Finding Your Inner Mentor (Tara Mohr)

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Tara Mohr is a coach, educator and the author of Playing Big: Practical Wisdom for Women Who Want to Speak Up, Create, and Lead, which is celebrating its 10th birthday this fall. I first met Tara a decade ago and was so taken with her and her insights that we did four stories together—stories that were deeply resonant with women everywhere. These stories were about understanding—and releasing—your inner critic, locating your inner mentor, examining the ways in which you keep yourself in the shadows and why, and the most potent one of them all: why women are so quick to criticize other women. We cover this same ground 10 years on—and it’s just as powerful as it was then. I loved reconnecting with Tara and can’t wait to do more with her over the coming decades, specifically revisioning what it might look like if more women led—but not in a model defined by men, in a way that might be uniquely their own.

MORE FROM TARA MOHR:

The Inner Mentor Guided Meditation

Tara Mohr’s Website

Tara’s Online Courses

Playing Big: Practical Wisdom for Women Who Want to Speak Up, Create, and Lead

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

ELISE:

It is been so long. I'm so happy to see you.

TARA:

You too. You too. I think we had a phone conversation. It probably was almost a decade ago, 10 years ago. Yeah,

ELISE:

I was going back. I think we did four stories on Goop together. I remember the book having a big impact on me at the time, certainly. And then when I was going back through our conversations, I was like, oh, this definitely has influenced my thinking in a big way.

TARA:

Well, likewise, from Substack to the book to the podcast, I really want to say I feel you're creating such a special, unique space, especially right now. Thank

ELISE:

You.

TARA:

And I so appreciate, I think for me, the intersection of spirituality, psychology, and feminism together also, that you're not just talking to who put a book out in the past three months. I feel like you're pulling from the canon that is so often forgotten or overlooked, and that's really valuable.

ELISE:

Yeah, thank you. I really appreciate that. In terms of the canon, not that they don't make books like they used to, but I obviously am an avid reader and going back to some of these classic books that have truly withstood time and are so intricately woven together and and that we just live in a more disposable culture and having written so many books, and I love the publishing industry. My brother has an imprint. I've worked with so many editors, but still I know how busy they are. And as a writer, if you don't take your book all the way to the end and make it as tight as it can possibly be, no one is going to do that for you. And I feel like maybe in the olden days there was more rigor. I don't know.

TARA:

Yeah, I think more rigor, probably even less emphasis on tightness in a way that was probably good, more room to explore. And I think about that all the time. I think about some of my favorite books. And would they be able to be published now? Either the book or the person, I just don't know if they would feel snappy enough or urgent enough.

ELISE:

And it feels like there's so many schisms in the book world. I mean, this is what I worked really hard with my book to try to bridge is books are either highly academic and somewhat inaccessible, almost by intention or because it actually takes a lot of time and energy to make your ideas incredibly clear and accessible and to do the work of bringing people along with you. But there is a certain type of book that appeals to reviewers and academics, and then there are books that are more accessible that often don't have that much rigor. And so I was trying to find someplace in the middle, but it's weird. You end up in a little bit of a no man's land, not for readers like your book. My book continues to sell by virtue of word of mouth recommendations. But yeah, you don't end up in, maybe you have, I am not ending up in any course curriculums. The book is not academic enough, right? Yeah,

TARA:

Yeah. No, not course curriculums. Yeah,

ELISE:

Yeah, no, that interesting. And it's such a disservice because I don't know, we need more books that are somewhere in between. I feel like both of our focus on women and my next book is less focused on gender, but obviously I care deeply about women and I care deeply about men and boys as the mother to two young boys. I'm more concerned about them in many ways, but I feel like so many of these spaces are dismissed and derided and mocked in part because they're so compelling to women. And so I also want to be a bridge to that and to suggest that, oh, actually you can be a serious person who has a brain and still be interested in other ways of understanding our world or putting our experience into a larger context. I'm always interested in the largest context possible, and I think that's where people are. I don't know why it's wild, but I think that's where most of us are.

TARA:

Yeah. Yeah. It's been a challenge for me to fully claim the interest in women's anything and psychology leadership and just work with my own internalization of the message that that's somehow not central. It's the whole Carol Gilligan piece that you talk about of is it a human voice? And if women are more than half the population, how do we really internalize that? We're not talking about some little niche thing when we talk about that. And most of the time I can claim that in a healthy way, but sometimes I get those internalized messages affect me too in my own writing, and I'll think, how come Eckhart Tole just gets to write about spirituality in general?

