Doing Beautiful Things (Richard Christiansen)

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I am continually amazed by how quickly Richard metabolizes and moves and by how much he's able to put out into the world at such a high level. Everything Richard creates is incredibly beautiful and special and thoughtful. I became close friends with Richard around the time when he was launching Flamingo Estate, which is his home and garden, and also the brand behind the most imaginatively crafted soaps, candles, pantry items, rare gifts and so much more. This week he brought something else into the world too, a new book called The Guide to Becoming Alive, and I use this as an excuse to bring him back to Pulling the Thread. He joined me last year to talk about creativity and friendship As a writer who sometimes feels like my own work is all words and no action, I love talking to Richard about doing things about where we can find momentum and growth about moving forward and tending to the garden that is right in front of us. I'm also very excited to share what it means to ripen your banana. I know this sounds vaguely sexual, but it's actually one of Richard's most profound metaphors. After the conversation, stick around for a minute and I'll share another practice I love from Richard's book, but first, here's Richard.

MORE FROM RICHARD CHRISTIANSEN:

The Guide to Becoming Alive

Flamingo Estate

Episode 1: “On Cultivating Creativity and Abundance”

EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION:

RICHARD:

Let me start. This book would never have happened without you. It's true

ELISE:

And all the people in the book, but why do you think without me? I love books. I'm a book pusher. You love books too. You owned a bookstore.

RICHARD:

I did own a bookstore. No, because I would be peddling, I don't know, peddling tomatoes at the farmer's market if I had not met you. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but you have been my guiding light and my greatest friend. I have so much big heart for you. You know that a lot of this book was souvenirs of growth in many ways and curiosity, and that all really happened in such a large part because I met you.

ELISE:

Oh, thank you.

RICHARD:

And many of the people in this book, Terry Tempest Williams and a lot of the other people in here because you sent me Terry's book and she's just a light holder as many of these people are. So thank you. This is a tribute to you, but also 600 pages of other things.

ELISE:

Well, it's fun. Thank you. And I want to talk about how we have been ripening our bananas together. That sounds vaguely sexual, but it's not and people will understand exactly what I mean as we explain what this is, but you have been such a wonderful and faithful friend for this stage of my life, and I met you almost immediately as it began, which is kind of wild, but actually not wild considering. I think how we see the world that the people you need emerge in the moment in which you need them, even though we'd encountered each other before times, but never had sort of glanced off each other and never stuck like Velcro.

RICHARD:

I love that expression. You jump and a net will appear, and I feel as though we met each other at that time when we both were jumping, right? It's true. Right? When you started Flamingo, you were in a moment of change as well. We met this crazy time and

ELISE:

Covid stuck both wondering why we were on the phone with each other. It was perfect and it's fun actually too, as someone who, and yes, you also love books and make books and it's part of in many ways what you do as a brand builder. And it's really interesting to watch you go through this experience in a more traditional sense and bring a book into the world because if there's anyone who can show the world how to bring a book out, it's Richard. And it's so funny in part because we were talking about the timing and we're recording this on October 27th and we're really hanging in the balance in a moment of extreme uncertainty. And your book comes out in November and from the beginning I have said that's really weird timing and the election and it's dark and it's dense and nobody's thinking about gardening and flowers in November. And yet as I was reading the book again and diving into various parts of it tonight, I was like, oh, it's perfect because so much of the book is about the seeds that we plant in dark times in dark soil, not knowing what's going to happen or whether they'll ever fruit or bloom, and the introduction of the book, which we don't have to spend a lot of time on it, but it is a conversation with Jane Goodall, that idea that seeds can lie dormant. Is it 2000 years?

RICHARD:

Yeah, that's a great interview. She has a great book called Seeds of Hope. That book talks about how she doesn't lose her capacity for hope in dark times because this tiny thing can seed forests and is all around us and this miracle of this minute little seed that can go through every possible obstacle in life and still grow into a big tree, she's such a force of nature. But also one of those people, and we both have met them who you meet some people and just think, wow, you are driven living in purpose. And I think purpose is such a scary thing for so many of us because it's so heady and it's so weighted and it's so full of ego, but she's just there doing it and one foot in front of the other and has been doing that her whole life. That's sort of why I love her.

