Podcast appearances and mentions of Elizabeth Gilbert

Loving greetings and welcome to August, a month that in many spiritual and cultural traditions holds a distinct mystique because it bridges the peak of summer and the first whispers of autumn. August is a powerful season of change, rich with blessings and abundance. Using the inspiration found in Elizabeth Gilbert's book, Big Magic, I […]

Elizabeth Gilbert schreibt in ihrem Buch "Big Magic" über Perfektionismus und was er eigentlich verschleiert und vor allem auch, was er verhindert. Darüber erzähle ich in dieser Episode. Wir werden ihr Buch im September im Buchclub lesen. Bist du dabei?

Loving greetings and welcome to August, a month that in many spiritual and cultural traditions holds a distinct mystique because it bridges the peak of summer and the first whispers of autumn. August is a powerful season of change, rich with blessings and abundance. Using the inspiration found in Elizabeth Gilbert's book, Big Magic, I […]

Being a beginner as an adult is its own kind of awkward, and most of us just call it nerves. Irish traditional musician and award-winning podcast host Tara Connaghan says that is not it at all. The real problem is that nobody handed you the rules of the room. She takes Lesley through the four stages of learning, why the frustrating middle is where most people quit, and the rock bottom that gave her clarity. If you have any questions about this episode or want to get some of the resources we mentioned, head over to LesleyLogan.co/podcast https://lesleylogan.co/podcast/. If you have any comments or questions about the Be It pod shoot us a message at beit@lesleylogan.co mailto:beit@lesleylogan.co. And as always, if you're enjoying the show please share it with someone who you think would enjoy it as well. It is your continued support that will help us continue to help others. Thank you so much! Never miss another show by subscribing at LesleyLogan.co/subscribe https://lesleylogan.co/podcast/#follow-subscribe-free.In this episode you will learn about:Why five to ten minutes of practice a day beats one long session.The trouble with joining sessions built for high level musicians.What makes correcting an adult learner harder than correcting a child.Why boundaries make newcomers feel safe and know if they fit.How to pick a group that matches your current skill level.Episode References/Links:Session Etiquette Website – https://www.sessionetiquette.comSession Etiquette Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61576848312798In Tune with Tradition Podcast - https://beitpod.com/taraconnaghanpodTara Connaghan Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/tarafiddleTara Connaghan Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/tara.connaghanTara Connaghan LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/taraconnaghanTara Connaghan YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5tQCcQU81_mewa2uMRbq7AEp 153 ft Tanya Dalton - https://beitpod.com/ep153Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert - https://a.co/d/010vNZRZEat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert - https://a.co/d/00rGaxuPSubmit your wins or questions - https://beitpod.com/questions If you enjoyed this episode, make sure and give us a five star rating and leave us a review on iTunes, Podcast Addict, Podchaser or Castbox. https://lovethepodcast.com/BITYSIDEALS! DEALS! DEALS! DEALS! https://onlinepilatesclasses.com/memberships/perks/#equipmentCheck out all our Preferred Vendors & Special Deals from Clair Sparrow, Sensate, Lyfefuel BeeKeeper's Naturals, Sauna Space, HigherDose, AG1 and ToeSox https://onlinepilatesclasses.com/memberships/perks/#equipmentBe in the know with all the workshops at OPC https://workshops.onlinepilatesclasses.com/lp-workshop-waitlistBe It Till You See It Podcast Survey https://pod.lesleylogan.co/be-it-podcasts-surveyBe a part of Lesley's Pilates Mentorship https://lesleylogan.co/elevate/FREE Ditching Busy Webinar https://ditchingbusy.com/Resources:Watch the Be It Till You See It podcast on YouTube! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCq08HES7xLMvVa3Fy5DR8-gLesley Logan website https://lesleylogan.co/Be It Till You See It Podcast https://lesleylogan.co/podcast/Online Pilates Classes by Lesley Logan https://onlinepilatesclasses.com/Online Pilates Classes by Lesley Logan on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjogqXLnfyhS5VlU4rdzlnQProfitable Pilates https://profitablepilates.com/about/Follow Us on Social Media:Instagram https://www.instagram.com/lesley.logan/The Be It Till You See It Podcast YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCq08HES7xLMvVa3Fy5DR8-gFacebook https://www.facebook.com/llogan.pilatesLinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/lesley-logan/The OPC YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/@OnlinePilatesClasses Episode Transcript:Tara Connaghan 0:00  It's too intimate to be putting pressure on it because I did lose it. So I put my hands on my heart because I feel like it's here. The music, when I play it, it's here. I suppose maybe because it is a fiddle as well, or a violin, but it's something so close, and I have lost it. I did lose it for a while, and if I lost it again, I don't know if I could survive that second loss. Lesley Logan 0:22  Welcome to the Be It Till You See It podcast, where we talk about taking messy action, knowing that perfect is boring. I'm Lesley Logan, Pilates instructor and fitness business coach. I've trained thousands of people around the world, and the number one thing I see stopping people from achieving anything is self-doubt. My friends, action brings clarity, and it's the antidote to fear. Each week, my guests will bring bold, executable, intrinsic, and targeted steps that you can use to put yourself first and be it till you see it. It's a practice, not a perfect. Let's get started. Lesley Logan 1:03  Okay, Be It babe. Here's the deal: we have a unique topic on the podcast, but actually, we go extremely applicable to your life, if anything. We're going to talk about learning. We're going to talk about rock bottoms. We're going to talk about etiquette with the types of people that you're wanting to be around, and I think it's just quite fun. Tara's my new Irish friend that I didn't know I needed. Her name's Tara Connaghan, and she actually is an award-winning podcast host, and she teaches people how to play Irish music and also be in Irish sessions and the etiquette for that. And you're, what? But all of it is, I think, really the conversation is so helpful because if you want to be it till you see it, and I want to be in a pickleball league, or I want to be teaching X thing, or I want to learn this new skill, some of the things we have to understand is the process of learning, and then the etiquette of how do we join these groups? What are those things? So it's really quite fun. I can't wait for you to hear her, and then you'll have to check out her award-winning podcast because that's so great. Here is Tara Connaghan. Lesley Logan 1:59  All right, Be It babes. This is going to be fun. This is going to be totally interesting. It's a topic I've definitely never had a guest on before, and that means we get to learn something new, but also learn things that we can use along our way to something unique. So, Tara Connaghan is our guest today. Tara, can you tell everyone who you are and what you rock at? Tara Connaghan 2:18  Hi, Lesley. I am an Irish traditional musician. I love playing Irish music. I love playing music in Irish music sessions, particularly. I'm from the northwest of Ireland, which is Donegal, which is kind of, it's not part of Northern Ireland, but it's more northerly than Northern Ireland. But it's geographically Northern Ireland, but not politically, if that makes sense. So we're in the Republic of Ireland. Very confusing. And I've lived all over Ireland. I've lived around the world a couple of bits, but mostly I'm always kind of living around Ireland. But I'm back in Donegal now for the last maybe 12 years, and I just love sessions. But I teach adults a lot, and they're always worried about joining into sessions because they're maybe newcomers to the sessions. So I always thought it was performance anxiety that was the problem, but actually, what's feeding the performance anxiety is that they don't know the etiquette to joining sessions. And so that was why I decided to start a podcast almost a year ago about etiquette, teaching people the etiquette of joining sessions, and I'm learning so much. Oh my God, it's amazing. Lesley Logan 3:21  Okay, there's so many things I want to talk about because, first of all, what are sessions, and then to know what the etiquette is, but also it just goes into a lot of us do label something performance anxiety or just blanket anxiety when really it's we don't know how to be a beginner, we don't know how to enter something new. We don't know how to... It's hard to join a group because when you're an adult, all the groups are already kind of filled, and you're, I've got to join in on something, and they already know everything, and I don't know, and we don't know how to be beginners. Is that kind of what's happening? Tara Connaghan 3:50  Totally, totally, yeah. Lesley Logan 3:52  Okay, so just so we have the definitions, what are sessions, and what is the etiquette? Tara Connaghan 3:56  A session can be lots of... There's lots of different types of sessions and different functions for sessions, but the main session is that it's a group of musicians who get together to play Irish music. Lesley Logan 4:09  Okay. Tara Connaghan 4:09  That's kind of the simplest term or the simplest way of explaining it. It's people who kind of know what Irish music is, and they want to play it with each other, and they want to kind of share their music together, and it's like a team. It's a team. Lesley Logan 4:22  Okay, like you're making a band, but you're not a band, like a group. Tara Connaghan 4:25  Yes, yeah. But there's no... Usually there's... Well, I say usually. A session is usually something without microphones, although sometimes it has microphones because it's maybe for tourists or maybe it's a noisy pub or something. So usually the ones that are in the corner with no microphones, they're just playing to each other. Lesley Logan 4:44  It's like jazz when they get together and they just play together. Okay, so there can be sessions of any kind, but sessions for this would be the Irish musicians getting together. And then is the etiquette different for the Irish music versus, I guess, any musician, or what does that look like? Tara Connaghan 5:00  I don't think it's particularly different. There may be slight differences. I think maybe one of the things is that you could be playing in a session with some of your heroes. They're quite accessible. Irish traditional musicians almost would be classed as... they're professionals but amateurs. Lesley Logan 5:17  Okay, okay. Tara Connaghan 5:18  Because they're not all making a living from it. Okay, so you could have some of the highest-quality Irish musicians playing in a session. You might have just come across, or maybe you've never heard Irish music before, and you walk in and you could be listening to some of the most amazing musicians. Lesley Logan 5:35  That's so cool. I love this. I love this. So this is... I am grateful for the definitions because you're an expert in this area, but this is the thing for a lot of things, right? You could be in a chess group or a mahjong or pickleball. I'm a Pilates instructor who travels to teach Pilates instructors, and I find that if I want to just be in the group, sometimes the nervousness from the other people who maybe watch my videos or things like that, they get nervous and they have this performance anxiety, and it's like we're just here to kind of hang out. So, I guess if we could take it in a broad sense, how did you get here? Because we don't wake up going, "I'm gonna teach this." You know what I mean? It's not like what you tell someone in kindergarten. "When I grow up, I'm gonna teach Irish music." So, can you go back to your journey? Tara Connaghan 6:23  I mentioned that I teach the adults mostly. I have a fortnightly fiddle class that I do, and I also teach at different summer schools or camps or things that we would teach music at throughout the year. And for the last... I've been playing music for nearly 40 years. Oh my god, I am playing music for 40 years. Oh god, that just dawned on me. Oh my god. Lesley Logan 6:45  That's amazing, though, but it's annoying because, wow, so much clout, and also, oh, I'm older than I thought. Tara Connaghan 6:53  Yes, yeah, yeah. So I've been teaching a long time. I do prefer to teach adults. I just have a natural sort of bond because an adult wants to be there. They're putting all their time and their energy, and they really want to be there. Whereas kids, the parents want them to be there. So I just want to be with people who want to do something, and then I can help them. If they don't want to be there, then I can't help them. So in every workshop, even though it's more about repertoire, when you're in the workshop we're like, we learn this tune and we learn this tune and we learn... So we might learn maybe three tunes a day or maybe one tune, depending on the levels of people. And always within one of those workshops or classes or camps, there will always be questions. Once one person asks, "Do I have enough tunes to start, to play in a session? Or can I sit there? Am I allowed to do this? Am I allowed to do that? Do you have to have this?" There's so many questions, and because there's so many unknowns, and they don't know the answers, they are terrified. And then when you're anxious and terrified, you probably do actions that you wouldn't normally do. Lesley Logan 8:02  You make mistakes because the nerves are taking away the ability to be present. Tara Connaghan 8:08  Yes, yeah, yeah. And then they start... Then things happen, and they're like, "Oh, and such-and-such gave out to me for doing something." And I think we've all been given out to. It's a natural sort of... If we go back to the animal kingdom, there's kind of a natural, "Look, you don't do that. You don't do that. Don't do this," and you're kind of almost like a cat would do to its kitten. Lesley Logan 8:31  Yeah. Tara Connaghan 8:33  It's not that you're trying to say you shouldn't be... There's no kind of "you shouldn't" or whatever. But it's just kind of a, "No, no, no. Wait this," or "Wait for your turn," or "Wait to this." So it's kind of the natural... You're teaching the natural language of your culture, whatever. But that's normally given to children. Lesley Logan 8:51  Right. Tara Connaghan 8:52  It's very hard to give that to an adult who is your peer in terms of age, but not your peer in terms of skill, and that's a really difficult thing to do. So Irish people are very, very bad at giving feedback. They don't want to offend anybody, so we just say nothing, and then things can blister away and fester. Lesley Logan 9:11  I wonder if anyone is good at giving feedback very often because we're not trained at that. You don't go to college and learn, "Okay, in your life, if you have to give feedback to someone, this is the way you give it." That's not anything anyone's trained in. So if your culture is more, "We're just not going to say anything at all," it's just going to fester and blister, and we'll just put you over there in the corner. Other people will just tell you what it is and honestly cramp someone's spirit. You could just step on a flower. So I think we all have to learn how to be better at feedback, but it's different when students are learning because when you're younger, yes, there are still personality types that are putting pressure on themselves to be perfect. No matter your age, there are different levels to learning. Correct? Because whether or not you are learning Irish music or anything, every learning has a level. Tara Connaghan 10:02  I mean, there's the four stages of learning. So there's when you're totally unconsciously aware. You're completely unaware. So when you were maybe two, your mother tied your shoelaces. You didn't tie your shoes. You didn't even know that shoelaces existed. They're just not in your conscious realm at all. And then maybe as you get... maybe four or five, you're like, "Oh, hold on a second. My mother's tying my shoes. I want to try that." You start getting, "I want to try it." Then there's that stage where you're conscious of it, but you realize how bad you are at it. So your competency level is pretty poor. You're incompetent, but you're consciously incompetent, so you know you're shit at it. Lesley Logan 10:45  That's so hard because it's so frustrating. Tara Connaghan 10:48  So frustrating. You're like, "I can't..." Sorry, I don't know if I can curse. Lesley Logan 10:52  You can curse on this show. Totally. Tara Connaghan 10:56  So you're so frustrated, as you say, and so many people give up at that stage because they're like, "I can't do this. No, I'm out." That sounds like me with surfing or certain things. I'm just like, "No, I can't do this. I'm out." Lesley Logan 11:10  I understand that. With ADHD, I can be okay being bad at something, but I have to get good at it quickly. Otherwise, I'm out. My attention span's not there. But it is interesting. We see that in people in all learning things, right? I teach people how to teach Pilates, and you can see even if they're already teaching Pilates, when they discover that there is stuff that they didn't know they didn't know, then there's a frustration that no one told them, "I didn't know this." But you can't be told, no one is expert at everything when they're new. You just start new. Okay, so then we're pissed off, we're frustrated, and if we don't quit, what happens next? Tara Connaghan 11:52  So if we don't quit and we keep going, then we start getting to a place where we're more competent. We've got a bit more competency. There's a big range within that. You're starting to get competent, and then you grow up to being much more competent, and you're consciously aware that you're competent. So it's maybe when you're six or seven and you're still tying the shoelaces. You can tie them, but it takes a bit of... You're still focusing on it. That takes a huge amount of energy, so it's a very exhausting stage where you're focusing on, "I have to tie the shoe. I have to do this loop and that loop." And your fingers are just faltering at it. The same with playing an instrument. You're kind of like, "I have to watch my left finger..." Lesley Logan 12:42  "...this thing, and then breathe, and then this one." You're still talking yourself through it. Yes.  Tara Connaghan 12:46  Or even driving. "I have to put my foot here, and I have to look at the clutch. I have to put on my seatbelt before all of that, and I have to look in the mirror." I have to do this. There's so many things. Your brain is still running through the process of how to do it. Then you get to the last stage, which is you're competent, but you're unconsciously competent. So it's totally, did you remember tying your shoelaces this morning? No. You just did it. It becomes ingrained so that you don't even know that you're doing it anymore, but you can do it. The same with playing the fiddle. I'm thinking of something else because it's unconscious. It's already in the muscle memory of my fingers. It's in the muscle memory of my brain, my elbows, my whole body. My body does it, and then I can focus on, not something else, but something like, the next level, which is, "How do I do it better? How do I do the intricacies?" You're listening and going, "Oh, such-and-such did that. I might do that." You're listening for something else. Lesley Logan 13:54  Yeah, you can take more in. My husband's a musician. That's not me, but I can attribute it to things in my world. I retook a workshop I've taken from this person before, and I thought I was just going to sit there and get reminded of a few quotes I liked from them. Then they said something, and I was like, "What? What is that?" And it was just like, "Oh, I didn't know the thing before that. It wasn't ingrained in me, so I couldn't even pick up on this if I wanted to." It was always there, but I didn't have the capacity to hear it or see it or understand it because I just had to get the muscle memory there so that nuance could even stand out. Tara Connaghan 14:35  And that takes years. We're in such a culture that everything is convenient. It's quick. Everything's fast. But I don't think there's anything that can replace just time of learning and putting the time in. Lesley Logan 14:52  Tara, how do you help people do that, though? Because obviously what you do is so unique. But however you help them, we all have to understand that it does take time, and it's hard for adults because there's so much unconscious competence happening because we're in our life. We can drive home without even realizing it. There's just things that we do. It scares the fuck out of me every time. I'm like, "How did I get here? Whoa." How do you remind adults to be patient to go through the different stages? Tara Connaghan 15:18  It's not easy. None of us like it for anything. I got a sewing machine. I am crap at sewing, because I never did it in school. I did woodwork instead. It just takes it. I just have to remind people it may only be five minutes per day, and then supplement it with a couple of maybe intense weekends or an intense week where you really focus on it, almost like 12-hour days. That really supplements it. But you need the five minutes per day, five to 10 minutes per day. I think, really helps people. Lesley Logan 15:53  Okay, let's dive into that because I think people think, "Oh, I'll just do this on my day off." But if you just do several hours on one day, it's almost... Do you think it's better if they were to do five to 10 minutes per day for six to seven days is better than one day for two hours? Tara Connaghan 16:10  Absolutely, 1,000%. Lesley Logan 16:12  And why? Do we know why? Tara Connaghan 16:15  There are actually studies that show that because you're building up the muscle memory. You don't build it up in one go. You build it up every day. You don't wash your teeth just once a week. Lesley Logan 16:27  Right. Right. Tara Connaghan 16:28  You wash them every day because ifLesley Logan 16:30  You washed your teeth for two hours once a week, it wouldn't even make up for it. Even though it's like three times the amount you should brush your teeth, it doesn't even make the difference. Tara Connaghan 16:38  No, it's not going to make the difference because the plaque is already there. It would be too hard to remove it. That's just what it is. And five to 10 minutes, that's nothing. Lesley Logan 16:47  Right. I think that's the hard part because people go, "That's nothing. So does it even matter?" Tara Connaghan 16:53  Yeah. So, tomorrow... I'm learning the concertina as well. I do play the fiddle. I've played the fiddle for almost 40 years, but I have a concertina, which is this little kind of hexagon-shaped instrument. I normally have it at my desk, but I'm not at my desk. I'm actually in New York. Lesley Logan 17:10  Cool. What's a concertina? I gotta look this up. I need a visual. Lesley Logan 17:14  Concertina. Lesley Logan 17:16  Concertina.  Tara Connaghan 17:17  Yeah, so, hexagon-shaped. Lesley Logan 17:21  This is... Oh, that's cool. For everyone who's not Googling this while they're driving, please don't. First of all, they're not cheap. It's like an accordion, but a hexagon has six or seven sides. Tara Connaghan 17:40  Your fingers are working from both sides. Lesley Logan 17:43  Yes. Tara Connaghan 17:44  Yes. So it's very petite and dainty. It's a real kind of woman's... Lesley Logan 17:50  It's so beautiful. An accordion is not sexy. Nothing's sexy about an accordion. This is quite cute. This looks like the Victorian era. Tara Connaghan 17:56  Yes. It's very ornate, and designs in it. So I'm learning that now. I had it right beside my computer because you're, especially if you're doing something, and then you need kind of like coffee beans to refresh your brain. So I used to have that, and I'd play for five or 10 minutes. I didn't have access to my concertina for about 15 years because I had lent it to somebody else, and they forgot to give it back to me. Eventually I got it back recently, and I started playing for about five minutes whenever I got bored, well, not bored, but my brain is overworked and overwhelmed and I needed to deep-dive into it for five minutes. The first day I was like, "Oh my god, I can't even remember where the notes are." I was like one-finger typing. Lesley Logan 18:45  I understand. Yeah. Tara Connaghan 18:47  Until, after a couple of weeks, he came down to the office and said, "That actually sounded quite good." Lesley Logan 18:55  Because it came back to you because you just had it. I love what you said, that you had it right next to you. For anything we're wanting to do, my listeners know I was studying the tarot, and unfortunately it got away from me because I had the app, which is great because when I was traveling I couldn't have the cards, but I'm a physical kind of person. So when I was at home, having the cards and the book at my desk, while I'm waiting for the Zoom call to start, I could just read a page. Having those little doses of information actually allows you to take it in. Whereas it's a lot, especially when you're in the incompetence, it's a lot in the brain to do it and you don't retain as much. I'm studying the science of learning right now, I'm really interested in this, and there's a whole lot we have to do self-reflection and self-quizzing. That's actually the best when you're learning anything. You're not waiting for the test to come where you cram, or in music, I guess, the concert to come where you perform. You have to kind of test your skills on your own and then learn from what you don't know. Tara Connaghan 0:00  Yeah, and I think for joining a session as well, you have to learn to play with other people, and that can be a big learning curve as well, because it might be that you've just started an instrument, so this is totally new. You've got a new instrument. Oh my god. I'm still trying to figure out where the notes are. I'm still trying to figure all this out. You're still kind of incompetent. And you need to learn also how to play with other people if you want to join a session. Lesley Logan 20:26  Yeah. Tara Connaghan 20:27  I think those kinds of camps are a great place to do that. They can be big sessions, so you can kind of hide behind people for a while until you get a bit more competency in playing with others because it's a really different skill, being able to listen to yourself while listening to others.Lesley Logan 20:45  How do you, how do you get the... Because that's a bit of courage and bravery, to go from playing by yourself in your home to, okay, I'm going to take this. What advice do you have for people who... There's embarrassment, there's nervousness. How do you get over yourself enough to go? Because I'm someone who'd be a fly on the wall until I'm shoved off the cliff. That's kind of me. But how do you get yourself ready?Tara Connaghan 21:06  I think it's a good idea, if you're learning from a class situation where you've got classmates, then maybe your teacher might have a once-a-year or once-a-month or once-a-week session where they encourage you to come, if you want to join a session. It's a very gentle process where you're coming into it in a very gentle way. What I would definitely not recommend you do is go into a session where there are high-level musicians who need something totally different. So if you're a beginner musician, you want to be feeling kind of a belonging. You want to sense this sense of community. A high-level musician who's been playing for 40 years, they already have that. What they want is challenge, and you're not going to challenge them if you're a newcomer. So don't be afraid, or don't be... not afraid, but don't be putting yourself in that position. Don't take it personally, I think is what I'm trying to say.Lesley Logan 22:01  Well, this makes a lot of sense to me because in life, if you have a skill or there's something you're doing, it's really good to have people who are your equals, so your classmates, like you mentioned. And then there's the people who are below you, in a different level. Playing with people below you builds your confidence because, whoa, I'm not like that anymore, right?Tara Connaghan 22:19  Yes.Lesley Logan 22:20  Playing with people who are at the same level as you makes you feel comfortable and, okay, I've got my people. But typically, if you're going to play with people who are above you, you'd be paying to play with them. You're in their workshop or you're in their thing because they need people above them to challenge them and people like them who understand what they need. And if they're going to have people below them, it's because they're teaching them.Tara Connaghan 22:43  Exactly. And I think it's funny that you should pick that up so quickly because that seems to be something that we've... I suppose we're so close to it, you can't see the wood from the trees when you're so in the middle of it. And so it's only recently that I figured, from conversations actually, that's more of a teaching environment when we're in a session with people that are below us. And that's a very different thing. That's quite draining because you're giving a lot of energy, and you're not.Lesley Logan 23:10  Getting yourself filled up. There have to be sessions for the person who's more of the expert to be filled up. I get that totally. I teach a lot of students, and I have no problems doing that. But when I am in the workshop to learn, if people bother me to understand, I'm like, "Oh, I'm not in that brain. I'm here." So I find I'm very particular about the places I go to learn in or be challenged in because I want to stay in that frame. And if you are wanting me to teach you in that space, I'm a little bit... Okay, I've got to get my cup filled.Tara Connaghan 23:45  I suppose I would love to be able to say that certain things in certain situations... I think we are quite welcoming.Lesley Logan 23:54  Yeah, and that's the hard part because I don't want to stamp on anyone's flowers or anyone's willingness to learn. And I also think they don't understand what they don't... You know what I mean? They don't know that they're just asking a question. And you are an expert, and you are someone who usually teaches. But there has to be a space where you can go be yourself and be challenged.Tara Connaghan 24:13  Yeah, yeah. I think so. I have found that some people like to shame skilled musicians for having that, and I'm trying to call that out and go, "No, I'm not happy that that is something that should be definitely there."Lesley Logan 24:26  I think that's interesting, right? What an awareness we can have because it's fine to have the need to have the space to be in your creative space or to not be in teaching mode, to be in play mode or creativity mode. And also, how do we remind people of the rules of the space without hurting their feelings or pissing them off or making them feel like they're stupid? I don't know if you have those in Ireland, but people have these signs in their house, like, "In this house, we believe in science," and things like that. There, we believe in these... When you walk into the space, if these-level musicians are playing, you're free to watch, but please write down all questions and save them for your... You know what I mean? It's okay to be in their presence, of course, and be inspired. But this is when you're allowed to ask the questions. I guess it goes back to the etiquette. It's like having rules for... If you're a house that has no shoes on or shoes off, it's kind of like that.Tara Connaghan 25:25  Yeah. I suppose it's always being one of those environments that is very spontaneous. So I think when you have a spontaneous environment, the thought of rules makes it really kind of...Lesley Logan 25:38  I understand. Yeah. Well, Tanya Dalton, we had her on the show, and she talked about when there are boundaries, everyone can be more creative and have more fun.Tara Connaghan 25:50  Yes.Lesley Logan 25:51  She explained it, and you guys, I'll put the link in the show notes because I actually don't remember which episode number she is. But she said if there's a school playground and there's no fence, and the teachers tell the kids, "Hey, stay close to the school building to play," you're going to have some kids who literally don't leave the wall. They just play next to the wall. You're going to have some kids who play in the middle, and then you're going to have some kids who are going all the way to the edge because they want to see how far they can go. But if you put the fence up and you say you just have to stay in the fence, then all of a sudden everyone can play. So I guess it's interesting because some people don't want to have rules on things to affect the creativity, but they'll have more creativity if they just have some set rules.Tara Connaghan 26:35  Yeah, and I think everybody feels safer as well then if there are some sort of boundaries. Especially newcomers can feel safe because they know, "Right, well, this is maybe not the session for me," or "This one is the session for me."Lesley Logan 26:47  Yeah, because I'm the girl who'd be next to the wall because I don't understand. I don't want to fuck it up, and I don't want to embarrass myself, and I don't want to make someone mad. So I would be the person who doesn't even join any session, even the ones at my level, because I wouldn't... So I think that's where it's important. No matter what the thing is that we're joining or learning, we have to understand the etiquette, but also the people above us have to define that so that we can.Tara Connaghan 27:11  Yeah, yeah, I guess. Lesley Logan 27:12  Or at least the host of the place. Tara Connaghan 27:15  Yeah, yeah, yeah.Lesley Logan 27:17  So Tara, your enthusiasm and joy for what you do is so contagious. I really do love it. How did you get to keep your passion for this? Because I have to imagine that in the 40 years of playing music, Irish music hasn't been famous for all 40 years. How did you keep it going? What did you do? Then you're in this new space where you have this podcast. I guess people listening to this have been doing things for 20 or 30 years, and sometimes they wonder if they should keep doing that. Is it worth doing? How do they know when to stop? What advice do you have for that?Tara Connaghan 27:55  I did have a time in my early 30s, which is almost 20 years ago. god, sorry.Lesley Logan 28:03  It's all right. I just looked at pictures of myself at 25, and I was like, "Whoa, that was a long time ago."Tara Connaghan 28:09  When I arrived in New York a couple of days ago, I had a suitcase, and I was trying to walk up the stairs, carry it up the stairs. And this young fella, I think he was probably about 25 or something, said, "Do you want me to help?" And I was like, "No, no, I've got a friend coming. She's going to help me as well." And he said, "Oh, if this was my mother, I would hope somebody would help me." And I was like, "Oh my god!"Lesley Logan 28:27  He was being so sweet, and also...Tara Connaghan 28:32  The realization. But of course I could be his mother. But I don't even have kids.Lesley Logan 28:36  Tara, I understand. I have friends my age who have kids who are in high school, so I was like, "I could have a high schooler." Tara Connaghan 28:44  Yeah, I could totally have somebody who's gone through college, finished college. Anyway, let's not go there. So in my 30s, I did have a bit of a, wow, I thought I would be somewhere different. I thought things would feel different. There was that kind of realization: Is this it? There was always this kind of, I thought it was going to be different, and I thought it was going to be amazing. I went through maybe not a spiral downwards, but I was just lost for a while. And then, it was kind of a spiral to a couple of things. I had somebody who was really, really close to me pass away, and that person held my future dreams. So that totally took the carpet from underneath me. I was like, "Well, what do I do now?" It was totally the end now. And I think when you get to rock bottom, you go, "What are the things that are actually really important?" That's what I had to do. I just had to go food, water... I mean, we're talking basic. I think I had probably experienced a bit of PTSD at the time, post-traumatic stress disorder, because I couldn't plan ahead. All I could think of was the next hour and what are the basic needs that I need. So food, water, shelter, friendship. And I thought, "You know what? Music is what fills my cup." And so I had to figure out what was the thing that fills my cup? I have loads of interests. What was the one thing that I really wanted? And I think when you get to rock bottom, things become so clear. I'm not advocating for getting to rock bottom, but if you want clarity, you will find it down there.Lesley Logan 30:37  I think years ago I heard someone say you can't take someone's rock bottom away. You can give advice, but also, sometimes we don't learn what we need to until we are there. Some of us just need to clear everything away. I have to say, I am so grateful for the rock bottom I had because it was, "Okay, I've got nothing. So if I'm going to add to this nothing, it better be something I want." I don't want to add. It was the first time I had a clean slate. I don't want to add stuff I don't want. So I agree with you.Tara Connaghan 31:11  Declutter.Lesley Logan 31:12  Yeah.Tara Connaghan 31:13  It really declutters the mind, and it really focuses on just the important things. Music was the thing that, it's almost like the light at the end of the tunnel, but it was just something that I had that was present, that was just filling my cup, as you said. So I kept doing that. Not that I was doing it all the time, but when I needed that sort of, because I went home to my parents' house, and I slept for about six months. I didn't go outside the door. I remember having relations saying, "Oh, you can't do that." And I was like, "Please don't ever tell anybody that they can't take the time that they need to recover because I needed that time." It took a good few years, but I needed the six months of complete and utter sleep. Then it took another couple of years before I was able to get back to being a normal person again. I'd say I'm a huge amount stronger because of it, and just more clear. So.Lesley Logan 32:12  Yeah.Tara Connaghan 32:12  Music is just... yeah. And I think every time I'm in a session, the other thing is if I'm playing for money, it's a job.Lesley Logan 32:20  Yeah.Tara Connaghan 32:22  So I kind of removed that. Even though I still get paid, I removed the, "Oh, this one is a gig." It's, "I'm going to go and I'm going to play music. Fantastic. If somebody gives me money at the end, great." Sometimes I want to make sure that it's good money at the end, but I looked at it differently. It wasn't for the money. It was for the music, and then somebody gives me money as well, and that's great.Lesley Logan 32:46  I appreciate you sharing that journey because I think we all look at other people and go, "Oh my goodness, they must have loved this their whole life," and not realize that there are parts of their lives where they loved it, but they didn't get up for six months. Everyone is on an up-and-down journey that hopefully always ends up, but it's going to have its own nuances. And if we don't take the time we need to find what fills our cup, then I don't know that we get to enjoy it. I feel like life is worth enjoying. Yes, sometimes we get paid for things we love, but also we should do things because we love them.Tara Connaghan 33:26  Yeah, totally. So I think that was how I got out of that sort of, "I'm doing it for the money." I don't know if you've ever read Big Magic.Lesley Logan 33:37  Obsessed. Great book.Tara Connaghan 33:39  Fantastic.Lesley Logan 33:39  I'm not sure I agree with her in the more recent years of life, but I love that book. So, everyone must, required reading. So good. Required reading.Tara Connaghan 33:51  Yeah. It just gives so much freedom to your creativity as well. It's like, "Oh yeah, that's so cool." It's like it's a muse. You're the host of a creative idea, and you entertain it, or eventually it'll just go, "Look, I'm an idea, and I need to be created. So if you're not going to create me, somebody else will have to do it." Such a great idea.Lesley Logan 34:14  You guys, if you're wondering what is she saying, you have to go read the book. It's, ideas want to be born, it's Elizabeth Guilbert, I believe that's her name. She wrote Eat, Pray, Love, and she even shares that she still worked as a professor even after she wrote that book, even after it was a bestseller, even after it became a movie. It was years before she thought, "Okay, I can just be a writer for a living." I think that's a really important lesson for all of us who are doing something we're passionate about because the pressure you put on it changes the joy you get out of it, and also what you create.Tara Connaghan 34:50  Yeah. It's too intimate to be putting pressure on it because I did lose it. So I put my hands on my heart because I feel like it's here. The music, when I play it, it's here. I suppose maybe because it is a fiddle as well, or a violin, but it's here anyway. It's something so close, and I have lost it. I did lose it for a while, and if I lost it again, I don't know if I could survive that second loss.Lesley Logan 35:17  Yeah. Thanks for sharing that. I think that's really important. Tara, you're so fun. We're going to take a brief break and find out where people can find you, follow you, take sessions with you.Tara Connaghan 35:26  Yeah.Lesley Logan 35:28  All right, Tara. Where do you hang out? They can listen to your podcast. Can anyone play Irish music? Tell us everything.Tara Connaghan 35:36  They can listen to it on Spotify, Amazon, Apple, wherever. It's called In Tune with Tradition. There's also the subtitle, Perspectives on Session Etiquette and Irish Traditional Music. There is a website called Session Etiquette. I also have a tour kind of thing coming up, a private session experience in September 2026, at the end of September. We've got a couple of places left on it. It will be in Ireland. Brilliant. I can't wait.Lesley Logan 36:07  I feel like September in Ireland is probably good weather. Tara Connaghan 36:10  Sometimes. Actually, do you know when it's been really good weather? It's April. April for the last three or four years has been really good, really dry, sunny. Then the rest of summer's awful, and around September sometimes it can pick up again.Lesley Logan 36:23  Feels like Vegas weather, but probably different. April is so beautiful here. Don't take me away, but the summer? Get me out.Tara Connaghan 36:32  I'm in New York, and it was really, really hot for the last couple of days. Today is nice. It's just perfect.Lesley Logan 36:38  Yeah. That's an interesting place to be when it's too hot. Okay, we've talked a lot about learning and things like that. You've given us so much already, but what bold, executable, intrinsic, or targeted steps do you have for people to be it till they see it?Tara Connaghan 36:52  I think they should listen to my podcast, number one. The reason I'm in New York is because it's an award-winning podcast. It has just won some awards.Lesley Logan 37:01  Get out. Congratulations. That's amazing!Tara Connaghan 37:06  Yay! So, anyway, but more actionable steps: I think life is short. Just pick the thing that fills your cup and go for it.Lesley Logan 37:15  Yeah.Tara Connaghan 37:16  If that's Irish music, fantastic. If it's not, do the thing that makes you really, really just gives you so much joy and fills your cup because otherwise you'll always be trying to fill your cup with something that can't fill, can't do it.Lesley Logan 37:31  I agree. I think that's so true. Oh my gosh, congratulations on your podcast. That's incredible, you guys. That's not an easy thing to do, especially with a new podcast, so way to go, Tara. I agree. I was just watching a show, and it's clear there are people on the show who don't have anything else. They don't have something that fills their cup. My husband's listening to somebody, and they're... If you don't have something that's a hobby, something that's creative, friends and family, and work that gives you purpose, if you don't have those three things, f you take one of those away, you put too much pressure on the other things, and they're never going to give you the tripod. You're going to fall over. So I feel like that's really important for today. I think we all need that information. Lesley Logan 38:15  You guys, go listen to Tara's award-winning podcast. Go listen to it, and go figure out if it's... If you don't know what's filling your cup, maybe it's time to start trying new things and be consciously incompetent for a little bit. It'll get better. Share this with a friend who needs to hear it. And until next time, Be It Till You See It. Lesley Logan 38:33  That's all I got for this episode of the Be It Till You See It Podcast. One thing that would help both myself and future listeners is for you to rate the show and leave a review and follow or subscribe for free wherever you listen to your podcast. Also, make sure to introduce yourself over at the Be It Pod on Instagram. I would love to know more about you. Share this episode with whoever you think needs to hear it. Help us and others Be It Till You See It. Have an awesome day. Be It Till You See It is a production of The Bloom Podcast Network. If you want to leave us a message or a question that we might read on another episode, you can text us at +1-310-905-5534 or send a DM on Instagram @BeItPod.Brad Crowell 39:16  It's written, filmed, and recorded by your host, Lesley Logan, and me, Brad Crowell.Lesley Logan 39:21  It is transcribed, produced and edited by the epic team at Disenyo.co.Brad Crowell 39:25  Our theme music is by Ali at Apex Production Music and our branding by designer and artist, Gianfranco Cioffi.Lesley Logan 39:32  Special thanks to Melissa Solomon for creating our visuals.Brad Crowell 39:36  Also to Angelina Herico for adding all of our content to our website. And finally to Meridith Root for keeping us all on point and on time. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Loving greetings and welcome to August, a month that in many spiritual and cultural traditions holds a distinct mystique because it bridges the peak of summer and the first whispers of autumn. August is a powerful season of change, rich with blessings and abundance. Using the inspiration found in Elizabeth Gilbert's book, Big Magic, I […]