ELISE:

Right. It's interesting. Yeah, I've been thinking about it a lot as I start. I've been researching my next book, but as I start to write it too of can I write this from a place of just being myself or am I going to need to scaffold this in the same way that I did on our best behavior with 20,000 Endnotes or whatever it was, 25,000 endnotes, which was mostly, I mean, I love citing other people, obviously, particularly because women haven't been in conversation with each other for that long. It's very important to me to bridge these conversations as well, but could I write a book without then going back? What I would find myself doing is saying, oh, someone must have said this, so let me figure out who so I can credit them. And I mean, I like that part of myself. And then at the same time, to your point about Eckhart, wouldn't it be nice to just let it rip and could I give myself that permission?

TARA:

Yes, I would really like to support you in doing that and call you forth in doing that. I see this a lot, and I think it is our good student good girl training where we are like, who's the authority? Who said this? What are the sources? Let me approach this creative project in the way I was trained to please a teacher. And there's a lot of internalized patriarchy in the ideas there about what's legitimate, where truth comes from, what's enough, and I totally hear what you're saying about, and there's this intellectual part of you that loves that stuff. So I think the distinction is where is it coming from? When it's fun and joyful and necessary to the work, great. But if it's coming from, I already know what I want to say, but that's a little uncomfortable to just say it, that's probably the place to turn away push.

ELISE:

Yeah. And sometimes it's incredibly fun to feel a truth and then recognize how resonant it is in the culture because you can find it in the research. And this book is top of mind for me. I just finished it in the last couple of months. I can't believe I hadn't read it, but I read The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haight. And going back to this idea of the way that we subjugate the feminine to the masculine, the mind superior to the body, rationality is superior to intuition. His point is a moral psychologist. The primary thesis of that book is actually we aren't these rational people that we perceive ourselves to be. Our morality is guided almost exclusively by intuition. And then we use our reasoning and rationality to find the facts or the truth that support that intuition. And it's a very compelling book, particularly for this point in time and in our political polarization in terms of suggesting that everyone has their own map of morality, but also that it's a feeling based experience.

That's how we approach the world. And yet we try and plaster over it with this idea that everything we do is truth bound and unquote and grounded in rational thought. And if anything, it just this ongoing subjugation of this feminine principle that lives in each of us, which is actually we're taking in all these inputs. We have all these feelings that we're processing in real time about the right thing to do, or the right way to move in the world, and then we justify it. So if women to our point, we're allowed more intuition, we are, I think, more intuitive, not to speak in sweeping ways or essentialist ways about gender, but as you say, or as you explain and playing big, if we could just let women play big, the world would look quite different.

TARA:

Yes. Yeah. And playing big is not really anything except playing free. I think sometimes when people first hear playing big, they're like, but I don't want to pump myself up to something bigger, and I'm not trying to supersize my life and I don't want to do something that's contributing to the problem by taking up more resources or whatever. So I want to just first say in the context, especially given everything we were just talking about, playing big is really what happens naturally. If you aren't self-censoring your gifts and your voice and your power, that's the playing big that I'm interested in. It's us being free to share our voices, share our critiques, use our creativity, stand for what we actually believe in. And that happens through all that unlearning that is so much part of what your work is about too.

ELISE:

Yeah, I feel like your book and your work and the chapters on pride and envy and the way that they overlap and scarcity is an incomplete lockstep, the way that we're conditioned to minimize or wait to be seen or appreciated or validated or affirmed, because to assert our own value or say, look at what I've done brings judgment and our own inner critic, maybe that's a good place to start because people I know are familiar with this concept of inner critic, but I feel like you do it a lot of justice, and I think it can be minimized in our culture, just voice on your shoulder, but it has real world implications for how we show up. So can you talk a bit about your work with women and inner critics and how to understand the light side of the inner critic and its instinct to keep us safe and then the cost of that smallness?

TARA:

Yeah, absolutely. And this is a great place to start because this was so much the spark of the playing big work for me. I had started a small coaching practice. I was in my own big career and life transition where I was accepting that I wanted to work with people around their inner lives and personal growth. So I had gotten trained as a coach and I had just started coaching friends of friends and family of friends as I was just getting started. And all of my early clients, I kept having this same experience over and over again, which would get to know this client. I would feel like this is a really brilliant woman. She's got some amazing ideas for her company. She's got some really important visions for the world. She's hardworking, she's conscientious. Gosh, I really wish people like her were in charge.