But yet still she's funny and she's silly and she's like a living life and Jane Goodall is a ray of sunshine that we can all listen to. And also for her, it's not from an ego place. She talks in that interview about how much anxiety she has about being famous. She doesn't want to be famous. She hates people recognizing her. She loves her alone time. There's other people in the book who are famous who struggle because they're not more famous. So that's the other thing that is so interesting about reading all those 15 interviews. You're like, oh, we're all still working it out. When I got through the whole thing, I was like, oh, I really put a pin in my own anxiety because we're, we're all still growing and no tree grows with a straight branch. Everyone's got crooked branches and everyone's sort of figuring their own shit out. And isn't it great that none of us have done it yet?

ELISE:

Yeah. Well, and in some ways goes back to this idea of one sort of these seeds lying dormant for millennia and then being able to sprout, but also that these seeds contain an entire world,

Each one, which is such a miraculous thing that we never really think about and we also contain an entire worlds and we create entire worlds. It it's very meta.

RICHARD:

Jane talks about how some seeds can only germinate if they're under incredible heat. You need the fire to germinate them, which is so interesting. We talk about the week we're about to have, which feels very fierce and violent and there's a lot of stuff going on culturally, but you and I talk about this a little bit in our chapter about shadow, about sort of dark times being a great conduit for growth and for newness in the same way

ELISE:

That seems essential. We want to avoid it, and we live in this culture obviously that's obsessed with the light right now, the light and the right and being on the right side and being good. And you hear it in communities that we're in a little bit of spiritual bypassing like I'm all about the light and so on and so forth, and it's like, no, babe, you're about the light and the dark. And we all carry these to quote Robert Bly bags of shadow behind us, all the parts of us that we've cut off because of the cultures that we're raised in, the parents that we were born to how we want to be seen. But those parts just all that contained energy we just drag around behind us and we're having that sort of reckoning right now culturally, I think on a spiritual level and we can finger wag at each other and stay in our polarity and we're all just showing each other the parts of ourselves that we refuse to acknowledge, reconcile or integrate, and it's wild watching our culture polarize and how so easily we start creating or behaving in a way that is as bullying as the other side or as exclusionary as the other side.

It's dressed up differently and it feels quite moral and righteous, but we won't get anywhere in a way until we accept the darkness is part of the light and the womb to the tomb, to the new life. It's an essential part of everything. Things die and they make way for new growth.

It’s very painful and we hate that,

RICHARD:

But one of the most interesting parts of that, our conversation was we talked about exercising your shadows. That idea of letting it come out, your shadow self come out in healthy ways to me was super powerful when you said that aggression coming out in contact sports or in video games or in exercise in other ways that are healthy conduits for shadow, which I've thought about a lot since you said that, which is so powerful.

ELISE:

And in some cultures, I was just reading today while the kids were riding horses as I was reading Robert Bly’s Little Book on the Human Shadow and smelling the manure and being in the dirt. It's my favorite smell. And he talks about in Bali how the shadow is turned into art, but it's present. It's in all the temples, it's carved into the masks. It's revered as an essential part of this duality. In America. We really struggle with that. We sanitize everything

And

It has to go somewhere. That energy has to go somewhere and yes, it will come out in ways that are violent and aggressive. It's what we see happening I think with men who are denying and suppressing and repressing their own feminine. And so they come to revile the feminine on the outside. They come to fear the feminine in a way that's wild to watch as they're sort of blaming women. It's very confusing, but I think from a perspective of looking at it from shadow and makes perfect sense that they're terrified of their own feminine nature because it's in the shadow bag that they're carrying around.

RICHARD:

And the more you repress it, the more you push it down, the more violently it comes.

