you could with what you had before you came to counseling. And now let's explore some other tools in the toolbox. The next system is the drive and excitement. Animals and humans need emotion and motivational systems that direct them toward important rewards and resources. From the time we're born, we have this desire for affiliation.  And this is a calming, rewarding interaction. The function of drive and excitement system in humans is to give us positive feelings that energize and motivate us to seek out the basic things for survival. You know, think about that Maslovi and hierarchy. Food, sex, and friendships. We need to have our biological needs met. And to a certain extent, our relational needs met. If people take cocaine and Fetamine or any other sort of stimulant, this is the system they're likely to stimulate. Why? Because it's ramping them up. It's getting them excited about doing something. The drive system and the threat protection system can be linked in complex ways.  The drive system may say we need to avoid rejection, which means we may need to put ourselves out there in a way that we could experience rejection. So the drive and threat protection system are constantly in this sort of little battle saying we need to do what we need to do to get what we need, but how much risk are we willing to take? Some ways that this can be seen are in the way we work to avoid rejection, doing things we shouldn't to please other people or status seeking. A lot of our clients who are highly critical of themselves think they should be able to show more, think they should be able to demonstrate to the world how worthy they are of everything else. They're trying to prove to themselves at the same time that they are worthy and competent, etc., instead of focusing on those external examples of their worthiness. And the third system is the contentment system. When a person or an animal thinking of sentient beings are not threatened or seeking resources, they can become, not they do, but they can become content. Contentment is associated with a positive calm, positive aspects and sense of well-being. It's not just the absence of threat. So when we talk about relaxation, when we talk about meditation, when we talk about mindfulness, it's about getting to the state of calm where you're not in a state where you're trying to seek something, you're not in a state where you're trying to protect yourself from something. You are good in the moment with whatever it is. The evolution of attachment behavior utilized the contentment system and enabled signals of caring and kindness to have soothing qualities that activated positive effects linked to feelings of well-being, safety, social connectedness. This is sort of the social-safeness system within contentment. And like I said earlier, the infant is born with this social-safeness system. When the mother and child are together, there's a release of oxytocin. This is one of the reasons that kangaroo care is so important, especially in premature and sick infants, because it helps them calm and soothe themselves. Compassion-focused therapy and compassionate mind training are directed at facilitating development of the soothing and social-safeness system. What we're doing is trying to get people to release their adherence to the threat system where they're constantly looking for threats and focus a little bit more on self-soothing and being content with where they are instead of saying, I have to be over here or I have to earn more or I have to run faster or I have to do this, just being content in the moment. The contentment system has been significantly developed with the evolution of attachment behavior. The key point is to recognize the importance of caring behavior in stimulating the soothing and safeness system and thus soothing over arousal and distress in the individual, which I've said several times, releases oxytocin. When someone experiences being cared about either by themselves or by another person, it helps them actually calm down. It releases some chemicals, opiates and oxytocin, that can help them turn down, maybe not turn off, but turn down that fight-or-flight reaction so they can say, you know, it's okay that I'm not going to reach this particular goal today. There's increasing evidence that it reduces sensitivity, especially to socially threatening stimuli and fear circuits in amygdala. So if people can learn to be kind and supportive of themselves instead of judging and say, well, you shouldn't be afraid of this, you know, repeating to themselves the shoulds, the coulds, it's really helpful in helping themselves soothe, so they can turn down those fear circuits. And they can say, you know what? I can do this. I've got this. Heightened sensitivity and overactivity of the threat protection and or drive systems is a common problem in people with high shame and self-criticism. So let's think about that. High shame means they feel guilty for some things that they've done. So they're telling themselves they're bad. The threat is the threat of rejection. And self-criticism is, again, that threat of rejection, but also self-rejection, almost in a protective way to reject yourself before anybody else can reject you, but also to motivate, if you will, and I use that term very loosely, motivate yourself to try to do better to avoid rejection. The soothing system provides relief and calming, but it's insufficiently accessible to people who have a