And then I would be hearing from that same person, oh, well if that idea I just shared was a good idea, obviously someone else would be doing it already, right? Or I'm definitely not qualified for that yet. Maybe after I get a PhD in the very, very specific thing I want to work on, I will be qualified, or why would my organization create that role for me? And there was this really huge gap between what was emanating out of these women, which was their capability and their readiness to lead and how they saw themselves. And then I had to admit to myself, well, I'm really only very interested in that because that's right where I am with myself. I was doing well in what was my day job at the time. I had done well in school my whole life, and yet I was feeling this self-censoring and constant push pull in sharing my voice and just feeling quite afraid of going for things that I wanted.

And so I got really interested in that gap and started to work with those clients around the inner critic. And my first guess was, oh, we're going to dig into their childhoods and find who was the critical source in their lives that created this voice. And very quickly I found out that was not going to be my answer because I would hear the exact same adult inner critic in these women. And some were like, my parents were so supportive and some were like, my parents ignored me, my parents cheered me on. Parents were so critical. And yet this adult more professionally oriented, more adult selfhood oriented inner critics sounded the same despite this wide range of early experiences. Then I had to look a little more culturally and also biologically. And what became clear was that that inner critic voice really spoke up when something took us out of our comfort zone or when we were contemplating something out of our comfort zone.

And to place that in a context of gender for women, what is unsafe and what we very deeply learn is unsafe, is visibility, power, too much success, shining bright, standing out from the crowd in some way, all of that. And so anything that verges on that evokes a lot of safety instinct alarm in us, and that actually the inner critic is a strategy that our safety instinct uses to get us to retreat into a safe comfort zone without us ever realizing that's what's happening. So if our safety instinct said, Hey, Elise, never write a book in your own voice. I'm your safety instinct, and I think that's too loaded. You'd be like, no way. But if it says, Hey, Elise, this is the way to be serious. I know what if it makes a good argument and doesn't reveal who it really is, we're much more likely to listen to it. So that's the model that I started using for helping people understand what's happening with the inner critic. And if that's what it is, it means we're not going to graduate from it or become confident. And so then the whole become confident in the way that we are often advised to as women,

ELISE:

Which is maddening. But yes, go

TARA:

Ahead. Yes, it is maddening. And so then the work is really about what's it like to have a lifelong relationship with fear slash self-doubt that pops up when we are on these comfort zone or safety zone edges, and how do we wisely respond so that the most expansive and aspirational part of us is running the show? Our safety instinct is not our deeper self, and so we don't really want that part directing our actions.

ELISE:

So how do you coach women to get in touch? I want to talk about the inner mentor, but how do you coach women to calm that inner critic down or thank it for its service or recognize it as the shadow or to quote Phil Stutz like the part X of you that wants to keep you in the safety zone? How do you practically work with it?

TARA:

So the good news is there's a variety of practices and they're also not that hard to learn, not they can be a bit hard to make habits like a lot of things, but you can digest what they are pretty quickly and start practicing them. So the sort of most fundamental one is just a mindfulness naming and noticing, which I know you talk so much about, just noticing. So just like, oh, my inner critic is speaking up. And I would say there's a world of difference between saying I'm such a mess. I'm not a confident person. Owning it as your identity versus talking about it as a separate thing. Oh, my inner critic is speaking up. This is one voice in me. So just starting to have a naming, being a noticing practice. And sometimes that's enough. Just like with anything, when you go, I'm scared, I'm angry.

It dissipates a little bit just from the saying of that. So that's one way. Another is, and this is a light fun way that is a little cartoony, and sometimes I cringe sharing it, but it does help people. So there we go, which is just to create a personification of your inner critic, and you can choose something from film or literature or make it up. I don't recommend it being your mother or your older brother who you're still trying to repair a relationship with, even if they remind you of them. But to create a character. And when you're hearing an inner critic thought, see it as coming from that character. And for a lot of people that just brings humor and they get some perspective on it. My favorite one really, especially in recent years, is to go to focus on your values, your personal values.

Instead in any situation where you're feeling self-doubt. So if you're feeling incredibly nervous about a new job to say, okay, what values of mine do I actually want to have guiding me on my first days of this new job? And people will usually say, oh, maybe learning or maybe collaboration or maybe kindness or maybe curiosity. There's something about those qualities of our values that helps us. They're bigger than our self-doubt. And so I'm more and more leaning into, it's not about how do we bite self-doubt with self-affirmation. We're actually trying to step into something that's not about self at all to carry us and our values help us do that. It's one way to do that.