ELISE:

It takes a lot of energy. It just takes a lot of energy, and I think we all know that. It's like the pressure, the builds, and then sometimes when you pop it, when you let that bad feeling come up or you're like, I'm going to touch this thing that I've been conditioned to think is bad or I'm going to explore myself sexually or whatever it is. There's many ways culturally,

RICHARD:

But you remember when we talked about that in the book and you talked about how we are so judgmental of our own shadows, and for me, I talk about it with you and you know about addiction and all my bad habits, but then you mentioned in our conversation that if someone else at a dinner party said that they had the thing that you have or doing the thing that you do, you would just laugh it off and not worry about it. But yet we are so consumed with the energy of it all, but they're letting it go. Bring the light into the shadow. Shadows is a mechanism for growth and just movement,

ELISE:

And it's not so scary. It's interesting. You think about shadow puppets and you think about how small things can create these massive shadows or that the more light there is, the more shadow to be fair, and that they had these become these looming specters in our mind of, oh my God, what would people think of me if they knew as a young child growing up in Australia, my brother in Montana, if they knew that I were gay? It comes to have these massive, massive, and then you say it sometimes, I'm sure everyone has had that experience of letting out a shameful secret that's haunting you and people are like, that's normal or not a big deal, or that's kind of fun, and so much energy is then released that can be used productively. So no, I love the shadow and I love being likened to a fern. I'm in the fern chapter

RICHARD:

Before we move on, the one thing about that which was so interesting for me is that everyone in the book sort of has that. We all have that, right? And so this internal dialogue around the Am I good enough, am I not? Am I this? Am I that? Am I bad? Am I good? This chatter, it's such a waste of time because

ELISE:

It is such a waste of time.

RICHARD:

You step back and look at everyone in the book who my heroes who are light holders, who were people I deeply admire. I was like, there's nothing wrong with any of you. You're fucking great. And yet each of us, all of us, everyone in the book had a thing which was so interesting and also so sort of comforting. You're like, oh, okay, we're all,

ELISE:

Yeah.

Not to make this a Robert Bly heavy interview, but he's so thick in my head, but he has this amazing line. I've just read it about how we spend our lives until we're 20 putting things in the bag, the shadow bag, and then we spend the rest of our lives trying to get all of those things out. Oh my God, that's amazing. Isn't that an amazing quote? I'm like 20. I didn't start this work until 40, but hopefully some people have a head start on all of us, but it's true. And so we're all contending trying to make ourselves whole and we are whole, but when you come into this world as a baby, your wholeness is somewhat unconscious. And then as you learn culture, that's when all this stuff gets shut away or cut off or consigned to the shadow, and then you have to decondition yourself and become whole in a legitimately conscious way, which is

A life's work, and that's what everyone in this book is doing. And thinking about Jane and thinking about Terry and I grew up reading Terry Tempest Williams from Utah, and I'm from Montana, and she writes these incredible books about nature and I think maybe I saw her speak in Missoula when she came to town and my parents had her books, and so she just felt very familiar to me even though she was raised in a Mormon family. She's very, very conservative family members, and she's beyond an ardent environmentalist. I think she's an oracle for the land and definitely for great Salt Lake, and she has done some radical stuff. She's taken actions. She and her husband, she lost her job I think for this at the University of Utah. She teaches at Harvard Divinity School and whatnot, but buying up these parcels of land, they set up an entity and then bought land that was going to be mined and extracted from in order to protect it,

RICHARD:

She bought an oil lease and it is illegal to buy one and not drill. And so she defied that rule and said, we're not going to drill. We're going to keep the oil on the ground a thing which other people had gone to prison for and she lost her job for and suffered enormous sort of social, I guess shame in some ways for it. How remarkable, right?

ELISE:

What I think is really interesting about Terry and Jane, and I think about this as in my own work, which is as a writer sometimes it feels like all words, no action. These two obviously take action. Jane has institutes all over the world, et cetera. It's an easy to see. There's an imprint of a legacy. And so sometimes I think when you're doing what I do, it can feel a little bit like, I know I'm doing a lot, but there's not always an impact hacked. And I think that's okay, although it's something that I think about all the time because I don't want to be one of those people, a keyboard warrior who isn't like Richard Rohrer when he set up his center in Albuquerque, who he calls it the Center for Action and Contemplation Action first because so often we're eager to contemplate and not actually do anything.