high threat system. So you can't be soothing and hyper-aware at the same time, which makes it difficult for the person to feel reassured, calmed, or soothed when they generate believable alternative thoughts or engage in helpful behaviors. So this is that person, again, who does really well in CVT. And they're like, I got this. I understand the logic behind it, but it doesn't change how I feel. It doesn't change what my emotions are. It doesn't turn off the critic in my head because there's the critic still going, yes, but. This system is particularly sensitive to interpersonal cues of social safeness, acceptance, and being cared for. This is what we're modeling. This is what we've been taught through our entire career to model a situation where someone can feel safe, accepted, and cared for in the therapeutic environment. We also want to help clients replace self-criticism with self-kindness. So when we hear the negative self-talk or when we hear them going down that road where they're looking at the threats, we want to ask them to step back and take a broader look at it in terms of self-kindness and looking for the positives. Attributes of compassion. In compassion-focused therapy, compassion is understood in terms of specific attributes and skills. Care for well-being, which means the person really actually wants to feel better. They want to care for themselves. They just don't know how yet. Sensitivity. Yeah. Well, we've got to be sensitive to ourselves as well as others, but not hypersensitive. As a therapist, we need to have sympathy for and be moved by someone's plight. But they also have to have sympathy for themselves. They need to have sympathy for themselves and go, you know what? That was really hard. I sympathized with the fact that I didn't like that. Distress tolerance. Clients have to build distress tolerance. They also have to build empathy. Now the difference between sympathy and empathy. Sympathy is being moved by someone else's experience or part of us being moved by the other part of our experience. Empathy is being able to kind of get down in there in the trenches with the person and go, I'm here to support you and you've got this. And non-judgment. Yeah, I think that's self-explanatory. The skills of compassion involve creating feelings of warmth, kindness, and support in a range of activities. And for the rest of the presentation, we'll be talking a little bit more about some of the techniques that we can use in CFT. If we're in conflict with someone or ourselves, we often overlook the things that we like about them. By refocusing our attention, we can create a sense of warmth, support, and kindness. Encouraging clients, if they're talking about a disagreement with someone else, to focus on, what is it about that person that you like? Because clearly that person is meaningful in some way or they wouldn't be stirring up the upset-ed-ness, if you will. Likewise, if someone is being ugly to themselves, if they're in conflict with themselves about something, if they're being self-critical, we want to help them look at what are the good things about you? Yes, you have some flaws. Everybody's got flaws. But what are some good things about you? It's not negating what you're talking about right now. But let's look at it with a more balanced perspective instead of focusing only on the negative. In CFT, the focus is on identifying the client's strengths, positive attributes, or skills. Paying attention and bringing to mind their positive qualities can be done by helping them revisit positive memories and working on those aspects of the self. So once we identify those strengths, positive attributes, and skills, you know, I'm big on journals, so I would write it down in a journal. And I would have them identify times in their life where they have modeled those strengths, where they have used those strengths, where those positive attributes have come in handy, or just how do they express their positive attributes?  Well, that's great. So, you know, that's actually a step ahead of where we thought we were. Because if you're a caring person and if you can be compassionate for someone or something else, even if it's, you know, animals in rescue, maybe it's not other human beings right now because there's too much stuff there. But if you can be compassionate towards anything else, what compassion looks like and you know what compassion feels like. So let's start talking about what it looks like and what it feels like and what it might be like to give it to yourself. Attention-directing exercises linked to the savoring of experiences, mindfulness, to develop appreciation and gratitude. For example, have them appreciate a meal that they're eating or just look around and appreciate and sometimes you just stop. Well, maybe not everybody does. But I actually take it, literally, I stop and smell the roses. If I see a flower or a butterfly, I will stop and go over and look at it.  But noticing the little things, appreciating the little things and the gratitude of being able to just experience it in that moment is something a lot of self-critical people don't do because they're so driven to try to reach a state where they don't have to be self-critical. But what's the catch? They're never going to be satisfied because being satisfied is scary. And we'll talk about that in a few minutes. But hold on to that thought for a minute. They will never be satisfied because if they are, it's a terrifying concept. When the threat protection system is focused on problems and potential difficulties, it's beneficial to practice refocusing attention and liberating it from this dominance. So if somebody's focusing on problems, we've all had those days. We get up on the wrong side of the bed. It just happens.  