ELISE:

I just want to make a vote for persona work, and I'm so happy that you do it because I led a workshop recently with a friend, Courtney Smith, who's a coach, and we did persona work based on our best behavior and just to create a character. I was working on a story about money, and so my mom had this fear of becoming a bag lady. She went on Donahue in the eighties to talk about it. And so one of my personas is Bag Lady bethy. And to take the time to actually create the persona and then recognize when she is there with me is so helpful. Everyone needs their own cast of characters that they can start just recognized by name. And to hear women talking about it in the room was moving and hilarious. And it allows you to, as you said, use humor and create a little bit of distance and to recognize that this isn't you, this is maybe a part of you, but that there is some separation and that then lets you breathe into it a little bit.

TARA:

Yeah, so great. You're reminding me of a really great coaching session years ago with someone about their bag, lady fear. And this is also for fears. It can be so great to just say, well, okay, so what if you do X, Y, Z and you really can't pay your rent? What if that worst case scenario comes to pass? And she just thought and thought long silence, and then she said, I guess I'd move in with my sister. And it was like the balloon popped. And so that can be so great too to just, I call that following fear through to the end game. Let's play the movie all the way through.

ELISE:

Yeah,

TARA:

Yeah.

ELISE:

No, and catastrophizing, if you really do it intentionally can be highly cathartic where you get to the end of what could happen and you're like, oh, I could live with that or I'm dead.

I want to talk about the first piece that I did with you 10 years ago about how women criticize other women because I'm sure this comes up for you all the time in every conversation I have about on our best behavior, it doesn't matter the trajectory. It always comes back to this in the envy chapter. So let's put that in a parking lot. But first, since we were talking about the inner critic, can we talk about the inner mentor? Because when you taught this to me a decade ago, this really stuck and I love my inner mentor and I visit her. So can you tell people what this is?

TARA:

Yeah. And then I want to hear a little bit about yours and what your visits are like and all of that. So the inner mentor is a tool that's based on work that was part of the early curriculum at the Coaches Training Institute where I did my coaching training. And they had an exercise that they called Future Self where they would guide the coaching students in this meditation and visualization, get really relaxed in your body, go into a more visual dream-like space and meet yourself 20 years out in the future. And I'll say for everyone listening now, don't try and do it now because the process of the visualization and relaxation is really what is so important here. And what happened in my coaching training is I just watched person after person having really powerful experiences when they did that, and I started to use it in my coaching practice.

And I found that especially in working with women, what was happening was this really powerful combination of they were meeting a more authentic, true to themselves picture of themselves. They were meeting some sense of their, what I would call their soul self, like the part of them that is calm, wise, loving. And they were also maybe getting some glimpses on a more literal level of what something in them wanted to grow into. So it has something to do with chronology, but it also has to do with authenticity, and it also has to do with what we might otherwise call the higher self or something like that. It's all of those at once. And what people would see would have usually some combination of literal and symbolic elements. So sometimes someone might see in that visualization, oh, she's a painter. And they would say, I left behind painting 10 years ago and I really know I meant to paint.

So that would be a literal piece, but sometimes someone would say, I'm living by the ocean. I don't live near any bodies of water, nor do I plan to. And then we'd often look at those things as a metaphor. Well, what's the quality of that ocean? Oh, it's so deeply calm and it feels really spiritual. And so then the question becomes, how do we bring more ocean quality as you're feeling that ocean in your life now, I think you draw on so many different spiritual traditions or systems of thought that have some notion of the higher self. And I also draw from in my life so many different ones. A key question in all of them is we know that soul self and that wisdom is there, but how do we reliably access it? And I'm surprised how reliable and accessible a way this is for people to access it.

So that's why I love it. And then just to go back to the gender piece too for a minute. I think for women in particular, this concept of an inner mentor that you can consult this archetype like a mentor and ask it really practical questions, we can get into that, but what should I do here? Do I take the job? How should I write this email? What should I do with my two free hours today? You can really both ask her and try to do things as she would do it. I think as women, we need that in a particular way because we cannot look outward for our roadmap. We need to be imagining into new spaces and liberating ourselves into yet uncreated ways of being, and she can give us that.

ELISE:

So beautiful. And I do a meditation too in terms of you can expand your inner mentor to, I visit my late brother-in-Law on a couch in Connecticut. Sometimes when I need Peter, and sometimes in those conversations I do automatic writing or whatever it may be. It's pretty deeply clarifying to your point where I can be shocked by what I get back. And yet I know it's completely true, but somehow feels inaccessible to just go there myself in the moment. Yeah, my inner mentor, this will surprise. Absolutely no one who has listened to the podcast for a while lives in the woods, and she's in a cozy cabin with a fire without a manicured lawn. It's just completely in the woods, woods adjacent. She wears comfortable flannels and plaids and is sturdy and strong and short haired and cozy. And she reads and writes, and I know I'm with her or I know how present she is in me because I know that friends come to me for my inner mentor all the time, and I can listen from that place.