Hey friends, Chase here. Every summer, I revisit conversations from the archive that have stood the test of time. Not because I'm nostalgic, but because the best ideas don't expire. They deepen. This is the sixth and final installment of Summer School 2026—episodes I personally returned to most this year when I was stuck, blocked, or facing a very particular need. This one with Elizabeth Gilbert is the closer for a reason. I kept finding myself spending so much time navigating my internal landscape that it felt like it was taking me away from everything I wanted to do out in the world. And then I remembered something Liz said that rearranged the frame: she considers mental health her full-time job. Writing—being a professional creator—is a hobby she does on the side. That line alone is worth revisiting every summer. Liz Gilbert is the bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love (more than 12 million copies), a Time 100 most influential person, novelist of City of Girls, and the rare creative who can talk about fear, mercy, grief, and truth-telling without flinching—and without performing enlightenment. She's a force of nature. Spend a few minutes with her and you'll know why. In this conversation, she makes the case that the way out of pain is through honesty. That grace can take you places hustling can't. That mercy is the foundation of any healthy creative life. And that you make the world safe for yourself by telling the truth in it. Grace can take you places where hustling can't. Summer School: Elizabeth Gilbert on Truth-Telling, Mercy, and the Art of Being Yourself Liz opens with City of Girls—a novel about promiscuous girls in 1940s New York theater who behave recklessly with their sexuality and aren't ruined by it. A palate cleanser, she jokes, from Anna Karenina: one orgasm and then you're under the train. Underneath the glamour is a deeper subject: how do you become yourself? How do you just be—not a role, not a brand, not a performance of "good girl"? Her aspiration is almost revolutionary: to be the most relaxed person in every room she's in. To show what it might look like for a woman—for anyone—to be at ease in a world of nearly universal anxiety. How do you get there? Not by hustling harder. Through foundational, almost unbelievable honesty—truth to yourself and truth to others. Spending most of the day saying no. Ending the hustle so grace has room to work. Her great love and teacher, Rayya (Ria in the transcript), lived by a line Liz now lives by too: the truth has legs. It's the only thing left standing in the room at the end of the day. Everything else blows up into drama. Since you're going to end up at the truth anyway—why not start there? If you've ever felt that taking care of your inner world is somehow stealing time from your "real work," this episode will reframe that entirely. The care is the real work. What You'll Hear in This Episode Why City of Girls is about becoming yourself—and why "just being" is rarer than we admit Liz's aspiration to be the most relaxed person in the room—and why honesty makes that possible "The truth has legs"—and how Rayya schooled her in radical truth-telling How withheld truth eventually breaks the body and mind—and why die-or-tell-the-truth becomes the only choice Why people-pleasing is really self-protection, not generosity Creativity and fear: being just 1% more curious than you are afraid A working definition of a creative life: decisions based more on curiosity than fear Mercy as the foundation—for self, for others, for the inevitable disappointment of making imperfect work Mental health as the full-time job; writing as the side practice The daily dialogue with Love that has saved her life for 20 years—and why writing slows the mind What to do when you're creatively stuck: walk away and do something with your hands Truth Has Legs Liz is clear: try to have a completely honest relationship with at least one person in your life—and it's best if that person is yourself. When she was younger, she thought she couldn't tell the truth because the world wasn't safe for it. Later she learned the reverse: you make the world safe for yourself by telling the truth in it. Around 30, the first major truth she couldn't say—ending her marriage—nearly destroyed her. Sleep gone. Appetite gone. Twenty pounds lost. Mental health broken. Physical health broken. Die or tell the truth. She finally told it. Instead of killing her, it brought her to life. And if she'd said it two years earlier, it would have been a greater gift to him as well. People-pleasing, in her frame, isn't kindness. It's manipulation for perceived safety. The other person deserves to know who they're actually talking to. And truth-telling isn't a one-and-done graduation. Life keeps offering another chance to be brave. The only way out is through honesty. Do it again. Trust builds. It gets easier—not because the stakes drop, but because you finally believe the method. Rayya's cancer journey deepened this. When Liz couldn't cope by clinging to her partner as salvation, she had to become the steady one. Wisdom she doesn't share, she says, starts to hurt—like unused talent turns into pain. So she shares. Not out of marketing duty to readers. Out of self-preservation and love. Mercy, Curiosity, and Mental Health as the Job Asked for compressed creative advice, Liz answers in one word: mercy. Mercy for yourself. Mercy for others. Mercy for the inevitable disappointment when what you make isn't the tourmaline butterfly you dreamed—when day one excitement becomes day two self-hatred. The only people who get to day three are the people who have mercy. Ann Patchett's image: smash the gemstone butterfly on day one, then make the weird little thing out of chewing gum and baseball cards and twigs—and say, good job, self. No one's ever made one like that before. That's compassion: ending the argument against reality. This is what we've got. Flap flap. A piece falls off. Keep going. On fear, Liz's saving grace is curiosity—just 1% more curious than afraid. That's enough. Her definition of a creative life isn't watercolor class. It's any life where your decisions are routinely based more strongly on curiosity than fear. Then the life itself becomes the work of art. And here's the Summer School lightning bolt: an enormous percentage of Liz's days is spent managing her mental health—the "dysfunctional family" inside her mind. Writing is what she does on the side. She was managing her mental health on the plane that morning. There are very few days off from saving her own life. Her primary practice for twenty years: a daily dialogue with Love (capital L)—writing the words she always wanted someone to say. I'm right here. I've got you. You can't tire me out. Love doesn't need the room to be different. Love doesn't issue a five-point improvement plan. Love is company in the darkest hour. Writing slows the mind enough to receive that. When creativity is stuck? Don't force the tormented artist fantasy. Walk away. Garden. Fix a bicycle. Power-wash a driveway. Get out of your head and into your hands. Inspiration returns after embodiment—not after more self-punishment. Timecodes So You Can Jump Around 00:00 – Welcome and why this episode closes Summer School 2026 04:24 – Liz joins; City of Girls, becoming yourself, and the aspiration to be relaxed 13:32 – Honesty, saying no, and "grace can take you places hustling can't" 15:12 – Rayya, addiction, and "the truth has legs" 19:00+ – The first major truth at 30: breakdown, then coming alive 22:23 – Truth-telling and creativity; Eat, Pray, Love as a story of learning to tell the truth 30:00+ – Rayya's illness, grief, and why unshared wisdom becomes pain 36:14 – Fear, curiosity, and the definition of a creative life 38:51 – Mercy: the foundation (and the tourmaline butterfly) 43:40 – Mental health as the full-time job; writing as the hobby 45:00 – The daily dialogue with Love 51:38 – Scrapping a book, gardening, and what to do when you're stuck 54:21 – Paint bicycles / power-wash driveways: walk away into the present Why This Conversation Still Matters We still live in the anxiety virus Liz named—exported globally, amplified by politics, climate dread, and the demand to be a thing at all times. Creators still treat self-care as optional overhead between "real" output. Hustle culture still pretends grace is lazy. This conversation is the antidote. Mental health isn't what you do after you're successful. It's the work that makes everything else possible. Truth isn't a brand strategy. It's how you stop poisoning your own body with secrets. Mercy isn't soft. It's the only way anyone ever reaches day three. That's why this episode earned the final Summer School slot. The year asked a lot of our inner landscapes. Liz's answer is still the one that helps me return to the world without abandoning myself: tell the truth. Tend the mind. Prefer curiosity over fear. Make the imperfect butterfly. Keep company with Love. Class dismissed—until next summer. Keep Going Deeper If this conversation resonates: City of Girls Big Magic Eat, Pray, Love Liz online: elizabethgilbert.com Follow Liz: Instagram | X/Twitter | Website Questions to Reflect On Where am I hustling for a result that only grace—and honesty—can deliver? What truth do I already know I'm going to end up telling—and what would it cost to start with it? Am I making the world safer for myself through honesty, or waiting for the world to feel safe first? Where has people-pleasing become self-protection dressed up as kindness? In my creative work, am I on day two (self-hatred) or practicing the mercy that gets me to day three? If mental health were my full-time job this week, what would change about how I schedule my days? When I'm stuck, am I forcing the art—or am I willing to power-wash a driveway and return to the present? The Core Idea You don't graduate from truth-telling. You practice it. You don't earn rest by producing enough. You save your own life daily so you have a life worth creating from. Liz's invitation—as the last lesson of this Summer School season—is both soft and severe: tell the truth until the room is safe. Put mercy under every creative attempt. Be just slightly more curious than afraid. Tend the warring neighborhood in your mind like it's the job. Write love to yourself when no one else can hold the need. And when the work won't move—move your body instead. If there's one lesson worth carrying forward from this final Summer School session, it's this: Mental health is the work. Creativity is what you get to do when you've tended it—and the only way out of the hard parts is through honesty.

[Workbook incluído] Diseña tu propia aventura creativa y sal a vivirla. Aquí es donde entran los viajes, librerías, museos y las mañanas en un café al otro lado del mundo con tu journal abierto inyectándole multipotencialidad a tu proyecto para que se llene con tu capacidad de hacer muchas cosas al mismo tiempo PERO ENFOCADO EN UN PROYECTO. Porque cuando todo lo que rodea tu proyecto te encanta: se te quita la necesidad y la curiosidad de irte a empezar otra cosa desde cero. En esta parte 2 del episodio vas a usar tu workbook para convertir tus fotos, canciones, lecturas y futuros destinos en las respuestas que no encuentras sentado en tu escritorio. Igual que Howard Schultz que viajó a Italia, probó un espresso en una cafetería de Milán y nació Starbucks. Walt Disney visitó los parques de atracciones de su época en Europa e imaginó Disneyland. Steve Jobs viajó a la India y regresó con la visión de Apple. Phil Knight viajó a Japón se inspiró para crear Nike. Elizabeth Gilbert escribió Come, Reza, Amar después de su recorrido por Italia, India e Indonesia. J.K. Rowling tuvo la idea de Harry Potter en un tren de Londres a Edimburgo. Y Dan Brown viaja constantemente para investigar símbolos, pistas y la historia de los lugares donde ocurren sus novelas. Así que aquí te enseño mis dos reglas para viajar como ellos y dejar de viajar como turista porque la idea que te falta está a un vuelo, tren o carretera de distancia.  

Today, we continue our creativity series with an audience favourite: Elizabeth Gilbert.In this episode of the Moonshots Podcast, hosts Mike and Mark dive into the enchanting world of Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert. This book has inspired countless creatives to live beyond fear and embr ace the magic of creativity. Whether you're an artist, writer, or someone looking to infuse more creativity into your life, this episode offers a treasure trove of insights and practical advice.Listen and Learn More:• Listen to the Episode: ⁠⁠Episode 143 – Elizabeth Gilbert: Big Magic⁠⁠• Watch on YouTube: ⁠⁠Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert | Book Summary⁠⁠• Read a Summary: ⁠⁠Creative Living Beyond Fear – Elizabeth Gilbert | Book Summary⁠⁠• Become a Member: ⁠⁠Support the Moonshots Podcast on Patreon⁠⁠Episode Highlights: • What is Big Magic? • Discover the essence of Big Magic and how Elizabeth Gilbert views creative inspiration as a mysterious force that calls us to engage with it. • Lessons on Confidence: • Learn why fear shouldn't stop you from creating and how permitting yourself to fail can lead to unexpected breakthroughs. • Explore getting comfortable with your fears rather than overcoming them entirely. • Lessons on Creating: • Understand the difference between originality and authenticity and why Gilbert champions the latter as the key to meaningful creative work. • Find out why finishing your creative projects, even imperfect, is more important than striving for unattainable perfection. • Final Takeaways: • Mike and Mark wrap up the episode by discussing embracing your inner creative trickster and why taking yourself too seriously might be the most significant barrier to your creative success.Why You Should Listen:This episode will resonate deeply if you've ever struggled with fear, self-doubt, or the pressure to be perfect. Gilbert's approach to creativity is liberating and empowering, reminding us that the journey is just as important as the destination.Listen and Learn More: • Listen to the Episode: ⁠⁠Episode 143 – Elizabeth Gilbert: Big Magic⁠⁠ • Watch on YouTube: ⁠⁠Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert | Book Summary⁠⁠ • Read a Summary: ⁠⁠Creative Living Beyond Fear – Elizabeth Gilbert | Book Summary⁠⁠• Become a Member: ⁠⁠Support the Moonshots Podcast on Patreon⁠⁠

Loving greetings and welcome to August, a month that in many spiritual and cultural traditions holds a distinct mystique because it bridges the peak of summer and the first whispers of autumn. August is a powerful season of change, rich with blessings and abundance. Using the inspiration found in Elizabeth Gilbert's book, Big Magic, I […]

This is a special compilation devoted to a subject very close to my heart and currently consuming a large percentage of my waking hours: writing. Over the years, I've asked some of the writers I admire most questions like: How do you choose a project and stay with it? How do you begin when inspiration refuses to show up? How do you build a practice that reliably produces pages? And how do you keep going when you fear your pages are terrible? Listen in to some of my favorite authors answer these and other questions. Please enjoy this special compilation on the craft of writing.This episode is brought to you by:ProLon science-backed Fasting Mimicking Diet that helps activate cellular renewal through fasting, while still eating nourishing mealsAG1 all-in-one nutritional supplementTimestamps:00:00 — Introduction01:52 — Elizabeth Gilbert: Choosing and committing to a project06:25 — Anne Lamott: Shitty first drafts and taking it bird by bird13:04 — Joyce Carol Oates: Don't wait for inspiration15:47 — Jerry Seinfeld: Building a writing system26:27 — Mary Karr: Revision and throwing out 1,200 pages35:08 — Brandon Sanderson: Consistency, word counts, and output45:04 — Seth Godin: Fear of bad writingElizabeth Gilbert is the author of Eat, Pray, Love; Big Magic; and City of Girls. Her ten books have sold more than 25 million copies worldwide. Anne Lamott is the author of 20 books, including Bird by Bird, Operating Instructions, and Help, Thanks, Wow, and co-author—with her husband Neal Allen—of Good Writing.Joyce Carol Oates has written more than 70 books, including Blonde and We Were the Mulvaneys, and won the National Book Award for her novel them.Jerry Seinfeld co-created and starred in the sitcom Seinfeld—which ran nine seasons and won 10 Emmys—and later created Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee and wrote Is This Anything? Mary Karr wrote the bestselling memoirs The Liars' Club, Cherry, and Lit and her book on writing, The Art of Memoir. Brandon Sanderson created the Mistborn and Stormlight Archive series, completed Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, and raised more than $41 million on Kickstarter for four secret novels. Seth Godin has written 21 bestsellers published in 40 languages—including Purple Cow, Linchpin, and The Practice—and a daily blog of more than 10,000 posts. *For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast.For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsorsSign up for Tim's email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Discover Tim's books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissYouTube: youtube.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferrissSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Loving greetings and welcome to August, a month that in many spiritual and cultural traditions holds a distinct mystique because it bridges the peak of summer and the first whispers of autumn. August is a powerful season of change, rich with blessings and abundance. Using the inspiration found in Elizabeth Gilbert's book, Big Magic, I […]

People Pleaser ist nicht gleich People Pleaser. Manchepassen sich an, um gemocht oder nicht verlassen zu werden. Andere vermeiden dadurch Konflikte, Erwartungen oder echte Verletzlichkeit. In dieser Folge stelle ich euch acht verschiedene People-Pleaser-Typen vor - mit kleinen Geschichten, psychologischen Erklärungen und Frage, die ihr euch selbst stellen könnt. Es geht um Harmoniebedürfnis, Anerkennung, Leistung, Schuldgefühle, die Retterrolle und vieles mehr.Außerdem checken wir die Bindungsmotive hinter deinemPeople Pleasing: Passt du dich an, um Nähe zu kriegen oder um Nähe zu vermeidenErwähnte LinksBücherAll the way to the River von Elizabeth Gilbert: https://www.amazon.de/dp/310397180X/ref=cm_sw_r_as_gl_api_gl_i_H553BD6MPCCP9T6X5VW7?linkCode=ml1&tag=wwwmoderngips-21&linkId=676a242610308f7cb16012ae9bb7e3c7*Liebe verletzt Liebe heilt von Juliane Steffen: https://link.amazon/B0gb0BhNm *InhalteFolge über die 4 ÜberlebensstrategienFolge über das Buch All the way to the river / SüchteFolge „Mach dein Maul auf“ Interview mit Juliane Steffen zu Bindungstypen und Beziehungsproblemen✨ Schmuck mit Bedeutung von byWUSCH: entdecke alle Pieces unter: ⁠https://www.bywusch.de *⁠Hier findest du mich auf ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠Hier⁠⁠ kannst du dir Stripped ⁠⁠auf YouTube anschauen⁠⁠Hier geht's zu meinem zweiten Podcast ⁠⁠JACK&SAM ⁠⁠Kooperationsanfragen von Brands an: management@jackowusch.de*Werbelink

Welcome to Country Proud Living "Where Nurturing Spaces Empower Your Life and Everyday Feels a Little More Like Home." What if creativity isn't reserved for artists—but is simply a way of living?Because the creative life is calling... and perhaps today is the day you answer. You don't need a perfect plan—you simply need enough curiosity to take the next step.In this inspiring episode of Country Proud Living, LoriLynn explores how creative living can help us rediscover joy, curiosity, and purpose in midlife. Whether you're refreshing a room in your home, planting flowers, trying a new hobby, or simply noticing beauty in everyday moments, creativity invites us to become active participants in our own lives again.Drawing on the wisdom of Elizabeth Gilbert, Julia Cameron, and Maya Angelou, this episode offers gentle encouragement to let go of perfection, follow your curiosity, and create a home—and a life—that reflects who you truly are.

Judi Holler will happily tell you she is one of the biggest fraidy cats you will ever meet. She is afraid of all the things. She is also a keynote speaker, USA TODAY bestselling author of Fear Is My Homeboy and a self-described professional experimenter who has spent nearly twenty years treating fear as her most important advisor. That contradiction is precisely the point of this conversation, because as Judi sees it, the goal was never fearless. The goal is brave. Her courage was built in unlikely places. Working in corporate America by day, Judi spent her nights in the dark, dingy little theatres of Chicago’s improv scene, eventually training at the legendary Second City. She calls improv her fear yoga. With no script and no safety net, those basement stages taught her how to make mistakes, recover, listen and act before she felt ready. Then she started smuggling those lessons into the office: speaking up first in meetings, sitting in the front row, going for the promotion, asking for the raise. Small brave moves that walked new people and opportunities into her life, until the morning her boss sat her down over breakfast and told her to choose between her corporate career and her growing speaking work. She set down her fork and knife, looked at him and said, I don’t choose you. I’m going to choose me on this one. I quit. A decade later, she has never looked back. Fearless is for five-year-olds and sociopaths Judi takes issue with the word fearless, plastered as it is across t-shirts, bumper stickers and tattoos. If you were truly fearless, she points out, you would never see a doctor, you would eat poisonous food on purpose, you would punch a shark in the face. Borrowing a line from Elizabeth Gilbert, she reminds us that the only genuinely fearless people are five-year-olds and sociopaths. Fear is wisdom. The work is not to eliminate it but to fear your fear less, and bravery, like confidence and creativity, is a muscle built through daily experimentation. Your brain versus your soul At the heart of Judi’s methodology sits a tension we all live with: our brains are louder, faster and more practised than our souls. The brain has one job, safety, and it can only reference past data, endlessly auditing your life and pulling you back towards the familiar. But life does not follow old data. Life is improv. There is no script. The soul is your capacity to trust yourself and make decisions inside uncertainty, and Judi is quick to note this is no longer woo. She points to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Work research, where skills like resilience, creative thinking, motivation and self-awareness now top the list of what the world needs, and every one of them lives in the soul. Reclaim, don’t reinvent When Judi felt creatively caged five years ago, she resisted the urge to tear it all down. Reinvention, she says, whispers that what you have built is not good enough. Reclamation says the opposite: I love what you have made here, and I want to see more. Through a confrontational journey of self-discovery, she realised nothing was ever wrong with her. She had simply been painting the canvas of her life with everybody else’s brush. Out of that season came the HOLLER Method, a personal operating system for courage built letter by letter from her own surname, along with nightly rituals like her 9.30pm glitch list, where she captures the ideas her brain would rather she forgot. Judi leaves the audience with three golden nuggets: Trust it all. Every twist, delay and detour is preparing you for what comes next. Experiment with your fear. Every day. On purpose. Small brave moves compound into a courageous life. Honour the graveyard rule. As Les Brown says, the graveyard is the richest place on earth, full of dreams that were never acted on. Do not let yours be buried there. It is a funny, honest and deeply practical conversation about courage, self-trust and the experiments that bring us back to ourselves. Whatever you have been waiting to do, take the first step. Go scared. Watch the full conversation on YouTube. Find Out More About Judi Holler Website: https://judiholler.com Instagram: @judiholler Facebook: Judi Holler Fan Page YouTube: @JudiHoller

In this episode of Make Your Message a Movement, we explore the lonely but rewarding path of being a "market outlier"—those entrepreneurs and thought leaders who see shifts before they become mainstream. Being ahead of the curve often feels less like being a visionary and more like being wrong, leading to self-doubt and the temptation to retreat into familiar language.Drawing inspiration from Elizabeth Gilbert's Big Magic, the episode discusses the concept of "stewardship." We shift the focus from merely having an original idea to the responsibility of developing, communicating, and staying with that idea long enough for the market to catch up. Using the evolution of the life coaching industry as a primary case study, we examine how to move from being "one of many" to becoming "unmistakable." You will learn how to navigate the three primary temptations that lead to idea failure and how to identify the two key signs that your "ahead-of-the-curve" idea is worth the effort.Key TakeawaysThe Weight of Being Early: Being ahead of the market often lacks validation or competition. This lack of "applause" can make entrepreneurs question if they are truly seeing a new opportunity or if they are simply failing to communicate clearly.Stewardship Over Originality: Originality isn't just about a brand-new thought; it's about your unique lens, your language, and your courage to stick with an idea. Stewardship is the act of building a bridge between what people understand now and what your idea makes possible.The Evolution of Differentiation: Using life coaching as an example, the episode highlights that as industries mature, the challenge shifts from explaining what you do to explaining why your specific process and intellectual property are different.The Three Temptations of New Ideas:Dilution: Subconsciously replacing unique concepts with industry "buzzwords" to avoid tension, which ultimately strips the idea of its novelty.Overexplanation: Burying a central thought under a "fire hose" of frameworks and disclaimers. The goal of a new idea is to create recognition, not to explain everything at once.Premature Abandonment: Giving up because of a lack of immediate response. New ideas require repetition and time to move from "unfamiliar" to "intriguing."Two Signs Your Idea is Valid:Persistent Patterns: You see the same underlying thread across different clients, industries, and conversations. You aren't inventing a problem; you are naming one that already exists.The "Unseeable" Recognition: When the right audience hears the idea, their expression changes. They recognize themselves in your words and feel that they can no longer "unsee" the truth you've presented.Mentioned ResourcesBook: Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear by Elizabeth Gilbert – Referenced for its concept of ideas as energetic forms seeking human collaborators.Book a call with Tiffany to discuss your big idea!Rate, Review, and Follow on Your Favorite Platform! If you loved this episode, leave us a review. And always make sure you're following the podcast so you never miss an episode. Follow now!

Books That Matter for Photographers: Elizabeth Gilbert's ‘Big Magic' — Recalibrating Your Relationship with Fear While Living a Bold, Creative Life.Fresh off a month in Botswana, Richard tackles Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert for the 'Books That Matter' series, and makes the case that fear isn't the enemy of creativity: it's a necessary ingredient. Seneca, mall cops, perfectionism, and why fear is just plain boring, all in service of one idea: stop waiting to feel ready and make the next frame anyway.Big Magic (2015) is Elizabeth Gilbert's book on creativity and fear, arguing the two aren't opposites but constant companions, so the goal isn't to eliminate fear but to keep it out of the driver's seat. Organized loosely around courage, permission, persistence, trust, and letting go of perfectionism.Notable Links:Big MagicElizabeth Gilbert WebsiteBooks That Matter: Episode 106 — Stephen Pressfield and 'The War of Art'Books That Matter: Episode 114 — John Szarcowski and 'The Photographer's Eye'*******MUENCH WORKSHOPS GIVEAWAY** Win a free workshop with me to Bosque del Apache, New Mexico in January, 2027. Application is free! CLICK HERE to learn more.Follow Richard Bernabe:Substack: https://richardbernabe.substack.comInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/bernabephoto/Twitter/X: https://x.com/bernabephotoFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/bernabephoto

Episode 184: Miriam Katz & Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear by Elizabeth Gilbert ABOUT MIRIAMMiriam Katz is Los Angeles-based public speaking coach, podcaster, and performer. She studied comparative literature at Columbia University, worked at Artforum magazine for many many years, followed by stints curating comedy shows and panels for Moma in New York and Silencio in Paris. She trained in improv at The Groundlings and UCB, and also studied acting, clown, and voice over in many other theaters and schools. You may have heard her in video games or seen her in films, tv shows, and Chili's commercials (plural). She is the host of the “Ex Appeal” podcast for which she interviews every person she's ever been romantic with on any level. The show was recently a “hot topic” on The View. That's right, Whoopi Goldberg knows her name.CONVERSATION HIGHLIGHTS• Miriam's unconventional podcast, X Appeal, and her honest conversations with ex-partners reveal our shared human experiences• The importance of curiosity over fear in creative pursuits and personal development• How her diverse background in arts and academia informs her approach to coaching and life• The influence of spirituality and intuition on her creative processInsights from Elizabeth Gilbert's Big Magic and its encouragement to see art and inspiration as playful, divine collaborations• Practical tips on embracing silence, pauses, and authenticity in communication and art• The significance of setting boundaries and focusing energy on what truly fuels your passion• The role of continuous learning and experimentation in evolving as a creative individualThe MAIN QUESTION for you that comes out of my conversation with Miriam is, How curious, playful, and open are you when it comes to your creative endeavors and general goals in lifeFIND MIRIAM• Website: https://www.miriamkatz.com/• LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/miriam-katz-b53ba828b• Twitter: https://x.com/miriamdkatz• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/miriam.katz.7LinkedIn - Full Podcast Article: CHAPTERS00:00 - The Book Leads Podcast - Miriam Katz01:05 - Introduction & Bio06:33 - Who are you today? Can you provide more information about your work?13:50 - How did your path into your career look like, and what did it look like up until now?52:15 - How does the work you're doing today reconcile to who you were as a child?55:43 - What do you consider your superpower?56:11 - What does leadership mean to you?01:04:32 - Can you introduce us to the book we're discussing?01:08:20 - Can you provide a general overview of the book?01:18:21 - What's changed in you in the process of writing this book?01:23:20 - What are you up to these days? (A way for guests to share and market their projects and work.)This series has become my Masterclass In Humanity. I'd love for you to join me and see what you take away from these conversations.Learn more about The Book Leads and listen to past episodes:Watch on YouTubeListen on SpotifyListen on Apple PodcastsRead About The Book Leads – Blog PostFor more great content, check out the catalog for my newsletter Last Week's Leadership Lessons, if you haven't already!