Encouraging clients to stop, take a breath and go, okay. Yeah, they were not the best way to start off this morning. But let's look at some of the positive things that are going on. And I tell my clients, put on their obnoxious rose-colored glasses. You know, I want you to find at least as many positive things as there are things that you're upset about right now. Compassionate reasoning involves how we think about the world ourselves and others. There are people who think the world is a very scary unfriendly, unwelcoming place. And there's a reason they feel that way. You know, that behavior, those thoughts, those schemas have been shaped over time. So I'm not going to tell them they're wrong because in their perception, that's how the world is. Compassionate reasoning helps them explore different alternatives. Logic is not enough. Evidence is secondary to the experience of being helped and supported.  But if you don't feel helped and supported, if you can't feel content, if you can't feel nurtured, then it's probably not compassionate reasoning. It's just reasoning. Many of our clients need to start learning that compassionate part to actually feel in addition to thinking. How many clients have you worked with that, I mean, they could spit out a textbook on psychology. They had the stuff down. They knew pretty much anything you were going to say before you had to say it. But they were still in your office because they were still depressed. They were still anxious, whatever their issue was. That's where we go to the issue of feeling. They can think it all day long. They can intellectualize all day long. But until they tap into the feelings underlying it, where the thoughts mean something, where the thoughts are validating and supportive and kind, they're probably not going to get unstuck. Particularly important is how people reason, ruminate and reflect on their current mood states, their future and their sense of self. That's three right there. Their current mood states, if you ruminate about being depressed and think you're going to be always depressed and you focus on all the reasons you're depressed, guess what? You're going to stay depressed. Looking at how that rumination goes and why it's there, what function is it serving? What function is it serving to kind of continue to focus on all the reasons you're depressed or all the reasons you're anxious? And the answer is in short, it's safer. You know what to expect. Their future. If they ruminate about their future never getting any better, then they're not going to be disappointed. They're not going to be let down if something doesn't happen. And they're not going to be critical to achieve a goal. And their sense of self. If they think, if they ruminate on all of their faults then guess where their sense of self is going to be. If they ruminate on yes, I'm not so good at that. Remember we've talked before about global versus specific attributions. If they focus on things as being specific. So yeah, I may not be good at X, Y, Z, but I am wonderful at the whole rest of the alphabet. That's a whole different perspective and it really affects how people feel in terms of their sense of self. Shame and critical thinking are clearly targets in compassion focused therapy. But it's important to understand the functions of the self critical thinking and why people may fear giving it up. And I know I've brought that up four or five times now, but you know, we're kind of priming you for getting to that point of why wouldn't somebody want to give up being self critical. As a therapist, we want to teach the problems of certain types of rumination. Why is it problematic to focus on all the things that are going wrong? Why is it problematic to focus on all of our faults? You know, a self critical person would say, if I focus on my faults, then I know what I need to improve on. Well, true. But you're also not focusing. It's in imbalanced look at who you are. You're focusing on three or four faults as opposed to the 30 positive attributes. And then we want to talk about how to substitute compassionate refocusing in their thinking. How do you switch from focusing on your faults or focusing on your fear of the future or focusing on your frustration and sense of helplessness about your current mood state? How do you switch from that to focusing on compassion and self support? Compassionate behavior is focused on alleviating distress and facilitating development and growth. For example, when the person has to engage in a difficult or frightening behavior, they'll try to create an encouraging warm tone in their minds with supportive thoughts. A lot of our clients hate public speaking. And this is the best example that I can give because so many people have experienced it, even if it's only speaking to five or six people. A lot of people can relate to a time where they've had to get up in front of others and it's just been terrifying. So, helping them imagine that situation and then helping them figure out how to create encouraging warm tone. What's it going to be like? You can walk out there and you can anticipate people to be critical. You can