And yet I struggle to give myself the same calm, measured wisdom and the same breadth of perspective at times. I can get so frantic and anxious without letting myself have access to that as well. And it's funny when it comes to psychic mediums and highly intuitive people, the quip I often get is, well, if they were so psychic, wouldn't they all have won the lottery and wouldn't they know everything about their own lives? And it's like, no, actually it doesn't work like that. I'm not calling myself a psychic medium, by the way, but I'm just saying they can't use their gifts on themselves. There's too much emotion attached. It doesn't work. They have no, they might get an occasional hit, but they don't really have a clear view on their own life, and it's so hard to get that. We struggle to be oracles for ourselves because it's so attached to what we want and all of that covert longing and daily anxiety. But I think to that end, I think that the inner mentor can be an oracle, particularly if you can really do the meditation, it feels like an oracle because sometimes it's not what you want to hear

TARA:

Often. Often, yes. Those darn inconvenient truth. Yeah, I mean there's sort of two parts of the process. Well, there's a few parts. So to your point, what we normally hear in our everyday thinking, the inner critic voice or just our everyday chatter is very intrusive and we really don't have to go seeking it out. For most of us, that inner mentor voice doesn't come and bang down the door of our conscious thought. We really have to go seek it, and we have to pause and slow down. And it can be a quick slow down once people have a sense of their inner mentor, sometimes that's just taking a moment to bring her to mind or picture how she'd moved through a situation. But we do have to seek it. And then as you're saying, a lot of times people hear things that they do not like, and then there's the courage and the willingness to move forward and take action or don't take action or whatever it is based on that guidance.

And I find especially for a lot of women in our contemporary busy culture, she will often say it's time to wait or it's time to rest or take it one step at a time. Things that can be hard to swallow for the doers. A lot of times people will be really caught up in a big urgent decision in their lives and she'll be like, guess what? It doesn't matter. You could choose either one. This is not the big stuff. And that could be uncomfortable. The principle for me is that if you're hearing from your inner mentor, there will be a resonance there. So you don't have to swallow anything, but if you're feeling a resonance and yet it's challenging, that's probably good to pay attention to.

ELISE:

Yeah.

So let's go back to the practical world and this idea because women are hurting at the hands of other women and it feels like probably at every moment, but in this particular moment, certainly there's this like there's nothing to see here. Let's not draw attention to this hashtag women Supporting Women. Everywhere I go, women want to tell me the stories of the men who have largely supported or championed them and the women who have not and sometimes done the opposite. And there's so much pain. And I think part of the process is just letting that come up so that we can heal it before we try and just blindly move forward and pretend like this isn't present in our culture because it's inconvenient and it aligns with many cultural tropes, which we do not like and do not want to reaffirm, right? Which is unquote women are catty bitches.

I have a lot to say about that in the chapter on anger and where that cultural conditioning comes from. It's not our nature just how we're allowed to express our aggression. But you've been coaching for a long time now, and in your experience, is this getting any better? And then can we also talk about you offer some really incredibly solid advice? I also believe about envy as a mirror and aligning with what you want and noticing when you're striking another woman down. And you also cite interesting research about lower status groups and inviting and how easy it is to set lower status groups on each other. We see this obviously all over culture. It's like white men just keep on keeping on. They don't even dip down into the fray. They don't engage with it, they don't acknowledge it. We don't hold them to account really. And meanwhile we're in it all the time attacking each other's character impugning, people's image canceling each other. It's wild to watch.

TARA:

Yeah,

ELISE:

That was 18 questions. I apologize.

TARA:

It's so good. No, so good. And I am so happy to get to talk about this with you. And it's interesting. I want to start with something that I did not think I would was not on my mind until you were talking, but I think it might be helpful, which is there's a sibling rivalry issue right now between two of my kids. I have three kids, and it is not a mutual sibling rivalry. One of them is feeling really just mad at the other one's success and thriving. And it's interesting to watch up close. And when I was talking about it with the one who's acting mean, I was able to say, I notice your heart is having trouble supporting her and your heart doesn't feel free to celebrate her. And that child said, yeah, that's true. And I don't know why and I don't know how to stop it.