Régulièrement, l'équipe de Folie Douce partage avec vous les extraits les plus marquants des épisodes du podcast. Aujourd'hui, on vous propose de réécouter l'autrice Elizabeth Gilbert.Dans cet extrait, Elizabeth Gilbert évoque sa relation amoureuse avec sa meilleure amie, Raya, et la charge mentale dévolue aux femmes et minorités, enfermées dans ce carcan par les personnes que cela arrange. Lorsqu'on demande aux femmes ce qu'elles veulent, elles répondent : être seules.Vous trouverez cet entretien sous deux formes : l'une complètement en anglais, l'autre doublée et expliquée en français par moi-même si vous préférez (les deux se trouvent séparément dans le flux du podcast, suivez les drapeaux !)Le lendemain de l'enregistrement de cet épisode - une dinguerie vous verrez -, je n'avais qu'une idée en tête : écrire à Elizabeth Gilbert, garder le lien avec elle. Cette femme a un charisme fou. Je le sais depuis 2006, lorsqu'elle a publié Mange, Prie, Aime, un livre qui a inspiré des millions de femmes - dont moi. Vingt ans plus tard, elle publie un livre poignant, Jusqu'à la rivière, dont elle estime qu'il est « la suite » de ce premier best seller. Le contenu en est bien plus sombre. Il lui a fallu huit ans pour avoir la force de « retourner en enfer » pour raconter l'histoire d'amour destructrice vécue avec son âme-soeur, Raya, atteinte d'un cancer en phase terminale et dépendante à la cocaïne et à l'héroïne. Elizabeth Gilbert, elle, était dépendante à l'idée qu'elle devait sauver Raya. Si, sur le papier, elle avait l'air d'être la « personne saine et altruiste », elle a compris ensuite qu'elle était « tout aussi folle, peut-être plus » que sa compagne. C'est ça, la « codépendance » un concept mal connu en France, qu'elle décrit d'une façon limpide : déverser dans l'autre tout ce qu'on est, puis rester « mains tendues, en espérant récupérer une miette de l'amour qu'on a déversé ». Elizabeth Gilbert est allée aux Codépendants Anonymes, et a fait ce fameux « programme en douze étapes » qui implique un bilan moral total, qu'elle décrit comme le moment le plus salvateur de sa vie.Elle me charme. Elle me fait rire. La conclusion à laquelle elle aboutit dans ce livre est exactement la même que celle à laquelle j'ai abouti dans Enfin Seule. Elle explore la nécessité pour les êtres humains, en particulier les femmes, de trouver l'apaisement dans une capacité reconquise d'être enfin heureuse seule.C'est pour ça que cet entretien m'a bouleversée. Je sais déjà qu'il vous plaira !Faites moi des retours sur les réseaux sociaux et n'oubliez pas de mettre des étoiles partout ! Ça aide Folie Douce à essaimer

What if the thing standing between you and your dream weight isn't willpower, discipline, or the right diet - but fear?In this episode, Laura breaks down Elizabeth Gilbert's Big Magic and applies it directly to losing weight for the last time. Perfectionism. Courage. Boredom. The letter to fear that will change the way you think about every excuse you've ever made.This isn't your typical weight loss episode. It's the one that reminds you why you started, and why you owe it to yourself to finish.One of our most downloaded episodes ever. We're bringing it back for summer because it's that good. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Vous avez aimé l'épisode de Vulgaire sur le sommeil avec Fabien Olicard ?

What happens when you search for purpose, only to discover the answers were inside you all along? Nathalie Cordell, coach and newly published author, shares her journey from corporate burnout to awakening her feminine wisdom and power. From struggling with imposter syndrome and spirituality to writing her transformative book and finding connection through vulnerability, Nathalie's story is one of service, self-discovery and healing. Exploring myths we live by, mental liberation and living authentically, Nathalie peels back the layers to reveal her midlife awakening. KEY TAKEAWAY "Your purpose, my purpose is very individual. As unique as your thumbprint, and if I could sum it up in a nutshell, it's just being more you, whatever that is."   BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS* Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert – https://amzn.eu/d/084TqBcu Loving What Is by Byron Katie – https://amzn.eu/d/005H16PL  Man's Search for Meaning  by Viktor E. Frankl –https://amzn.eu/d/0cfhr5OI  Awakening the Sleeping Queen: How to Reclaim Your Feminine Wisdom and Power by Nathalie Cordell - https://amzn.eu/d/01pd1Es3    ABOUT THE GUEST – NATHALIE CORDELL Nathalie Cordell is an accredited psycho-spiritual coach and writer of Soul Seeds on Substack, a space for women navigating the messy middle of life. After 20 years climbing the corporate ladder in pharma, she got tired of climbing and decided to see if she could fly instead. She retrained as a coach, earning an MA in Psychosynthesis Leadership Coaching. Now she helps women discover who they really are and reclaim their authentic power. Passionate about exploring life's mysteries and the depths of the human soul, her new book Awakening the Sleeping Queen guides women on the journey home to themselves.   CONNECT WITH NATHALIE CORDELL https://www.cordellcoaching.com https://nathaliecordell.substack.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathalie-cordell/ https://www.instagram.com/nathalie_cordell_coaching/ https://troubador.co.uk/bookshop/self-help/awakening-the-sleeping-queen   ABOUT THE HOST - AMY ROWLINSON Amy is a purpose and fulfilment coach, author, podcast strategist and mastermind host who empowers purpose-driven leaders to boost productivity, engagement and meaning in life and work. Through transformational conversations, Amy helps individuals overcome overwhelm and live with clarity, building living legacies along the way.   WORK WITH AMY If you're interested in how purpose can help you and/or your business, please book a free 30 min call via https://calendly.com/amyrowlinson/call    KEEP IN TOUCH WITH AMY Sign up for the weekly Friday Focus - https://www.amyrowlinson.com/subscribe-to-weekly-newsletter    CONNECT WITH AMY https://linktr.ee/AmyRowlinson    BUY AMY'S BOOK (Shortlisted in the 2025 Business Book Awards) * Focus on Why by Amy Rowlinson with George F. Kerr – https://amzn.eu/d/6W02HWu    HOSTED BY AMY ROWLINSON   DISCLAIMER The views, thoughts and opinions expressed in this podcast belong solely to the host and guest speakers. Please conduct your own due diligence.  *As an Amazon Associate, Amy earns from qualifying purchases.

Book Vs. Movie: Coyote Ugly (2000 film vs 1997 GQ Story)Today, we are joined by special guest co-host, Sonia Mansfield of the “What a Creep” podcast! Neither of us has ever read anything by Elizabeth “Eat-Pray-Love” Gilbert until now. Her 1997 story for GQ Magazine, “The Muse of the Coyote Ugly Saloon” launched the 2000 film, which, in turn, launched an international bar franchise.In this episode, we discuss:Elizabeth Gilbert's stellar career trajectory (and did she really plot to murder her girlfriend?)The differences between the book and the movieThe short, short distance between New York City and South Amboy, New JerseyHow humans need water to liveFollow us on the socials!Follow Sonia at TheSoniaShow.com and on Instagram @thesoniashowJoin us in the Facebook at Book Vs. Movie Podcast GroupInstagram: Book Versus Movie @bookversusmoviebookversusmoviepodcast@gmail.com Margo P's Instagram: @shesnachomama Margo's Substack (blog): https://substack.com/@shesnachomamaMargo P's YouTube Channel: @shesnachomama*Please support your local booksellers or buy your books online at Bookshop.org, where proceeds support local, independent booksellers.

Book Vs. Movie: Coyote Ugly (2000 film vs 1997 GQ Story)Today, we are joined by special guest co-host, Sonia Mansfield of the “What a Creep” podcast! Neither of us has ever read anything by Elizabeth “Eat-Pray-Love” Gilbert until now. Her 1997 story for GQ Magazine, “The Muse of the Coyote Ugly Saloon” launched the 2000 film, which, in turn, launched an international bar franchise.In this episode, we discuss:Elizabeth Gilbert's stellar career trajectory (and did she really plot to murder her girlfriend?)The differences between the book and the movieThe short, short distance between New York City and South Amboy, New JerseyHow humans need water to liveFollow us on the socials!Follow Sonia at TheSoniaShow.com and on Instagram @thesoniashowJoin us in the Facebook at Book Vs. Movie Podcast GroupInstagram: Book Versus Movie @bookversusmoviebookversusmoviepodcast@gmail.com Margo P's Instagram: @shesnachomama Margo's Substack (blog): https://substack.com/@shesnachomamaMargo P's YouTube Channel: @shesnachomama*Please support your local booksellers or buy your books online at Bookshop.org, where proceeds support local, independent booksellers.

In part two of my conversation with bestselling crime fiction author Vanessa Lillie, whose books include "The Bone Thief," "Blood Sisters," "Little Voices”, and “For the Best,” we're breaking down all the mental hurdles that can get in the way of your writing, and how to overcome them, including:- Fighting erasure by weaving her family's story into her books- The thrill of writing about your culture, and worrying about getting it wrong- How Vanessa steadies herself when that anxiety crops up- Embracing the challenge of writing a page turner- Dealing with the fear that your current work isn't as good as your previous work- Seeing ideas as a butterfly that come and sit on your shoulder (from Elizabeth Gilbert's book “Big Magic”)- Why it's so vital to get clear on why you are the right person to tell this story- Why being in her 40s feels like such a relief- Some frank talk about early motherhood–-and why it was a theme in her first novel- Letting go of the idea that your success is within your controlThis episode is a replay.Connect with Vanessa on Instagram @vanessalillie, where she hosts a long-running series of interviews with crime fiction authors.For full show notes with links to everything we discuss, plus bonus photos!, visit ⁠katehanley.substack.com⁠.Thank you for listening! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Over the last eight years of Moonshots, we've explored the work of hundreds of authors, entrepreneurs, scientists, artists, educators, and innovators. We've studied creativity from every angle imaginable. We've looked at the habits of musicians, the methods of filmmakers, the thinking of scientists, the systems of entrepreneurs, and the practices of some of the most creative people who have ever lived.As we prepare to launch a new creativity series on Moonshots, beginning with Steven Kotler's *The Art of the Impossible*, I wanted to pause and reflect on what we've learned so far.What surprised me most wasn't how different these thinkers are. It was how often they arrived at the same conclusions.A legendary music producer, a bestselling novelist, the founder of Pixar, one of history's greatest physicists, an education visionary, and a pair of Stanford design professors all seem to be pointing toward the same set of principles.Creativity is not a gift possessed by a lucky few.It is a practice.It is a way of approaching problems, ideas, opportunities, and life itself.In this episode, I share eight creative practices that have had the biggest impact on my own work as a founder, advisor, podcaster, writer, speaker, software builder, and lifelong learner.The first lesson comes from Rick Rubin and *The Creative Act*. One of the most valuable ideas I've taken from Rick is the importance of showing up early and allowing ideas time to develop. Great work rarely appears on demand. Whenever I'm preparing a keynote, building a product, creating content, or solving a difficult client problem, I start earlier than I need to. I immerse myself in the work and then let it sit. I allow ideas to ferment. Some of my best work has emerged not from pushing harder, but from creating enough space for intuition and imagination to do their job.Elizabeth Gilbert's *Big Magic* offers another powerful reminder. Momentum is more important than perfection. I see perfectionism derail founders every week. They delay launches, delay decisions, delay customer conversations, and delay progress because they want everything to be perfect. The reality is that creative people create. They publish. They ship. They learn. Progress compounds. Perfection delays.Austin Kleon's *Show Your Work* reinforces this principle. Big achievements are usually the result of many small outputs shared consistently over time. Moonshots itself is a perfect example. The show didn't grow because of one viral episode. It grew because Mark and I showed up repeatedly for years. Small contributions, delivered consistently, eventually become meaningful bodies of work.Walt Disney reminds us to dream first and judge later. Too many ideas are destroyed before they have a chance to grow. Whether it's our own self-talk or feedback from others, premature judgement can suffocate creativity. Disney's genius was creating environments where imagination could run free before practicality entered the conversation. Creativity often requires us to suspend disbelief long enough to discover what might be possible.Ed Catmull, in *Creativity, Inc.*, extends this idea even further. He argues that unfinished ideas need safety. Great ideas rarely arrive fully formed. They emerge through discussion, experimentation, and collaboration. Teams that create psychological safety unlock more creativity because people feel comfortable sharing incomplete thoughts. Innovation depends on creating environments where ideas can evolve rather than be evaluated too early.Ken Robinson's work on *The Element* introduces one of my favourite questions. Rather than asking what your passion is, ask yourself what feels good. What activities energise you? What work absorbs your attention?

Quante volte ci lamentiamo della nostra creatività? Basta con la lagna!Ce lo dice Elizabeth Gilbert nel suo “Big Magic”, edizioni Rizzoli Bur.Basta conla lagna e piuttosto ripetiamoci quanto amiamo la nostra creatività!Ti ricordo che è uscito un nuovo episodio del mio nuovo podcast “SAPORE: arte e creatività in cucina”, in cui gli chef stellati ci raccontano i loro processi creativi, e ti ricordo anche che se ti piace questo podcast, puoi parlarne con qualcuno a cui possa interessare. Ti auguro una buona giornata.A presto!Alessandro#ilmondoinvisibilepodcast #respiropodcast #arte #creatività #ispirazione #podcastitaliani #respiro

In this episode, I share a personal look at the "gremlins of self-doubt" that arrive during a book launch. Inspired by Elizabeth Gilbert's Big Magic, let's discusses how to treat fear as a passenger rather than the driver, using a "Fear to Focus" framework to turn anxieties into actionable truths. Links: Joyster Monthly Meetup: Friday, June 12th. Topic: "Courage to share your work without losing your joy." Free for Joysters or $5 for a one-time pass. Book Tour: Stops include NYC, South Carolina, Williamsburg, VA, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Visit artistsforjoy.org/launch for more info. Support the Show: Join the community at patreon.com/artistforjoy. Follow Along: Follow @ArtistsForJoy on Instagram for daily updates leading up to July 7th.  

Vous trouverez cet entretien sous deux formes : l'une complètement en anglais, l'autre doublée et expliquée en français par moi-même si vous préférez (les deux se trouvent séparément dans le flux du podcast, suivez les drapeaux !)Le lendemain de l'enregistrement de cet épisode - une dinguerie vous verrez -, je n'avais qu'une idée en tête : écrire à Elizabeth Gilbert, garder le lien avec elle. Cette femme a un charisme fou. Je le sais depuis 2006, lorsqu'elle a publié Mange, Prie, Aime, un livre qui a inspiré des millions de femmes - dont moi. Vingt ans plus tard, elle publie un livre poignant, Jusqu'à la rivière, dont elle estime qu'il est « la suite » de ce premier best seller. Le contenu en est bien plus sombre. Il lui a fallu huit ans pour avoir la force de « retourner en enfer » pour raconter l'histoire d'amour destructrice vécue avec son âme-soeur, Raya, atteinte d'un cancer en phase terminale et dépendante à la cocaïne et à l'héroïne. Elizabeth Gilbert, elle, était dépendante à l'idée qu'elle devait sauver Raya. Si, sur le papier, elle avait l'air d'être la « personne saine et altruiste », elle a compris ensuite qu'elle était « tout aussi folle, peut-être plus » que sa compagne. C'est ça, la « codépendance » un concept mal connu en France, qu'elle décrit d'une façon limpide : déverser dans l'autre tout ce qu'on est, puis rester « mains tendues, en espérant récupérer une miette de l'amour qu'on a déversé ». Elizabeth Gilbert est allée aux Codépendants Anonymes, et a fait ce fameux « programme en douze étapes » qui implique un bilan moral total, qu'elle décrit comme le moment le plus salvateur de sa vie.Elle me charme. Elle me fait rire. La conclusion à laquelle elle aboutit dans ce livre est exactement la même que celle à laquelle j'ai abouti dans Enfin Seule. Elle explore la nécessité pour les êtres humains, en particulier les femmes, de trouver l'apaisement dans une capacité reconquise d'être enfin heureuse seule.C'est pour ça que cet entretien m'a bouleversée. Je sais déjà qu'il vous plaira !Faites moi des retours sur les réseaux sociaux et n'oubliez pas de mettre des étoiles partout ! Ça aide Folie Douce à essaimer

Vous trouverez cet entretien sous deux formes : l'une complètement en anglais, l'autre doublée et expliquée en français par moi-même si vous préférez (les deux se trouvent séparément dans le flux du podcast, suivez les drapeaux !)Le lendemain de l'enregistrement de cet épisode - une dinguerie vous verrez -, je n'avais qu'une idée en tête : écrire à Elizabeth Gilbert, garder le lien avec elle. Cette femme a un charisme fou. Je le sais depuis 2006, lorsqu'elle a publié Mange, Prie, Aime, un livre qui a inspiré des millions de femmes - dont moi. Vingt ans plus tard, elle publie un livre poignant, Jusqu'à la rivière, dont elle estime qu'il est « la suite » de ce premier best seller. Le contenu en est bien plus sombre. Il lui a fallu huit ans pour avoir la force de « retourner en enfer » pour raconter l'histoire d'amour destructrice vécue avec son âme-soeur, Raya, atteinte d'un cancer en phase terminale et dépendante à la cocaïne et à l'héroïne. Elizabeth Gilbert, elle, était dépendante à l'idée qu'elle devait sauver Raya. Si, sur le papier, elle avait l'air d'être la « personne saine et altruiste », elle a compris ensuite qu'elle était « tout aussi folle, peut-être plus » que sa compagne. C'est ça, la « codépendance » un concept mal connu en France, qu'elle décrit d'une façon limpide : déverser dans l'autre tout ce qu'on est, puis rester « mains tendues, en espérant récupérer une miette de l'amour qu'on a déversé ». Elizabeth Gilbert est allée aux Codépendants Anonymes, et a fait ce fameux « programme en douze étapes » qui implique un bilan moral total, qu'elle décrit comme le moment le plus salvateur de sa vie.Elle me charme. Elle me fait rire. La conclusion à laquelle elle aboutit dans ce livre est exactement la même que celle à laquelle j'ai abouti dans Enfin Seule. Elle explore la nécessité pour les êtres humains, en particulier les femmes, de trouver l'apaisement dans une capacité reconquise d'être enfin heureuse seule.C'est pour ça que cet entretien m'a bouleversée. Je sais déjà qu'il vous plaira !Faites moi des retours sur les réseaux sociaux et n'oubliez pas de mettre des étoiles partout ! Ça aide Folie Douce à essaimer

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Vi è capitato di continuare a fare corsi di formazione perché non vi sentite mai formati abbastanza, pronti abbastanza?Ne parliamo oggi partendo da “Big Magic” di Elizabeth Gilbert, edizioni Rizzoli BUR.Se ti piace questo podcast, parlane con qualcuno a cui possa interessare. Ti auguro una buona giornata.A presto!Alessandro#ilmondoinvisibilepodcast #respiropodcast #arte #creatività #ispirazione #podcastitaliani #respiro 