anticipate people to heckle. You can anticipate people to laugh at you. You can anticipate people to fall asleep. Or you can walk out there and focus on the people who are really excited to be there and interested in what you have to say. Because in any group, there are going to be some who are there because they want to be and some who are there because they have to be. And their attitude may have something to do with you. So, talking about different interpretations of any stressful situation and having someone figure out basically if you were a cheerleader for somebody and they were getting ready to do something that was anxiety provoking, what would they say? What would you want them to do? If you were in a recital when you were little, you know, maybe you took ballet or tap or sang or whatever how did it feel if your parent was backstage and encouraging and, you know, welcoming to you when you came back, no matter how you did, versus being there and being critical as soon as you walk off the stage getting all up in your face and telling you all the things you did wrong. We want to create that warm environment. This is a repetition of what would normally happen within a parent-child relationship where the parents encouraging and supportive. Before, even before looking at CFT, one of the things that I often asked my clients when they would start holding themselves to this standard that was far above anything that they would hold anyone else to when they would start being self-critical, I would say, you know, if this was your child what would you say to them? Or would you hold your child or your best friend to that standard? 99 times out of 100, they say, no. So then we talk about why they think it's necessary to hold themselves to that high standard. CFT seeks to stimulate positive affect processing, which means we've got to have positive affect. So we need to figure out how to create that warm inviting, welcoming, supportive situation. Behavioral tasks encouraging exposure to positive emotions can help the client learn to enjoy experiencing them. The caveat is some clients are not able or willing to experience pleasure. Why? Well, maybe they don't know how. Maybe they grew up in an addicted family where it was don't talk, don't trust, don't feel. And heaven forbid, you should be happy when the addict was in a bad mood. Maybe they experienced abuse. So they're afraid that something's bad is going to happen if they experience pleasure. So there are a lot of reasons and you have to look within your particular client's history to figure out what may be preventing them from experiencing pleasure. We want to help people become more process focused rather than task focused. So if they do something, instead of focusing on how far short they fell of their goal focus on the effort. This is true with mental health or addiction, but addiction tends to be a little bit more rapid cycling if you will if it's going to cycle. When people go out and then they relapse and they're like, some people will be very focused on the fact that they relapsed. Other people will be focused on the fact that I stayed clean for six months before I relapsed. So they focus on the effort and the progress instead of focusing on not meeting some arbitrary goal. Clients explore the image of their ideal of compassion. The therapist can guide the client through imagery exercises exploring feelings associated with various images. So what would it look like? If someone were being compassionate to you what do their facial expressions look like? It's important that we tell the clients that these images are usually fleeting and not clear in the mind so they don't get frustrated that they're not doing it right. Because a self critical client is going to want to do it exactly right and if they can't see it, if they can't feel it, they may get even more frustrated. If they can't do it right now, that's okay. If like I said before they've had an experience of being compassionate maybe have them take that situation and go, okay what did your face look like? What did it feel like? What was your tone of voice when you were being compassionate? Friend of mine can be very demanding, can be very harsh you know, former military all that kind of stuff but it is fascinating to watch his demeanor change when he's talking to his kids or when he's talking to his dogs he is infinitely compassionate with them but he is very, very critical of both himself and other people there's definitely a switch that people will see sometimes clients prefer non-human images such as an animal a tree or a mountain these must be imagined as sentient with specific qualities of wisdom, strength, warmth and non-judgment basically what you envision your parent being or the ideal parent being we also can have the client imagine themselves as highly compassionate and explore their sense of age, facial expression body posture, voice tones and styles of thinking so encouraging people to go is there a time for compassionate what would it look like one thing we want to do is encourage clients to practice each day at becoming their compassionate self when they're using appropriate facial expressions voice tones and ways of thinking and one of the things we talk about in addiction recovery is fake it till you make it now they're not going to be able to be their compassionate self all day long probably at first encourage them to do it for an hour maybe an hour in the morning