And when he talks about Jesus, he talks about how he's always talking about orthopraxy right practice. He doesn't really care what people say they're going to do in the scriptures or saying the right or proper words. He cares about what people actually do. And I think about that a lot in the context of what I create. And so I'm going to really right turn us from action and contemplation to this iteration of your life where you are no longer for the past four plus years, you spent your entire life building brands for other people, looking for answers, meeting interesting people, traveling to creating something that could somehow combine your early life as a farmer, your deep veneration for nature and the garden, your love of design and art and beauty, and a quest for pleasure, which maybe had felt like it had exited your life

Long before. And it's so beautiful. I mean, I obviously am a Flamingo Estate, Stan. I'm not the only one, but everything you do is amazing. What's wild to me about you is that many of us can sit and say, that would be a fun idea or that would be an interesting collaboration. And I have this conversation with you. We'll be walking down the street in New York or having a glass of wine and we have a chat, and then 10 days later there's a newsletter from you and you've made this thing happen. So first of all, how do you do that? How do you move so fast? How do you metabolize so fast?

RICHARD:

I feel like I know the dance steps to do that. I spent 20 years working in creative stuff and I kind of figured it out. I know how to make things I love. I spent so long, so long and so many years making up stories for other people. So then when I finally found the thing and I met the farmers that we started working with, and as you know, it's 128 farms, but the real genesis of this book was a little bit of kicking the tires of what you just said because the deepest fear I had was that this was a lucky fluke that this moment in time where I was able to start a business out of my home and do this thing that a lot of people loved and we got attention for was maybe just a child of covid and was really a lucky moment and it's not going to last and fickle.

And that sort of kept me up at night that, oh my God, what if this is a fleeting moment and this thing that I put my energy into is temporary? And so I had a lot of imposter syndrome around that. I was like, what if this is going to disappear? I put all my chips on the table, what happens if this doesn't work? And so to be honest, the start of this was like, how do I safeguard and pressure test this? And we figure out a thing that people love and we have a good life, and I radically different life than I had before covid, and it's good, but how can it be great? And so some of this is like how do I talk to people who I think have figured it out, who are great, and how do I get some of those tools?

So some of this is a little bit of, oh, I hope I want to safeguard this for the future, but yes to all of that. Yes. And I feel like some of my thoughts were confirmed in the book. I think there's great, I amazing value in speed. I think there's something to be said, but just the velocity of doing a builder by building a baker becomes a baker by baking. We just have to just do shit. And so this idea of sitting and thinking and talking, it's never been my thing. I'm a very productive person. I love doing. And when I spoke to everyone in the book, I feel like that was one of the other connective things. You raise your vibrational energy just by doing, but just putting yourself out there and doing stuff and getting your hands in the soil and making things or creating things. And it was the same for Martha Stewart as it was for Gonzalo, the farmer in Mexico. It was the same for all of them, just velocity and doing the, that's the key.

ELISE:

I feel like too, watching so many brands show up, evolve, grow, die, work, all the different iterations of this, I think a lot of people are consumed by this idea that brand building is glamorous parties and connections and sort of who, and those are the stage gates to growth and building something meaningful and viable. And as I know you know, because I've watched you do this, it's actually about creating things iteratively, looking for product market fit, getting incredibly close to your customers who I know text you directly and really having your ear to the ground in a very humble way. Otherwise you're sort of creating something that's completely disconnected from the people it's supposed to serve and the land from which it's supposed to come. And I think a lot of people forget that and they think it's a theoretical exercise that can be engineered, programmed with certainty, and it's like, no, it's highly iterative and the depth of, even in the four years, I'm like, oh my God, I remember that. I remember that collaboration. I remember the Tiffany

RICHARD:

I, it, oh my God, there's hundreds of things we made in four years. And

ELISE:

I was like, wow, the life scale flamingo gingerbread house.

RICHARD:

But also, can I say something about that? I was actually reading an interview this morning in the New York Times about how unglamorous it is to be a politician today. And everyone thinks it's like a press wing and it's really glamorous and it's like short, bitchy sound bites, but really the reality of being a politician in America is just like falling asleep on a sofa in a bad hotel with takeaway food because you're just away from your family and you're working. And it was super interesting to read this real life idea. And I think the same thing actually running a business and the grunt work on it and the small things are the big things. And every Sunday I call the top 50 customers of the week and I ask them how they are and what they bought and all that sort of stuff. I just feel like there's something for old school clientele, there's your shop, your shopkeeper, you need to talk to people and you can't algorithm your way out of it. I think that's the difference. I hope we are building a brand, but it's very different to selling products. And there's so much shit out there. There's so many products to buy that are sort of copies of copies of copies, and we make things directly from farms. And I think we have a real story and we are a real place and we're real people. And those things are increasingly rare

ELISE:

In a way. Making books or writing things for me too is like that's how I know what I'm up to. I can't really see what I'm up to until I look back at something and say, oh, now I understand myself. It's all a process of self-discovery that hopefully people relate to and enjoy as well. But how do you know you? I mean, I think you have a brand. I think Flamingo certainly qualifies and fast, but what qualifies as a brand?