How can you supercharge your creativity in an age when AI is reshaping everything — including how we write, edit, and market our books? What does it look like to use AI as a genuine creative partner rather than a shortcut? And could professional speaking become an income stream that complements your writing career? With James Taylor. In the intro, Audible's new royalty model; New royalty model details [ACX; Kindlepreneur]; Public Speaking for Authors, Creatives and other Introverts; Why Indie Authors Should Ignore the Market's Mood and Focus on their Mission [Self-Publishing with ALLi]; Lichfield Cathedral; This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors. This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn James Taylor is a nonfiction author, professional speaker, podcaster, and entrepreneur who helps people unlock their creative potential. He hosts the SuperCreativity Podcast and his latest book is SuperCreativity: Augmenting Human Creativity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Notes How to define creativity and why it's becoming the most valuable skill in the age of AI The five stages of the creative process — and the stage most people skip Three types of creative purpose: play, self-expression, and legacy How James used multiple AI tools alongside human collaborators to write, edit, and market SuperCreativity Bulk book sales, industry-specific editions, and revenue models for nonfiction author-speakers Practical tips for authors who want to break into professional keynote speaking You can find James at JamesTaylor.me. Transcript of the interview with James Taylor Jo: James Taylor is a nonfiction author, professional speaker, podcaster, and entrepreneur who helps people unlock their creative potential. He hosts the SuperCreativity Podcast and his latest book is SuperCreativity: Augmenting Human Creativity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Welcome to the show, James. James: Well, thank you for having me as a guest. I'm looking forward to this conversation today. Jo: It's going to be really good. First up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing. James: Well, today I'm a professional keynote speaker, so I deliver about fifty to a hundred keynotes per year in twenty-five-plus countries. Primarily I speak on creativity, innovation, and artificial intelligence. Go back into my deepest, darkest history—I actually used to manage rock stars. That was my old job. I used to be in the music industry for many, many years. I worked with members of The Rolling Stones, and for our listeners in the UK, I managed bands like Deacon Blue. Then I went to the dark side. In 2010, I moved to California to work in Silicon Valley, to work in the world of tech. That got me involved in artificial intelligence. Right about 2017, I was speaking at an event in San Francisco and someone came up to me and said, “You realise you could probably speak for a living, you could do this for a living.” So I thought, well, how does that work? And he told me. Then I embarked on the career that I have today, which is primarily as a speaker, with writing now coming a bit more to the fore. Jo: Wow, I remember Deacon Blue. James: Yes. Jo: “Dignity.” That's crazy. Very, very cool backstory there, but we'll come back to the career side of things. Let's get into super creativity, because my listeners are certainly creatives. Most of the listeners will have a book either on the way or they might even have lots of books. So we all do want to be super creative. How do you define creativity, and why is it important to keep focusing on this even if we do identify that way? James: For me, creativity is about bringing new ideas to the mind. Innovation is about bringing new ideas to the world, but without creativity, there is no innovation. So creativity is really the engine of innovation. Whether that is designing new products, new services, or creating new works of art and new books. The reason that creativity is becoming more important is because of what we're seeing right now in terms of artificial intelligence. AI is going to replace a lot of the non-creative tasks that we currently do in our jobs. If you look at things like the World Economic Forum, there was recently a study with a thousand global business leaders, and work from companies like LinkedIn—they all highlight that creativity is going to be one of the foremost important soft skills for this new future. So creativity, strangely, will actually become more important, not less important, as we go ahead. That's the creativity side. Probably for many of the listeners here, they'll consider themselves to be creative. That is not the norm. As I mentioned, I speak in about twenty-five countries a year, and if I ask the audiences—primarily corporate audiences—to put their hands up if they consider themselves to be creative, only between ten to forty per cent of the audience will raise their hands. So part of my job is to show them why they are more creative than they think they are and why we're all born with this creative potential. Then moving into the super creativity side, it's really to show them how they can augment that creativity by collaborating more deeply with other people or machines—things like artificial intelligence. So SuperCreativity, the book that I've written and the speeches I give on it, is really about how we can augment our individual creativity by collaborating more deeply with other people or artificial intelligence. For me, that's been the thing I've been fascinated by for the past few years, and probably for many of our listeners who are now using AI in their writing, their researching, and their marketing of their books, they're probably getting into this space as well. I really wanted to dive into that—both the collaboration with other people and with machines and AI. Jo: In terms of the super creativity then, do you have any practices or ideas? Before we get into collaboration, many of us authors work alone—and of course we can come back to the AI stuff in a minute—but in terms of super creativity, are there ways that we can even supercharge what we do already? Then, of course there are people listening who might not feel creative. So give us a few tips on how we can potentially change our mindset or become even more creative. James: In the book I talk about what I call the eight Ps of super creativity, which are purpose, personality, practice, people, process, place, product, and persuasion. Persuasion is really the marketing piece at the end. Probably the one that could be most useful to many listeners today is the practice piece—the practice or the process side of things. For many of us, what that usually consists of is just having some type of daily creative practice. Different people do it in different ways. Many of your listeners will know the works of people like Julia Cameron—the morning pages style of having some type of daily practice. Other people do it in slightly different ways. The process bit is really interesting. I talk about this creative process that we all have, and I talk about these five stages of the creative process. The first stage, let's say if we're writing a book, is really that preparation stage. That is usually the stage where we are trying to absorb as much information as possible about the thing that we're going to be writing about. The topic, if it's nonfiction, or going to the places, visiting the scenes that we're going to set certain things within for the book. So that preparation stage is really about absorbing as much information as possible from the outside. It's not going to look very creative. We're just absorbing at that stage. Now the mistake that a lot of people tend to make is they immediately try to jump from that preparation stage to looking to generate ideas. But what all the studies show us is we should spend a little bit of time in what we call the incubation stage. This is where it's often very useful if we've done some research, that we put things to one side for a little while, maybe a few weeks, move on to another project, think about something completely different. Your brain will continue to work in the background. Your unconscious brain will work on that content you've been absorbing. Then what often happens as a result of that is we come to this third stage, which is that insight stage—that aha moment. That happens for various different reasons and you can seed that in slightly different ways so you're more likely to get inspiration in your day-to-day work. Then as we know—as you are a writer of many, many books—many people think, “Well, that's it. I've done it. The idea for that book or that chapter has come to me.” That is really just the first five per cent of the process. The next stage is where we look at all the different ideas we have and decide which ones we want to pursue, which ones are going to make the grade. This is what we call the evaluation stage. Once we've done that, we move to that final stage, which is the elaboration stage. If it's a startup, this is when you're building your minimum viable product. As a writer, this is where you're actually doing the work, putting those words out onto the page. It's a very iterative process, so it's not necessarily linear. You'll go back and forth. Even as you're getting input from readers and audiences in that last stage, that is then giving you the material to move back to the preparation stage and think, “Oh, I wonder if this next book in this series, maybe I go in a slightly different direction with this character.” So each of those different stages, you can do different things to increase your levels of creativity. Jo: I love all of that, but can we go back to purpose? Because you mentioned that as one of the Ps and I think this is something that a lot of us need. As we are recording this in April 2026, the world is an interesting place. There are lots of things going on that have people worried. Well, we are not talking about politics, but I think one of the things that people struggle with is, what's the point in writing this story, for example, or what's the point in trying to get my words out there when things are difficult? I feel like coming back to purpose is perhaps the thing that helps people even take it into the process as you were talking about. And then of course, just from a practical angle— Is purpose about making money or reaching people? So maybe you could talk about the purpose side of things. James: Yes. So I talk about three different purposes, and it's not that there's just one that predominates, but usually there's one that maybe predominates on different projects. The first one is creativity as play. It's what we're basically, as humans, hardwired to do—this instinctive joy that we get just for creating for its own sake. There's nothing that really sits beyond that. We just have fun. We find pleasure in creating something. That could be a musician creating a piece of music, a sculptor creating a sculpture, an entrepreneur creating a new business or product or service. There's just this sense of play. One of the things I talk about in the book is this idea of being childlike, not childish. If you look at children, you see this very instinctively. If you see a three-year-old or a five-year-old, you give them some crayons and they will just naturally create. That's part of who they are and it's pretty abstract. Then what happens is they go to school and they're taught useful conventions—”this is how you should do it.” You even see their work start to change. You start to see them move from abstract paintings to more formal structures. Then you get your peer group, then you go to college or university and the world of work, and you're taught all these useful conventions. That's fine, but as adults, it is our responsibility to become what we call post-conventional, where we see these conventions as a useful signpost but we're willing to challenge them. We're willing to have a playfulness in what we do. So the first one is just this hardwired thing—creativity as play. The second one, and this is maybe for a lot of your listeners the reason that they are writers, is self-expression. It's a way of placing something out into the world. I was actually just in France recently, and I was talking to a young visual artist, a painter from Hungary, and she had to go up and give a speech. She really hated doing it. She was having to talk about her work and she was really uncomfortable. I could see the discomfort and my heart went out for her, because that is not the way she primarily expresses herself. She expresses herself through her art form, which is painting. For many of us, we might struggle to get on a stage, but we can express ourselves in the written word. We have something we want to say, a position we want to have, and we want to express that and get that out into the world. The final one is just this idea of legacy. That is not going to be for everyone. I can tell you, for me personally, legacy is not the reason that I write and do a lot of the stuff that I do. Maybe that changes—maybe as we get a bit older, we want to leave a body of work. So those are the three main purposes that we tend to see. Then you mentioned the financial side of what we do as well. This starts to come into that self-expression, because we need to be able to get people to buy our books or download our books and read our books in order to give us the ability to write new works and create new things. The financial side is an important component of it, but it is not the only one. I think there's a great question any writer should ask themselves. One of the first questions that I asked myself as a relatively new nonfiction writer is: why am I writing this book? What is the purpose of this book? For me, primarily it is a form of self-expression, and then you have to go, “Well, that's fine, but I also need it to have some type of financial basis for it.” It doesn't need to be the main driver of my income, but I need to have some type of revenue model. I'm happy to talk about revenue models, because probably the type of revenue model that I have as a writer is going to be different from other listeners. I tend to focus more on bulk selling of books rather than individual selling of books. Jo: Yes, I definitely want to come back to revenue models and business, but a few other things first. I want to circle back to collaboration, because I've certainly co-written with some humans, and I know a lot of listeners either have co-written or collaborated with other humans—and some of it works and some of it doesn't. You have some great information on human-plus-human creativity and collaboration. So maybe you could give us some tips on how we can be more effective collaborators with other humans. James: So there's a whole section about this idea of creative pairs. Often if you look at great creative work or innovative companies, very often when you strip it all back, you'll find at the core lots and lots of creative pairings. That is usually two different but complementary personalities who are willing to develop and challenge and improve each other's ideas. We think of Jobs and Wozniak in the world of business, or Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. For authors, often that relationship is the work with their editor. There was a documentary I saw—I think it was a New Yorker documentary that came out a while ago—talking with a writer of history books about his relationship with his editor. It was a really beautiful relationship. These were two very different personalities, but what worked was the fact that they were different. A core component of having these creative pairings is a sense of trust—or what some people today would call psychological safety—that you are willing to challenge someone's ideas, but in a space of trust. The Germans have a great phrase for it. In English it translates as “someone to steal horses with,” which I love. Hopefully our listeners have that person where you can go to them and say, “I had this idea for a book or a chapter or a character,” and that person is a “yes, and.” Like, “Yes, and have you thought about doing it this way?” or “What would happen if you did this?” They stress test your ideas. They make your ideas better. For many of us, maybe it's our husbands or wives, our partners. Some of us are lucky enough to have editors. When I started rewriting this latest book, I actually had someone like that—a human, not an AI—that I worked with, especially on taking all these random thoughts and ideas I've been expressing in keynotes and putting them into more of a book form. The format and the structures that we use for telling stories in a speech are quite different from the structure that we would use for a nonfiction book. I didn't have as much experience there, so I wanted someone who could say, “Have you thought about structuring it this way?” or “This is a great story arc you might want to think about.” So I don't know, for you, who is your creative pairing? Who is your “someone to steal horses with”? Jo: Well, it's funny. I really think since the arrival of Claude Opus 4.6, it is absolutely Claude. James: Yes, yes. Jo: All the way. I mean, so we could come onto that next in terms of how AI has changed, because I do still work with a professional editor for both fiction and nonfiction, but it is very much in the “make my finished work better” stage. It is not in the exploratory phase. I find particularly the latest reasoning models to just be fantastic at this. And my Claude is not sycophantic. The Opus 4.6—I'm sure you've been using it too—it just doesn't behave in the way that a lot of people think these AIs did. They did behave like that, and now it's changed. So let's talk about that. What are your thoughts on collaborating more effectively with AI tools, especially as they become more and more powerful? As we record this, Claude Mythos has not come out, but it's certainly rumoured to arrive. I'm pretty excited. James: So because I've been doing this AI thing for a little while, it's given me the ability to experiment with things—the early versions of what many people are using today. I'll give you an example. Even before I started writing the book, I decided to write a book proposal. Even though I could pretty much sense I wanted to independently publish this book through my own publishing company, I thought it's a good practice to put it down into a proposal form, even though I don't go to a traditional publisher or a hybrid publisher. One of the things I did within that was get a sense of who my ideal readers are. I used a very early version—this was a few years ago—of an IBM AI tool, creating what we call a psychometric map of my ideal reader. This basically tells me, over about seventy-two different factors, how this person thinks, how they feel, what their value system is, very broadly for my ideal reader. I pulled in different sources. I knew the kind of magazines and books they were reading and what their general worldview was. So I created this—going one step beyond just creating your ideal reader to really understanding their psychometrics. I do this in my keynotes too. Before I ever give a keynote or an important pitch or a presentation, I use AI to analyse the psychometrics of the audience I'm going to be speaking to. This might tell me, for example, this audience values humour a little bit more, or this audience values a bit more practicality so they want actionable next steps, or this audience is going to be a little bit authority-challenging so they're going to push back. So even in those very early stages, just starting to think about the book—who was I writing this book for, what was the purpose of the book—I was using AI to understand the psychometrics of my absolutely perfect, ideal reader. I gave her a name. It was a female reader. There was someone similar to her that I already knew. Probably for some of your listeners, they do this instinctively anyway. They maybe have a person or a few different people they think of in their head. Then from that stage, because I've been delivering lots and lots of keynotes—and this may be an important distinction in the way that I have decided to write books as opposed to how other people write books—my family were all jazz musicians. The difference between a rock musician or a pop musician and a jazz musician is this: a rock or pop musician will go into the studio, create this opus, this work, and then tour that for the next two years. A jazz musician, on the other hand, goes out and performs the songs and the things from the album that they're eventually going to create hundreds of times, thousands of times, to find out what works with audiences, and then they go into the studio and record the stuff that works best. So I created a book more like a jazz musician. I'd delivered keynote versions of the book hundreds of times before I ever decided to actually write the book. So it had been stress-tested with real people to a certain extent. Then, getting into it, I thought—well, what works as a keynote is not necessarily going to work as a structure for a book. So what I did was start using ChatGPT models at that point to think about the structural edit of the book. What was the structure going to be? What was great is you can basically feed it every single keynote you've given over the years, all the notes, everything you've done, and it could start to give me something to riff with and really get into thinking about how I was going to create this. I was using it a little like that creative pairing we spoke about earlier. Then once I'd done that—so I've now got an idea of a structural edit essentially—I then go back and speak to some humans about it. “What do you think about this?” “What do you think about that?” And try some things out over dinner conversations. “I'm thinking about doing this—what do you think?” Then once I did that, I just did the thing that I really didn't want to do, but I guess you absolutely have to do: sit in a seat for multiple weeks and just get that crappy first draft done. That was just me writing, from my voice, in my way of doing things. Every so often I would use an AI to research a particular thing, but I didn't want to slow down the pace too much. I was focused on getting that word count done. Once I had the first draft, I then brought the AI back in. In this case, I was still using OpenAI at this stage, to act more like an editor. To tell me what was weak about the book. At this point I was starting to give it the overall framing. What was weak, what chapters needed to be improved. I then went back, started reworking each of the chapters, and worked chapter by chapter using that AI as a sparring partner. But once again, the AI is not really writing my words for me. It's maybe saying, “This part could be said better. You might want to think about doing it this way,” or “You are missing a really powerful case study or example here,” or at the very end of each chapter, I have actionable next steps, and “You're missing some things here.” So I've gone through that entire process of writing, and now I'm essentially at the second draft. At this point, what I'm doing is using another AI tool—Claude, in this case—to have a different perspective on it. I gave it the work. I mentioned a couple of editors that I really respect and different writers I respect and said, “I'm going to create a virtual beta readers group. Give me feedback on this now.” For someone that's listening to this, and we're recording this in April 2026, here's some good news for you. There are now a bunch of tools out there that use AI swarms, as we call them. You can basically feed it your book and it will create synthetic readers—thousands and thousands of synthetic readers that read your kind of style of book—and it will then give you feedback from these synthetic readers. Essentially, I was just doing an early version of that. So I got the feedback from the synthetic readers, the AI readers, and then reworked a little bit. Some of the stuff I just decided not to do because it didn't align with what I was trying to say in the book. Then the next stage was I had a beta reader group of about thirty human beta readers—my ideal readers. I sent the book to them, they gave me feedback. I then used AI to give me an overview report of all their feedback, and then I was able to go back into reworking the book. That's still really just draft three of the book, not the final book at this stage. But just to give everyone a sense of opening up the process: you could see how the human and machine were working together. Jo: Yes, I love that. I also often say to people who are speakers first that you can, if you have recordings of your talks or if you use your slide decks to record them as MP3s and then just use that transcript as the basis of a draft. Obviously it's not the book or a chapter, but it can actually preserve your voice—your speaking voice—which I think can be really effective for speakers. I like your multi-step process there. And then of course, if you have audience avatars in AI, that can help you design your book marketing. So take this into book marketing and how you're doing that. James: So I still decided to go old school with a human editor—a book editor that someone had recommended to me. I used that human book editor just to go through the book. At that point we're talking about style, some stylistic things that we wanted to do, and they can pick up other things as well. So I've got that book, and then I'm obviously starting to use AI to understand what tags, what kind of copy do I want to have in terms of putting it onto Amazon, putting it onto IngramSpark, and all these other platforms I want to put it out into. I'm using Claude here in particular—and with Claude, you have something called Cowork. It wasn't quite fully happening at that point, but there were early versions of it and Claude Code—to almost start working with and creating a virtual marketing team. I give it the book and then they could start thinking about: what is the marketing strategy for this book? What does the campaign look like? What are the things that we need to do? That was then starting to break it down. We're now three months out or so before the book is due to get released, and I'm starting to deploy that particular campaign. So for example, I'm on a podcast right now, and we try different versions. We have a human going out and reaching out to potential shows for me to be a guest on, but I also have an agent. There's also one going out and finding and researching podcasts and reaching out to those podcast hosts to have me as a potential guest. So they're doing some of the tactical work there at the same time. One mistake I made—and I don't know if you've experienced this as well—if I was to go back, one thing I would do differently is this: I decided to record the audiobook version after the physical book was already committed and ready to go out. Jo: Mm-hmm. James: And I noticed so many small errors or things I would change after having spent two days in a studio recording the voice for the entire book—changes I would have made. This is something other people did ask me: why are you not using ElevenLabs or an AI clone of your voice to read the script? There are some things I feel quite personal about, and my voice is one of those things. As a professional keynote speaker, I decided I wanted to keep that and have it in there. So it's going to be different for everyone which things they decide to offload to AI, which things they decide to give to a human member of their team, and what they decide to keep to themselves. Jo: Yes, I mean, I human-record my nonfiction, but I have an AI voice clone with ElevenLabs for my fiction now. But obviously, for people listening, you can't put an ElevenLabs voice-cloned audiobook on Audible, and a lot of your sales will be on Audible, especially for a book like this. So I think that's also important. I agree with you on doing the audio edit. There's always things you want to change. But as you mentioned, you're self-publishing this, so you can just go in and change your files. James: Yes, and that was the other reason, and this was part of the marketing—now we're moving into the marketing and the business model behind the book. For me, the book doesn't have to be a financial driver in its own sense. The way that I sell books, and usually people like myself—professional speakers—is we bulk sell books to our clients. Let's say I'm speaking at four different events this month. Each has about a thousand people at them. Those organisers will buy, say, a thousand copies of the book. So at the end of that month, you might have sold four thousand copies—not individual copies. Anything that sells on Amazon or in other places is almost like a positioning piece. Obviously you want people to buy the book and learn things from the book, but in terms of the distribution model, it's slightly different because I'm primarily selling through bulk sales. Now, here's a little twist you can do on this, and this is a decision I made even before we released this version of the book. I speak to lots of different industries. There was a speaker and author—I've forgotten his name now, I think he was from Florida—and what he decided to do was to write a slightly different version of his main book every year, but for a different industry. So what this allows him to do is, let's say in my case, I'm doing a version of the SuperCreativity book just for legal professionals because I speak to a lot of law firms and legal groups. I've already started working on a version of the book which is a little bit more attuned to that audience. As a speaker, it allows me to go to all these law firms and legal associations and bar associations and say, “Hey, I've just written the book on creativity and artificial intelligence for the legal industry.” That makes you a very bookable proposition for a client. And then obviously you can sell books from that as well. And that's before we get into the foreign language versions. That's just a model that happens to work pretty well for my part of the industry, but obviously it's going to be very different for other types of authors. Jo: No, I think that's great. For nonfiction authors, as you say, there are different revenue models. Your income, I guess, would be what, eighty, ninety per cent speaking revenue? Or do you have other things as well? James: Yes, primarily it's the keynote speaking, and anything that comes from the back of that. Sometimes it's boardroom advisory work that I do as well. But primarily it's the speaking side. So really the book is just the simplest form to get my ideas out and the most affordable form. Jo: Mm-hmm. James: Because the other thing is, you want as many people getting your ideas as possible, and there is no better, more affordable way of getting someone's ideas out there than in the form of a book. I think it's just the most unbelievable transmitter of knowledge—a book. That's why I love to write the book as well. A lot of my friends say, “Listen, books are old hat. You don't need to do a book any more. You can do these other things, other forms, online courses.” I've done lots of online courses in the past and membership sites and all those things, but there's just something that is great about a book—to be able to summarise your ideas at a particular point in time. It's also a great transmitter of value to other people. And it is affordable. Any book, someone can download a book on Audible or wherever they want—that's just an affordable way of absorbing that content. Jo: Yes. Well, of course we are all fans of books here. I do speak—I don't tend to do keynote speaking. I do more content speaking at conferences. For people listening, keynote speaking is where you tend to get the higher revenue. So if people listening have books already—let's say they have nonfiction books or even fiction books that could be turned somehow into different topics—if people want to get booked for speaking gigs, preferably ones that pay— How would you recommend authors think about moving into speaking if that's something they want to do? James: So obviously it's much easier for nonfiction authors to do that. I mean, I'll give you an example. I was speaking at an event last week in New York for L'Oréal, the hair care and cosmetics company. They had six different speakers. One of them was a speaker on macroeconomics and geopolitics. Another was an expert on communications. Another was an expert on AI. Another was an expert on storytelling. So you have to think: does my topic have value for that type of audience—that corporate audience? An easy way of finding that is if you just go onto any of the speaker bureau websites, type in “speaker bureaus,” look for the speaker bureaus, and then type in your topic area—emotional intelligence or whatever the topic area is—and look at the other speakers. See if there is obviously a number of speakers talking on this area. Importantly, look at how busy they are and look at their fee levels as well. I did an online summit a few years ago called the International Speakers Summit, where I interviewed a hundred and fifty of the world's best professional keynote speakers. I interviewed Sally Hogshead, who's an author and a speaker, and she said to me, “James, you're going out speaking about creativity, but if you just twisted it a little bit and spoke more in terms of innovation rather than creativity, you would earn an extra five thousand dollars per keynote.” So creativity and innovation—an extra five thousand dollars. That's just a simple thing that, as you get to understand the industry, you learn. Then once you do that, it's like any business—you have to treat it like a business, obviously. What makes someone a great storyteller on stages is not the same as what makes a great storyteller on the written word. So depending on where you're at, you might need certain training and skills development. If you are listening to this from America, there are things like the National Speakers Association, the NSA. If you're living in the UK, the Professional Speakers Association. These are great ways just to develop your skill set and learn from other professional speakers. Here's the good news, I didn't know anything about professional speaking until 2017–18, and it was only from having a conversation with someone who said, “Listen, you have some original thoughts. You can get paid to speak about this on stage.” Then I spent the next year really researching and understanding and looking at how to do it and creating a minimum viable product—a speech—that was a very short period of time, a year. Most of the listeners here have gone through that process of writing a book, which takes many, many months. So you have the stamina to do this type of work. You just need to find out where you fit. I thought I was going to be a speaker in marketing. I thought that was going to be my thing. And it turns out that's not what the market wanted from me. They wanted me to talk about creativity and artificial intelligence. So you have to listen to the market, like you have to listen to your readers. Jo: Yes, I think that's really interesting. I was also a member of the PSA here, and I learned in Australia with the NSAA as it was. James: Yes. Jo: And that thing about who you speak to—I mainly speak to author conferences, who, I just want to be frank, don't pay very well, if at all. So exactly what you said there— If you want to be a highly paid speaker, you have to pick the audience who's going to pay, as well as a topic that works with them. It is a very different thing to writing a book, I think. James: It is a different model. This is what was interesting when I interviewed those hundred and fifty professional speakers—the thing that came back loud and clear is there is a model to suit everyone. Jo: Mm. James: So the model that works for me—getting paid high fees to go and travel around the world, speaking on stages to primarily corporate audiences—that is not the only model. There is another model, which is called the “sell from the stage” model, where you maybe don't get paid anything to go and speak on the stage, or very little, but what you're doing is you're selling your consulting, your online course, your books, your other products from the back of the stage. That's another model as well. I have friends who have young families and they are writers and they don't want to schlep on planes like I do. I know one speaker in particular who never leaves his own city. He is a very successful professional speaker. He happens to live in Orlando, Florida, which is one of the busiest cities for conferences. So literally, he's home with his kids every night. He gets to do all this cool stuff he wants. He never has to step on a plane if he doesn't want to. That just shows you the range. I remember I once interviewed a person whose title was a Buddhist monk, French speaker, and author. He figured out he could live very affordably by living in Thailand. So he lives in Thailand for part of the year and he's very into meditation, mindfulness, yoga, and writing. He figured out he only had to give two keynotes per year to pay for his entire lifestyle. That was it. So that gives him a lot of freedom. He does those two corporate keynotes a year and for the rest of the year he's doing his yoga, his meditation, his writing, and surfboarding, whatever he's into as well. So you can see there's a whole range of different ways you can design that life. Jo: Yes, we talk a lot about definition of success and it's great to hear those different examples. So before we finish up, I just want to come back to your journey into the writing side, into books and self-publishing. We all understand, me and the listeners, how hard it is to write a book and also to market a book, but we've got the bug. So we wonder: how much have you got the bug? Do you plan on doing more writing, more books, or do you still want to lean more heavily into speaking? James: Primarily the income for me will still come from speaking. I remember listening to Elizabeth Gilbert once when she talked about her writing. She said she always wanted to have other things, so she never had to push onto her writing that it had to be the income stream for her. If it was successful, great, that's fantastic. So I have a little bit of a similar view to that. In terms of my own writing, I've got about five different nonfiction book ideas I'm now looking at. Some of them relate to speeches that I already do. Some don't. I'm looking at different versions of the SuperCreativity book, so there'll be other versions coming out—different industries, different languages. That gives you a few years of work. The other side that I want to develop is the fiction writing side. I'm already starting to work on a fiction book at the moment—a little bit like this idea of one for them, one for me. Jo: Mm-hmm. James: So one for them is for the corporate audience, that world that I live in, and the other one is for me, for my own creativity. My hope—and I don't know, maybe we need to speak in a year's time when I've written and published it—is that by doing the fiction side, it will make me a better storyteller on stages as well for my corporate audience. It will help me understand story arcs, slightly different ways of expressing stories, building emotion, building the anti-hero characters within a book, for example. So I'm hoping that they both feed off each other. But we will see. Jo: Yes, we will. All the best with that. So where can people find you and your books and everything you do online? James: The easiest place to go is JamesTaylor.me, and you can find the book, which is called SuperCreativity, there. Or just go to wherever you buy your books—your local independent bookstore—and get a copy of SuperCreativity. The audiobook may already be out by the time you're listening to this as well. If you want to learn a little bit more, we also have a podcast called the SuperCreativity Podcast, where I interview lots of wonderful guests talking about this area of super creativity. Jo: Well, thanks so much for your time, James. That was brilliant. James: Thank you, Joanna. Thanks for having me as a guest on the show.The post SuperCreativity And KeyNote Speaking With A Non-Fiction Book With James Taylor first appeared on The Creative Penn.

The Ascension can't compete with Christmas, but the story offers insights into holy living. Elizabeth Gilbert wrote, ‘There's always another level up.' Pastor Dan connects the Ascension to modern life.

Whitney writes in raving about Jones Road Beauty's Miracle Balm and What the Foundation. Amy shares she’s obsessing over her new face tanner, SaltyFace. Listener Corin shares a hilarious and heartwarming story about raising her daughters with open period conversations…including her 12-year-old's unforgettable suggestion to practice tampon use with a drilled watermelon. And Heather, calling in from Canada at 53, weighs in on a recent hot topic: naming your daughter after yourself. Then, Amy and Kat dive into Elizabeth Gilbert's (Eat, Pray, Love) fascinating "Hummingbird vs. Jackhammer" theory…are you someone who laser-focuses on one passion for life, or do you flit from interest to interest, collecting experiences along the way? Neither path is wrong, and the answer just might help you find exactly where you're supposed to be. Get some Feeling Things merch by clicking HERE! (FeelingThingsPodcast.com) Sign up for the Feeling Things newsletter HERE! Watch us on Youtube HERE! Call and leave a voicemail: 877-207-2077 Email: heythere@feelingthingspodcast.com HOSTS: Amy Brown // RadioAmy.com // @RadioAmy Kat Van Buren // threecordstherapy.com // @KatVanburenSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On tending to our interdependence, living life fully, and dying with attention and equanimity. 0:00 — Introduction  1:34 — Overview of Ann's Book "Traveling in Bardo" 3:55 — Personal Reflections on Grandmother's Funeral 7:20 — The Role of Practice in Embracing Impermanence 16:15 — Living with Attention and Interdependence 34:57 — Authenticity and True Nature 42:09 — Conclusion and Final Thoughts Ann Tashi Slater writes for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Paris Review, and Granta, among others, and is a contributing editor at Tricycle. She presents and teaches workshops at Princeton, Columbia, Oxford, Asia Society, and The American University of Paris, and was a regular speaker at NYC's Rubin Museum of Art during the museum's 20-year run. Ann's new book, Traveling in Bardo: The Art of Living in an Impermanent World was released by Balance/Hachette in September, 2025. TRAVELING IN BARDO explores how we can find meaning and happiness in a world where change is the only certainty. Interweaving explorations of "bardo" between-states in relation to marriage and friendship, parents and children, and work and creativity with stories of her Tibetan ancestors and Buddhist teachings on the fleeting nature of existence, Slater illuminates what the teachings have to tell us in our contemporary lives. She relays vital wisdom from Tibetan culture, giving us a bold, new framework to navigate moments of change and live life fully. With a foreword by Dani Shapiro, the book has been praised by Elizabeth Gilbert, Melissa Febos, Sharon Salzberg, and Julia Alvarez, among others, and has been selected as a "Must-Read" by the Next Big Idea Club, co-curated by Malcolm Gladwell. In the midst of this shifting landscape, Slater invites us to embrace impermanence in a powerful way, rooted in ancient wisdom. During over forty years of writing and speaking about her Tibetan-American heritage and the relevance of Buddhism in Western society, Slater has come to see how Tibetan bardo views on impermanence can transform the way we live. A luminous guide to navigating transition and impermanence, it offers us the opportunity to find happiness in an impermanent world.