and an hour at night being compassionate with themselves and not pushing listening to where they are that also increases mindfulness if they're being compassionate then they're aware of themselves in the moment in a non-judgmental fashion this is very good with kids who are or people who have been victims of sexual abuse or any kind of abuse because a lot of them have very negative associations remember we talked about the interpersonal relationship being calming and soothing but if you have been victimized by someone who you're supposed to trust then that gets rewired calming and soothing and if you blame yourself which a lot of survivors of abuse do for what happened then there's that self-critical also going on so there is a huge amount of overlap between CFT and trauma work clients explore feelings in their bodies when they focus on being compassionate experiencing compassion from others and being self-compassionate so these are three different activities going through and feeling how it feels if they're focusing on being compassionate on something non-threatening like their puppy that will feel one way experiencing compassion from others how does it feel if other people are compassionate towards you what are you telling yourself are you feeling vulnerable are you feeling suspicious or are you feeling confused and comfortable and how does it feel if you're self-compassionate what goes on in your body what kind of things are you telling yourself if you're trying to basically cut yourself a break CFT suggests that internal thoughts and images can act just as external stimuli do activating different parts of the brain and again we've talked about this if you see food and it smells really good you're probably going to start to salivate but you can also think about your favorite meal to eat without even seeing it or smelling it and likely you will start to salivate the same thing happens if you imagine yourself being in a hostile environment or if you create a hostile environment in your own mind the abuse the negativity is still the same therapists can ask clients to consider how they would feel if someone kept putting them down undermining their confidence and becoming angry with them when things didn't go well usually clients can identify the feelings of anxiety and depression and can recognize that this is because critical signals stimulate their threat protection system so they know when they're bullied they're going to feel threatened then we can take them all the way back around and help them see how bullying themselves being self-critical to themselves triggers those same feelings of anxiety and depression and I told you we were going to get here fear of compassion many clients cannot easily access the soothing and social safety system that underpins compassion much of the work that you would do in CFT addresses people's fears and resistances to becoming self-compassionate and compassionate to others some clients will be able to do one or the other but not both and some clients won't be able to do either one at the beginning so figuring out what they can do and working from there signals of kindness and compassion from another person will reactivate the attachment system and memories and feelings within that system which may trigger considerable sadness and grief and this is the key part if a person starts to feel cared for if a person starts to feel like there's a relationship the attachment system is triggered but if they have been abandoned before if they have been hurt by those who are supposed to take care of them then it's going to be traumatic to start feeling those feelings again because as soon as they feel it they will remember the last time they felt that way and it didn't end up so well the compassion-focused therapist will help to normalize, validate contain and work on those feelings so when someone starts to feel anxious as they are experiencing compassion our job is to help them work through it some people find compassion-focused imagery physiologically stressful due to prior trauma abuse or abandonment history but some systematic desensitization can really be useful in working with this because as people start to feel that compassion that fight-or-flight system gets triggered they are trying to protect themselves from a threat they don't want to feel that abandonment or abuse again so using systematic desensitization we can help them calm themselves down get refocused mindfulness in the present moment and learn to tolerate the distress as well as balance out those systems and look at what's going on now and recognize the artifacts from their past some clients have negative beliefs about compassion as being soft, self-indulgent or not deserved I can imagine a parent telling a child that I can imagine a child internalizing that when they're growing up if they're always being pushed if they're always being driven to be number one and any rewards they get any support they get is predicated on them being the best exploration might reveal that the individual is afraid that if they give up self-criticism they'll become lazy unpleasant or unlovable well, they probably got that message from somewhere or they may be punished for self-compassion by paying for it later or having it taken away everything ends, everyone leaves we've probably heard that from our clients at one time or another depending on what causes or where these thoughts came from will really affect how