RICHARD:

I mean a real story. I think I'm super panicked that this hyper availability of information, so things can be copied faster and things can be replicated very quick and an availability of capital so you can build product distribution kind of easily and contract manufacturers who can make things fast. For me, I care deeply about the way things are made and I care about the way things are grown. And if things are not made in a test tube that they're made on a farm, there's already a story there. And those things are so precious to me.

ELISE:

I think that that gig is up almost. I think it's just that cycle is coming for products as well in the sense that if it's not memorable, it has no intention in it, it has no efficacy, it serves no underlying need, it's one and done, and these things poof. And you'll end up with the big players and you'll end up with the niche, highly connected brands. And I know maybe you don't want to be a niche. Well, maybe you do want to be a niche, highly connected brand.

RICHARD:

No, I don't actually. No.

ELISE:

What do you want?

RICHARD:

I want to be a billion dollar brand. We will be a billion dollar brand. I know that with my full heart, and not because I'm greedy, because there is no brand, there has never been a brand that has scaled using regenerative farms and sourcing directly from those people. There's never been a brand that has done that and scaled a vibrant way. And so I do want to do that. I want to do that so that I can show other people that it's possible. And so we can Estee Laus and L'Oreals and all those other people that there's a different way of doing things. It needs to be a bit of a sea change in the way that we make things and do things, as you know.

ELISE:

I do think that to be fair, I feel like there has been somewhat of a sea change in terms of what consumers have been their expectations and that people ultimately want to do, I think the right thing and they will move when pressured. And so I feel optimistic that a lot of these things that were very hard to find are becoming table stakes now. We'll see.

RICHARD:

We'll see. No, but I think we wouldn't be here if that wasn't the case. And I think the challenge, I think is for us to make sure that that message is always exciting and design driven and cool. And I think whenever we as a brand talk about money, we give back to the environment or purpose stuff, we see engagement drop very fast. I think we want people to think about the environment a different way. You have to show it to them a different way, which is sort of maybe what we've been trying to do.

ELISE:

Yeah, no, it's true. It's very hard to get people to engage.

RICHARD:

Oh my God, it's so hard for many of us just to get out of bed and deal with our husbands and boyfriends and kids and all that stuff. Can we just not stop feeling bad about something? Can we just be joyful? And

ELISE:

Yes,

RICHARD:

We never talk about, as a brand, we never talk. I never ever talk about the stuff that's not in our products because I feel like that's telling people the party's going to be nice because of the people who are not going to be there. We need to talk about what's amazing and what's great and what's fun, and just let's celebrate that part.

ELISE:

And I think that one of the things that people are allergic to and might not necessarily have the name for this, and it's huge in marketing and some parts of marketing, it's the drama triangle

In a lot of these spaces. It is, these are the villains, you the consumer or the victim. We're obviously the hero. And so we're back in that shadow territory again that I think it's just a drag. And I think people hear it and subconsciously are like, I don't want to do this anymore. I think there's an empowerment triangle and an above the line empowerment triangle where it's about challenging and coaching. I think that we stay stuck when we move into these are the bad people, these are the good people in that space, and marketing in a way that people are getting enough of it and it's so compelling, it's so fun to light an industry on fire, et cetera. And yet at the end of the day, our energy doesn't shift it because we don't want to engage in that dynamic. It's just one theory. We'll see. We promise to talk about bananas at the start of this conversation, and that's one of my favorite. So for people who do not yet have this beautiful book, it's such a treat. But there are essays from Richard Intermingled with these interviews where he talks about the qualities of various plants.