And I feel like that to me is what we're talking about. And maybe I was able to say that to that child. I know that feeling at the root, what we're talking about is why does it feel tight and constricted in my heart that I cannot openly celebrate this person's flourishing, success, visibility, whatever. As a woman, I know that feeling because that's the bind that we're in with each other. And this did really come up. I feel a little like I wrote Plain Big. I just wanted to talk about the individual woman in a way and her path when I was writing it. And then when I went on book tour about it, everywhere I went, I would do my little talk about all that individual stuff and somebody's hand would shoot up and they'd be like, but why was the meanest boss I ever had another woman?

Or Why did this other woman? So it's so up for people and I think it remains up and I don't feel like I have a complete way to wrap my head around it. I'm probably swimming in it too much. But what I do know and what I often say that in the room people feel it and it lands with them is what we do not allow in ourselves. We will never allow in another woman. And what we do not celebrate in ourselves, we will not celebrate in another woman. So however, we are policing ourselves. We not only police others that way, but we're quite provoked when we see the same thing in them. And we want to shut down that bravery, that comfort with money, that lack of inhibit whatever we've shut down in ourself. We do not want to see that running free in somebody else.

So I think those people are there to be our mirrors and for us to say, Hey, what do I want that I'm not allowing myself? What am I uncomfortable with in myself? What have I been taught is not lovable, so it's too excruciating to even tolerate in myself. It's all of that. And the other thing I'll say that I've gotten interested in lately is there's so much conversation about burnout among women now, and I've had a couple coaching conversations where what it turned out was right underneath the burnout and people were leaving jobs or leaving careers over this burnout was hurt from another woman, including workplace hurt, which I think workplace hurt is a very interesting under-discussed subject because it really affects us. And I think people don't think it's legit enough to take to therapy or really look at because it's their coworker or their client, but unhealed hurt is a really big deal. And so if you feel like a colleague backstabbed you or a female boss really let you down, whether that was real or it was our cultural double standard for how those women should behave, which it often is that unhealed hurt is a really big deal and it will really stomp out your energy and make you feel quite burnt out and exhausted. So I'm interested in how much that is a larger phenomenon now too.

ELISE:

Yeah, there's the other side of this too, which is that yes, I think all of those feelings are certainly valid, but there's a certain amount of burnout I think that comes for women in the workplace, particularly in this culture of canceling where as a leader or a manager, if you aren't abiding by the cultural idea of what a woman is, which is deeply relational and caring, and this goes to Carol Gilligan's work about how we're conditioned to prioritize relationship, which is a beautiful thing. I'm not suggesting that it's not, but that how prioritizing relationship is core feminine value and to abandon that is a betrayal of your very identity. But I think that that then puts pressure on women in the upper echelons of work environments to perform to a standard where there is this idea that if you make me cry, if you hurt my feelings, if you make me feel small in some way, that there is an intolerance for that, which may or may not be valid.

But we saw this in 2020, right? With the vast number of canceling of high profile women. We don't have that many high profile women in business to sacrifice on the altar, and they just disappeared themselves because of this idea that they were bad women who had misbehaved in some way. And I'm not suggesting that there isn't credence to those concerns, but there's this, it is exhausting. I mean, it's made me, why would I ever want to go back into a workforce? Why would I not just work for myself and only work by myself because carrying the load of cultural expectations is so much work when I'm already doing all that caring for my family. And so it's a double edge sword too, where that's what I think makes it so tricky as well give women some space to be human and what is actually vicious behavior,

TARA:

Right? I think that part of what's confusing about it is that genuinely different things are going on in different situations as well as sometimes multiple of those. So sometimes there's a clear dynamic of feelings of scarcity about female power and women taking each other down and vicious gossip going on and backstabbing stuff and all of that, or just that unconscious hazing of if I had to sacrifice myself in XY way to survive in this really tough male dominated industry, you younger women are going to have to too, and I'm going to not be very nice about how I demonstrate that. So that's real, and I think real hurt comes from that. Then I think there's a double standard what you're talking about of how we expect women to treat us in the workplace. I think we bring a lot of mother issues. I think we look for friendships.

We're really confused. Of course, we are swimming in this weird milieu around power as women, but workplaces involve power dynamics. And so between women, I think that gets really confusing and it's impossible to do a senior level job and be a people pleaser and a caretaker to everybody at the same time. I don't think the two things are compatible. I think it's possible to do it with wonderful ethic of care and great people skills, but you do have to make controversial decisions and not everybody is going to like the decisions. And sometimes you're going to be moving too fast to handle people as carefully as you could. And I absolutely agree with you. We need to grant women that permission. And that's why also often part of the coaching will do with women around those workplace issues is let's really try and imagine if that boss had been an older white guy, how would you have read the same behavior, the same words, the same email, the same decision, like let's try and be aware if there is a double standard here in how we're judging other women.