you work with it in therapy but understanding why they're afraid why they're quote resistant to being self-compassionate is a huge step and they'll probably get to the point where they logically understand it before they can emotionally commit to it and go you know, it's okay to be kind to myself the therapist is constantly exploring the interactions between the functions of self-criticism and avoidance of self-compassion so how does self-criticism and fear of self-compassion work together or work against each other many clients struggle not only with low self-esteem but also a highly critical negative internal voice in CFT the therapist explores the roots and functions of self-criticism helping clients understand how it might have been a survival response they help clients explore what a compassionate other would look like what would it have looked like if you had that compassionate person in your life help clients describe and rehearse being self-compassionate maybe you can start out with when you've been compassionate with someone else maybe it's your child maybe it's your dog who knows what it is how did you look what were your facial expressions what was your body posture now I want you to take that and practice it the next time you hear yourself being self-critical it explores the interaction between self-criticism and avoidance or fear of self-compassion so if you're being self-critical it's going to be hard to be compassionate at the same time I mean they're kind of opposite ends of the spectrum we will explore the sensations and fears associated with self-compassion some of the sensations can be as strong as making someone nauseous other times it can trigger a panic attack I mean this isn't really strong ingrained drive that we have so uprooting that and you know kind of basically saying well let's take how you perceive the world and turn it on its head is really anxiety provoking for some people so go start low go slow and help people explore the sensations so they can de-escalate as their anxiety starts to go up before it gets out of control and will help clients understand why compassion in the present may cause so much distress due to unresolved attachment issues from childhood so these are just a few of the things that the CFT therapist will do obviously we're almost at the end of our time so an hour wasn't nearly enough time to cover CFT in depth there are a lot more readings you can get them either from the center for compassion focused therapy or new harbinger publications and you know I would recommend a lot of these books they're highly recommended, highly rated and Paul Gilbert himself wrote and I don't know if you can see my cursor the Compassionate Mind so that's one obviously if you're really interested in CFT I would probably recommend starting with so and some questions that came in do you find it's helpful or hinders the process when the client is on medications for depression or anxiety you know I really think that if the medications are being used correctly and the person's not just using so many meds that they're just completely numb um the psychotropic meds often help take the edge off so people have the energy and the ability to focus without um having it get out of control um the books for the client CFT Made Simple is a really good any of the Made Simple books by New Harbinger for example are good primer texts for clients to use because they're workbooks um I would definitely suggest looking at Amazon and some other places to see if you can get some ideas I've included in your um in your classroom there's a link to like I think it's an 82 page text that is written and geared toward um client usage so actually I would start there buying any books um and uh see what it has, what activities are in it you can also google um compassion focus therapy activities or worksheets and just like most other theories there's a lot of worksheets that people have made and put online for free um so you can go and see what seems like it would work for your clients or send them to go look at it and see if they can find um or see what they find that appeals to their particular learning style and preferences one of the nice things with compassion focus therapy is it can be incorporated with other techniques it's not something that you just have to be a CFT therapist and that's it there are trainings the center for compassion focus therapy is actually based in New York um and you can become a certified CFT therapist if that is something that um appeals to you so that you can go online and look at what they have to offer um as well as reading the journal articles I will have an in depth 15 hour um multimedia course you know some video some text ready by the beginning of next week on CFT that will give you credit if you will for doing additional readings and doing more in depth study if this is a theory that you think you want to pursue for your practice and with your clients um when working with adolescents um you know adolescents span such a broad range um obviously if you're working with your your younger adolescents they're not going to have the frame of reference necessarily as others but most adolescents know what kind of parent they wish they had um or what kind what it feels like if someone's ever been compassionate to them and you know most people have had someone somewhere in their life be compassionate to them they may have rejected that person because it felt so