When was the last time you made a decision that fit for you? Performance coach and creative business strategist Shari Teigman joins Lesley Logan to pull back the curtain on the chaotic beauty of perimenopause. Shari specializes in helping high-achieving people stop following outdated templates to finally start listening to their own internal rhythm. This episode is a permission slip to stop holding everyone else's baggage, how to move from fear to curiosity, and start making decisions that actually serve the woman you are becoming today. If you have any questions about this episode or want to get some of the resources we mentioned, head over to LesleyLogan.co/podcast https://lesleylogan.co/podcast/. If you have any comments or questions about the Be It pod shoot us a message at beit@lesleylogan.co mailto:beit@lesleylogan.co. And as always, if you're enjoying the show please share it with someone who you think would enjoy it as well. It is your continued support that will help us continue to help others. Thank you so much! Never miss another show by subscribing at LesleyLogan.co/subscribe https://lesleylogan.co/podcast/#follow-subscribe-free.In this episode you will learn about:Navigating the "not this" phase to rediscover your true identity.Why perimenopause is the best time for deep internal decluttering.The "red shoe" analogy for carrying other people's emotional baggage.How to transition from paralyzing fear to productive, playful curiosity.Using internal contradictions to stop lying to your own nervous system.Episode References/Links:Shari Teigman Website - https://shariteigman.comShari Teigman Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/shariteigmanThe Maverick Way: A Field Guide to Coming Undone on Purpose - https://sharidteigman.ac-page.com/TheMaverickWayPrelaunch?test=trueFemGevity - femgevityhealth.comBig Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert - elizabethgilbert.com/books/big-magicTiny Habits by BJ Fogg - tinyhabits.com/bookWhat to Expect When You're Expecting by Heidi Murkoff - https://a.co/d/0j80fU42Submit your wins or questions - https://beitpod.com/questionsGuest Bio:Shari Teigman serves as a catalyst for high achievers who are ready to dismantle the status quo and reclaim their individuality. As a performance mentor and strategist, she guides leaders through the process of unlearning rigid structures to make room for radical, creative breakthroughs. Shari is best known for her ability to cut through the noise with a blend of sharp strategic insight and a "Maverick" spirit, encouraging her clients to stop adjusting to external pressures and start building lives that resonate with their core values.Beyond her strategic work, Shari is a dedicated advocate for personal sovereignty, helping global professionals navigate the complex intersection of high-level performance and emotional well-being. By challenging the traditional "resiliency" narrative, she provides the tools necessary to move from a state of constant survival into one of intentional, authentic growth. Whether she is addressing the mental shifts of perimenopause or the hurdles of international business, Shari's mission is to ensure that success never comes at the cost of self-recognition. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure and give us a five star rating and leave us a review on iTunes, Podcast Addict, Podchaser or Castbox. https://lovethepodcast.com/BITYSIDEALS! DEALS! DEALS! DEALS! https://onlinepilatesclasses.com/memberships/perks/#equipmentCheck out all our Preferred Vendors & Special Deals from Clair Sparrow, Sensate, Lyfefuel BeeKeeper's Naturals, Sauna Space, HigherDose, AG1 and ToeSox https://onlinepilatesclasses.com/memberships/perks/#equipmentBe in the know with all the workshops at OPC https://workshops.onlinepilatesclasses.com/lp-workshop-waitlistBe It Till You See It Podcast Survey https://pod.lesleylogan.co/be-it-podcasts-surveyBe a part of Lesley's Pilates Mentorship https://lesleylogan.co/elevate/FREE Ditching Busy Webinar https://ditchingbusy.com/Resources:Watch the Be It Till You See It podcast on YouTube! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCq08HES7xLMvVa3Fy5DR8-gLesley Logan website https://lesleylogan.co/Be It Till You See It Podcast https://lesleylogan.co/podcast/Online Pilates Classes by Lesley Logan https://onlinepilatesclasses.com/Online Pilates Classes by Lesley Logan on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjogqXLnfyhS5VlU4rdzlnQProfitable Pilates https://profitablepilates.com/about/Follow Us on Social Media:Instagram https://www.instagram.com/lesley.logan/The Be It Till You See It Podcast YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCq08HES7xLMvVa3Fy5DR8-gFacebook https://www.facebook.com/llogan.pilatesLinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/lesley-logan/The OPC YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/@OnlinePilatesClasses Episode Transcript:Shari Teigman 0:00  In our lives, we walk around carrying everyone else's red shoes and polka dotted bags and pile of crap, and you walk around wheeling it with you, because you call it identity, you call it belonging. You call it your culture, your religion, your family, your blah, blah, blah. And you open up this bag and it's filled with shit you don't know, so you have no room for new stuff.Lesley Logan 0:18  Welcome to the Be It Till You See It podcast where we talk about taking messy action, knowing that perfect is boring. I'm Lesley Logan, Pilates instructor and fitness business coach. I've trained thousands of people around the world and the number one thing I see stopping people from achieving anything is self-doubt. My friends, action brings clarity and it's the antidote to fear. Each week, my guest will bring bold, executable, intrinsic and targeted steps that you can use to put yourself first and Be It Till You See It. It's a practice, not a perfect. Let's get started. Lesley Logan 0:57  All right, Be It babe, get ready. Get your notes out if you're driving, Get your ears on. This is an interview I was stoked to have, and I'm even more excited for it to be in your ears right now than I could have imagined. Shari Teigman is our guest today. She is the coach for Mavericks. But really, truly, you high flying women that listen to this podcast who are going through perimenopause, maybe already there may be on the other side, but when I talk about being it until you see it, sometimes you're like, well, who am I? Now? We are going to dive into so many different amazing tools, tats. There's going to be nuggets that are going to just go that hit right where I needed it to. You will relisten to this episode. I know it's great. We did record during Mercury in Retrograde. So there are a couple of times where I think there might be a blip in the audio. I promise you you didn't miss anything. So please bear with the three of those that happen if my team didn't get rid of them and and just know that like the magic is here, and it's very much worth listening to, and relistening to and sharing with a girlfriend of yours who needs to hear it. So here is Shari Teigman. Lesley Logan 2:06  All right, Be It babe. So here's the deal. I have been kind of stalking this woman for a bit through the socials, and when I saw her and what she raves about, I was like, oh, we have to have her on the be it pod. She is exactly what you guys need to hear today and probably repeat this episode. We haven't had it yet, but I have a feeling there's gonna be some nuggets you're gonna want to relisten to. So Shari Teigman, tell everyone who you are and what you rock at. Shari Teigman 2:30  I would say I feel pressure, but I don't. I'm just excited. So thank you for having me. I'm very excited to be here and stalking right back. So I always love finding a friend on the interwebs that sounds and moves like me. Well, you move better than I do, Pilates and all, but the energy, the excitement and the passion for life and a lot of realness as well. So I am a performance coach and a creative business strategist, and I help people unleash the Maverick within them. So it's stopping following everyone else's bullshit templates and moving into a space where you're listening to your own gut, you're following your own rules, and it doesn't mean you're rebelling against anything, and it doesn't mean you have to be angry at everyone. You know the stage of life can come with a little perimenopausal rage, which is always welcome in my world. But I work with both men and women to find a beat of their own drums so that they don't have to be checking in everyone's yards to see what they're doing and measuring themselves non stop. We're not in high school. I didn't do it in high school. I'm certainly not doing it now. So that is the fire that I like to bring to the world.Lesley Logan 3:27  Oh, I love that, and I love how clear you are in what you do. And I'm sure many people's ears perked up on the menopausal race, all that stuff, because I think, like one of the things that so I started doing this podcast years ago, and I'm like, I know who I am and people are trying to figure out why I'm so confident, and really, it's just because I do things scared. But then, like, you know, you start to get past 40, and you're like, why am I freaking out? Well, who? Why am I (inaudible). Shari Teigman 3:52  Fearless me? Lesley Logan 3:54  Yeah, why, why am I hesitating? Like, what? What is happening and and like, in being until I see it, it's like, wow, this is, like, a lifelong thing. Thank goodness I like doing this. But also, but also, like, it is interesting to get to know yourself again when you especially for the women who love the show and who we attract, who thought they did, and now they're like, kind of feeling like my girlfriend said today that she feels like she has, like, sea legs.Shari Teigman 4:20  Yeah, it's so nice of you to call it interesting, to get us to know ourselves, because I have some other choice words for the state of life while I accept it and rage, it's fascinating. And may not get all metaphysical here, and you're going to have to drag me into a crone phase of my life. I don't plan on going lightly or gracefully, but there is the no shits given point where we do get to course correct and say, okay, for those of us who did know ourselves for the past 15, 20, 30 years to check in that that's still what we want, or the identifications are still valid and accurate and have not expired just because everyone else like someone they work for everyone else. So it's a real face to the fire moment of I say I'm all these things. I better check in that I still am because I'm too tired and can't remember anything to pretend I'm something that I'm not. So I think it's a real truth telling phase. And like I said, I'm not planning on getting old and wise, but I will be loud and old and happy, fun. I just got to get through this can't remember my name thing, and then, you know, carry on to the next chapter. Lesley Logan 5:28  The other day, I saw this thing, and the guy was on Instagram, and the guy was like, hey, you meet someone who was born in 1995 and it's, they're 30 years old. And you're like, that's interesting. I'm 30 years old. And then I'm like, weird. And then I was like, wait, oh, I'm not I. I just keep thinking that I am.Shari Teigman 5:45  Yes, my eldest son turned 26 and I am not okay because I'm 22 and I'm not good at math, but that is not math. That is off, all off. Lesley Logan 5:50  So you said we have to, like, check in with ourselves. And I think that that is, like, a brilliant thing that no one has told us to do, right? Like, as you grow up, everyone's like, what do you want to be when you grow up? And then you go to school to be that thing, and you're like, check the box. And I think all the high flyers are good box checkers. Like, check this box and check that box and and so we've checked all the boxes, and then we get to a place, it's like, but how do you check in? Like, you add more boxes. What? What did you do, Shari? Like, how do you check in to see if these are the things you still want?Shari Teigman 6:22  So it's a long answer, Lesley. Lesley Logan 6:24  I'll take it. Shari Teigman 6:27  For me, I have, I have decluttered the boxes many times, because for the first 33 years of my life, I fit very well into the boxes I was supposed to that I was given. And I did a great job, and I was funny about it and zesty about it, and Miss bubbly and head cheerleader and exactly what you think I was like at 18. I still am like at 51 and I went through a really rough divorce in my early 30s as a mom of two kids, and after a couple of years of survival and just knowing what I didn't want, which is a very painful but beautiful process I can say now later, that not knowing what I want, Liz Gilbert had a great I saw her in an interview, and I love her. In my head, she's my best friend, but she just doesn't know it yet. So we'll let her know it's fine. But my bestie, Liz said on this podcast, she went through an era which was called not this. So everything became not this, not this, not this. Most of us think we have to know what we want, and you said it, we're asked when we're younger, what do you want to be? I have no idea what the hell I want to be. I have no idea what the things are my options. So I can pick something off the cereal shelf and not know what's inside. And then, because I said it, I then went to school for it, and then I wore the t-shirt for it, and I told everyone about it, and I posted on social media about it. I can't not do it now. So we wear these costumes for a while, and then they start getting tight and uncomfortable, and not because of the perimenopausal weight. I mean, internally. And then you say, wait, am I allowed to put it down? Is the question I asked myself. So in this, not this phase, at the end of my divorce with these two amazing kids that I love, I then free myself from a situation and I saw black because I had no idea who I was and I had no idea what I wanted. I hadn't gotten up to asking myself that question, probably for the first time in my life at 34. Terrifying, highly don't recommend, but we got here. And so I think at that point, I stripped away everything that I knew and said, well, if none of this was true, what if I could be anything? So hence, the Maverick was born after, I mean, I make it sound really nice, there were a lot of crying on the floor and break down in the therapist's office. And I had had psychiatrists call me scrappy. He's like, you don't need meds, you're scrappy, you'll be fine. I blew up at him, and I don't react to anyone. I was like, I get a reward for being able to constantly be in survival mode. Americans, brace yourself. He refunded me my $250 which does not happen in our country. He was so apologetic that he pissed me off so much he probably got all the rage that everyone in my life until then had not gotten. It was amazing. So the long answer is, I checked in, and all of a sudden nothing felt like me. And while that was scary, it was so liberating, because I didn't have to fit new stuff into an old package. I was like, wee let's just turn the whole thing upside down, and I rebuilt what I wanted and put the right things back in in the drawer, instead of whose is this sock? Like example I always use is, I think the first piece of finding yourself is unpacking. So let's say you go on a girl's weekend with a bunch of friends, and the last night's a little blurry. No one remembers how they got to the airport. You get home, you open your polka dotted suitcase, and there's a red shoe. You don't have a red shoe. You go into the WhatsApp group, you're like, hi, guys, has everyone thrown up yet? Anyone's red shoe? Does this belong to anyone? Of course, you know it's not yours. But in our lives, we walk around carrying everyone else's red shoes and polka dotted bags and pile of crap, and you walk around wheeling it with you, because you call it identity, you call it belonging, you call it your culture, your religion, your family, your blah, blah, blah. And you open up this bag and it's filled with shit you don't know so you have no room for new stuff. So you and I's come into the world with all this passion and all this excitement, and everyone's hands are filled wondering, where do I put one more thing? You have to unpack, and you have to understand why you keep repacking the same thing in order to then get a chance to make any choices.Lesley Logan 10:33  That is an I love that long answer so much because it's like the simple like, the part that we all wanted to hear was like the short answer, oh, just do these three things. Shari Teigman 10:44  I can't do it because I don't believe it. And I used to listen to it and cry and think I was broken because I don't have that availability. So now what do I do? Lesley Logan 10:51  Yeah, and I also like, thank goodness, like, that guy gave that money back. I can't believe there was a guy and he gave his money back. I can't believe it was a man who told you you don't need drugs. But I can't believe apologize (inaudible) because one of the things that like, I it like, is nailed on a chalkboard when someone goes, oh, you're just so resilient. I'm like, I don't want to be resilient anymore.Shari Teigman 11:14  And I hang that one up because I know, and I know you all appreciate it, but it's killing me from the inside, so (inaudible) anymore? Thank you for appreciating it. Lesley Logan 11:25  Right because also, like, of course, as a business owner, as someone who's still, like making the money we need to make till we're retired and living our best life. Resiliency is great in my day to day, like operating my business, but like being resilient in my friendships and my family-ships and all that stuff, it's like, no, because then you don't ever check on me. No one checks on me. Shari Teigman 11:43  And also, we don't know how to ask for help yet then, because it's already uncomfortable and there's no room for it, so you're like, but can I? No, can't, no. Lesley Logan 11:51  Why can't I ask you because I'm holding your red shoe. I can't ask you because I'm holding your red shoe. Shari Teigman 11:56  And I never learned how, so I guess I'm the red shoe holder now.Lesley Logan 12:01  Okay, so, but then, like, so we have to, I love the not this, and I love the unpacking. I think that that is so key. It's, I mean, like, you know, there's something I want to, I want to do in our business, and it requires letting go of some other things. Like, you can't, can't just keep adding to the, you know, it's so then it's unraveling. Like, well, what am I letting go of? And what? What does that look like? And for everyone listening who is freaking out, I'm not letting go of the things that you're paying for, don't worry. It's like, doesn't affect you. It's not affecting you. There's no change affecting you. Okay? It's affecting the people who work (inaudible) I know I'm like, it's affecting, it's affecting the people who work for me. It's not affecting you. You have to stipulate, because people start to freak out, like, so, but thankfully, I understand that right, like the old, the old me would have been like, okay, let's just, let's just, let's just add these, undo that expander zipper and, like, shove, we'll just shove this in. So I love that. I know that about myself now, and I think that that is the real key. But I think, you know, you Shari, got to figure that out kind of in your 30s and so, and like, I find that a lot of people are figuring out in perimenopause, as they're freaking out and don't know themselves, and now they have to unpack. And that's a I find, I still, I feel nervous for that, because is it a hard time to, like, relearn who you are, or is it the best time to relearn how you are?Shari Teigman 13:21  Both. It's hard and the best time. Because as crazy as this sounds, because from a neuroplasticity place, we can't hold on to as much of the story as we did because of the brain fog and the hormones changing, there's a release valve comes. But what's terrifying about it is we never had it before. So the feeling of loss of control is one that makes us want to grip to the old story, my old identity, the things that I achieved in my job before the younger people came in and take it, or technology's changing, or my kids no longer think I'm cool, or I've been with my husband 40 years. I can't even hear him chew anymore. You know, like all the things that we hear from this rage that they don't realize is coming from a lack of tolerance, the tipping point in themselves of what they've made okay for themselves for all these years. So it comes out in a burst, because it's not going to come out any other way. There's not going to be everyone at 2pm everyone open up their computers, scream, and then close it, and we'll all feel better. I mean, I feel like we should start this. The world would be a much better place. But since we don't have it, we wait until everything is chaotic and we hate everything, and then we have to start looking at it. So the kind of stuff I teach, when I teach with FemGevity and with a lot of my private clients, is just starting to ask yourself better questions. Instead of assuming it's only this one category of life, it gives you more permission to be creative. I think if we move from fear to curiosity, we ask better questions, we get better answers. It doesn't mean I'm asking anyone to change anything yet, but when was the last time you made a decision that fit for you? I know it hurts, because even as I teach it, I'm like, brace yourself, girls, because we're going in and I'm going in there with you, oh, my god, I haven't made a decision for myself or I didn't think of my partner, or I didn't think of my team, or I didn't think of my kids, or I didn't think what my family is going to think. I don't know. I don't know the last time I asked myself that. So then I have someone just start with an easy thing. What do you want for dinner? And it's heartbreaking to ask a woman in their 40s and 50s, what she wants for dinner, and she looks at you with a blank look because she doesn't know. She (inaudible) went to what do I have leftovers for the kids, for tomorrow, for school? What can my husband take? What did I get from the supermarket that's about to spoil? I asked what you want for dinner, and then the tears go. What kind of TV do you want to watch? What sheets do you want on the bed? And we're talking professional, high achieving women who just look completely blankly at no one ever taught me to I wouldn't, wasn't allowed to ask a question. There was no space in my high achieving masculine run life and then emotional vulnerability that I have to hide. Who has space for it? So I think if we allow ourselves in this perimenopausal phase to say the exploration can be curious and creative and playful and find community to do it in. You're not crazy or we're all crazy together, and we're just going to figure this out, and there's no right or wrong answer, and no one is taking anything away from you. So it's in sovereignty we get to unpack one whole red shoe for another three years? Go right ahead, girl, no one's pulling the shoe away from you, but if we can slowly untangle the things that hurt us the most limit us the most, a lot of the other stuff sorts itself. It just feels like an emergency because we've never asked ourselves the question. Lesley Logan 16:38  Yeah, it feels like an emergency because I also think like we are so, our brains don't really know how to prioritize different things, so we the red shoe and the leftovers and that big merger you're working on, or whatever it is, they all take up the same priority level in the brain. So that's why they feel like that, right? But I want to highlight something, you said, untangle. And I think that's where a lot of people don't understand that that's such a key word I got to study with BJ Fogg and his and his habits training, and he talks about how to break a habit, which is, you have to, there's no such thing. It's not a stick. You have to unravel it. Because a habit is something that you no longer like, that you do, like a habit.Shari Teigman 17:21  I don't know how to make habits. I'm like, oh, sure, you do. Where's your chocolate habit? Where is your phone scrolling habit? Like you're an epic master at your habits. Everyone needs to be different. Who is it? We're wired.Lesley Logan 17:33  We're wired, you're, it literally is a brain wiring thing. And so untangling those things, and it's true, like when you can figure out, okay, I would like to untangle that I have I don't get to choose what I'm having for dinner. You know, then it becomes, you get to figure out, well, where did it start? Well, actually, maybe everyone you've been thinking about, everybody wants for dinner, and they actually thought you were thinking what you wanted for dinner.Shari Teigman 17:57  And also you're dead on. And it's a more gentle process. It's not like you walk into the family and say, you can all fuck off and make your own food. I want pasta, and they will look at you like, did you bang your head? And then that perimenopausal terror on everyone else's face, receiving the rage is like, oh, wait a second. Can everyone pick a night like they're gentle ways to do this. I actually want everyone else to make some decisions in this house, teenagers then feel empowered. A partner is then included. You get to pick, or guess what, you're allowed to eat something different than everyone else. It's most of these parameters we put on ourselves, and we blame everyone else because we didn't ask.Lesley Logan 18:34  Yeah, yes, no, I'm laughing so hard. Okay, so my husband, he's amazing at doing projects at night. Like, he like, he like, like, the sun goes down, I go to bed, and he is like, you know, he becomes the midnight gardener. Or, like, he puts together something, or, right before I turn this on, he's like, hey, did you see the thing I did in your office? Like, he put all the cords, you know, all the cords, in like, a little sleeve. So, like, it's nice. I know, we love him. Last night, he was doing the same thing he did the same thing he did the night before. The night before, I slept like the dead. I got like a 90% recovery, last night, 1:14 I'm hearing this like It's like drilling, and I am like, did I get up and go, hey, that's I just woke up to that. No. Instead, do you know I did? I sat there for 15 minutes going, when the fuck is it gonna be done? (inaudible) And then I marched down the hall, like, what the fuck are you doing? Shari Teigman 19:28  Why is this a good idea? Lesley Logan 19:31  Why are you doing this? And he's like, I did this last night. I didn't wake up last night. And I was like, well, clears in a different part of my rim cycle. I'm clearly in a different part of my cycle right now.Shari Teigman 19:44  Wind has blown. I am no longer who I was yesterday. You should have known that.Lesley Logan 19:49  Hello, but like, it's this funny thing, because we we do take on so much, and we wait until it's the paramount explosion to say what we're thinking instead of like, I thought, at at the moment I woke up, I thought, what is that noise? And if I had just been inquisitive it could have been, oh, hey, instead of, like, the and then, of course, did I sleep? No, I didn't sleep because I was angry.Shari Teigman 20:10  You weren't finished. You were still processing. You know, it comes like someone doesn't throw out a tissue and the whole house you're on fire just because you didn't say 14 other things because, oh, it's fine. It's fine. It's no longer fine, ladies, it, none is, nothing's fine. So we have to find our voices be kind, and realize we taught everyone else how to treat us so we don't get to be mad at them. We get to teach them what the next version of us needs, and most of us have no idea. So we get to sit down with our children, and we get to sit down with our partners and our friends and our family members, as terrifying as it is, and say there's a new sheriff in town, and I'm just getting to know her, and I need a little grace. And I like I know for my partner, I'm not speaking for him, but I could see the relief on his face when I'll actually say what I'm feeling, instead of him trying to guess which mood I'm in, or I say I have no idea what I need. And he's so relieved, because then he doesn't have to figure it out. Like the people who love us just want us better. Is it over yet? I wish it was over. I don't have cold. I'm just 51 it does. I don't know when it ends.Lesley Logan 21:17  I know that's the fun part. It's like, like, and also, and also, if you care about your heart health, ladies, you want to keep it going for a really long time, so then you better figure out how to talk about what you need and how to manage is the, not the word I want to because I don't like the way that it sounds, but like navigate or dance with all of this change, because once you are on the other side of this and your brain has changed and all the things, then you get to worry about your heart. So I'm just gonna say like you might want to lengthen this out and figure out who you want to be.Shari Teigman 21:54  Also, what an opportunity. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I like to take the funny side of life. If we already feel like shit. Why don't we start unpacking when we already feel like shit? I'm not gonna wait till I feel better to then figure it out. I'll be much more honest with myself if I have frustration. It's like, you know what? I don't want to do that anymore, even though I've done it every Tuesday for the past 20 years. I'm good. I don't want to apologize for it. No is a complete sentence. I don't have to be unkind. But I'm done. I'm done with that task at work. People then learn your new boundaries, and weirdly, they adjust faster than we do. No one else stays up at night worrying about this. Oh, she wants something different, cool. Oh, God, I should have said that 20 years ago. Why didn't I say that 20 years ago? Lesley Logan 22:35  Yeah, yeah. Well, and that's, that is, I think, where a lot of people get stuck. It's like, why, why? And it's like, almost like it's that is worth exploring. And also, in the meantime, just start sticking up for yourself now.Shari Teigman 22:46  Process it later but we'll get to it. And I find a lot of my clients, both men and women, are so terrified to put down what they've been doing, because if they realize that it's much easier to get unstuck than it was to get stuck, they're mortified at how long they tortured themselves, in their mindset, in their performance, in their roles, in what they made true. I could just decide tomorrow not to be stressed about that. Obviously, there's more to it. But then, what do I do with the 20 years of torture that's I have to reconcile that I lost that time, or I gave that away, or I let someone else make decisions for me, it's painful, but we don't have to sit in it, acknowledge it, and say, I'm not going to lose any more days.Lesley Logan 23:28  Yeah, yeah. I guess, like, do they need to I mean, do they need to feel the pain? Do they need to grieve? How do they what is the best way to acknowledge it so that they can, you know, keep going with the new way and be satisfied in that?Shari Teigman 23:41  I love the question, because most people think I can't do that. You have no choice if you want to get there. I believe that equal to the level of joy and fulfillment and peace you want, you have to be willing to go as deep as you want to go high it's we don't get to close off one door and then think, you know the arrow is going to stretch without pulling it back. So I like to call it the glorious end. I can be pissed off and ready. I can be terrified and excited. I can be sad and elated about something. So if I don't allow the emotion, the emotion will sneak up on me when I don't want it, it will come out in the who put the empty cereal box back in the cabinet. It'll come out at work when it should have come out at home and vice versa. It'll come out in too small a new decision, because I don't have the bandwidth to make the real decision I want. Why would we waste more energy? So for me, I tell everyone, men and women, feel it. Punch a pillow. Cry in a pillow, write it out. Burn it out, whatever your ritual needs to be dance it out, bang it out. I'm actually coming out with a journal in a few months that is basically, it's called The Maverick Way: A Field Guide to Coming Undone on Purpose. And every exercise is more ridiculous than the next one. And it's like, the Fuck It Resume is one of them. Like, what are the things you're terrible at? Write it out like we have to tell the truth so we can't. Pretend to only have the highlight reel, and then feel like a human being I am awful at some things, which reminds me of why I'm so good at other things. Then I've got my own way. I don't know what I want. Of course, you don't know. You don't know who you are. You're not willing to say I'm not good at that. Knowing that bothers me. That makes me cry. Am I too much? Okay, am I too little for someone else? Okay. We have to take all of these rules away, feel what we need to feel, and say, I know that might not make may not make you sad, Lesley, but I've been thinking about this for 40 years, and I need to sit in this for a couple of hours and just grieve what I made okay, or mourn what I lost, the conversations I didn't have, the jobs I didn't get, the pain I allowed myself because I didn't want to hurt anyone else, like ow, that hurts, and we get tired of the feeling very quickly when we let it stick it out, when you avoid it, it will chase your ass everywhere and pop up when you don't want it. I am going to grieve, because it's part of my process of making space for something new. I'm unpacking. So I'm unpacking, and I'm understanding. In my unpack, I'm really angry at my third grade teacher because she told me that I couldn't do something, and I believed her for the next 30 years, and she wouldn't even remember who I was. So I already think it. I might as well let myself, let it come up, journal it out, write it on the wall, scream it, throw it, laugh at it. Whatever you need. You get a freedom. There's just a release. As soon as you have release, just like in our bodies, you know, Pilates, yoga, what do you do? Breathe deeper into it so it releases. Grip it. You're all in grip. You know, it's a Chinese finger, that's trapped, it's not getting out. So how do we get out of where we're trapped? We release. We go deeper in, and then we can come out. It sounds scary, but if we don't judge emotions for right or wrong, we'll just feel what I need to feel. I don't need it anymore.Lesley Logan 26:45  Oh, I love this so much. And also, are you gonna do a fuck it retreat? Because you could do a fucking retreat where we could have rooms with pillows and then the smash rooms, and then we could have those, like those phone booths you could just scream in. Shari Teigman 26:57  And then a nap room for all of the exhausted rage.Lesley Logan 27:01  Yes, oh my god, this is like this all. It could just be a fucking space, and people could just be members.Shari Teigman 27:07  Yes, I love this. Every month there's a new way to let it go.Lesley Logan 27:12  I'm in. I interviewed this guy who, like, created these booths for hospitals where, like, nurses or doctors could go in. And I think he said it was just so they could have some peace and quiet, because hospitals are really loud, and all I could think is, like, you could scream in there.Shari Teigman 27:26  I would totally. Are you telling me it's soundproof so you won't know what I'm doing in there? (inaudible)Lesley Logan 27:34  I know. Like, isn't this? I think this, in Vegas, there's a place where you can go and, like, smash things. And I'm like, you can go, like a rage.Shari Teigman 27:40  (inaudible) to one in New York. I think it's the greatest thing I've ever done in my whole life. We did it five years ago. My kids and I are still talking about it. It was so powerful, and it was very meditative. And I never felt stronger in my life. We were running in the streets afterwards, kicking garbage cans, which maybe they should have a restroom afterwards, because we were so amped up.Lesley Logan 28:01  Like, like a waiting area, like a reentry.Shari Teigman 28:05  We're gonna integrate before we let you on the streets of Brooklyn, lady, thanks.Lesley Logan 28:11  Oh, my god, I love that so much. Okay, so obviously, like, you work with these amazing Mavericks, and you do have a lot of experience, and you talk about perimenopause, is there anything that you find in the perimenopause space with women? Because that's we have a lot of and we have, you know, we have a women who are on the other side and enjoy your space, ladies, I hope you're, hope you're having a great time. We'll get this. Shari Teigman 28:30  We're coming as fast as we can.Lesley Logan 28:33  But is there, are there signs and symptoms that people are ignoring? Because I think, like everyone pays attention to the medical ones, the hot flashes or dryness, or my whatever, but like, what about like, the emotional? And that's one of the things I think I tried. There's these, these things that come out in our personalities.Shari Teigman 28:50  I think it's that. It's those days you feel like Jekyll and Hyde, and then you're counting your cycle, and you're wondering, it's not physical, it's the emotional, shorter fuse. Care about less things, because sometimes we're more emotional and other times we're equal amounts of completely numb. So when you feel yourself numbing out, notice when you feel yourself raging about something you didn't care about before. Or I know for me, the lack of control when a brain fog comes in, I'm obviously creative and very cerebral and very verbal, and when I can't remember my name or remember how to say the word pink, I get terrified. I thought I had dementia. I didn't know this was a thing. I was I something's wrong with me, so noticing when you just don't feel like yourself, like I remember when I was pregnant with my first son, I was 24, what the hell was I doing? But okay, I was 24 shouldn't have been allowed to cross the street by myself, and I didn't lose him. He's great. We were figuring things out as we go. But we have these books What to Expect When You're Expecting. Never read them. If you don't have the symptoms that week you think something's wrong, and the last time I checked a woman's body, you and I could be next to each other. We won't have anything that's the same. Why the hell would I follow someone else's blueprint for life, pregnancy, for business, for relationships? I don't want blueprints. I want tear away sheets where I can make it up and then throw it out when I'm done. So if you feel something that isn't you and you're not sure how you feel about it, because some of us like that, all of a sudden I care less or that I can't remember every detail about some gossip someone told me that I don't not interested in. I kind of like that it blows out. So when I started noticing the difference, because I was scared, I only paid attention to the bad things. But when I found out I wasn't dying, I blessedly, didn't have dementia, I'm just lucky enough to graduate to the next video game of mother of womanhood, yay. And the new monsters are coming. I tried to look at, what are the good things? And I do that with all the FemGevity women is, what do you like in the midst of it that I can't juggle as much as I used to? So, I used to be queen multitasker, and I can't do it anymore, and it's okay, and it's actually really nice for my nervous system not to be the master of all at all times, like, I don't have that valve anymore, I can enjoy that, that when I want to be present, I can actually feel more present, because I can't be on as much as I used to be. I care less about a lot of things, so I will speak out for myself, not as much as I'd like to, but much more than I used to, because I can't keep it in anymore. It just comes out of my mouth, like, who, who said that? I would never used to say that. So look at the pros and cons of this. If we're on this roller coaster, instead of just gripping the bar, maybe we could put our hands up once in a while. Maybe we can enjoy the view from at the top of it before we drop. So what are the things that if you could let go of that you've never been able to your whole life? What if this is the opportunity to loosen some of the glue, move some of those joints and let it out anyway, in the wash, because it's going so we don't have to hold everything and new hobbies, things that I haven't made the time for, that my brain can use as new instead of I used to be good at this, and I'm not anymore. What else do I want to try? So I travel a lot for work, so I'm in London for a month, New York for a month, alternating. So I try to let my brain be a different version of me, wherever I am, because I'm jet lagged and exhausted, even if I didn't go anywhere. So it's like, okay, which version is going to be me? So like, I'm in London now, when I go home, I saw a three hour DJ class. I'm not a musician. I know nothing about it, but my brain wants something new to chew on, instead of all the mistakes that I've made and all the things that I can't remember and where did I put my keys? I'm going to go use it for something fun. If there's space in there, because I can't remember anything, I might as well put something good in there. So I think it's the permission to let it flow out of you, good and bad at the same time, and just say you're moving anyway. So you know, when you move house, like, while it's emotional and sad, you find shit you didn't even know was there. So the piles for donation and the clearing out of the 14 mugs you got at someone's Bar Mitzvah that you don't need. Like, it's a great time to let stuff go. We don't have to pack it all and bring it to the next place. So I think if you look at it as a time of decluttering and re-deciding those mental symptoms can be less scary. It's not, oh, I'm gone. No, that version of me doesn't want to be here anymore, because if it did, I'd find a way to keep her.Lesley Logan 33:22  Yeah, yeah. Oh, okay. I'm obsessed with you and all this. And there is the woman who's listening going, okay, well, easy, easy for you to say, you know what? I mean, like, what do you what do you say to the person who's like, kind of, and I'm sure you've met them, they kind of fight to to hold, I mean, we already talked about this, fighting to hold on to the shoes.Shari Teigman 33:42  (inaudible) I am her, so I was the biggest train wreck in this of anybody. I've got two kids in their 20s. My mom, who was my best friend, passed away a year and a half ago. I work internationally, so I never know what time zone I'm in, and then perimenopause hits, and I'm 4'11" and gained about 45 pounds overnight, so I looked like a little blueberry. I didn't like I don't know what. Everything changed at once. And I'm a fighter. The psychiatrist told me I'm scrappy. I still have that personality trait. I don't go down easily. I don't surrender easily, which is why I'm really good at what I do, because I know the resistance. If 17 years ago, me met me now, I would cross the street. I would never go anywhere near me, because I didn't want the help. I didn't think anything was wrong. I couldn't handle the silence of my own mind. I was in survival mode. So like I get it, I want everyone to know they're looking and listening at a version of two women. I don't know your backstory, but I know you do the work. Who do the work? Which means there was a reason we started the work. You're seeing an evolved version of us. I mean, if you want the old me, I'm good, I'll tell you. And you people say to me, why do you tell everyone everything like so they don't put me on some imaginary pedestal. I'm crazier than you. I'm ragier here than you. I have more mood swings than you. I. Work with people, and I don't like them so much most of the time. I love souls. I don't like all the people-y stuffs like, I'm friendly, and then I'm not. I'm an introvert, and then I'm an extrovert. I'm on stage dancing, then I don't want to talk to anyone like I am the whole kaleidoscope. So for all the women thinking, oh, but you've got it figured out, I made it up as I go along, and I make it up every day, and people pay me a lot of money to help them make it up also. So if we make it playful and we make it funny, it's easier to untangle, it's easier to get out of our shackles, because everyone's making it up. Lesley Logan 35:33  Yeah? Well, that's the thing, right? Like, that's the thing you like, discover along your entrepreneurial journey. I'm like, I'm in a room with all these people who are making all this time, like, oh, you just bought ads and (inaudible).Shari Teigman 35:46  And you're crying in the bathroom too, while I wanted to take a selfie with you because I thought you were a guru, I'd rather hug you in the bathroom crying. This is even better. Lesley Logan 35:52  Yeah, yeah. And it's, it's really, it's so true, right? Like, because, like, we're on social media, and people can be like, the the typewriter troll, who's like, oh, easy. It's like, and I have just come to the place where I'm like, I really do like, this phase I'm in. I'm like, no, I was homeless 10 years ago, and I've worked my ass off to do my dream job. (inaudible) Yeah, yeah. So I've worked my ass off. And so you might think I'm this, but I'm gonna tell you right now, I deserve everything that I have right now because I work for it. So don't take that from me and.Shari Teigman 36:16  Go (inaudible) your mother's basement and (inaudible) someone else.Lesley Logan 36:26  Exactly. So, but, like, it's so fun. Like, I'm like, wow, the 10 years ago version be like, oh my god. People think I'm this. Shari Teigman 36:34  An imposter. Yeah, no, I am fully me. Sorry everyone. Lesley Logan 36:37  Yeah, but I do. I'm with you. Like, I also think that a lot of people we do have, we have put on imaginary pedestals, have told us their traumas and their stories, and we only we are like, this is this? You are the Mecca that I need to be, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna do all the things. And so I think it's really easy for us to just forget that stuff. And I appreciate your honesty. And I also think thank you for sharing like for everyone listening, I hope you heard like, you just have to kind of get started and get to know every single day. You can't wait until you feel ready. You're not gonna feel ready. I'm sure, I'm sure Shari's never felt, I don't feel ready. Shari Teigman 37:12  I don't feel ready even when I am ready because I wouldn't even ask myself that question, well, we're doing this then, aren't we?Lesley Logan 37:18  Yeah, yeah. It's true. Yeah. It's so true. Because, like, the one time I I said, okay, people, it was many years ago, but the first time I was teaching like 85 people, and all these people had come to this, the first time this event was happening. So, like, I was so, like, I felt blessed and honored and excited to be invited to this, the inaugural of this thing. And I'm looking at all these people who've, like, wanted to take class with me, and they know what they're doing. And then I'm looking at this front this front row of people who just wanted to support me, but they've never done anything. And I'm like, oh my God. I have people who don't know what they're doing. I have people who have this expectation of me that I don't even know what it is. And my husband was micing me, and I'm like, is the mic on? And he's like, no. And I'm like, I'm actually, like, really nervous, right? Like, I don't think I can do this. Shari Teigman 38:01  I don't even ask if the mic's on. I'm like, I'm gonna ship myself, and it'll be 600 people waiting, and I don't want to go, who gave me this microphone? Who thinks I can do this? And then 20 seconds later, I'm on stage, arm flapping like nothing happened. Like, bring all of it with us. If you weren't scared, you wouldn't have missed the whole thing.Lesley Logan 38:19  Yeah, well, and also, and that's just exactly it. And he just like at me, and he just said, how is this different than what you already do? And I was just like, oh, that's right, thank you. Thank you for the reminder that, like it's, I'm fine, but I think, like it's, it's so important that you all hear like we're every person you put on a pedestal. You hear their story, you're like, oh my god, I'm so inspired. They wake up every day and have to figure out who they are that day, like they all do. Shari Teigman 38:44  The panic in our stomach some days and the anxiety. And I'm not wishing anyone stuff they don't have, but I want you to know everyone has their version of this, and it's not, oh, you're so brave. I didn't have a choice, so I got brave. And some days I'm not brave and but unfortunately, I'm a naturally happy, sad person, so like, I navigate this who are we going to be today? I want to be happy, but I feel sad, but I am happy, but I'm also sad. I stopped trying to pick one or the other. I'm both. I love when I'm on a podcast and like BJ Fogg's sister Linda is a friend of mine. We were in a mastermind together years ago. Lesley Logan 39:20  She lives, she lives in my town. Shari Teigman 39:21  Linda, you're kidding me. I love she's amazing. How funny. What a small world. That's crazy, like I watched the Linda's and the BJs of the world, and it's brilliant, and it's all very organized, and it's strategic, and it makes sense. And then you've got me, who is complete creative chaos. It's the only way I know how to function. You either love it or I terrify you. I'm fine with both. I can't, not going to change. I've tried. This is who I am, and I'll be on a podcast big audience, and they're like so Shari, what are your rituals every morning? And I burst out laughing, because I'm not going to lie to anyone which day, which mood, which temperature. What's it like outside? What am I wearing? I don't know. I wake up every morning I decide what I want to feel. I'll start with a feeling I want connection today. So yes, my days are crazy and scheduled, and I'm blessed to have a very busy coaching practice, and I run a department for a company in a country, in another country like I don't have a lot of flexibility in my time, and I still have to lead with what I need. Otherwise, no one else will get anything from me, and it took me a long time to not go into my own performance mode to help everyone else with their performance. What? I stepped into the same step for wife game that I was in my marriage. Climbed out of that, and I'm like, oh, coach world, green juice, yoga pants, alignment, words, what am I wearing? It's all lovely. If it works for you, that's when the Maverick was born. It's either going to be my way or I can't do it. Stop trying to pick up everyone else's way of fitting into your own life. It won't fit you. So again, it's that curiosity, it's that playfulness, it's the bad mood and good mood mixed together. Then you're being honest.Lesley Logan 40:54  Yeah, it's true. I am. I have three hours every morning for a morning routine, and the very start of my morning routine is the same. I get into a cold plunge. I read three books that are like daily things that I'm hopeful that something sticks, and then I go for a walk. And then after the walk, it's like, okay, what do I want to do? Do I want to do Pilates? Do I want to do my shake plate? Do I want to do my red light? Do I want to have breakfast now or breakfast later? And it has to go with what I'm feeling, which is why I gave myself three hours to do that because I, like you, I, well, I just discovered I have ADHD, which is its own fun thing, to discover perimenopausal. And then you're just like, oh, I'm the one they need to I thought my husband had ADHD. No, I do. And then it's like, wait a minute. So I'm overwhelmed because of the ADHD and. Shari Teigman 41:47  All of it, yeah. Lesley Logan 41:49  Just like, What do you mean? I can't, like, I'm also freaking out about the typing of the fingers because I, like, I just thought that I just had sensory integration disorder. So it's just you have to, excuse me, excuse me. I just wasn't diagnosed as a child and and here we are and now I get to know myself and perimenopause. But I think, like, I love that you share that, because I think that there's a world where you can be in the yoga pants with the green juice and the alignment words, and if it does, yes, and if it doesn't work for you. You can be like Shari and I and you can ask yourself how you want to feel, and give yourself the time to feel that. And I think that that's brilliant, yeah. Shari Teigman 42:27  And then have your green juice, or take a nap or rage or sleep or meditate like it's all wonderful, but none of these things are going to save you from yourself till you know yourself.Lesley Logan 42:34  Yeah, oh my god.Shari Teigman 42:34  It doesn't work. I tried it.Lesley Logan 42:34  I'm obsessed with you. We're gonna take a brief break and find out how people can find you, follow you, work with you, and your Be It Action Items. Lesley Logan 42:44  All right, Shari, where do you hang out? Where will this journal be when it's ready? Where can they stalk you?Shari Teigman 42:55  So I hang out on Instagram. I am there. I am loud. Sometimes I'm consistent. This is my consistency. I'm gone for a week, and then you'll see me 14 stories later. It just depends on the mood. When the mood strikes and the ideas come, the journal will be out, I'm hoping in February, which is extremely exciting. It's being designed now by a chaotic designer, which is perfect for me. And I love making new friends so they can come and come say hi to me on Instagram. It's Shari Teigman. You'll see me with my crazy glasses. As I'm known for a variety of glasses, it only happened because I'm on Zoom all day long, and I get very tired of looking at my face, so I needed to mix it up so that I wouldn't be bored. So I'm saying hi.Lesley Logan 43:39  I just needed some magic to look at. There were signs that I had ADHD. I'm like, let's put stars on your hands.Shari Teigman 43:44  I wouldn't have known it, right? I don't know where it came from. So I'm there. This is what I'm like all the time. I love when someone gets on a call with me, like a sales call, like, oh my god, you're exactly like you are online. Who else could I be? This is enough trouble to maintain you think I'm gonna have another personality for someone else? So I'm exactly like this. No one else answers my messages. I love meeting new people. I'd love to hear what you got from the podcast, what you're working on, what's your Maverick? What do you want to say out loud that you won't say to anyone else, like, I'm here to witness it. Come and play.Lesley Logan 44:17  Gosh. Okay, you have really given us so much already, but we do like our bold, executable, intrinsic and targeted steps at the end. What do you have for us?Shari Teigman 44:25  So I actually felt long and hard about this, which you should feel special, Lesley. Lesley Logan 44:29  I do. I actually really do. Shari Teigman 44:30  (inaudible) about anything, so I'll think about it and then I'll forget it. So it's not a want to, it's just in and out. So I think, based upon everything we talked about, an easy action step to live this is it's a hard one to say out loud, but it's going to punch everyone in the face, which is why I like it. Clean up the internal contradictions, and it's as simple as you're saying you want a bigger life, but you keep making micro choices. You're lying to your nervous system. You're answering an older version of yourself. You have to understand that the identity that you want for the life that you want is going to require aligned actions to that. So it's as simple as I say, I want to do Pilates every day, and yet I find myself laying on the couch. Pilates isn't happening. I did it today. I am tired from jet lag. I'm a yoga person. I love it, and I haven't done it so I could tell you, I love yoga, but I haven't done it in six weeks. I didn't realize till I said, when's the last time I took my mat out? Oh my god, I would have told you I did it a few days ago. Perimenopausal brain, I thought I did. So, telling ourselves the truth and cleaning up the internal contradictions makes us stop looking for answers from the outside of like, how come I just can't do it because you're not telling yourself the truth. So if I choose to lay on the couch, maybe I needed it that day. Maybe I didn't realize that that's what I wanted. Like, if I decide to stay on the couch, I do it intentionally. If I decide to do the yoga I don't check my phone in between, like, choose whatever it is intentionally and clean up those internal contradictions. The questions you ask will be much more clear and much more honest, and then you'll get to some answers.Lesley Logan 46:07  It is a good punch in the face, and I really like it. Shari Teigman 46:09  I punch myself in the face with it too. I'm like, oh god, if I say it out loud, I then have to do it.Lesley Logan 46:17  I it's so true, and it's really it's really funny. We get smart like, then I'll just keep it to myself, but.Shari Teigman 46:23  Not gonna unleash that one. Are we? Lesley Logan 46:25  No, I'm like, I won't tell anyone, and then they won't know. Shari Teigman 46:29  Let me know how it goes. Lesley Logan 46:31  Yeah. Oh, that one is so good. I'm so glad to have you. I mean, we're gonna have to have you back. I can't believe we haven't crossed paths, because I feel like you are just a dear friend in my life already. You guys, I agree with Shari. What touched you, what made you think like, what? Where did you go, oh, fuck it, Shari. Can't believe you called me out. She wants to know. I want to know. So tag her. Tag the Be It Pod. Share this with a girlfriend who needs to hear it like cheer for the scrappy front of the resilient friend, because I know that they need to feel so seen, and you know what to do. Until next time, Be It Till You See It. Lesley Logan 47:03  That's all I got for this episode of the Be It Till You See It Podcast. One thing that would help both myself and future listeners is for you to rate the show and leave a review and follow or subscribe for free wherever you listen to your podcast. Also, make sure to introduce yourself over at the Be It Pod on Instagram. I would love to know more about you. Share this episode with whoever you think needs to hear it. Help us and others Be It Till You See It. Have an awesome day. Be It Till You See It is a production of The Bloom Podcast Network. If you want to leave us a message or a question that we might read on another episode, you can text us at +1-310-905-5534 or send a DM on Instagram @BeItPod.Brad Crowell 47:46  It's written, filmed, and recorded by your host, Lesley Logan, and me, Brad Crowell.Lesley Logan 47:51  It is transcribed, produced and edited by the epic team at Disenyo.co.Brad Crowell 47:55  Our theme music is by Ali at Apex Production Music and our branding by designer and artist, Gianfranco Cioffi.Lesley Logan 48:02  Special thanks to Melissa Solomon for creating our visuals.Brad Crowell 48:05  Also to Angelina Herico for adding all of our content to our website. And finally to Meridith Root for keeping us all on point and on time.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