ELISE:

Yeah.

Thinking about too. And there's obviously been a lot of ink spilled about this, particularly with Covid, but the mother issues that you mentioned and the way that in the last however many decades at least, we've turned work into family. And not that there aren't, I mean, some of my closest friends are work friends, particularly from my first job when we were still growing up. But the way that we have created this work family and the implications of that which are largely, I mean there are some positive implications but are also very complicated. Your family is likely not going to become estranged from you or fire you. Your family isn't going to give you a bad review. I mean, maybe. And then there's this dependency that develops too, where we expect our coworkers, our bosses, our managers to be somewhat responsible for our feelings. And then you get into this, well, she made me cry or he made me cry, whatever it is. And it's like, well, who's actually responsible for your feelings? And how do you separate that feeling from the fact of the encounter? It's very tricky. But there is this expectation that your work should feel loving and warm and like an embrace.

TARA:

Yeah,

ELISE:

Business is a cold lover.

TARA:

It's unfortunate too because I think in our struggle to find a middle place of how do we recognize that people are whole people at work and bring good people skills and be attuned to things like emotional safety and how it affects the workplace. We need all of that. And I think professional boundaries are really important. I think really being aware of the differences between a workplace and a family or a friendship are important. And I think understanding what's the purpose that we came together for in this workplace, and then we're taking care of the whole person in a way is to support that purpose. But we're not replacing the purpose of the work as we're actually not here as emotional growth resources for each other in this context. But it is unfortunate. I think I would say in the last 18 months or so, I see such a pendulum swing where now corporations are becoming really resistant and fearful to anything that smells like that emotional caretaking stuff.

And the relationships are becoming much more transactional to the detriment of the mental and emotional health of the people who work in them, but also to the detriment of the work because the employees become quite guarded and jaded. If you've watched three rounds of layoffs happen and you feel like it happened in a pretty heartless way and your company's cutting a lot of the wellbeing programs or whatever, you don't show up to work in the same way. So I think we're looking for a middle ground in a new way that takes what we know about human psychology, but we need to reintegrate it into holistic thinking about workplaces

ELISE:

A hundred percent. And without putting the toll for that on women as the keepers of the relationship and care sphere, which I think it's often in workplaces left to the women to do all that caretaking. I mean, the very premise of your book is we can't afford culturally for women to diminish themselves. Again, as you say, in playing big, this isn't about let's go be dominant in this male driven structure and take over the boys club. And it's not a performance of business as it is done today, but we can't afford to watch women diminish themselves, remain invisible, and abide by this structure. So it's not about recreating this old system. It is how do we create something different that is a different model of work and business that perhaps is more feminine, and what does that look like and how do we help each other create it? It's a big challenge

Because I think most of us, as you point out, I feel this way where I'm like, I don't want to participate in the decline of the planet. I don't want to get bigger to get bigger. I'm not here to hack my way to the top. That's not what I care about it. That's not in alignment with my values. I need to build a billion dollar brand. I don't need to sell people a lot of stuff, and yet I care deeply about the world and want to do my part in service to hopefully a better future for my kids and your kids. And so I'm not opting out in the sense that obviously I am still participating in the world, but a lot of women who can particularly are, and I get it.

TARA:

I

ELISE:

Get it.

TARA:

Yeah. I think this is a real conundrum of our time, and it's something that I think about a lot now. It's been 10 years since playing big came out and 10 years of working with women around these tools. And I guess the question I feel like I'm in is I think there's been this sea of women who can opt out, are opting out, meaning we're opting out of participating in the big dominant mainstream structure. So a lot of opting out of corporate America, a lot of opting out of, not too many of us are like, I know how I'll change the world. I'll run for Congress or I'll join my city government. We tend to be opting out of our mainstream political systems, and we're creating often smaller, beautiful niche things outside of those systems. But who is left over to guide those systems? Is it fair to sacrifice the quality of our calm and wellbeing?