scary and felt so strange but they'll probably be able to go yeah that person was kind of nice to me um having them play off of that having them really explore what compassion means because a lot of adolescents are going to kind of roll their eyes as soon as you start saying compassion because they're like oh boy let's give ourselves a hug and just move on and that's actually kind of what my daughter said when I was telling her about this presentation today so you know helping them conceptualize it in terms that are um meaningful to them so they can be less self-critical um focusing on their strengths and uh that goes a long way to helping them get into that compassionate state of mind okay if there's no other questions the quiz is available for you in your class and I will see you next week if you enjoy this podcast please like and subscribe either in your podcast player or on youtube you can attend and participate in our live webinars with Dr. Snipes by subscribing at allceuse.com slash counselor toolbox this episode has been brought to you in part by allceuse.com providing 24-7 multimedia continuing education and pre-certification training to counselors, therapists and nurses since 2006 use coupon code counselor toolbox to get a 20% discount off your order this month


To the world over Superman was the first superhero. He made comics what it is today without him There would be no other comic book hero. No Avengers. No Justice League. No fantastic four But what if I told you he wasn't even DC Comics first superhero and what's more? He wasn't even America's first superhero. In fact Superman wasn't even the first Superman If you ask anyone around the world who the first superhero was the majority of the people will tell you it was Superman However, there were actually a number of superheroes who debuted long before the man of steel Spring-heeled Jack would actually be the first although he wasn't a superhero in his debut in the 1878 penny dreadful. In fact, he was a super villain who was eventually made into a superhero in the late 1970s But generally most historians consider Jack the first superhero There was however another actual superhero who actually introduced the world to the superhero fiction comic And that was Hugo Hercules in 1902 Hugo Hercules was a good-natured man endowed with superhuman strength and wonders about town helping people with their problems This comic strip wasn't very popular though and ended just five months after its debut in January of 1903 1903 also saw the introduction of a character often cited as the earliest American superhero in the scarlet Pimpernel as a stage Play and then made it into a novel in 1905 The Scarlet Pimpernel was the first to disguise himself as a meek and ineffectual ordinary person the first superhero with the secret identity 1911 introduced John Carter of Mars, which would be the leading inspiration for Superman 1912 introduced Tarzan the eight man to the public in 1919 the curse of Capistrano introduced Zorro for the very first time Buck Rogers took to the sky in August 1928 in the amazing stories pulp magazine in a story entitled Armageddon 2419 AD in 1930 the shadow debuted as a voice announcer in the radio show detective stories He then debuted in pulp fiction in 1931 in the story the living shadow from the shadow magazine number one January 1930 also saw the introduction of the Lone Ranger with his faithful companion Tonto being introduced a month later Conan the Barbarian hit pulp fiction magazines in December 1932 while Doc Savage was introduced in the Man of Bronze in March 1933 and would actually hold the title of the Superman or the Man of Steel Long before Superman himself the first incarnation of Superman appeared in the short story pulp the reign of the Superman in January of 1933 as a bold telepathic supervillain other superheroes were also introduced in one medium or another during the 1930s as well These include Mandrake the magician on June 11th 1934 created by Lee Falk the phantom magician on April 15th 1935 by Mel Graff the phantom on February 17th 1936 by Lee Falk all three of which were newspaper comic strip heroes in comic book form the superhero as we know them today was introduced in October of 1935 in new fun comics number six under the name Dr Occult the ghost detective Dr. Occult is a member of the JSA even to this day She needed the jungle queen who most historians agree to be the first female comic book superhero made her debut in the comic book Wags number one in 1937 both Superman and Zedara made their first appearances in action comics number one in June 1938 Zedara's story in this issue was entitled Zedara master magician and it took up pages 20 through 31 by Fred Gardner with Superman story being on pages 1 through 13 by Siegel and Schuster So for those keeping track Superman was not the world's first superhero In fact, there were many superheroes before Superman and yes I know before you make the argument that most of them were comic strip pulp magazine or novel superheroes I'll be going into the difference between the many different styles of superheroes in a different video However, that does not change the fact the Superman was by far not the world's first superhero I'm Shannon for comic again TV if you enjoyed this video make sure you hit the subscribe button So you don't miss out on future videos Go ahead and leave us like comment down below and share with your family and friends. Take care