You've built a career. You hit the milestones. You look great on paper. So why does it still feel like it's never enough?Today I'm sitting down with executive coach and author Brooke Taylor whose book Healing the Success Wound was just named one of Cosmo's best self-love books of the year alongside Glennon Doyle and Elizabeth Gilbert, and y'all, this conversation cracked me open.Here's what we cover:What the "success wound" is and how to know if you have itThe 5 types of unfulfilled achievers (and which one you are)Why your self-worth in work always shows up in datingHow to take tiny steps toward change when you're too exhausted to startIf you've ever felt empty after hitting a goal you worked so hard for, this episode is going to give you a name for that feeling — and a way through it.Connect with Brooke Taylor:

Oh WOW, this one hits different for sure. In this episode, there are many ah-ha moments as Betsy outlines three signs to watch for when your partner promises change. Is it performance change, or real transformation? This podcast will leave you with the clarity you have been craving. You may even want to take notes during this one! Transcript:  Welcome to The Art of Living Big, where we explore how to live intentionally and with more joy. I’m Betsy Pake, your host, master, coach, and creator of the Navigate Method. Here to help you listen in to your true desires, elevate your standards, and live life to the fullest. Now, let’s go live big. Hi everyone. Welcome to the show today. Our trip to Belize has been finalized, so if you heard me on last week’s episode, talk about this retreat that I’m doing the Reimagined Life in Belize this July. It’s the 23rd to the 27th, please join me. There is a link, on my website. In the header bar if you go to live, and I’m posting about it every day on Instagram. I think we got, we opened yesterday afternoon and we’ve already got a really great group of women coming, so I am so excited. I’m like thrilled. This is gonna be just really so much fun. And we had our first live coffee here in Atlanta, and that was so fun to see everybody. I was planning on going to California in May, and I was gonna do one of these in May, and then my trip got changed. But we are still looking at all of these and, and trying to plan. Times to go. And also, and also why is the airlines, the flights are so expensive ’cause of gas. It’s so exhausting. I remember years ago when I took that trip to Iceland, I flew from Atlanta to London and it literally was like. 30,000 delta points, what would translates to like 500 bucks. Now it’s like 1500 bucks. , It’s just so sad. And so to kind of circle back to Belize, I know that if you come to Belize, I know that it is a challenge and I’m gonna show up for you. There’s still, I think, one spot left, maybe not by the time you hear this, but maybe, , for the VIP swag bags, so, you know, get in there and who knows it. Maybe all the early people that get in right away will get a swag bag like that. So we’re working on all that stuff in the background here too. So today though, what I really wanted to talk about was this thing that I have posted about online. And it’s something that people ask me about all the time. It is something that many women have seen me post about. And so when they have seen that particular post is when they decide to investigate working with me. And then they go through the whole program. And then when it happens to them, I think they’re like, oh my God, what? What is this? And I’ll tell you, it. It is a really, really hard thing when you have been working so hard and fighting for your marriage and not feeling as if you are heard to then get to the heart wrenching decision that you can no longer stay intact as a human in this relationship. To then decide to leave, to ultimately save yourself, and then to have your partner go, Hey, I’m gonna do the work. And so I wanna talk about that moment because it is something that I have a lot of thoughts about. And also, even as I go to talk about it, I wanna preface, and this is something I say inside my program all the time. Is that there is no right answer here. It’s just about what’s right for you and honestly, what’s right for you today may not be the same thing that’s right for you six months from now, , or two years from now, and you’re allowed to move through things and change your mind and lean into hope and get your bearings and make a decision. Like all of those things are really, really valid. And so even as I say all this, I just wanna say there’s no right decision, and I am certainly not coming here telling you what to do because if I knew what to do, then I would be, I don’t know, sucking on a pina colada somewhere in, in the deep Caribbean. But my point is that if I knew what to do. Then that would have made my whole journey easier. I was in indecision too. So I understand deeply this place, and I think that this place of indecision has value. I know that sounds so crazy, but I think there’s something to learn in every single part of our lives. And so I wanna talk about this and I wanna talk about this specific moment where you get to the place where you decide you wanna leave. So first of all, I wanna talk about. What is historically what I have seen and what I have experienced in my own life experience of what happens before you get to this moment. Now, I believe you can choose to believe differently, but I believe that women will stay long after it has fizzled out for them because they want to have. A partner, . They wanna have a partnership. They wanna have a life that they had hoped and dreamed about. , When women get married, we want this vision. We, have an idea of what partnership will be, what it’ll be like to possibly raise kids with that person. What our vacations will be like and how we’ll make joint decisions and what all of those components of building a life with somebody actually entail. And when those things are never realized, I truly believe women. I’m using a lot of blanket statements here. I get that. So if you’re a man listening, this can go both ways. , I work with women, whether they’re married to a man or a woman. So I’m just talking from a woman’s perspective here. I believe that women will just try to make things work and they will try. If the vision that they had doesn’t work, they’ll try to adapt to a new vision. I don’t believe that it’s that women only want their way or the highway. I really believe it’s that they’re trying to navigate, well, what does this mean? And when there’s communication issues or when hard decisions are being avoided, or when they as human beings aren’t being seen and met. It becomes this really confusing swirl of, I don’t know what to picture from here, because this isn’t, not only not what I imagined, but it’s also not clear what it is. And I think that moment for a lot of women is where the indecision and the circular thinking about it sets in. Because they can’t make a decision to stay or go when they don’t fully understand what they have. Some moments he meets them where they’re at some moments he doesn’t he’ll, ask for what they’ll need and he’ll say that he’s going to do it and then never does. So that confusion starts to really set in. And so, , the men in my comments sometimes get really angry with this particular post. Because of their own experience with it. But I believe that when you get to this moment where the woman says she’s gonna leave, there is a whole lifetime of work and exhaustion and pleading and trying and adapting that happens before they ever get to that place. And so when they get to that place. It is really a moment where they’re throwing their hands up and saying , I don’t know what else to do from here. And I believe it is a moment where their life force energy is rising up and saying, I will not be lost in this. I cannot be lost in this. And I think the women that really get to the place where they are grasping for their own air in this. And so now here you are. You have been through it trying to get him to hear you and step up and do things differently and become a partner. Even if it’s not the partnership you had in mind. You are willing to adapt and to discover and to create something different, but you never get any clarity or any communication. To tell you what this is, and now you’re taking your one last big deep breath of air before you feel like you just will drown and you say, I can’t do this anymore. I’ve decided that this marriage no longer works for me anymore. And what I see so often in my program is, there’s a moment he maybe takes a beat, maybe he gets mad, maybe he just ignores you. But what I have found in the program is that there is always a pause of some sort, and then it sort of settles. And as it settles, he begins to understand that his experience is about to change. And when that awareness happens, when he recognizes that you are no longer willing. To just keep doing things the way that you had been. Then he wants to show up differently. He wants to talk. He wants to go to therapy. He’s reading the books. He’s saying all the things. Maybe he’s even crying, which you haven’t seen maybe in years. He’s asking you what is it that you need, and he’s telling you that he’s willing to do it. , He will do anything. He’s telling you I am changing. Like it’s been three days. And he’s like, I am changing. , I’m looking at this book, I’m reading this, listening to this podcast. I’m whatever. He’s just telling you to give him a chance.. And so what I wanna talk about today is what, that is what happens inside you when that happens, and how to tell the difference between. Real change and , the same kind of pattern, maybe showing up a little bit differently. And I think most importantly, how do you hold onto what you know to be true without turning into a shell of yourself trying to do it right? Because I think that’s the trap, right? Like in order to protect yourself and your clarity, you think, okay, well I’ve got. Get hard, like I’ve got a armor up here. And so you think that you, need to stop feeling stuff because it is a shell shock. It’s like you got whiplash from it. And so what I wanna talk about is how to move through that whiplash and finding where it is that you really need to go. So I wanna talk about what is actually happening. Inside your body when this change happens, right? When he says this is gonna happen, and when he says, I’m already changing, I’m already doing the work. And maybe he’s learning some words, right? He’s learning some new vocabulary words that make it sound like hopeful and that maybe it’s true and. So that version of him, , that’s showing up. Now, this engaged version, the one who wants you to know, the one who wants to listen, right? And the one who wants you to know he’s changing that version, is the version that you have likely been asking for years, maybe decades, , depending on how long you’ve been doing this. And your nervous system does not know what to do with this. So when I say nervous system, if you’re newer here or not, in my circle in my world, our nervous system, what do we see? What do we hear? What do we smell? What do we like? These are all the ways that my nervous system takes in information and inside my body it’s how I’m processing what’s happening. So I’ve got like cognitively what I’m thinking about it, , Ooh, this sounds like everything but what’s happening inside my nervous system. So your body remembers. Every single time that you begged him to, listen, right? Every conversation where you tried to explain yourself or, , felt defeated and, cried about it every moment that you made yourself smaller. And when I say smaller, I mean like where you realized that asking for something. Was met with avoidance and so you learned to not ask, but instead to just internally turn inward and just get tiny so that the relationship could keep working. And every time that you told yourself, , maybe it’ll change maybe after the holidays or , maybe we can work on this after the kids’ graduation, or once this project at work settles down, or whatever it is. And now you have gone come to this painstaking decision and now he’s here doing the thing. So , , it scrambles you, right? Internally? Of course it does, because one part of you, the part that was holding on for years is going like, oh my God. He’s finally, he finally gets it. He finally sees me. And then there’s this other part of you that, finally was able to stop holding on it. Like grasping for air is going. , Wait, I, just put this down like I finally made a decision and put this down. And you are caught between those two things. And this is like your whole history colliding and, dealing with this new present reality. And honestly, it feels terrible. It feels terrible, and I don’t think that. The person, the partner who is all of the sudden showing up recognizes how terrible it is. I don’t know how they could, , because if they had been ignoring you for so long, then how could they just suddenly understand? And if they truly understood, then they would know how terrible it felt and they would stop asking you to do something that you’d finally decided to do. So. The question , that I want you to sit with in this whole thing is like, why? Why? Why is it now? Why now? Because the things that you are leaving over have been there for a long time. You’ve been saying them, you’ve been asking him to change or her to change. You’ve been signaling it right? In a lot of different ways. So why are they showing up now? And there’s a version of this that I think can be true, absolutely can be true, which is like they finally heard you, they finally get how severe this is, and that is possible. , There’s the version where maybe they finally did it, understood it, or there’s a version where they finally felt consequences to what they were doing. And those are different sides of the stick because when someone changes because they heard you, that’s change coming from them seeing you. When someone changes because they heard you, that’s change coming from them seeing you. When someone changes because they felt consequences. That’s change coming from them feeling the loss of what you provide. And you have to be honest with yourself about which one this is, because one of them is a response to fear and one of them is real change that you can actually work with. One of them deserves hope and one of ’em is the same pattern, running in a different way. A response to fear lasts until the fear goes away, which, happens the moment you decide to stay or they feel safe enough that you’re going to stay, that you’re not going to leave. And so when you think about this, you have to get honest with yourself about what is he actually responding to. Is he responding to you like the whole you, the, you that maybe he hasn’t really. Paused to look at in years? Or is he responding to the possibility of losing his life as he knows it? And those look the same from the outside, right? The words are the same. The going to the podcast and going to the therapy and finally getting a coach and doing all that. All of that looks the same, but they’re coming from completely different places and they go in completely different directions. So. I wanna talk about how to actually tell the difference, but I also wanna, interject this thought too as I’ve been talking. You know, when we think about values, like what’s important to me, what’s important to me about a relationship, what’s important to me about a friendship, what’s important to me about work, what’s important to me about any of the number of things that I do in the world? Those are my values. Now, if I had a, friend, even a coworker that came to me and said, what you are doing is really upsetting me, I would pause and I would say, help me understand because I don’t wanna upset you. Now, if it was a partner, absolutely I would stop everything that is in my value system. I would be like, wait, what? That’s not how I’m gonna move forward. And if your partner didn’t do that, that’s a difference in values. And a difference in values is a whole lot different than we just like different things for dinner. This is like. How we actually operate and how we experience the world is different. Okay, so now how can you tell if this is like a real change? So I’m gonna give you a couple things to watch for, not to analyze him. I don’t want you putting him or her on trial. I just wanna give you something to look at when your nervous system gets this overload and you are like, I don’t know what to think. Okay, so number one is that real change is actually slow. Real change is slow. , If inside two weeks he has become a totally different man, like that is not change. That is the performance of change. Performance of change is really fast. Real change in a human being, especially around patterns that are decades old, don’t happen in two days or two weeks. It doesn’t even happen in a month. It happens over a long time, and it has a lot of, I’m gonna say like reflection or ugly, messy parts. Right. There’s like, this is what I want to accomplish. This is what I’m trying to figure out. I’m trying to understand myself and why I do this. Oh my gosh, did I do it again? Tell me how that felt to you. This is what I’m thinking about. This is what I’m afraid of, like there are backslides, there’s discomfort on their side about who they used to be. Like they get a, a realization. Of the pain that their behavior has caused. Right now, so many women in my program say, but I get it. Like his family was, you know, he had the, it’s okay, you can understand it, and his behavior can still cause real harm. And if he thinks he’s changed in two days, because you said you’re gonna leave, that is performance change. And so if what you’re seeing is super. Smooth, , super polished. I want you to pay attention to that. Okay. So real transformation with a person that’s really wrestling with their behavior. And, and, and potentially being embarrassed of themselves, of getting it wrong. Like that person is showing up much differently than someone that’s like, Hey, I’m doing the work. I know I’m a Apex man. Or whatever the, the bro podcast say. Okay. So number two is, and this one is, this one’s tricky. Okay. But number two is that real change isn’t about you. It’s not about you. It when he is doing the changing to accommodate you, to make you happy, to get you to notice how he’s doing things. If every gesture is aimed at you right when he’s doing it, to get you to change your mind. When every single thing is about how he’s going to be different for you, that likely isn’t change. It’s just a more, I’m gonna, I’m gonna say like sophisticated reason or sophisticated version maybe of making you responsible for him. Right. Now you are responsible for his behavior instead of him being responsible for his behavior. Real change when someone actually is doing the work, it includes them going and getting themselves help. That has nothing to do with you, right? It’s not a. It’s not you guys sitting down and just talking about stuff. It’s him working on his own stuff, his own shame, his own patterns. Just like you have likely done, right? This is why you’re listening to this show, stuff that has its own separate life outside of your marriage, because if the entire project of him changing is happening because of you, then it’s all aimed at you and the minute you are not there, or the minute. That project stops then it’s not his, it’s yours, and then you are still carrying it. But just in a different way. Just in a different way. And I have often thought when I hear the stories and my own lived experience, like if you really understood what you’ve done, you wouldn’t be asking me to do anything different than what I’m doing. Okay? So number three is that real change doesn’t pressure you. In your decision. Right. Just what I just said. This is, this one is, big and I think sometimes confusing, right? Real change looks like him saying like, oh my God, I’m getting it. And I understand why you have decided what you’ve decided. And I’m gonna go do this work because it’s mine and I’m gonna do it. Whether you stay or don’t stay. And I am so sorry. And maybe someday we will meet again and you’ll meet a different version of me performed. Change looks like him saying, you know, look at, I’m trying, look at, I brought out the garbage. I did all this stuff for us. Right? Please don’t. And they’re like, please give me a chance. You owe me a chance. The kids need you to give me a chance, right? I don’t wanna live without you. I don’t wanna do this without you. And on one of those aspects, , there’s this person that you decided to do your life with, that you want to be with, and the other one is treating your decision. Like something he’s in charge of that he gets to decide what you do and you’ll feel the difference in your body. You know you’re gonna feel it. One of them leaves you feeling more spacious. I always say , if you can feel your chest expanding, that’s likely the direction you wanna go if you feel yourself constricting. That’s a lot of really good information and so. , Even if you listen to those three things that I said and you’re like, okay, he fails all of those, I can see clearly that this is a, you know, it’s fear. It’s not real change yet. All the things you are still gonna feel like you wanna stay. It’s totally normal. It is not like a sign. You’re making the wrong decision. It’s just a sign that you’re human. So it doesn’t mean that you’re making a right decision. It doesn’t mean you’re making a wrong decision. It just means that you are a human being who loved someone for a really long time. , You built a life with this person. You possibly had children with this person. You shared pets and history, and maybe inside jokes or a house. You know, you both love the holidays the way you do them. Maybe you have coffee with them in the morning. Maybe there’s parts of him that you’re like, he can be a good friend. And the pull is that part of you doesn’t wanna lose that world. And that part of you isn’t bad. It’s not weak, it’s not wrong. It is just the part of you that knows how to love. Then you don’t wanna get rid of that part of you. You just don’t want that part of you to be the one making the decisions. When the pull comes, I, want you to do something. I want you to stop and let it speak. You know, Elizabeth Gilbert has this really good line in her book, big Magic about Fear. And how it can be in the car with you, but it can’t be the driver. It can’t operate the radio. It has to sit in the backseat. Will you decide? So don’t argue with it. Don’t try to put it down. Just put it in the backseat and let it say whatever it is he wants to say. It’s gonna say things like, I love him. It’s gonna say things like, but what about the kids? What about if this is a wrong decision? Or I’m scared, I don’t wanna go through this. What if he can change? What if I don’t know who I am without him? Let it, let it say all of that, and then when you get in a really settled place that you have worked so hard to get to, you get to answer that. And whatever way is a right for you. , I’ve talked about my own journey here. I, I decided, I, I got the bravery. I mean, it took me a long time to get the words to say I’m gonna leave, and he said, I’m gonna work on it. And I leaned into hope, and I think that’s so important. And I stayed for a few more years until I had the wisdom to see that the change in my experience , wasn’t real. It wasn’t the way that I wanted to move forward, and so I finally had the wisdom to leave and to not turn back and to just keep going down the path that was right for me because you can still love him and leave, like you can still get to the place where you are just like, I can’t continue to live in a container. Where I feel like this all the time, loving him and staying are two different decisions. And I know that sounds really confusing and if that doesn’t feel right to you, that’s okay. I think we can love someone, who is the, parent to our kids. Somebody who we have experienced a lot of life with and not love who we are in the relationship with them. So I wanted to talk with you about how to get through this without like, turning into a shell of yourself really. So here is something that I see women do when their husband start fighting for the marriage after they decided to leave, is that they just go kind of cold. Like they, they don’t even know what to do. They kind of get like frozen, you know? They get distant or they armor up and they don’t know what’s real and what’s not. And I totally get that because I think the pull can be really, really strong to be, to keep going the path you had decided, which was painstaking to come to, and the pull of being afraid you’re making a wrong decision, but you don’t have to just turn. Into a shell of yourself in order to make any decision. The, feeling of being frozen is, just a, sign that you’re afraid. That’s all. It’s not a sign that you’re unclear. It’s not a sign that maybe you were wrong about your decision. It’s just a sign that you’ve got fear. So I think. That if you are in this right now, I want you to know that I know it’s hard and I know you’re freaking exhausted. I know it feels like you can’t really find any solid ground anywhere, and I know that there is a part of you that’s wondering if you should just go back. If you should, just give it one more try. Lean into hope and just see what happens, and I would never tell you what to do, but my job is to help you hear yourself. And so I want you to do that. I want you to know what you already know before any of this started. That’s how you ended up at this decision. It didn’t come from nowhere. And you can give yourself the space of seeing if the change is real or if it’s performance, and you get to decide that you don’t wanna go through that as well. Both options are fair because it’s up to you, it’s your life and you get to keep what you know. Nobody can take that from you, not his fear, not his change, not his pleading, not even your own pull back and forth. You get to keep the clarity of what you know, and I think that is how you live a big life, not by getting cold. And not by winning an argument, but by staying with yourself, even though every single thing is gonna try to pull you out of it. I love you so much. I will see you guys next week. Thanks for joining me on The Art of Living Big. I hope today’s episode sparked something within you, maybe pushed you to dream a little bit bigger and live a little larger. Don’t forget to subscribe. Leave us a review and share this podcast with someone you know who might need a little inspiration today. You can find me over on Instagram at Betsy Pake and on my YouTube channel. Remember, the world is vast. Your potential is endless, and your life, it’s yours to shape. Until next time, keep reaching, keep exploring, and keep living big.

This week we're talking about the books that genuinely shifted how we see the world — not just 5 star reads, but the ones that rewired our thinking and books we still find ourselves talking about years later.   Thank you to this week's sponsor: Make sure to go to Biologica.com/MESS and get up to 32% off your first subscription order today! Just use code [MESS] for 15% off the Premium Starter Kit at BranchBasics.com.   Elsie's books: Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton Station Eleven by Emily Sr. John Mandel Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro   Emma's books: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen   Nonfiction Bonus: Elsie: Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert and Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg Emma: The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt   Book Report: Elsie: The Astral Library by Kate Quinn Emma: One Golden Summer by Carley Fortune   You can support us by leaving us a couple of 5 star recipe reviews this week at abeautifulmess.com Have a topic idea for the podcast? Write in to us at podcast@abeautifulmess.com or leave us a voicemail at 417-893-0011.  

On story ideas, where they come from, how we make them our own - including a funny story about my lovely friend Lexi Ryan and her upcoming, absolutely delicious adult romantasy: NIGHT TIDE. Also, enough of this self-care sh*t, I need to get to work! (And what getting myself back into the groove looks like.)$3, $4, $5 audiobooks here!Indie Booksellers! You can buy my indie books direct from me at discount!! Submit a Request for an order hereNew Releases ~Love, Lies, and Ley LinesMAGIC REBORNNever The RosesPreorder ~Among The ThornsBlades, Books, and the BanditSocials ~ @jeffe_kennedy on all platforms :)Upcoming Events ~Tuscon Festival of Books is March 14th-15th this year! See you there! https://tucsonfestivalofbooks.orgFollow me on Amazon or BookBubThe posture correcting sports bra I love almost more than life itself can be found hereThank you for listening! You all take care. Support the show