RICHARD:

As I said, this was a book to figure out how I could safeguard like myself. And then as always, what can the garden teach? And then maybe the cement set when I was thinking about wisteria, which is this, everyone knows wisteria is amazing, buying purple flour that many of us have that grows and grows and grows and grows and you cannot kill it. And my mom planted wisteria in the goat shed here in the worst soil. It's sandy soil, it gets no water, it's terrible. And she planted these two wisteria plants that have just completely taken over the building. They're all over the front of the building. They roots are deep, their vines are spindled everywhere, wisteria cannot be killed, and they're really the hardest working plants in the garden. And so I was thinking about, I wrote a chapter work like wisteria, which is just find the thing work, just keep going. And then I was like, who represents that spirit? So that led to the interview with Martha Stewart, which was about work like wisteria. And so the idea is here's a plant, what can we learn from it? And then who best personifies the spirit of that?

ELISE:

The TOC alone is so brilliant. Here's this smattering, find your banana, which we're going to talk about work like hysteria. Shed your bark like the eucalyptus, stop and smell the sage. Prune your roses. Eat real food, worship water. Salute the sun like the heirloom tomato court, your shadow like the fern flirt. Like the orchid. That's mine. I'm the fern friends. Flirt like the orchid. Love like a dog. Embrace your winter like the plum tree. Travel far like the dandelion cook a meal for someone you love. Oh, I love it. It makes me a little emotional. So let's talk about our bananas because it's such a beautiful metaphor. And then it's an interview with someone we both love Jo Horgan of Mecca, but your essay, it's so good. Richard, do you even remember what you wrote

RICHARD:

In which part

ELISE:

About finding your banana?

RICHARD:

No. Is just this idea of when you put an avocado and a banana in a paper bag, the avocado ripens so much faster. And so it was a rally cry. Can we find if I'm an avocado, what's my banana? Can we all find our banana and help us ripen? And so for me, it was very much Harvey, my partner, but also the flamingo, like this whole business we have, I often say Harvey's banana and flamingo's the paper bag, but this idea of just riping quickly and you need people around you who encourage you to do that, as you know.

ELISE:

Yeah, no, it's such a beautiful metaphor.

You write in the essay about that moment of transition and trying to move out of stasis and finding forward momentum and looking for growth and having deep empathy for people who feel lost on the path and yet not wanting to be one. And I love this part. I'm going to read to you if I know one thing, which I might not, it's that the secret to growth lives in the simple act of commitment. There are no right or wrong decisions. There are just decisions. And whichever path you take is the right one. A flower moves toward the sun without thinking or examining the process that pulls her forth. And that is so true, even thinking about Flamingo, I don't want to call it compulsive, but there is a compulsive drive or there's a growth factor that's very similar to nature where it's like there's that part of you that just needs to express and self-express some more and plant a seed over here and then we're going to harvest this.

RICHARD:

But also most of this wonderful, the flower doesn't blossom for the be it blossoms in the bee comes this idea that what nature and the garden shows us is that we cannot and must not look left or right or up and down for other people or what they're doing or look for other people for their approval. That there is enough sunshine for every single one of us and that we just start looking upward. And that was one of the things really took away from all those conversations in this chapter especially comparison is the thief of joy. And we all know this and it means we have to put our phone down and we have to just get our hands in the door, it in the soil, and we have to just focus on ourselves

ELISE:

In our own work, like tend the garden that's in front of you. And I think comparison is a thief of joy and it is the thief of originality too. And it's so hard, I think, to find ground or it feels like it's impossible to find soil that hasn't been planted in before and you can't, that's also not the point.

RICHARD:

But also it doesn't matter if it has been.

ELISE:

Yeah, exactly,

RICHARD:

Yes.

ELISE:

Everything we do is referential to something else. It's like nothing is a vacuum is truly the absence of life and everything in a way builds on what's already been here.

RICHARD:

The Jo Horgan interview was so interesting to me because she built a billion dollar brand on her own and she says that you have to have cup fillers, not cup drillers. This idea of people that fill your cup not depleted and simple basic rule. And I thought about that so much when you think about the people you could work with and the people that you spend time with. And we know this, it's so basic, but we don't police it well enough. And so I really feel like she's testament to the idea of policing that idea. And since I did that interview, we actually sort of did that. I started saying no more than yes and telling some people they needed to leave when they wanted to stay. And she was right.