I don't know that it's fair, but that's a question. And I think it's a very disillusioning time for many people, including me. But what I like about the trajectory is that I feel like it's become more obvious that those systems are not working and that they are not going to be our way through and forward. And so I hope that can embolden us in our critiques and in our reinventions. But I do worry about what do all of our beautiful independent efforts aggregate into, and are we going to see a pendulum swing where we're going back to like, oh, no, we need mass movements and we need to join things, not just start things. I'm wondering if we're starting to be on the cusp of that

ELISE:

Actually building a coalition. And this will require, I would say, contending with that envy and contending with all of the things that we've been talking about today, which is recognizing that other women are the women who are driving that VR mirror for what we want, and we have to own that and step into that and figure out how to celebrate and build each other up. Because I agree with you. I feel like we're siloed and it's been my experience. I don't know if it was your experience, and this isn't obviously entirely true, but that a lot of the women who are doing very similar work to me don't want to collaborate and don't want to build a coalition. There's still lane guarding and scarcity and it's too bad, but I'm hoping it's just a moment in time as we build the skills and the fortitude to deal with all that bad feeling and figure out how to really get on side with each other because it's great that we're all rowing in the same direction. It would be great if we were all rowing in the same boat.

TARA:

Yeah, I think you've really highlighted that particular issue, especially as it relates to women in our field and made me see it more than I saw it before. And so it also makes me really curious what your vision is for it. I have a sense you can see an alternative that maybe some of us aren't quite seeing.

ELISE:

I need to go to my inner mentor. I mean, I feel it. I feel the future. I can't quite articulate it. We're going to do a part two and maybe we can do a visioning of what this looks like because my friend Courtney, who I mentioned, who you need to meet, who's also a coach and also exceptionally well educated, she talks about the women's groups that she's doing is feeling so vital to her because it's a way for women to practice growth and individuation wellbeing and community. And I don't think that we have a lot of opportunities to do that that are not transactional,

TARA:

And

ELISE:

I really want to see that. Not that women can't be transactional and can't be networking, and we really need to learn how to ask very overtly for what we want from each other rather than this sort of covert, manipulative relationship building with a hope that maybe someone comes through and writes you a check in three years, but I want to see that also come out of a lot of this work because it feels like our response to this male dominated world is to be like, let's just do that too and be really networky and transactional. It's like, no, I don't want to use people or be used in that way. I want to collaborate and support, but that's not the work I want to do. I want to do much deeper work.

TARA:

Yeah. Yeah. I think I love that. And it's reminding me, it's highlighting that. I think part of what is tricky for women is it starts to feel like wheeling and dealing and we're trading things and we're trading favors, and then everybody feels allergic to that and would be our own original way of approaching that. It's reminding me a little, and I'm realizing, I'm like, we have not discussed any etymology

ELISE:

Next time. What is

TARA:

Going on? How can that be? But it's reminded me a little bit when I was researching mentorship for the inner mentor, I had not remembered or realized that the original mentor is the figure in the Odyssey who comes to be the standin father figure for tele mockus while Odysseus is away. And for a long, long, long, long time up until basically mid 20th century mentor was seen as the standin father son relationship or analogous to the Father-son relationship. And then you had second wave feminists saying, well, women deserve that too. And really largely still following a model of you're going to have a more senior guide and you're going to have a mentee who receives. And I think for a lot of women that doesn't quite feel right. They're looking for something that feels more mutual and reciprocal. So this is an example of, I think we need to find our mentoring way for ourselves. We need to find our sort of, what is that professional circle of support? How do we do that? What does that look like? That feels resonant for

ELISE:

Us. Yeah. All right. We're going to figure it out next time.

TARA:

Love it.

ELISE:

I love talking to you and so fun to reconnect with you over the last year. And hopefully this is the first of many conversations.

TARA:

Likewise, likewise,

ELISE:

I love Tara. I will include a link to the inner mentor visualization exercise in the show notes, which you can find on my Substack eliseloehnen.substack.com. It's wild. Actually, it was wild to go back into playing big and back into my early conversations with Tara from 10 years ago and realize how much her work influenced my thinking and how simpatico we continue to be. And playing big is it's not sort of a typical sort of rah rah, go out and be the person you're supposed to be. It's highly nuanced, incredibly researched, and certainly acknowledges the cultural frame in which we're operating, including the ways in which this framework operates against us and that expression. And so you won't feel, it's not one of those leadership books where you feel subtly gaslit. It's really full of great insights and I hope she writes another book. I think it's one of those books that's also just continue to sell, and she coaches and does online classes as well. And I know that not everyone loves writing books as much as I do, but we will definitely do a part two in terms of visioning what this could look like if it were a different model for how to build a business, have so many thoughts about it, including the way that our venture backed world doesn't really work for so many of us. That's why I at this point, will never raise money. Anyway, that's a conversation for another day.