Are you tired of the hustle-harder approach to book marketing? What if a quieter, more creative strategy could work just as well — and feel a whole lot better? How can special editions, physical letters, and library outreach bring readers to your books without the daily grind of ads and social media? Sara Rosett shares her low-key approach to marketing, direct sales, and the creative business of being an indie author. In the intro, dealing with uncertainty, and Becca Syme's Quit books; The Successful Author Mindset; Building resilience and the creative lies that writers tell themselves [Wish I'd Known Then]; On Writing – Stephen King; Big Magic – Elizabeth Gilbert; This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors. This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn Sara Rosett is the USA Today bestselling author of over 30 books across 1920s mysteries, cosy mysteries, and travel mysteries, as well as nonfiction for authors. She's also the co-host of the fantastic Wish I'd Known Then podcast. In this episode: Why low-key, personality-driven marketing can be more sustainable than aggressive advertising How to pitch your books to libraries using a simple email strategy The pros and cons of special editions, physical letters, and Kickstarter campaigns Shifting from retailer-first releases to direct sales through a Shopify store Co-writing nonfiction and the power of series bundles for reader discovery Drawing creative inspiration from other industries and international storytelling trends You can find Sara at SaraRosett.com and at WishIdKnownForWriters.com Transcript of the interview Jo: Sara Rosett is the USA Today bestselling author of over 30 books across 1920s mysteries, cosy mysteries, and travel mysteries, as well as nonfiction for authors. She's also the co-host of the fantastic Wish I'd Known Then podcast. Welcome back to the show, Sara. Sara: Hi, Jo. Thanks for having me. It's great to be back. Jo: It is great to have you back. You were last on the show five years ago, around February 2021, and we talked about writing a series — and you have a great book on that. But first up, give us an update. What does your author business look like right now, and what are you up to with your writing? How Sara's author business has evolved Sara: Well, it's changed a lot. I sat down to think about this and I thought, yes, I have got into direct sales. I've done Kickstarters. I have a Shopify store now. I've really shifted from releasing first on the retailers. I don't really do that anymore. I've done some special editions, some physical things — I'm sure we'll talk about those later. Still doing the podcast with Jamie, the Wish I'd Known Then podcast, we're still doing that. I also have a Mystery Books podcast, which is an episodic podcast that comes out in seasons. I do a short season, about one a year, so I keep doing that. Writing some nonfiction. I did the trope book with Jennifer Hilt for mystery and thriller. And writing-wise, I've created a spinoff, a short spinoff in the 1920s series. I'm still loving the 1920s timeline. But I've slowed down a little bit on the releases. Busy, but good. Jo: Busy, but good. All right, we're going to get into all of those things. Although I must say I had forgotten about your Mystery Books podcast and going to seasonal. I also had my second podcast, Books and Travel, which is now on a kind of hiatus, but going to a seasonal approach is actually really interesting. Do you find that listeners come back to that podcast? The power of a seasonal podcast Sara: Yes, and it surprises me because I've always thought you have to be weekly with a podcast to gain any traction at all, which I think is the best way to do it. You can build an audience quickly then, but I just knew I couldn't sustain that. So when I set out, I started with maybe seven to ten episodes and I did them each year — each year has had a season — and I do five to ten episodes. Readers find it, and I have highlighted specific books. I think maybe they're searching for a podcast about the Thursday Murder Club or something like that. They find it that way, and I get downloads, just steady downloads throughout the year, and I don't do much. I do some Pinterest pins for that, and that's about all I do. This is one of those things — it's the kind of low-key marketing that's low threshold, but it does work. I think if your readers are looking for stuff to listen to about the topic you write about, it could be a good way to do some low-cost, long-tail marketing. I love it. I keep doing it because I love it. Jo: That's great. Low-key marketing that fits your personality Jo: As you mentioned, I really wanted to talk to you about this low-key, non-hype marketing. We've met in person a number of times, and I think we're quite similar — we're quiet, reserved. We are quite low key. I just put content out, and yes, I do some paid ads or whatever, but I just don't find the hype marketing something I want to do. I like the attraction marketing, and I feel like I do intuitive marketing. So how does your low-key marketing fit with your personality? Sara: Well, I did try some of the more promotional marketing. I tried to have a street team back when I heard authors talking about that. I thought, oh, I'll do a Street Team, and that doesn't really match with my readers. My genre — that's just not a thing that happens a lot there. So I backed off of that, and I've tried ads. Not really interested in those. I'm not really good at them, and I don't really want to get good at them. So I've searched for ways that I can find readers that don't rely on ads. I've really focused on my newsletter, and I have two of those. I have a main one that goes out to my readers who sign up in the back of the book. And then I have a New Release in Historical Mysteries newsletter that goes out about twice a month most of the time. That's just curation. I'm saying, hey, these are the new books that are out. I feel like those are easy to do. They fit with my personality, which is like, here, let me give you some information about what's going on in this genre. I do newsletters, the promo sites, the smaller promotional paid ads — I do those occasionally. I have a rotation that I go through, and I try to get a BookBub. If I can, that's great. I've just done things that are leaning into what I feel comfortable doing. Pitching books to libraries Sara: A lot of it is finding small sites where I haven't run an ad. Let me see if there's anybody who wants to sign up or get a free book through me here. I've done some BookFunnel marketing, where you can join the group promos. I like those. And I've reached out to libraries because I feel like my books appeal to libraries. They like the 1920s historicals. It's an easy way to reach people — it's attractive to libraries. So I had a list of libraries in my state, and I have an assistant who helps me out. She emailed down the list. She picked a few every week and messaged them and said, hey, this is a local author. She lives in this state. Here are some books you might enjoy from her. And I have, because of you, large print — I got into that when you started talking about large print a couple of years ago. So I have large print case laminate books that libraries like. I just do things like that, things that are not the norm. Hardly anybody is talking about marketing to libraries. But I try to do that. Sometimes I'll just think of something. I was at the library and I thought, wow, look at all these hardcover case laminate books they have in this large print section. Maybe I should try that. And then I search out and try to figure out if I can do it. Jo: And just for people who don't know, case laminate is a hardback. Sara: Yes. Jo: That's really interesting. You mentioned the libraries and the list. Was that a list you were able to buy? I remember years ago I had someone on the show who was doing that kind of thing. Or was it that your assistant had to go through and find all the libraries, find an email address, that kind of thing? Sara: I think I found it through Sisters in Crime, which is a mystery writers' organisation, and I think they had a contact list — you could get libraries and bookstores in your area. I think I started with that and then just research. And I'm sure now with AI, you could put in where you are and say, in a radius of 250 miles, what is near me? And you could probably get a great list. Jo: Absolutely. And when the assistant is emailing, is it just information about you and then saying, would you like to buy? Because you have a big backlist, and we don't want to be sending loads of expensive hardbacks to libraries unless they're actually going to buy. What's the process to actually sell to them? The library email approach Sara: I wrote up an email and introduced myself. I leaned into the “I'm local — I live in the same city or state that you're in.” Then I described my most popular series and said the first book is this. I put a link to a PDF that they can go look at. I think it's on my website, and they can go see the books. They can print that out, of course, and it has the ISBNs. I make sure they know they can order them from Ingram, and that's all I do. Then when I had a new release, we switched it up and put that at the top. But I have all the books in the series so they know it's a series. Jo: That's fantastic. I love that. Set-and-forget promotional marketing Jo: A lot of what you were talking about was newsletter, email marketing, some ads, but nothing aggressive — as in you're not monitoring it every single day. The email pushes, like a BookBub or free books, bargain books — you can book it and then it's almost set and forget, isn't it? You don't have to log in every day to check the results. Is that what you mean? Sara: Yes. And I like those because they are set and forget. You just have to remember to drop the price and then reset it on Amazon, and then they send it out to their list and hopefully you get some traffic from that. I like that much better than Facebook ads, because with ads I feel like you have to go in and monitor the comments and check on how they're doing. It's a more full-time type job. If you're doing a lot of ads, it's a couple of hours — for me anyway, because I'm not very savvy with it and I'm not as experienced. So it would take a long time to increase my knowledge there. Jo: To be fair, both of us have had many years when we could have become experts, but the fact is it doesn't suit our personalities. I am now working with Claude Code a bit more to do Amazon ads, but even then we go in once a week and Claude does a few things and then we log out again. I'm not doing this daily stuff, and I may eventually get back into doing it for Meta. But in terms of what I mean by low-key marketing — it's lower stress when you don't have to do stuff every day. And I guess what you're doing with the Mystery Books podcast, with the library pitches, with the batching — is that what you're doing? Putting aside time for marketing occasionally? Sara: Yes. And that's what I do. I'll think, oh, I haven't checked Kobo promos, so let me go check that, because I do use those too. I'm wide, so I'm trying to find things that bring my books to readers everywhere. I use the Kobo promos, I use Kobo Plus, I use Draft2Digital to get digital books into libraries. I'm always running — if they have a library sale anywhere, I sign up for it and I just do these occasional things. It's not every day, and I like doing things in phases. I like doing a special edition and working on that and then being done with that and putting that away and going back to writing or whatever. I don't mind doing promo for a little bit, but then I don't want to do it every day. A project-based approach to the author business Jo: We are similar in so many ways. I also have this project approach to life and business. If I'm writing a first draft of a new book, pretty much everything else goes out the window. Sara: Yes. Jo: Exactly. I just don't have the bandwidth. I'm not in that head space. And then, as we record this, I've got a Kickstarter coming up for Bones of the Deep and yesterday I did the book trailer, and I'll do the push for the Kickstarter and then I'm just going to stop. Sara: Well, the positive way to look at that is it's focus, right? We can focus for two weeks or a month or whatever — two months doing a Kickstarter or whatever — and then we're done with it, and then we move on. Jo: That just seems more sustainable to me. I didn't like doing everything every day or every single week. Sara: Me either. I like switching it up, and I do enjoy the different phases of writing. I like the research and then I like doing the — well, I don't like the drafting that much, but once I get a draft done, I like the editing. And then when it comes time to promote it or do a special edition or whatever, I enjoy that part. Finding whatever I'm going to use for the interior photos and stuff — just things like that. I enjoy each phase and I like switching it out. Jo: I think that's really good. Some people think this writer's life is you write new words every single day and you manage your ads every single day. That seems to be what some people do, but that's certainly not us, is it? Sara: No. And that's great if you want to do that. I just don't want to. And I think we've come to the point now where each person can do this as they want. Hopefully people don't feel the pressure to meet these self-imposed deadlines or parameters that don't exist. There's no rules for writing or publishing. You can do whatever you want. Social media — or not Jo: Let's just mention social media then. What are you doing for that? Sara: Not much! Jo: Nor me! Sara: I'm dabbling in Pinterest because I think that could have the longer tail. I do a little Instagram, but that is about it. And I really considered just leaving it altogether. I'm never on Facebook. We were talking earlier about saying no, and I don't want to join any more Facebook groups. I don't care what information they have. I figure I'll hear about it on a podcast if it's great. I think social media has changed so much. In the beginning, it was great — you could find readers. Now it's just much harder to connect with readers there. I want to have a presence so that if people go look for me, they'll find my books and hopefully find a link to download a free book and read it or an audiobook and listen to it. Then they can get on my newsletter and connect with me there. That's my philosophy. Jo: I think so too. I am on Instagram @jfpennauthor in that I do post pictures there, and even very recently I've discovered how to do a reel, which is just hilarious — I'm only about seven years late. But I don't check my DMs, so if anyone messaged me on Instagram or Facebook, I'm just not getting them. Sara: I know. And I feel like there's so many places people can connect with you. I put up a post on Facebook and said, I'm not going to be here much anymore. If you're looking for me, you can find me on Instagram maybe, or sign up for my newsletter to really stay in touch. Jo: I think that's what we have to do. But our idea of this project-based approach to the author life and the author business doesn't suit social media, because the people who are really good on social media are on it multiple times a day, creating content multiple times a day. It just suits some people and not others. Sara: I do things and I take pictures and think, oh, I'll put this on Instagram. And then I don't ever do it. One time we went on a road trip and I took a bunch of paperbacks and dropped them off in the free little libraries. I took a picture at each one and I never posted those ever. I ran across them years later and thought, oh yeah, I did it but I didn't post it on social media. That's just not my thing. Special editions and physical design Jo: Although you did just say that you like doing the art and the photos, and you've done some beautiful special editions. You've done letters, you do a lot of physical design for your books. So talk about that — why you're doing that, why it's fun, and the pros and cons, because it can be a time suck and a money suck. Sara: Yeah. I think you have to figure out where your gauge is for that, because you can go all in and do everything for the special editions. I've come to the conclusion I'm going to survey my readers before I do another one and say, what do you really like about them? Because I do mine and release them on my Shopify store first — is it just that you're getting it first, or do you like all the bells and whistles? I enjoy doing the endpages and the ribbon, and I've done character art for them. But since my books are set in the 1920s, there's a lot of photos from that time period that are available. In Deposit Photos, you can go in and search for those. The last two books I did, I used photos that I thought captured what the characters would look like. That was a lot of fun to find and just include photos instead of character art. And it was a lot faster than waiting for character art too. The pros are that it's fun and you get to do things you don't normally get to do — finding beautiful illustrations for the endpages, doing the sprayed edges, just making it really special. Storytelling through letters Sara: I enjoy doing things that you can't do on Amazon. You just can't do letters on Amazon. With both Kickstarters, you could get three physical letters in the mail. They were a story told through letters, and they had art. The first one was black and white, and then the second set was colour. Since then, I've done colour, and it's a challenge to write those because it's a totally different type of writing. It's a 1,000 to 1,500 word little snippet, and where you end is important so that readers will be looking for the next one. Including art — whether it was a map, illustrations of what the view looks like, what the house looks like. Not that I illustrated it — I had somebody else help me do that. It's fun to think about how stories can be told in different ways. I love novels, but 70,000 words is a lot of words. That's a big project. Sometimes it's nicer to have a shorter project. The letters were shorter and a shorter time investment. I enjoyed them for that. For the cons — it's just a longer ramp up to get it going. If you want to do a special edition or letters or book boxes or anything like that, just estimate how much time you think you need and then multiply by three or five, because it's going to take so much longer than you think. Would you agree with that, with your special editions? Jo: Yeah. Although I think now I've got a process for it. Although, I did my book trailer for Bones of the Deep yesterday, and it reminded me — the book trailer is 30 seconds, and it took me nearly ten hours! Sara: I do believe that though. I completely believe it. Jo: Because I'm a bit of a control freak. I love working with Midjourney. I say I think I'm a control freak — of course I am. We all are as indie authors. But I'm a very visual author, and you sound like you are as well. I see the book, and if I'm generating pictures of the characters or the ship or what happens in the storm or whatever, then it needs to look like what's in my head. So I end up generating and generating, and then I did music and then — yeah, it's very creative, but it takes a heck of a long time. From Kickstarter to Shopify store Jo: Coming back to your letters and your Kickstarters — I did go check. It's been a while since you've done those. Have you changed to using your Shopify store, and will you do another Kickstarter? Sara: I may do another Kickstarter. I do feel like I found new readers on Kickstarter. That's a pro definitely — people will see your work that maybe would never see it on Amazon. It's a much smaller pool to stand out in. Whereas on Amazon there are thousands and millions of books, on Kickstarter there might be five historical mysteries or two at that moment. So it's easier to stand out. I'll probably do another Kickstarter, but to me it was difficult with the prep that went into it. Then the launch, and the launch kind of stressed me out. I know we talked to you on our podcast before your first Kickstarter and you were a little stressed, so I'm not as stressed as I would be with the first one. But it is a lot to prepare, and I do feel some pressure that I want this one to do well. And then the fulfilment — I like to do things in phases, so I felt like it was hard for me to move on to anything else while I was waiting for the books to arrive, because I didn't feel done with that until I had sent out the books. It just seemed like it took quite a bit of time. So with my next release, I thought, I'm going to launch this on my Shopify store and see how it does. I still did the special edition and I still did a lot of the things I learned to do with Kickstarter, like emailing my list a little more often and highlighting these special things. And coordinating with a couple of other authors in my genre to say, hey, I have a book out and it's a special edition — you might be interested. And then share their stuff when their book comes out. The first one I did, I had the book sent to me. I signed them, packed them, and sent them out. But the second one, I said, to save time and money, we were just going to do a digital signature. I had them shipped directly from Book Vault to the reader, and that just helped simplify things so much. Launching on my store, I didn't see quite as many sales or bring in quite as much money as I did on Kickstarter, but it took a lot less time. I feel that was a good trade-off. It simplified the time it took to do it, so I was able to get back to writing more quickly. The second one I launched on my store as well. I've done the spinoff series on my store — it's a three-book series — and I'll probably do the third book on my store too. Then maybe when I go back to my original 1920s series, which is the one that does the best and is my most popular, I may go back to Kickstarter with that one. I think it's nice to have the choice to launch on my store or Kickstarter. I can choose — do I have enough time to do it the way I want to on Kickstarter? Scarcity, direct sales, and training readers Jo: I feel like launching on my store, there's less of a time pressure. We don't really have scarcity in our business, and the only way to make it scarce is to have a limited-time offer. Which to me, Kickstarter by its very nature is a limited-time offer. Obviously it's easier for me because I'm near BookVault, so I go up there and physically sign the books, and I like doing that occasionally. But I hear you with the direct store, and I also presume it trains people to buy from your store. So how has your revenue shifted from the big stores like Amazon, Kobo, to Shopify, Kickstarter, direct sales? Sara: It's shifted a lot. I do the Shopify store just like I do everything else — in phases. I'm like, hey, I have a new release. Go buy it at my store. And I have a lot of sales. I also launched a third set of letters last year around October, leading into November. I said, you can get this series of letters — two a month all year in 2026. Go to my store, sign up for it, buy it there. They'll be launching in December. I push it, I talk about it. I do a podcast about the letters or the special edition on Mystery Books podcast. I ran a couple of ads, got the word out, saw some sales, got everything done, and then it just kind of tapers off. What I need to do is continue to market it, especially to my list — hey, did you know I've got these bundles? Did you know you can get bundles of paperbacks or audiobooks over here from me at a discount? I need to work that into my newsletter strategy. It's kind of like I use it in phases. I still have books on all the retailers and still promote those and link to them. But that's not my focus now. If I'm going to send traffic anywhere, I'm going to send it to my store. My mindset is more on direct sales and the special things I can do — the special editions, the unique things they can only get from me. I'll still do a BookBub if I can get one, and push that to the retailers. The smaller newsletter sites — I use those to reach readers there. But my focus is definitely on the special editions and doing things on my store that you can't get anywhere else. Beyond ebook, audiobook, and paperback Jo: A lot of people, new authors particularly, are thinking about ebook, audiobook, paperback. And all of those you can get anywhere — for both our books, you can get them in those formats anywhere. And large print as well. I have large print paperback, and I actually remember, it was probably five years ago when you were here and you mentioned large print hardback. And I was like, oh yeah, I should do that. Of course, I never did. You can't do everything. Sara: You can't do everything. Jo: You can't. But I think you probably can do a large print hardback on Amazon now with KDP Print — you can do hardback — but none of them are as good quality as the printing we get elsewhere. Also, as you say, all those special things — you actually can't sell them on Amazon. People can sell them secondhand or whatever, but you just can't do that. So I think that's the creative fun of having your own store or doing Kickstarters or selling direct — just all the other fun things that satisfy us creatively too. Because it's not all about the readers, is it? Sara: Right, because we want to be enjoying what we're doing. We don't want it to be a slog. Jo: What's the fun in that?! How long Sara has been an indie author Jo: Just remind us how long you've been doing this now. Sara: My first book came out in 2006. It was traditionally published, and I had a series of ten books with a traditional publisher. Then as that one was getting near the end, I was experimenting with indie — was a hybrid for a while. Then I went all indie pretty much. Jo: In what year? Sara: That was probably — I think my first indie book came out in 2012. So for a while I was trying to do indie and a traditionally published book, and that was very — I felt like I was torn in all kinds of different directions. I thought it was going to be so much simpler just to do this all myself. Maybe not, but — Jo: Pros and cons, as we said. Co-writing the Mystery and Thriller Trope Thesaurus Jo: One of the things you've done recently is co-written a Mystery and Thriller Trope Thesaurus with Jennifer Hilt, who's been on this show as well as your show. Tell us about co-writing, because I don't think you've done much co-writing. Sara: No, I hadn't. That was the first co-written book I'd ever done. And it was a great experience. Jennifer Hilt made it so easy. She has several books in this Trope Thesaurus series, so she had a format and we just used her format. We took the tropes and divided them up. She took half and I took half, and we went off and wrote on our own and came back together and then we would trade. It was really easy. I don't know that this is the way co-writing usually goes, but we did have a contract and we started out with all the normal things — a plan and a contract. We had to decide who was going to coordinate everything for the cover and the copy editing and all that. When we got done, we used Draft2Digital and did the payment splitting, which made that part easy. It's been a great experience, and I think it's just because Jennifer has done this before and she's really easy to work with. I highly recommend co-writing if you can find somebody like Jennifer who's already done it and can take you through the system. Jo: I think that's the point — if you have someone like Jennifer who has a layout, it's a bit like the For Dummies series. I had an opportunity to do something with them at one point, and it's so formulaic in terms of doing it, and then you're filling it in. Clearly Jennifer's managing that really well. The co-writing I've done with various people has been pros and cons, but it's not been in an established series. I love that you say that, but just to warn people — that might not be your experience. Sara: Yes. And I think it's so much about personality and how you work together, how you each write, and your deadlines. If you try to set a really close deadline — we pushed our deadline out. We had planned to do a Kickstarter with the launch of the trope book, and then she ended up moving and I had a bunch of stuff going on. We were like, you know what, that's fine. We won't do a Kickstarter. And it was okay. You just have to figure out how it's going to go. And if you have someone that's flexible when you need to be flexible, that's so important. Jo: Adjusting is the reality of life, isn't it? And I feel like the Trope Thesaurus — it's not going to necessarily have a spike sale and then disappear. It is an evergreen book, right? Sara: Yes. People will find it when they find the series. It's not something that has to be pushed during a certain time period and then we're done. It's a long-term, evergreen type book. The role of series and bundles Jo: Talking of series, you've obviously got multiple series. People should definitely go look — you've got great branding and your series are so clear. What part do series and bundles play in marketing in general, and in your direct sales? Sara: I like to bundle them for my direct store because I figure I need something special about my store — a reason for people to go there. They can get the books on Amazon and Audible and Spotify and all these places, so why would they go to my store? I've really leaned into bundles for the store, so they can get a three-book audiobook bundle or the whole series in pretty much all my series. They can do the paperback bundling. I've done a paperback starter series bundle where they can get each book one in my first three series bundled together through Book Vault. I thought I really need to do that with the audiobooks. That's on my list — to create a starter audiobook bundle. Bundles do well on Kobo. They draw readers in over there. And for the rare times I can get a BookBub, I think bundles seem to appeal to BookBub. If I'm going to pitch something, it seems like they like bundles. Readers like them too. Part of it is the convenience. You've got the whole series together and you can just read one after another. You don't have to go find it and figure out what order they're in. Jo: They do. And I love offering bundles in the Kickstarter as add-ons and on my Shopify stores as well. Because I'm always surprised — somebody's just found me and then they order the 13 ARKANE thriller paperback bundle, and I'm like, okay, wow. That just feels like a win. Sara: Yes. I love to see those come in and you think, oh, I wonder how they found me. Why they would dive in with the seven-book series. That's fantastic. Jo: It is interesting. With the paperbacks and the shipping, you drop some money for a complete print series. And then obviously it's usually a bit less on things like audio and ebook bundles, but it's still a real commitment. So yeah, everybody, we love bundles. Sara: We do. What Sara is excited about next Jo: I wanted to come back to the podcast, Wish I'd Known Then, which is brilliant. I often refer to it on this show. Hopefully we share quite a few listeners, and you and Jamie talk about industry changes, personal things. Given all the stuff that's going on, what are you excited about? What are you experimenting with? What changes are you seeing that you're enjoying? Sara: We appreciate the shout-out. Every time you give us a shout-out — and I do think we share a readership. I think you are our most frequently mentioned other podcast. We are always referring to you on Wish I'd Known Then. What I'm looking forward to is — I like seeing what other businesses or industries are doing and seeing if I can apply that to writing and books. That's how I came up with the letter idea. I saw some people doing that. I found out later there were some mystery-related mystery letter subscriptions, but I didn't know about them and they weren't well known. I thought, oh, I could try that. So I'm looking forward to doing more creative things that we haven't had the opportunity to do, but now we are going to have the tech and the fulfilment to do. Merch could be fun. I haven't ever delved into that. Translations — I didn't even mention translations earlier. I've done a couple of languages in my historical series, and I think it's really interesting the options we have now in translation. The books could go into so many more languages, so much easier. So I'm looking into that. Just reaching out and trying some of these new things that are on the horizon. You're much more futurist than I am. I'm much more about looking back at the past and going, oh, that was cool. Maybe we can do something similar, but different now. Finding creative inspiration from other industries Jo: That's interesting. How are you finding out that information about what other industries are doing? Because the curation of the information stream is hard for all of us. Sara: I don't know. I seem to run across things. I'm always reading and browsing online and seeing what people are talking about. I did see a post years ago about a company that was doing special edges — limited-edition special edges. When I saw that, I thought, oh, I wonder if I could do that. And I hand-stamped snowflakes on a Christmas book. Jo: Oh, I remember that. I actually bought a stamp. I got a (skull) stamp made. Sara: Oh, awesome. Jo: I never used it! Sara: Well, it's a lot of work. It takes time. But they're very special. Each one is unique, just like a snowflake. Each book has all these different types of snowflakes and ink colours on it. I'll see something and think, oh, I wonder if I could do that. And then I'm always consuming really quirky media. I'm into Asian dramas — Korean dramas, Japanese dramas — and I'm seeing trends over there for storytelling. The vertical dramas they're putting out, super short. I just wonder what that's going to turn into in the future. I'm not a video person, but in the future I think there could be short little videos that we could make of our books. That would be just crazy. I don't know that I would have the skills to do that, but we might be able to hire somebody to do that for us. Korean dramas and new storytelling trends Jo: There are lots of AI apps that are already helping with that. I do love making book trailers. And I have also thought about my short stories particularly — turning them into short videos. I've written a few screenplays, so I'm also thinking about that kind of visual-sized content. I also watch a lot of Korean shows. Sara: Oh, do you? Jo: I love Korean shows. Sara: Oh, we have to talk later. Jo: They're very good. I also like the Korean sports stuff and the cooking stuff, and they're just so good at hooking you in. Sara: Yes, they are. Jo: They are so good. Sara: They're really good at blending genres. And I've noticed with their storytelling, they're doing a lot of these stories they call isekai stories, where the main character falls into a story. I heard somebody talking about it, saying they think that's popular because we're so familiar with media entertainment — we kind of know where the story's going. So that's a new way. If your character falls into a fictional mystery and knows who the bad guy is and is trying to prevent a death or something, that's a completely different story than just a straight mystery. Jo: That's interesting. In a way, the LitRPG genre where the character goes into a game, or the character is in a game — I suppose it's got some relationship to that. But I think K-Pop Demon Hunters is like the most successful film and music and all of this kind of thing. It's clearly coming to more Western audiences. Sara: Yes. It's becoming much more mainstream than it used to be, I think. Jo: That's really interesting given that you're mainly a historical author. Are we going to get 1920s Korea? Sara: Oh, maybe. That's an interesting time period. Maybe my character needs to travel there. Jo: You have a travel series, don't you? Sara: Yes. I have a modern, cosy kind of travel series, and then in my 1920s series, it takes place mostly in England, but I have a spinoff with a character who's gone to Egypt, and I have three books set in Egypt. Jo: Well, you never know. Sara: I know. Maybe they need to travel. Jo: I love it. Okay, where can people find you and your books and your podcasts online? Sara: Thanks for having me. This has been so much fun. You can find me at SaraRosett.com. My store is SaraRosettBooks.com. You can find the podcast with Jamie and me, Wish I'd Known Then — it's everywhere, Apple, Spotify. We're even on Substack now. Yeah, that's where everything is. Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Sara. That was great. Sara: Thank you.The post Special Editions, Seasonal Podcasts, and the Art of Low-Key Book Marketing with Sara Rosett first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Does your life fit you? Or does it feel more like an itchy sweater you can't wait to swap out for something more comfortable? If there's a better topic to explore, the way we do in this edition of Doing What Works, we hope you'll let us know.Here are your show notes…Are you a finisher or an opener?Your chances for happiness are increased if you wind up doing something that is a reflection of what you loved most when you were somewhere between nine and eleven years old.No one ever gets talker's block.Are you watching a different movie on the same screen?Career coach Barbara Sher was the author of Wishcraft.Big Magic author Elizabeth Gilbert didn't expect her writing to pay the bills.The fastest way to attract what's meant for you is to express yourself so honestly that everything misaligned falls away on its own.