ELISE:

Yeah, Jo, I met Jo through Richard, and I've been doing work with Mecca, which is the company that she founded, and her husband is the CFO and she's our CEO. And I don't know what their titles are. It's like a band of Mary Musketeers, it's Jo and Pete, her husband and Marita, who's one of my favorite people on the planet.

RICHARD:

Oh my God needs to run the world. She's amazing.

ELISE:

Marita for president,

RICHARD:

For the Americans listening, Mecca is I think the best retail brand in Australia. It is the most amazing.

ELISE:

I think it's one of the best retail brands in the world. And It is, well, in some ways I'm really easy to impress and in other ways I'm not. And I went to Australia with Richard when my book came out and to speak at the Mecca conference. We went to Mecca headquarters in Melbourne, and I had met them once or twice when they were in LA and I loved them. But when you see people out of context, you don't really know what is this company going to be like? And it was me or it was someone else who was like, are we on Candid camera? Because everyone in that building, it was like everyone was on acid. Everyone was so happy and it was so fun and bright and joyful. And as I've worked with them, it's really been deeply healing for me. I don't know if you know that, but in the sense of helping me find my faith and healthy corporate structures, and it's really let me explore my own relationship with beauty, which I think is speaking of shadow, one of the most complex topics for women. And watching Joe and Marita and the other leaders of the company and just the whole team really work has been really fun. And they don't take things so seriously. No, they're so

RICHARD:

Successful. No, that's not true. I think they do. But it's that leadership through joy, not leadership through shame or guilt. It depends on where the light is coming from, right?

ELISE:

Yeah. I get why all of my truly, most of my best friends are Australian. I think there's a message in that for me, someone's Australian, I'm sure to love them. That's where I'm at. That's my conclusion for our conversation.

RICHARD:

Before we finish, can we talk about the last chapter? Would you mind? I think it's

ELISE:

No, please do. Let's talk about it.

RICHARD:

Dr. Kerry Howells. So Dr. Kerry Howells was my university professor when I was 17, and she was sort of ostracized and criticized because she was in this very macho, terrible university culture. And she was talking about gratitude and about softness and about feelings, and people thought she was crazy. People thought she was a witch. And I loved her. And she really, the old people I met in my early teens through my education, she just radically changed me. She was so different to everyone else. I'm just so caring. And anyway, Carrie set me on a course and I hadn't spoken to her for so many years, and then I thought, well, I can't really talk about becoming alive without talking to Carrie, this person who really was the original match that started the flame. So anyway, Carrie has written three books on gratitude. She's a professor of gratitude.

She has an enormous amount of research on gratitude, and she talks a lot in our interview about how easy it is for us all to feel asleep in life and how we have a responsibility just to feel awake. And she talks a little bit about this word, which is so interesting, thunk, which is this medieval word, which is about, it's the root word of think and think thunk. This idea that you can't really have gratitude and think anything unless you're also deeply thinking about it. And also the inverse is true. If there's a difficult situation in your life and you're thinking about it, you also have to thank it. So in her interview, she talks about the floods in Australia, which was happening. Australia had this terrible kind of system of floods that was happening when we were on the phone and she talks about how people were obviously devastated and really angry and sad, and she said, yes, we should talk about the floods, but also and think about them, but also thank our families and our friends and our communities and these people who are around us. It was such an interesting conversation just around the circularity of thinking and thanking and gratitude. I love her. Also the indigenous Australian language. There isn't a word for thank you, because gratitude is sort of like a unspoken and expected in your behavior, which is what? It's

ELISE:

Beautiful.

RICHARD:

Yeah,

ELISE:

I love that.

RICHARD:

But if your actions don't truly and meaningfully show gratitude, you're considered uncivilized, which was so interesting to me.

ELISE:

I like that. I think that should be our compass going forward. Richard mentioned his Carrie Howell's interview, and I love this practice for us all to take forward. She says, I have this theory that if we prepare our gratitude before starting our day, before we actually go into a situation, especially if it's a difficult situation, then we can be in that state of thanks in advance. So we're thinking about what's ahead of us. For example, you wake up and think about all the tough things that you are doing today. You might be going to work and you think I'm going to bring a state of gratitude to this because we get lost in the moment when we're in it. So it's often difficult when you're really busy to hold that gratitude. You can actually project into the future what state you want to be in, and that sets the tone for the day ahead.