What if the source of your best writing isn't something you control — but something you learn to collaborate with? How can ancient ideas about the muse, the daimon, and creative genius transform the way you approach your work? And what might happen if you stopped fighting the silence and let it become your greatest creative ally? With Matt Cardin, author of Writing at the Wellspring. In the intro, thoughts on bookstores and Toppings; 20 ways authors can signal humanity and build reader trust [Wish I'd Known Then]; Learning from Silence – Pico Iyer; ProWritingAid spring sale; Bones of the Deep – J.F. Penn. Today's show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, self-publishing with support, where you can get free formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Just go to www.draft2digital.com to get started. This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn Matt Cardin is the multi-award-nominated author of eight books at the convergence of horror, religion, and creativity. His latest book is Writing at the Wellspring: Tapping the Source of Your Inner Genius, which is fantastic. I actually blurbed it as follows: “A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning. . . . If the page is a threshold, this book will show you how to cross.” You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Notes How Matt balances a full-time academic career with his creative writing life The ancient concept of the genius, the muse, and the daimon, and why creativity is about collaboration with something beyond yourself Why the silences that come into our creative lives, including writer's block and inertia, might actually be gifts rather than obstacles The stages of the creative process Living into the dark, and embracing uncertainty How Substack and blogging can organically grow into books You can find Matt at MattCardin.com or www.livingdark.net. Transcript of the interview with Matt Cardin Joanna: Matt Cardin is the multi-award-nominated author of eight books at the convergence of horror, religion, and creativity. His latest book is Writing at the Wellspring: Tapping the Source of Your Inner Genius, which is fantastic. I actually blurbed it as follows: “A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning. . . . If the page is a threshold, this book will show you how to cross.” It is a great book. So welcome to the show, Matt. Matt: Well, thank you, Jo. It's really a pleasure to be here, especially since, as you and I were briefly acknowledging before we started recording, we have overlapping interests to a great degree. So it's really great to make official contact with you. Joanna: Indeed. So, first up, before we get into the book itself— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing. Matt: Well, I'm one of those people whose story is probably typical in some ways, in that I really wanted to do it from the time I was a child. My father was a great writer, although he was an attorney. He wasn't a professional writer. Something about books and reading when I was a child really seriously enchanted me. I was very frustrated when I was so young—and I vividly remember this—that I couldn't read, because I loved the books that were read to me. I craved being able to read them for myself. So as soon as I gained that ability in school, it was off to the races, so to speak, and for some reason, a desire to tell stories myself came along with that. Being a “writer” was one of the earliest life desires, job or career desires, that I expressed. I was one of those young people really into fantasy, horror, and science fiction. So I was reading a lot of it and trying to emulate it and write a lot of it. There was a cinematic component—I was a movie fanatic as well. I won a local Authors' Guild short story writing contest when I was a senior in high school and began trying to write stories seriously in college. Then my interest in horror and religion became dominant over time, and that's what I ended up writing about. Joanna: Has your interest turned into paid work? That's the other thing, because there's an interest and then there's making writing more of your income and your business. Matt: Right. Well, actually, although I have made and do make money from my writing, it has always, always, always remained on the side. My main career, as far as my moneymaking life, first started off in video and media production, which is formally what I got my undergraduate college degree in. Then I switched into education. I taught high school for some years, and then now for the past, good Lord, 18 years, I have been in higher education. First as English faculty who also taught some religion courses, and then now for the past several years in the administration. I'm Vice President of Academic Affairs at a college. My writing has been something that I pursued as an avocation. As far as earning money from it, that didn't happen even with my first publication, which happened on the internet in 1998, I believe, with a horror story titled “Teeth.” It was just free—I didn't get paid. That led to paid publication of that story three or four years later, when it appeared as my very first print publication in a Lovecraftian horror anthology from Del Rey titled The Children of Cthulhu. It appeared as the final story, and that was the first time I had received a paycheck. It was a professional per-word rate. Since then I've had several books published and more stories and essays and that kind of thing. I've had income sometimes from writing and sometimes I haven't. My first book came out of that story. I attended the World Horror Convention in 2001, actually before that Lovecraftian anthology was published, but it had been placed. At the World Horror Convention, which was in Seattle that year, I met one of the two editors of that book, and that led to me having my first short story collection, Divinations of the Deep, which was not for much money, but it attracted a lot of good attention and some good reviews. So it's been like that all along. I mean, I've made a couple of runs at saying I would love to just be an author, as it were, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards for me. And honestly, I'm glad it's not. I have made the most money from some academic editing projects that I've done. I created and edited a two-volume encyclopedia of the history of horror literature, for instance, for a big academic publisher. Those are work-for-hire projects that I get paid for. Making money on my own creative vision and my own creative work has been intermittent. It really has proven over time that not having my primary creative, spiritual, and philosophical drive hooked to what I earn my bread by has been a blessing. I don't want to take this thing I love and make it be how I have to grind to earn my money. I want to keep it in a protected space. That has been spontaneously what's happened with my writing career. Joanna: Yes. I think as you say, there are a lot of benefits of that, especially where you are writing at this convergence of horror, religion, and creativity. Your writing is very deep. I would say it's on the edge of academic. I don't want to say it's completely academic, because a lot of people will find that difficult. But I think Writing at the Wellspring goes very deep while still being open to non-academic readers. As you say, I think if you had wanted to make a living with your books, you would've had to have gone in at a lighter level, perhaps. Do you think that makes sense? Matt: Yes, I know what you mean. I want to specify, I know that neither you nor I are saying anything about this as any kind of criticism or condescension to anyone who does make their living as a writer. I mean, I believe you do. Joanna: Yes, exactly. Matt: And that's fine. There really are people who have had significant commercial success from books or other things they've written that don't appear to be making huge concessions to being commercial. You can make a living as a writer, I think, and really follow your muse and not feel like you have to pander or cater or cheapen it. Then there are people who have perfectly happily decided to commercialise their work and tune it in whatever way is currently popular. That's fine. Every writer, every creative person should do what is right for him or her, in my opinion. In my particular case, I think what you said is right. I do think that I might have needed to change some things, to back off, to word them differently. Whenever I've tried to exert deliberate control like that, it just turns out that it's not something that my creative spirit wants to do. I don't really feel like I'm in contact with the work anymore. I'm fine with that. I don't think I'm doing a sweet lemons type thing. It really is the way it just needs to be. If it ever proves that me doing it strictly the way I want to do it, going however deep I want regardless of trying to appeal to a paying readership—if it turns out that at some point aligns with boatloads of money coming in, that's fine. That's perfectly fine. I'd be open to that. Joanna: Yes. Matt: I would be open to that. Joanna: You mentioned muse there, and with Writing at the Wellspring, the subtitle is “Tapping the Source of Your Inner Genius.” So I think this is a good place to talk about it. As you mentioned, you are leaning into your muse and your inner genius, and you use other terms—daemon or daimon. I think sometimes people find the word “genius” particularly very difficult because it has the connotation of brilliance in some form. So how can people think about this? How can we lean into this [genius] side of ourselves? Matt: Honestly, one thing that I would suggest people do is I would refer them to the TED Talk that Elizabeth Gilbert gave some years ago—was it 2009, 2010, 2011? It's one of the more popular TED Talks. Elizabeth Gilbert spoke about. I think it's sometimes given the title “Your Elusive Creative Genius” or something like that. Her whole talk is about the way in her own creative life, and as she recommends to others, it has been very important for her to seize on the older model that we're talking about. The most clear articulation of it is that it used to be the case—and we're talking about in ancient Western history, back to the Romans and even earlier to the Greeks—that genius was not something that you identified a person as being. It was something that a person had. And I would also say importantly, maybe had them too. In ancient Roman culture surrounding art and poetry and that kind of thing, the genius was the spirit that might, say, live in an artist's studio and would provide the same service to that artist as the Greek muses provided to someone who was writing epic poetry or history or something like that. That understanding of it has continued in various ways down through history. But there was a fateful transition as Western culture went through what we commonly call the Enlightenment and the Renaissance as well. This was where the term “genius,” while it didn't lose all those connotations of being an inspiring spirit—something that a person both has and maybe has hold of them—did become internalised to the point where we speak of people as being geniuses., which is exactly what you're talking about. I agree, some people listening to this probably have some reservations about this. They don't want to call themselves a genius because we tend to mean that's a super brilliant person, some kind of prodigy who is possessed of amazing artistic, creative, or intellectual skills. Again, that is the result of a cultural, philosophical, psychological, historical transition that occurred several centuries ago. And you still see the older meaning of it being attached sometimes. You think of people who we call geniuses being touched by something. Well, the older version—where you think of the genius, which in the way I use it in this book and also in my first book on creativity, A Course in Demonic Creativity—the genius is equivalent to the muse, which is equivalent to that other figure that you mentioned, the daemon or the daimon. It refers to a separate—what seems for all the world to be a separate—centre of intelligence or entity or influence. The thing that gives you both your creative drive and also your ideas, and serves as the source of what comes to you naturally to write. It's more than just ideas. When you talk about the ancient Greek daimon, there was a whole well-developed tradition of that in ancient Greek philosophy and religion. A daimon was, in one famous sense, a spirit that you were born with, that the gods had given you. It was like your double, your higher self. It was the thing that represented your character, your interests, the blueprint and the outline that your life was supposed to follow. There are great books written about that. There's a book by the psychologist James Hillman titled The Soul's Code. A lot of people have read it. It lays out the daimon theory and gives it application to modern instances. The idea is that everybody has a genius or has a muse or has a daimon. For writers, my recommendation is to say, whether you believe it or not, whether you take it as a metaphor—which is fine—or whether you want to get somewhat mystical and delve into the idea that maybe there's really a spirit or something, it doesn't matter. Productively, with practical, measurable results, you can learn to relate to your creative impulse as if you are collaborating internally with someone else. It's the centre of why you're interested in writing what you want to write, why you want to write the way you want to write, and even the types of things that unfold in the course of your career—both your creative career and the rest of your life, in the mould of the ancient daimon. I have found that to be a vein of great power and meaning in my own life. I do it exactly the way I'm describing. I don't actually believe it, but I don't disbelieve it. I find that in experience, it really doesn't matter. It works and it may as well be true. Joanna: I mean, obviously the book has a whole load of ways we can tap into that, but I did like that you talk about stillness and silence, because I feel like that is actually increasingly difficult as authors. Obviously it's noisy online and we're meant to be doing things like social media or interacting with people online. And then the world is just noisy. The news is noisy. There's lots of things. How can we use this idea of stillness and silence? Also, any other ways we can practically tap into this side? Matt: Sure. One thing that wanted to say itself in this book was some things I had been thinking and feeling about silence for a long time. As you say, it can be difficult these days to find what feels like the silence that we need to even get our work done. We're talking about the muse or the genius. How can we even hear it when it seems like the clamour of all the pulls that we have on our outward attention has become truly a cacophony? We have opted for this in many ways through our engagement with social media or other things, but in other ways seems like it's been thrust upon us. What I want to point out, that has been of extreme importance to me, is that many silences come into our lives as creatives that we resist. It's not just that we can't find the silence and the space that we feel like we need so as not to drown out our creativity. It's that we have unwanted silences come in, like writer's block. Or even if it doesn't feel like a block, just inertia. Just stasis. I don't know about you, but I have many, many times found myself grappling with what, for all the world, feels like a totally natural, organic sense of wanting to slip into complete inertia, just total stillness. And that feels like it has been in conflict with my creative drive. It's like I have this residual desire and also a sense of duty that I really should be writing. Maybe I have an idea in mind and I'm just not working on it. Or maybe I'm in the middle of a project and I feel like I'm abandoning it. Or maybe nothing's coming up, but I feel like it should be. I'm pushing myself, but there's a division in me where I also just want to leave it alone. Whether that means actually just sitting there silently at my writing table or in meditation, or maybe just going about regular daily life and forgetting about trying to fulfil this creative calling. I really think there's a vein of gold to be tapped in the silences that come to all of us. Because as I said, that can be in the middle of daily activity. We have this kind of franticness, some of us, about our creativity. We get wrapped up in it. We feel bound to it. The thing that so much of the time we want to think is a gift—we're proud of it, we cherish it, we like our writing—also becomes a burden. This fantasy of just chucking it all, of just saying, “I would love to be free of it. It's like something that's weighing me down. I'm sorry that I roped myself into it. I would love to just sink into complete silence.” This sort of meditative thing, or just muteness—hey, that is valid to hear. That's valid to heed when it comes up. I mean, sometimes we have gotten ourselves into situations where we have external responsibilities and deadlines, and it's important to try and honour those and not be a bad person on the level of just fulfilling practical obligations. It's also important to recognise you've got silence offering itself to you in all kinds of ways. The more important silence is paradoxically the one that we so often resist if we're creative people and feel like we have to be making. The more important silence is not whether or not your outward conditions seem like they're a clamour and they're chaotic and they're distracting and they're full of pressure. It's that inner silence. So I recommend paying attention to when it comes up. And for practical ways—they are endless. Take advantage of early mornings. A lot of people have found great value in getting up earlier than they are used to and making a practice of that, and either just meditating or free writing. Maybe using, for example, Julia Cameron's famous practice of morning pages, which has been valuable to me sometimes. Or doing things like—as I've said about the muse and the genius and the daimon—personify your unconscious mind and maybe write down a dialogue between yourself and your creative spirit, whether about your current project or just about your life and your creativity as a whole. There are various tricks to get in touch with this unconscious part of you, and I really am convinced out of practical personal experience that it's not necessary to have outer silence and outer spaciousness when you can find it within yourself. You can find it through some of these exercises for getting in alignment with what your creativity wants to do. You can get in touch with it if you're paying attention to what you might not recognise as a gift—offering it to yourself. If things go quiet and you think, “Oh no, I should be doing something”—why not let that be a place where things can germinate? Why not let that be the silence that you might not be able to find on the outside? Joanna: Yes, and I'm feeling guilty here because of course we are producing a podcast episode for people to listen to. I find personally that one of the places I can find silence is when I walk. It's not obviously silent outside, but I am definitely guilty of always listening to podcasts, often at very fast speed as well. Sometimes when I go for a walk, I just deliberately do not listen to anything—don't listen to an audiobook, don't listen to a podcast—and a lot comes up there. I have my phone with me, and when I get back from those walks and jot down things that come up in my mind, I will have so many notes of things that have come up in my brain during the walk. It's really difficult, isn't it? Because I know you also love input. You do a lot of research. As I said, your books have a lot of research in them, and so we both like doing the research. But also I definitely find that has to be balanced with the time for letting it come out again in some form, with that mental silence. You also talk about being uncomfortable, and I feel like sometimes that silence can be uncomfortable as well. Matt: Yes, it can be. There's no telling what might come up when you are faced with silence. Again, it's one of those things—even the outer kind that we think we crave. Sometimes it's a bit frightening when it comes up, which is why we try to fill it with things, like this podcast episode for example. There's a threshold that you can notice you cross sometimes, where what was a natural desire to connect with something that you heard about and found interesting becomes a bit frantic. Where now, really, what might be good is if you shut off—didn't go for the next podcast episode or didn't go for the next click to the website—if you just shut the browser and just sat there and did something else. You're kind of, with a little desperateness, trying to fill the void. What you described about needing to get quiet and let things happen—yes. I love reading and research, but the classic stages of the creative process—first codified, I think, by Graham Wallas, if I remember correctly—they still work. It's really good sometimes to have a model and understand how it works. You have what's sometimes called the preparation stage. All the input, all the research, all the brainstorming, all that kind of thing. Then the incubation stage can be vastly important. That can get frightening, both because the silence seems somehow threatening, like something about you is going to be exposed. Or maybe that you're going to lose the thread of whatever it was and it's never going to come out. But really, if you just stop and let your muse, let your genius do its thing, let your unconscious do its thing, it will suggest itself again. It will come up on its own. Ideas will come back. You'll realise, “Oh, I didn't know what I was going to do with that character. I didn't know how these ideas were going to come together. I didn't even know what this idea for a story, a book, or an essay was going to be.” It comes back up, and with you working with it, it shows what it wanted to be all along. This whole thing about doing the preparation and then allowing it to incubate and germinate and then sprout when it wants to, that still works. Part of the reason that we're scared of the silence, I'm convinced, is because each of us operates in our psychological selves as a closed system. It's like we each comprise our own cosmos, so to speak. I know you know that I have worked in horror literature, the literature of cosmic fear. In cosmic horror, as laid out by the likes of Lovecraft and others, the basic effect has been analysed as constituting a disturbance of the universe. That's the horror of cosmic horror—the world is transformed into this nightmarish thing in a cosmic horror story, where there's a haunting, threatening presence that's out of the ordinary and it's somehow bound up with the narrator's interior world. Life reveals itself as supernaturally or ontologically something nightmarish—there are awful forces that are about to erupt all the time. And whether anybody's into cosmic horror or not, I think it's pretty accurate to say that we each constitute our own world, our own cosmos. A lot of the noise that we make—the mental noise and the complications we introduce into our own lives—is, usually unconsciously, trying to stave off confrontation with the otherness that is outside the barrier of our personal sense of self. The weird thing is that that otherness is actually in us, and in fact, we can approach it in the figure of the daemon or the daimon or the muse. So creativity is fraught. You're dealing with something that you might want to think, “Oh, this is great, it's going to be the source of my ideas, it's going to fulfil my creativity.” Well, yes, but it is frightening to think about the fact of something about yourself being beyond yourself and perhaps being out of your conscious control and somehow guiding your destiny. A lot of people have trouble getting along with their own unconscious, which is another way to put it. There's a horror, a fear, a dread effect that comes when we feel like we are out of control. We all face that ultimately—when it comes to our death, for example. There are some spiritual traditions that talk about dying before you die, that being basically the way to enlightenment in those traditions. Recognising and coming to terms with the fact that this thing that is you, that you call yourself, is transitory. It is only there by being enclosed within and swamped from without by this thing that is not you, which is a sort of void to which you'll return. In the book, I deal with some of that, and I talk about it from a non-dual spiritual viewpoint, because ultimately for me, these creative questions have become inseparable from spiritual questions. Joanna: Yes. And obviously people know about my book Writing the Shadow, which is how we really connected around this Jungian idea of the shadow and the darkness. I agree with you—there's some really interesting things at the juxtaposition of all of these topics, which we could talk about for a long time. I do want to ask you around your idea of “living into the dark.” Because I feel like you do take things beyond just the writing into this idea of living into it. So maybe talk a bit about that. And obviously synchronicity, which is a Jungian psychology concept. Matt: Living into the dark is the thing that forms the overarching ethos or perspective for me of all this. I got the term from “writing into the dark,” which actually comes from the American science fiction and fantasy author Dean Wesley Smith. He wrote a book titled Writing Into the Dark, subtitled “Writing Without an Outline.” It's a great book. I recommend it to anyone. It is about forsaking and foregoing the felt need to outline writing in advance and trusting your creative mind to be able to make up a story in real time. That draws on the deep nature of storytelling to come out right. Therefore you write into the dark, as if you're walking down a road where you have a lantern and you can only see one step ahead. You haven't mapped out the territory. It was a great metaphor. I had already been thinking in that direction about life and about creativity for some time when I first came across that book. I devoured it and recognised it described how I had already been writing anyway, which is one reason it was so powerful for me. Then it edged out into a broader understanding for me that I had also been coming up with, that I just ended up calling “living into the dark.” None of us knows where anything is going, that much is obvious. But living into the dark goes farther than that, to embrace this understanding. I think of this in connection with what so many people, either personally or because of jobs they have where they're required to think like this. I think of this in terms of the famous five-year plan that so many of us want to draw up. There's nothing wrong with a five-year plan or a ten-year plan or a one-year plan. You can come up with that for practical purposes and try and chart where you're going, but we too often forget that that's just a fantasy exercise. We are not actually thinking into the future, nor are we ever actually thinking into the past. Remembering the past, predicting or projecting the future—both are events that are happening right now, in this moment, which is always now. It's no less now than it was when you and I first started this conversation. Past and future are projections—mental projections right now. And everything is unfolding in the present in real time, which effectively means what's going to come next is coming out of—well, we don't know where it's coming out of. Darkness. Living into the dark is living with full-on contact with, and awareness of, and embrace of this fact that we don't know what's coming up. That encompasses all of life and all of creativity. That same darkness, if it's helpful for you to take on this emotional tenor—which it is for me—can relate to the darkness in cosmic horror fiction, or to some of the rich traditions of darkness, like in Daoism with the yin contrasted with yang. Yin is the dark, moon, feminine aspect of things—the receptive source of the universe. This idea of living into the dark, of just accepting that we're all on this journey on a path where we can only see one step ahead, even if that far, has been meaningful to me. It's been meaningful to my creativity, and I recommend it to anybody to whom it appeals. It takes a lot of pressure off. I think that's a guiding meta-theme for me—trying to take the pressure off us from trying to control things that can't be controlled, and more stepping into that flow of understanding: what's going to come to me is going to come to me, and my posture toward it, whether I align with it or not, is what's going to determine my experience of it. You mentioned synchronicity. It's interesting. It's verifiable. I know a lot of people have verified it for themselves. Maybe some people listening to this have too. It's verifiable that when you really get in tune with this present-moment thing and get in tune with your creativity—and you can tell when you're aligned and not, when you feel blocked or when you feel resistance or not—when these things align on their own sometimes, strange coincidences do happen. Jung talked about synchronicity as an acausal connecting principle. That was probably due to the fact that the psyche is not separate from the fabric of the world that gives rise to it, so that we might have subjective things—impressions, fantasies, dreams—that we rather uncannily see mirrored in objective events. Like the famous thing that clarified and coalesced that for him: a psychotherapy session with a patient who was describing a dream she'd been having about a scarab beetle. Then he heard a tapping at the window of his office and he went there and opened it, and there was a European beetle—a kind of scarab beetle, much like the Egyptian scarab—that was there. He held it up and said to the woman, “Is this your beetle? Here is your beetle.” It just blew her mind. It opened new levels of the therapy that she was receiving. Those kinds of things happen. I've had them happen. Joanna: Me too. Matt: If you're a long-time writer or reader, you're familiar with the library genie—the library daemon, we sometimes refer to it as—the book that, just at the moment you think of it and realise, “Oh yes…” You're doing your study, and it doesn't have to be a library, it could be on the web or whatever. You finally realise what it is that you need, what you've been looking for, and in some cases it literally falls off the shelf onto someone's head. What do you make of those when they happen? At the very least, it rattles your cage. You might enter a state of suspended judgement about whether we really are living in a kind of magical cosmos full of real correspondences. It's a bit like the daimon or the muse: is it a metaphor? Is it just an interpretation, or is it something real? Probably the best place is one of profoundly, actively embraced agnosticism, and just take it for what it is. Joanna: Yes, and leaning more into your intuition. I think you definitely demonstrate that in the book as well, really exploring a lot of very interesting topics. Now, we are almost out of time, but you do have a Substack, The Living Dark, where you publish essays, and you've also got all kinds of really interesting books. I want people to go have a look at some of the other stuff you've written, especially if you enjoy horror and religion and all of that kind of thing. So just to ask, how do you decide when something is an essay on The Living Dark, and how do you decide when you are going to put it in a book or in some other way? I feel like a lot of authors are thinking about Substack but don't necessarily know what to put on it. I think I first connected with you on your Substack, where I was like, “Oh, this guy's writing interesting, weird stuff.” How do you use Substack as opposed to writing for your books? Matt: Sure. Let me answer by first talking about what happened previously with that first book on creativity that I mentioned, A Course in Demonic Creativity. I had all kinds of thoughts and ideas coming up, seeded over many years of practice and reading about the daimon and the daemon and the genius and the muse. In 2009 I founded a blog—it was just a WordPress blog—and I titled it Daemon Muse. I attended to it for two to three years. A lot of people ended up reading it. I really did not have any plans, not even any back-burner plans, of taking the material that I published in posts there about this way of creativity and making it a book. I did realise about a year and a half in that essentially I had a book I had already written in those posts. So it took some work, and I spent six months making it all into a coherent book. By the way, that book was only ever published as a PDF, which is still free on my website, MattCardin.com—although plans for the first-ever print edition of it are in motion right now. That was published in 2011. When I went to Substack and started my newsletter there in 2022—and by the way, it wasn't originally called The Living Dark; my first title was “Living Into the Dark,” and then I changed it about a year, year and a half in—I kind of am doing the same thing. It's been a while since I took anything and thought, “I'm writing a book with it.” I write what comes to me to write. You know how Substack Notes is Substack's own version of social media, kind of like Twitter used to be or like X kind of is now. It happens all the time that I write things that just stay in contact with people as a Substack Note—some short thing. And then I realise I wanted to say more about that. Or you have what happened just this morning. Three or four hours before you and I were talking, I started writing a Substack Note and it got so long I realised I had something that could be a post to The Living Dark. So I switched over and finished it that way. The book Writing at the Wellspring came together after I had written things for a couple of years at The Living Dark and realised that I could trace a path through about a third of the posts that I had ever published there, and had the makings of a book. So that, plus other material from earlier in my life—there are things from my private journals from years ago in Writing at the Wellspring—plus some new material, ended up turning into that book. So I'm not thinking about the difference, is what I'm saying. I find writing at my Living Dark newsletter to be a needful and enjoyable creative outlet, partly because I have some 3,800 readers now and it feels good to be in contact with them and to have that audience and to know that there's that eye on what I'm writing. That's partly because I just have the freedom to work it out to my satisfaction and publish it there. I'm already halfway forming another book that will be of a different focus, to come from things that I have published there. So for me, there's an organic relationship between Substack writing, or any kind of blogging, and the writing of books. If people haven't thought about that, they might want to consider it. If you have one already or if you're thinking of starting a blog on Substack or anywhere else, maybe you have things that can guide you to a book that already exists and you just haven't realised it. Joanna: So where can people find you and your books and everything you do online? Matt: Well, The Living Dark that we're talking about is at www.livingdark.net—and it does require the three Ws at the beginning to get there. Then my author website is MattCardin.com, and you can go to the books page there to get a link to all the books I've published and read about them. Joanna: Great. Well, thanks so much for your time, Matt. That was fantastic. Matt: Thank you, Jo. I really appreciate the invitation.The post Writing At The Wellspring: Tapping The Source Of Your Inner Genius With Matt Cardin first appeared on The Creative Penn.

What if your most beautiful love story turned into your biggest nightmare? And what if your most devastating heartbreak opened a pathway to your greatest awakening? * In her critically acclaimed novels and immensely popular works of nonfiction including Eat Pray Love and Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert expands our understanding of creativity, spirituality, and love. This episode features a powerful conversation between Elizabeth and psychotherapist and CIIS professor Emily Marinelli on love, loss, and breaking free. * This episode was recorded at the beautiful Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco on October 24th, 2025. A transcript is available at ciis.edu/podcast. To find out more about CIIS and public programs like this one, visit our website ciis.edu and connect with us on Instagram @ciispubprograms. * Some podcast apps may not display links from our show notes properly, so we have included a list of links below. * We hope that each episode of our podcast provides opportunities for growth, and that our listeners will use them as a starting point for further introspection. Many of the topics discussed on our podcast have the potential to bring up feelings and emotional responses. If you or someone you know is in need of mental health care and support, here are some resources to find immediate help and future healing: * -Visit 988lifeline.org or text, call, or chat with The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline by dialing 988 from anywhere in the U.S. to be connected immediately with a trained counselor. Please note that 988 staff are required to take all action necessary to secure the safety of a caller and initiate emergency response with or without the caller's consent if they are unwilling or unable to take action on their own behalf. * -Visit thrivelifeline.org or text “THRIVE” to begin a conversation with a THRIVE Lifeline crisis responder 24/7/365, from anywhere: +1.313.662.8209. This confidential text line is available for individuals 18+ and is staffed by people in STEMM with marginalized identities. * -Visit translifeline.org or call (877) 565-8860 in the U.S. or (877) 330-6366 in Canada to learn more and contact Trans Lifeline, who provides trans peer support divested from police. * -Visit ciis.edu/ciis-in-the-world/counseling-clinics to learn more and schedule counseling sessions at one of our centers. * -Find information about additional global helplines at befrienders.org. * LINKS * Podcast Transcripts: https://www.ciis.edu/podcast * California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) Website: https://www.ciis.edu/ * CIIS Public Programs YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/ciispublicprograms * CIIS Public Programs Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ciispubprograms/ * Mental Health Care and Support Resources: https://988lifeline.org/ https://thrivelifeline.org/ https://translifeline.org/ https://www.ciis.edu/ciis-in-the-world/counseling-clinics https://befrienders.org/

Dear Wonderful Reader,Tuesday, March 17th, 2026, marked 4 years since I freed myself from the shackles of my corporate job. Four years is a decent chunk of time. For the same duration as my undergraduate degree, I've been frolicking around Mexico City, perfecting my Spanish and waking up every day to the joy of being alive. How have I survived without a regular paycheck? And, more importantly, have I learned anything that's useful to you?It has been mostly a dream, but this quit-my-job-aversary comes at a particularly difficult time. I've barely made $2,000 this quarter, not even close to my personal OKR of $15k. Selling some of my index fund investments to pay my rent makes me feel like I'm failing at being an adult. Then again, I did take six months off client work to launch my second book, get it funded on Kickstarter in just 12 days, and get featured in The New York Times. Still, it's hard to see the beauty in all that I've accomplished when reality is currently kicking my ass.As you know, last week I was hit by a family emergency, causing me to fork out a couple thousand dollars more to fly to LA and say goodbye to my grandmother, who it seemed was on her deathbed. I sat with her in the hospital for five days as she went through a heart operation, reflecting on life in a mortal-imperative kind of way, while somehow helping to nurse her back to health. It was a close call. Not every day is sunshine and roses.Sometimes those deeper, existential questions irk me. Am I really that much better off than before I burned my New York 9-5 life to the ground back in 2022? However, all it takes is a five-minute conversation with another software engineer who hates his life to knock my own sense back into me. I've definitely made the right choice.I'm definitely not in the same place in this “creative career” as when I started. My direction is clearer and narrower in a way that's motivating. I have a product to sell. I have workshops to teach. My path has a lot more shape, but it's not easier. In fact, I'm still suffering. Yet I am following the advice of Graham Weaver, from my favorite episode of Lenny's Podcast:“Life is suffering, so make sure you pick something worth suffering for.” That's how this feels right now. It's a lot of work, but I'm much happier doing this than sending Sean a stupid, boring spreadsheet. (If you remember, in my corporate tech career, I worked with more men named Sean than with women on my teams, lol).Here are four lessons I've learned in my fourth year of freedom.A second date?

If you've ever wondered whether grief is something you get over — or simply learn to carry — episode 414 of the Grief and Happiness podcast is for you. Poet and survivor Sarah Hanson reframes grief not as something to be fixed, but as a scar that proves you survived — and shares why still sharing "cosmic jokes" with her late best friend is one of grief's greatest gifts.In This Episode, You Will Learn:(00:52) Sarah's journey as a poet and trauma survivor(01:41) Why trauma made poetry the only way to tell her story(03:10) How to tell hard stories without re-traumatizing your reader(04:29) Why everyone is grieving — and why forgetting that matters(07:56) Why people fear talking about grief — and why they shouldn't(08:41) Sarah's honest guide to navigating early (12:46) Cosmic jokes and staying connected to those we've lost(15:01) Why the most meaningful objects left behind are never the obvious ones(19:57) Why getting grief down on paper — even imperfectly — helps(22:20) The power of haiku for overwhelming feelings(25:12) How joy quietly grows back in the grief garden(29:06) Fragmented memory, complex PTSD, and the power of writing it downSarah Hanson is a Minneapolis-based author, poet, and truth-teller whose work sits at the intersection of trauma, resilience, and the ongoing journey back to oneself. Her debut memoir-in-verse, Conjuring the Hurricane: The Best Way to Save Your Life Is Any Way You Can (April 2026), weaves together stories of domestic violence, childhood trauma, grief, and hard-won healing — earning praise from Elizabeth Gilbert, among others. A graduate of the University of Chicago with a Master of Arts, Sarah writes with the candor of someone who has walked through the storm and wants to show others the way out. In this episode, Sarah brings the perspective of a survivor and poet to a conversation about grief, healing, and the transformative power of writing. She explains why she chose the nonlinear structure of poetry over traditional memoir — trauma fractures memory in ways that resist linear storytelling, and the form allowed her to honor emotional truth without getting tangled in factual precision. She also offers a tender reframe of healing: rather than expecting to recover as though the wound never happened, she encourages listeners to understand they will heal with the scar — carrying both the proof of survival and the new self built around it. Sarah and Emily find deep common ground on journaling and poetry as grief tools, with Sarah championing longhand writing and poetry as particularly accessible mediums for people in pain.Connect with Sarah Hanson:WebsiteThreadsInstagramSubstackLinkedInBook: Sarah Hanson - Conjuring the HurricaneLet's Connect: WebsiteLinkedInFacebookInstagramTwitterPinterestThe Grief and Happiness AllianceBook: Emily Thiroux Threatt - Loving and Living Your Way Through Grief Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode wasn't planned out beforehand. No outline. No prep. No attempt to make it “valuable.” Just me hitting record and sharing what's been on my mind and heart. I've been thinking a lot about the kind of content I actually enjoy consuming. The kind where someone just shows up, talks, and lets you into their real experience of life. No performance. No polish. No filtering everything through what they think will land best. Just honest, present conversation. I share a bit about a few creators who have been inspiring me lately, and why this style of communication still feels like the most meaningful to me. From there, I go into what's been shifting in my own thinking around business, especially after finishing Company of One. I've gained a deeper clarity about who I'm creating for and what kind of work I actually want to build moving forward. I also talk about a book that found its way to me at exactly the right time, Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert, and how it reawakened something that's been quietly pursuing me for years. That led me to make a commitment to finally write my book on mastermind groups. Along the way, I share what's been happening behind the scenes this past week. New episodes published, conversations that stood out, a return to early morning reading and journaling, and a sense that things are coming back into alignment in a way that feels both simple and deeply satisfying. This is one of those episodes where you either resonate with the style or you don't. Links Mentioned in This Episode Upgrade Your Peer Group (Mastermind Podcast): https://upgradeyourpeergroup.com Next Level Mastermind: https://nextlevelmastermind.info Company of One by Paul Jarvis: https://amzn.to/4dCSmbh Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert - https://amzn.to/4bOpniq The Walk Podcast by Father Roderick - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-walk/id1621703766 It's a Drama Podcast by Brian and Liz Deacle - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/its-a-drama-podcast/id1448200711 Next Level Mastermind If you're building something meaningful and want to surround yourself with other people who are thinking at a high level about their work, their life, and their next season of growth, I'd love to invite you into the Next Level Mastermind. Just reach out and let me know you're interested, and we'll start a conversation. My email is Cliff@CliffRavenscraft.com

Today we're sharing something special that was previously only available to The Breaker community on the MBB Substack page. We were joined by Elizabeth Gilbert—celebrated author of Eat, Pray, Love and Big Magic—to discuss her newest book that explores a rarely-addressed topic: the dangerous impacts of co-dependency and sex and love addiction. We discussed how her path took her from the stability of a suburban marriage into a profound, life-altering romance with her best friend-turned-lover, Rayya Elias. And we explore the “untouchable darkness” that followed, where a relationship with a relapsing addict revealed Elizabeth's own deepest addiction and codependency. Elizabeth describes her descent into unmanageability, contemplating both murder and suicide—her only perceived options out of the pain—before experiencing a spiritual revelation and hearing the voice of what she now knows is her Higher Power. While we often investigate the life experiences that shape our behavior, Elizabeth asserts that understanding “why” we suffer is rarely enough to heal us. Many of us attempt to fill a persistent internal darkness with food, drugs, sex, work, or porn, but ultimately, that “God-shaped hole” is only filled through a direct relationship with a power greater than ourselves. Our live also covers: - Visions and the Voice of God: The specific spiritual revelations and “visits from beyond” that have directed Elizabeth's writing career and her path to love. - The Dissolution of Fear: A look at the numerous spiritual revelations that led her to be rid of fear, anger, and shame. - Discovery vs. Recovery: Why understanding the “why” of our behavior isn't enough to change it. Elizabeth reminds us that our peace cannot be held hostage by the expression on another person's face. We invite you to watch this session as we explore the “invisible line” between love and pathology and find our way back to ourselves. Elizabeth Gilbert's Latest Book, ALL THE WAY TO THE RIVER: Love, Loss, and Liberation: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/707805/all-the-way-to-the-river-oprahs-book-club-by-elizabeth-gilbert/ Elizabeth Gilbert's Substack: https://elizabethgilbert.substack.com/ Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we're sharing something special that was previously only available to The Breaker community on the MBB Substack page. We were joined by Elizabeth Gilbert—celebrated author of Eat, Pray, Love and Big Magic—to discuss her newest book that explores a rarely-addressed topic: the dangerous impacts of co-dependency and sex and love addiction. We discussed how her path took her from the stability of a suburban marriage into a profound, life-altering romance with her best friend-turned-lover, Rayya Elias. And we explore the “untouchable darkness” that followed, where a relationship with a relapsing addict revealed Elizabeth's own deepest addiction and codependency. Elizabeth describes her descent into unmanageability, contemplating both murder and suicide—her only perceived options out of the pain—before experiencing a spiritual revelation and hearing the voice of what she now knows is her Higher Power. While we often investigate the life experiences that shape our behavior, Elizabeth asserts that understanding “why” we suffer is rarely enough to heal us. Many of us attempt to fill a persistent internal darkness with food, drugs, sex, work, or porn, but ultimately, that “God-shaped hole” is only filled through a direct relationship with a power greater than ourselves. Our live also covers: - Visions and the Voice of God: The specific spiritual revelations and “visits from beyond” that have directed Elizabeth's writing career and her path to love. - The Dissolution of Fear: A look at the numerous spiritual revelations that led her to be rid of fear, anger, and shame. - Discovery vs. Recovery: Why understanding the “why” of our behavior isn't enough to change it. Elizabeth reminds us that our peace cannot be held hostage by the expression on another person's face. We invite you to watch this session as we explore the “invisible line” between love and pathology and find our way back to ourselves. Elizabeth Gilbert's Latest Book, ALL THE WAY TO THE RIVER: Love, Loss, and Liberation: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/707805/all-the-way-to-the-river-oprahs-book-club-by-elizabeth-gilbert/ Elizabeth Gilbert's Substack: https://elizabethgilbert.substack.com/ Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Greg McKeown is the author of two New York Times bestsellers, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less and Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most. 200,000 people receive his weekly 1-Minute Wednesday newsletter, and he recently released The Essentialism Planner: A 90-Day Guide to Accomplishing More by Doing Less. Sponsors:Momentous high-quality creatine for cognitive and muscular support: https://livemomentous.com/Tim (Code TIM for 35% off your first subscription.)Shopify global commerce platform, providing tools to start, grow, market, and manage a retail businessHelix Sleep premium mattresses: https://helixsleep.com/timCoyote the card game​, which I co-created with Exploding Kittens: https://coyotegame.com*Show notes: https://tim.blog/2025/01/09/personal-reboot-greg-mckeown/*For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast.For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsorsSign up for Tim's email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Discover Tim's books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissYouTube: youtube.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, Margaret Atwood, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Dr. Gabor Maté, Anne Lamott, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.